How to Get More Clients Without Working Harder

Hey everybody, welcome, welcome. Good to see you all here today. Um, happy Friday. Today we are going to talk about how you can get more clients without working harder. And I'd love to hear from you in the chat. Uh, number one, it would be great to know if you are a creative professional or if you're an entrepreneur, what kind of business you're in. Uh, also maybe how long you've been in the industry would be really helpful as well. Also, welcome to everybody on LinkedIn. I'm streaming to YouTube and LinkedIn. And so, the one thing you should know if you're watching on LinkedIn is that I can't actually see your comments or your chat um on LinkedIn. That feed doesn't come into me. So, if you want to engage in the comments or ask me a question when we get to the Q& A section, pop over to YouTube. The link is actually in the first comment already on LinkedIn and um I'd love to chat with you. But if you want to watch on LinkedIn and that's your jam, that's totally cool. So, it's good to see you all. Um, it would be great if you someone could pop into the chat and just let me know if I am coming through, if you can hear the audio, video, see the video, if everything is kosher, that would be great. Um, you may have noticed that I actually uh did not use my countdown timer today. I usually use a threeminut countdown timer that kind of gets me focused and I get settled in. I get ready to go and then I pop in. Uh, but I didn't use that because it records that. And so when you watch back the live stream, you get a three minute countdown timer. And it used to be that you could actually edit, you could crop that off on YouTube, but for some reason that's not working now. So um so I'm going without going naked. Jumping right in. Um good to see you guys. Jorge, good to see you back. I remember you from last week. Uh Steve Bikes, 30 years in graphic design. Great. This is going to be a great presentation for you. uh orange top hat. That's a great screen name. Uh Justin, thank you very much. Uh loud and clear. That's great. Uh so it's good to see you guys. Um also, do you guys ever This is a question for you people who are watching on YouTube. Do you guys ever watch live streams on LinkedIn or is it is YouTube just your jam? Let me know. That would be cool to know. Um and so Robert Smith, welcome Robert. It's good to see you. Um, Robert is also a 30-year veteran, at least I know. And, uh, 20 years in fashion retail. Oh, that's cool. Orange Top Hat, I know. Um, you and I have a lot in common. I had 15 years in fashion retail. Um, and uh, so that's a great industry to come up in actually to be honest with you. It teaches you a lot about consumer behavior and um, and the process of creative in business. Um, I'd love to know, you know, where you're doing that, where you've been in fashion retail, surface design. Yeah, pattern design. I oversaw pattern design, uh, the CAD textile group at, um, Old Navy, the GAP when I was there. Um, so you guys, this is going to be great. So, if you haven't connected with me on all my social platforms, I'm going to throw those on here. I have a newsletter called Brand Muse. Comes out every two weeks or so. If you go to philipvandusen. commuse, you can sign up for my uh email list, that's the one place where um you can communicate with me directly. In fact, if you get a newsletter or an email from me and you just hit reply, it comes to me. Doesn't come to my team, comes directly to me. So, if you have a question for me or you know, you want to hop on a one-on-one or something, explore coaching or whatever it is, that's the [snorts] way to get in touch with me. But the only way to do that is if you join my email list. So definitely check that out. And if you don't know about my podcast, uh, Brand Design Masters is my podcast. I guess I'm moving into episode 159 or something like that at this point. Um, [snorts] it's mostly solo episodes at the moment, but I'm actually going to be starting to do interviews again soon. Um, and so, so that's something you should check out as well. It's in top less than the top 5% of marketing podcasts in the world which you know is nice. It's nice to have gets a lot of visibility. And um so the other thing I wanted to mention is that uh if you have a question today, let me take that off of here. If you have a question today, it would be really helpful if you type question in all caps before your question because as I'm giving through the going through the presentation, it's kind of distracting for me to stop or to watch the chat too closely. So, if you

have a question, type question in all caps and when I get to the Q& A section at the end, I will definitely circle back and make sure to answer your question. So, totally do that. And um Robert I know has been through this drill before. So, Robert, if anyone has a question, you could always pop in and ask people to do that if you have a chance to hang out for um the duration. And if not, that's cool, too. Anyway, Jojo Saint 21 year graphic design pivoting into brand strategy. That's awesome. Congratulations. And that reminds me, if you were interested in taking my brand strategy course, I have a uh really amazing foundational brand strategy course. It's about eight hours long. You get over 30 downloadable tools and templates and um it is can take you from being a purely pure creative professional to an amazing uh foundation that you can hit the ground running and start delivering brand strategy to your clients next week if you take this course. Um I'm telling you. Um so you should definitely check that out Jojo if you don't know brand strategy already. All right. So, if you guys are game, I say we jump right into it. Okay. So, let's talk about how to get more clients without working harder. All right, you guys ready for this? Um, any questions before we jump in? Anything anyone wants to hear about in particular um on this topic? I'll try to uh focus in on that if there is. And if there's not, we will go for it. Let's make sure all my tech is working today. I am going um Oh, one thing I want to mention. I'm doing a uh live stream with an organization called SEO Charity next Wednesday. And I'll post about this um in my newsletter on this coming Tuesday and also on my show socials. But I'm going to be doing a presentation on how to grow your personal brand visibility on YouTube. So if you're getting into video, short form, long form live streams on YouTube, this would be a really great live stream to catch. And SEO charity is a charity that benefits uh animals in shelters in Ukraine. and they, you know, they did very well at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, but you know, as that drags on, interest in that waines. So, it's an amazing charity. All of the money that they raise goes directly to the shelters. They don't take any money off the top. salaries. And so, I'm doing um an appearance next uh Wednesday and a live stream for that. And if you want to join for that and learn more about how to grow your personal brand visibility using YouTube, that would be a really great live stream for you guys to catch. Um, great. Jorge says, "Maintaining clients and not just oneoffs. " Okay, that's cool. All right, you guys. So, how do you get clients without working harder? First of all, let's talk about where do clients come from? And this is a very important metric that you have to pay attention to. Clients come from three places. They come from promotion. So that's doing ads or cold outreach cont, you know, cold contact. Uh, and I know what a lot of you are saying is, I hate cold calling. I hate cold emails. It feels yucky. Feels salesy. And yes, it does. Or you can pay for it. You can buy ads. You can pay to get your message and your face and your brand out in front of people. Number two is attraction. That's content marketing. That's inbound marketing. Newsletters, whatever that is that you get people, you get you show up, become visible online, get people to come to you. The challenge with inbound marketing and content marketing is that it takes a while. Takes a while to build an audience. trust. Takes a while to get people into that pipeline and to start coming to you. For instance, this is just a fun fact. When I started YouTube, my YouTube channel 10 years ago in June, um I said to myself, I'm going to publish a video every week for 52 weeks and I am not going to stop. I'm not going to look at my metrics until I do that and see what happens before I quit. I'm going to publish a video every week for a year. And I did that. And within that year, by the end of that year, I was 80% of my clients for my new consultancy and agency were coming to me directly from YouTube. And that fact is still true today. But it did take a tremendous amount of effort on my part to publish 52 videos and that much content. Um, and so yeah, it can

take a while. Number three is networking and referrals. And that is uh coming in from partners either your network or referrals from old clients. And networking can be hard for some people. It's uh it takes some effort. Uh you have to show up places, you have to develop relationships and uh that can be a challenge for some creative professionals too. So when you look at the breakdown of what is the percentage of these incoming new business sources for creative professionals in general and this is uh sourced from data from spark Toro in a survey they did called the state of digital agencies 15% of new business comes in from promotion or cold outreach only 15% in general attraction and content and inbound is 25%. The vast majority, 60% of new business for small agencies, solarpreneurs, freelancers, comes in from your network and referrals, either referrals from old clients or partners, um, or word of mouth. I want you to bear this in mind as we walk through this presentation, okay? The creative economy has reexploded. It exploded about 10 years ago and it has done nothing but gain steam and the in you know the advent the explosion of AI and what it's doing to our industry and the capabilities it's giving us as creative professionals and the capabilities that it's giving companies and our clients to do more be more and uh and create and much more impactful creative assets has caused our industry to reexplode. And we as professionals have to really look at that. How can we utilize that and what can we bring to our clients? Every business needs media. Every it used to be the businesses could get by with, you know, magazine advertising and outdoor and maybe some radio, right? Or if they were a big enterprise television, that is long, long gone. And it moved into social media, right? It moved into digital content in the digital sphere and digital visibility and social, right? But almost every business needs a vast array of media these days in order to be effective in today's marketplace. They need social media. They need branded assets, video, audio, animation possibly. They need all sorts of imagery to populate their social posts. And now there is this explosion of AI and companies are struggling and they are scrambling to figure out how to use AI, what applications and programs to use, how to integrate with that with their existing media streams, how it can expand their make their media streams more professional looking or more impactful. And that's going to be our job. That's gonna be our job as creative pros to learn how to use that stuff and how to teach and advocate that our clients integrate that into their businesses. And everyone's, you know, chicken little in the creative world saying the sky is falling. We're all going to lose our jobs. AI is going to take all our jobs. The thing is that AI is not going to take your job if you make it your job to learn AI because your clients are not don't have time for this. They're out there selling products and services, right? There's they're servicing clients. It is our job to learn these AI tools and to bring it to our clients to help them in the work that we do for them. So, that's a new business need for us in terms of something that we've got to kind of um set up straight and get back to school and figure this stuff out because that's what our clients are going to want from us. So, here's the winning skill set for creatives. Now, in the creative economy, you have to have your core creative skill set. What is it that you're great at? What's that one T-shaped skill set that you're amazing at? You have to also, and we're going to get into this in depth, think about an expanded offering. What is what you're like, what I like to call what is your design. Plus, you also have to have a meaningful network. And I don't mean a casual network. I don't mean social media followers. I mean a meaningful network that actually works for you. And we're also going to get into that deeply. You have to have a strong business brand and you also and hopefully visible personal brand. And like I said, this Wednesday in this new live stream I'm doing with SEO Charity, I'm going to be talking about how to

build your personal brand visibility using YouTube. You also have to have a new business funnel. We're also going to be talking about funnels and what that looks like and how you can actually grow and widen your funnel without working harder. And that's what today's presentation is about. And you have to have a level of business skills and marketing skills for yourselves and also an understanding of these things for your clients. That is a winning you know creative economy skill set in 2026. So, what's the biggest challenge I hear from my creative professional clients in my community? How do I get more clients? That is really always the number one question. Whether you're coming right out of school or whether you've been in business for a long time, what is the way? The answer is a wider funnel. And I don't just mean being more places, doing more things, more hustle, more posts, more effort on your part, you know, more social, more outreach. I'm not talking about that. the more work part of it. In fact, that's the whole point of today's presentation. When it comes down to it, your funnel is basically your offer and your network. So, how wide is your offer and network? And we're I'm going to show you exactly why that impacts how many clients you get. If you have a narrow offer, say you offer graphic design services, you design logos, your client base is based on what prospective clients are out there that need a logo, right? It's very fairly narrow, right? So, if you have a narrow offer, you have a narrow prospective client list or a short list. If you have a wider offer, the number of clients who need a range of things is much broader. So the number of clients that are in need of a broader range of services is a much longer list. So, if you're looking at your offer versus your potential clients, as I said, if your offer is graphic design or it's photography or it's illustration or you do audio editing or video editing, your potential clients are limited to that need, right? And if you expand through what I like to call design plus a wider offer offering a wider range of services, your list of potential clients broadens exponentially. So what is design plus? And you understand the math here, right? If you have a single offering, the number of clients that you have are the ones that need that single offering. If you offer a much broader range of services, your chances of hitting a client that needs something within that broader range of services is much greater. So when it comes down to it, really you have to offer more than design. And I don't mean it's all has to come from you, right? But when I say more than just design, like what do I mean by that? What is your design plus or what is your photography plus or your audio editing plus or your copywriting plus whatever your creative superpower is your main kind of key offering what is the plus to that design plus can look like your core offering plus brand strategy. So for Jojo saint right brand strategy video could be audio editing could be consumer insights or marketing content user research social media management illustration photography content development AI imple implementation like I mentioned before. What is the plus to your core skill set that can widen that funnel that can widen the number of clients that you could conceivably appeal to? Think about what that is and how you could broaden your offering. And again, I'm not talking about you learning the new thing or all of these new things and offering all these new things yourself. I'm going to talk about it in a different way. The thing to remember is that design plus a broader range of offering positions you to become a true strategic partner for your clients. The best thing to be is the go-to

partner for your client. You want them to think of you first when they have a problem that needs to be solved. And clients have a range of problems that need to be solved. And so if you come top of mind as the solution to not just their video editing, but maybe their brand strategy, maybe their logo design, maybe their content development, maybe all those things, you become much more of a true strategic partner. I when in my brand strategy 101 course, I talk about moving to the tip of the spear. When you offer brand strategy thinking as a deliverable intellectual partnership for your clients or a broader range of services, you start to move to the tip of the spear. The tip of the spear is where all the strategic decisions are made and where the problem solving happens before execution. Execution is down on the shaft of the spear. And if you're a creative professional who's doing audio editing, video editing, logo design, and you have a particular deliverable, you are living on the shaft of the spear. execution end and not necessarily the planning, decision-making, strategic end, the tip of the spear. The more you offer the broader services that you offer, you become more and more of a strategic partner, a thinking partner for your clients for how they can solve this range of problems that they have. And that is the goal of design plus. You want to build out your network of specialist partners because you will do this through partnerships. one of two ways. You will either white label your services under the services of another strategic partner or they will white label their services under you. And what do I mean when I say white label? A number of you may know this but essentially let's say that um I know a copywriter and they have their own copywriting business and their own you know business name and they have their own clients but I have my agency name and my clients. I need some intensive copywriting for a project. I may reach out to my copyrightiting partner and say, "Hey, would you white label your services? If I have this big project I'd like to bring you in on, and you could get a lot of work out of it, but I need you to work under the label of my agency and be invisible in terms of the name of your agency to my clients. you're going to get all the work, but I need you to white label your services under my business. And I've done that for other businesses. I still do, right? It's kind of a it's a very symbiotic relationship. And when it comes down to it, you have to have you have to let go of your ego a little bit. You have to be a little humble. But the thing is that working the work is never the problem. The problem for creatives is getting the work. If you can get the work, you can get people to work the work, right? And there are other people out there, other, you know, expert creative professionals who are thinking the same thing. If they get a project, they would love to be able to accept a large project that's far beyond their basic skill set if they have enough partners that they can build a team to work that work. So, where do you find these specialist partners who do what you don't do? Right? You have your key T-shaped skill set, your superpower, but how do you find those partners, those strategic partners who are going to help you work that's outside of your core competency? So, the answer is your network. It's a very simple answer, but the word network can mean a lot of different things. And the type of network that we're talking about is a meaningful network. It's a network of potential strategic partners. Again, let's talk about network in regards to getting clients. The narrower your network, the fewer clients you can possibly appeal to. Because if you have a narrow network, a narrow range of possible strategic partners, if you're even doing that, you can appeal to or service fewer clients. The flip side of that is if you have a wide network, a wide range of strategic partners, you can service more clients. You have the appeal of potentially attracting a much broader range of clients. Let's look at that graph again, right? But through a different lens. You look at your network, how many people that you know, how many old clients, co-workers, uh, and we'll get into exactly who a network connection is, but you look at the breadth of your network and the

number of clients that can come from that narrow network. And then you dial into that your expanded network, your strategic partners networks, and all of the clients and referral services and and uh and inbound they have in terms of potential clients that are coming from any number of additional people or strategic partners. You broaden the top of that funnel and you also broaden the base of it, which is how many clients that you can get. So, I know the question that you're asking yourselves, right? You're saying, "Okay, great. Thanks, Phil. How is all this not working harder? Sounds like a lot of work to me. " It actually doesn't have to be because when it comes down to it, you aren't doing all of this work. You're not learning all these new things. You're not expanding, you know, and working so hard to find all of, you know, these people and bring in all these new clients. You are leveraging the skill sets of others to broaden what you can offer. And you are leveraging the networks of others as well in terms of the range and um visibility and contacts that you have in order to start feeding you work and your partners' work. When it comes down to it, your network can get you more work. clients. You have to think of those things being inextricably linked. And how do you magnify? How do you 10x your network without doing a lot more work? I'm going to tell you exactly how to do that. And I want you to stick around to the end because I have an offer. I'll be transparent. And I have an offer at the end that's going to really show you how can you can literally with an extremely small investment do this overnight. And there are people here in the chat right now I know who have done this and have seen their networks expand exponentially overnight and their businesses increase because of it. Your network is literally your net worth. You have to think about it that way. And when we think back to that graph that we looked at the beginning, 15% coming from ads and promotion, 25% coming from inbound and content, but 65% coming from your network and from referrals and partners. If your new business is not reflecting that right now, you have to think about networking and partnerships in a very, very different way. As I said earlier on, we're not just talking about your network. We're talking about a meaningful network, a network that can get you work. It's very different. Casual connections, social media followers, connections, quote unquote, on LinkedIn. These are vanity metrics. Unless these are actual partners who are on the lookout for work for you and projects they could pull you into and you are on the lookout for work for them and projects you could pull them into. That is a meaningless connection. So who is a network connection? Network connections can be old schoolmates, old co-workers. They could be professional group members. So professional groups like BNI which is business network international or DMI which is design management institute. The AIGA has chapters all over the United States. Anyway, there are ad clubs, creative director clubs, freelance partners, ex-clients are one of the major sources of referrals for people. Ex- managers, you know, there they could be mentors or people who've coached you in the past. It also could be business owners that you know, but a lot of us feel stuck when it comes right down to it. Networking is a little hard. A lot of us feel stuck in with our heads in this peanut butter jar. And so, how do you get unstuck? Because networking can really be awkward. A lot of creative professionals that I know, myself included, are introverted. We find social outreach when it's cold in particular or when we're trying to develop relationship, nurture networking relationships, go to conferences, reach out and introduce yourself to people that you don't know. It's can be incredibly difficult. There's a lot of people who are like hyper, you know, phone phobic now or even zoomophobic. They prefer to do everything through texting or email and that is not a h human connection. It's tough to build

true meaningful network connections that way, but it doesn't have to be that hard. And this cycles back to the title of the presentation, right? So, how do you get more clients without working harder? Let's talk about that a little bit. Skipped a slide. Where do you find the right people to do this? Sources for new connections are places like conferences. Even though sometimes reaching out to people that you don't know at conferences can be awkward, conferences like the how conference or the AIGA conferences, Fuse, South by Southwest, 99U or VidCon or Adobe Max is a big one. Um or Social Media Marketing World. The problem with, you know, and Adobe Max can be a great one, Mike, because it's full of creative professionals and it's a great way to kind of make connections across disciplines. social media groups like Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Reddit, Threads. Threads is exploding right now. Um, and also professional groups like I said BNI, DMI, AIGA chapters, art director clubs. These are places where you can meet and develop relationships with people who could become meaningful connections, prospective strategic partners. And here's a secret I want to tell you about. mastermind groups. This is how I catapulted myself from coming out of big corporate, big agency work when I was totally lost. I burned out. I didn't know anything. Didn't know how to start my own business. Knew nothing about personal branding or social media or content marketing or any of that stuff or speaking or lead magnets or email list building. When I came out of my corporate agency life a decade ago, I didn't know any of this stuff. any of it. Look, I'm telling you, I was a babe in the woods. I had like I'm the dog at the computer. I have no idea what I'm doing. That was me. And the thing that unlocked it for me was joining a mastermind group. I joined a paid community, a mastermind group. And I went into that with the idea of making as many connections as I could and to add value to that group and share what I knew from my decades of experience with this group. And I had this feeling like people in that group were going to do the same for me. And it absolutely catapulted the speed and trajectory of my learning into building my business to what it is today. But when it comes down to it, all of those sources, doing that sort of thing, networking can be awkward. But like I said, it doesn't have to be. How do you make networking painless? You join a mastermind community. It's so simple. A lot of people don't even know what masterminds are. I mention them to people when I go to conferences or I went, you know, show up in different communities and you I talk I say I run a mastermind group. I I'm part of two other peer mastermind groups. Masterminds have changed my entire business. And they're like, I've never even heard of this. What is this thing? [snorts] A mastermind group does the two things that we've been talking about today, which are they widen your offer and they widen your network and they do it very quickly. They can literally do it overnight. And so a mastermind community is a peer group that offers a combination of networking and support and feedback and training and goal setting and accountability. And it puts you in touch with potential strategic partners that can exponentially, as I said, broaden your offer and exponentially broaden your network. When you join a mastermind group, you're surrounded by other likeminded, highly driven, highly skilled, in many cases committed people who are on a similar journey to you. It's a mutually beneficial admiration society, right? You are there so you can grow and learn and network and expand your offering and expand your network. People other people are there doing the same thing. So they're we're all there for the same purpose. And so everyone is very open and everyone is very willing and trusting to give because you want to give and you want to receive. masterminds offer you that meaningful network that I've been talking about and they offer it to you if you join one literally overnight. You have to, you know, you have to participate. You have to show up. You have to share your expertise. You have to be vulnerable and talk about what your goals are and what you want to achieve. And you also have to um you know kind of

uh be present. And it takes a little bit of time, but you're making all of those connections. You're being connected with all of those people who are in the same boat as you and have the same goals as you when you walk in the door of a mastermind group. It's a new business pipeline. You get resources. You get inspiration from people. One of the things when I joined the mastermind group that I joined 10 years ago was I didn't know anything about like people who made their business speaking at conferences or people who, you know, had paid newsletters or had, you know, were making tens of thousands of dollars through paid sponsorships for their podcast or for their YouTube channel. I had no idea any of this stuff exists, much less how to actually take the first step to going about to doing it. That's the sort of inspiration that I got and I built my newsletter, then my YouTube channel, then my podcast, then my brand strategy course, then my mastermind groups, which I've run a number of different types of. All of that came from my exposure to people in the mastermind group that I joined and I continually to be in to be inspired by the people in my mastermind and also in other masterminds that I'm a part of. You set goals and by becoming, you know, putting a stake in the ground to those goals, you become accountable to the other people in the group. And if you voice your goals, you are much more apt to achieve them if you know that you're being held accountable by the people in the group. You also get trusted, constructive feedback from people that you trust. This is one of those things I hear a lot and I'm just going to go off a side jog really quickly and that is that creative professionals can't build anything for themselves. We are great at building creative stuff and products and marketing for our clients. But when it comes down to it, it is really hard for us to write our own social media to write the god forbid the copier on our website or redesign our websites or recreate new uh customer journeys or navigation on our websites because we have no perspective on ourselves. we don't have the kind of distance that you need to be able to make those more objective observations and decisions on what it is that you're doing. And mastermind groups give you that. They give you a trusted audience of creative professionals like overnight like a dozen, you know, agency people who are going to give you a critique of what it is that you're doing, give you suggestions of how it to do it better. So you can get that sort of perspective and you don't have to, you know, you don't you're not paying them as individual agencies thousands and thousands of dollars to help you build your website. You're essentially getting a tremendous amount of impact on your business for a tiny investment. You get that constructive feedback and you get through this you your confidence in your own decisions increases. This is one of those things that I hear all the time in my mastermind group that I had no really idea about it until I really got deeply into them myself and that is that your decision-making confidence goes way up. So all that self questioning all that secondguessing of yourself can go away because you can get true perspective and feedback from people that you trust. And so when you're surrounded by people who are on fire, on fire for their businesses, they're ambitious, they want to change, they want to grow, they want to get more clients, they want to make more revenue. When you surround yourself by people who are on fire, you can't help but catch fire, too. Because when it comes down to it, you may feel like this cow right now. I know I did earlier in my career, like you can't make great leaps by yourself. It's very difficult and as creative pros a lot of the times we find it very awkward to do anything in groups particularly reach out or talk to or be vulnerable with people that we don't know. [sighs] So don't be this cow. Don't be stuck on a fence trying to get over the other side by yourself. So I started this group. It's a mastermind group. It's a membership group. So, there is a subscription fee. It's incredibly reasonable. I'll share that with you in a second. But it's called Bonfire. And it's built around this idea that if you surround yourself with other people on fire, you can't help but catch fire, too. And if you go to philipvandusen. com/bonfire, you can learn more about it. There's a lot more detail on that page. There's a couple videos from me on that page describing what it's about. And there's also a number of testimonial videos from people who have been in Bonfire and are in Bonfire about the effect that it's had on their business. And the thing you have to understand about this is that

I've I ran uh four different timebound masterminds before Bonfire over a period of two years. They were incredibly successful and it decided to make it a non-timebound thing. So it's an ongoing thing now and I named it Bonfire. Bonfire has been running for over two years now and it is not in beta, right? It is a proven thing that is delivering results for its members. Here's just a quote from a woman named Joselle who she said, "I came in with three clients and in 12 weeks I had 10. One of them even came from someone who was inside the group itself. " Really amazing. Here's another quote by um a very talented uh previously New York designer named Mark. He said, "The industry has changed so much and my career plateaued and then a lightning bolt hit me when I came across Bonfire and I suddenly realized I had to change things to get different results. " I hear that a lot. Bonfire is a mastermind group. We meet on Zoom four times a month. Two of those meetings are mastermind sessions and two of them are others. One is an office hours and one is either a visiting expert. I bring in experts to present to the group and uh we also have inspiration sessions called pasture. So there are four zoom meetings um a month and bonfire offers you mentorship and coaching from me. So, group coaching from me, depending on the level that you enter in on, you can get one-on-one, regular one-on-one coaching with me. Uh, you get this overnight meaningful network, goal accountability, a trusted peer feedback loop. You make more confidence, confident decisions, and you have exposure to the possibility of these strategic partnerships and greater progress in growing your business and getting more clients. Here's a quote by a guy named Zach who was in Bonfire. Um, Bonfire helped me build my personal brand online and gave me the kick I needed to start putting myself out there without the fear of failure or judgment. Before I knew it, I'd landed a full-time role teaching designers at the university level. Zach did not come into Bonfire with the goal of teaching designers at the university level. He was inspired to do that through his exposure to people in Bonfire and suddenly got the confidence to start to pursue that idea and it happened for him and turned around for him very quickly and uh he was kind of blown away by it actually. A woman named An came in and she said, "After being laid off, I was at a crossroads. After joining Bonfire, within months, I landed an incredible creative director role. " If you're a creative pro navigating a career transition, I cannot recommend Bonfire enough. It transformed her career. And Ann in particular was dealing with developing her portfolio, figuring out how she was going to represent herself, redesigning her website. She was really down to be honest with you and she was really stuck in terms of how she was going to pivot her career. She had been laid off. She was not expecting it. She was mid to late career and she was stuck. And her experience in Bonfire gave her the feedback and the confidence to make those decisions that she needed to make and moved her to a very new place and a better place very quickly. So, Bonfire gives you group coaching with me. As I said, you get two times a month mastermind sessions which happen on Zoom. One time a month is an open office hours. It's basically like an open coffee chat with all the members of the group. And then one time a month we either do a visiting expert or we do a pastor session. Pasture is the name of our inspiration session where we bring in inspiration to the group and share with each other. And then there are session recordings. So we record everything. They're all posted on our community online which is firewalled. Only members can access it. It's not visible to the public. And you can look at any of the sessions if you missed one or you just want to go back and review some of the feedback that you got. There's a private online community. It's built on the Circle platform. So, it's, you know, it's a it's like a Facebook group, but it's totally firewalled and it's not public and it has a tremendous amount of functionality within it. There's also a success map, so a planned kind of trajectory that can lead you through the stages of your business depending on where it is that you want to go with it. There's a massive resource library of playlists and tools and downloads and templates that you have access to from the day you walk

into the group. And then you also get a steep discount, a 50% discount on brand strategy 101. Laura was another member of Bonfire and she said, "I was recently promoted to associate art director and Bonfire was a huge part of making that happen. The feedback I got was super helpful and Philip's mentoring gave me the confidence I needed to tackle some tough decisions. Laura's career skyrocketed from her experience in Bonfire and continues to grow. Sonia, who often comes to these live streams and she's probably busy today, but she's a dedicated member of Bonfire and she had said, "I had goals of building and communicating my brand, but I was struggling with how to do it. Now I've got more confidence because I can bounce ideas off the peers I can trust. " There are a number of people in Bonfire who have been rebuilding their social media platforms, their content platforms, their websites around repositioning themselves and representing themselves and improving their um visible business brand and personal brands and they're being helped through that and given feedback to do that through their relationships and their participation in Bonfire. Here's a point I want to make to you. You may tell your clients often that they you need to, you know, encourage them to want to hire you, right? To pay your fees so you can deliver your creative thing to them. And so you're always encouraging them that they need to invest in creative in what it is that you deliver so their businesses can grow in the future. Invest in branding. Invest in logo design. Invest in content or it video or audio editing for a podcast or you know a better website. You're encouraging them to make that investment in their business so they can grow in the future, right? But it's shocking to me how few creatives will do this for themselves. Again, we don't practice what we preach that much. If you look at the stats, most businesses, and this is in aggregate, on average across enterprise to the smallest of small businesses, most businesses will reinvest 15 to 20% of their revenue back into new business development, whatever that looks like, whether it's content or whether it's, you know, branding and marketing or whether it's paid advertising. Businesses reinvest the money they make back into growing their businesses. They spend money. You've heard it. They spend money to make money. [snorts] We have to practice what we preach as creative professionals. We have to spend money to make money. You need to invest time and money into your own business so you can grow in the future. And that leads us to Bonfire membership. Not membership. It's a bonfire. So there's embers, right? Branding membership. Bonfire membership is $97 a month or 297 a quarter. And so I actually it's 291 a quarter. And generally people pay quarterly because you want to come in, spend a little time there, build some relationships and trust and you will begin to see the benefits of being in a mastermind group very quickly. So Bonfire membership is $97 a month and there are different levels. There's $97 a month for base bon bonfire membership. There's also what I call the guild level which includes one-on-one coaching every month with me. And then there's a level of bonfire which is actually a one-on-one mentor mentee relationship which includes in-person um interaction and that is a higher level of commitment. Bonafires on the circle platform as I said it's a really amazing um kind of platform to be on. There's all these different spaces and forums and chats and resources and downloadable asset areas and video replay areas. It's a very robust platform. And when you join, you get access to all of this immediately. As I said, there's hundreds of resources. There's tools, there's templates, there's checklists, there's downloads, there's a number of video playlists. Um, and as I said, brand strategy 101 is also located on the platform. Excuse me a second.

I can't believe that. How long was that? How long did that go on? It's when I coughed. I coughed and I put myself on mute. I hit mute again and it didn't take me off mute. I am so sorry. All right, I'm going to back up. Okay, I don't know when I went on mute, but I'm back. I'm hoping you guys can hear me now. What I said was that if you are interested in joining Bonfire, all you have to do is go to phipvandusen. com and go to the contact page and shoot me a contact email and say, "I'm interested in joining Bonfire. I'd love to hear more about it. " And we'll schedule some time on Zoom and we can talk about whether it'd be a good fit for you. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and shoot me a DM once we get connected on LinkedIn. Um or join my newsletter. Like I'll put that back up there. Just go to phipvanus. commuse. Subscribe to my newsletter. As soon as you get the first email from me, just hit reply. Say, "I'm interested in joining Bonfire. Let's jump on a one um let's jump on Zoom and we'll talk about it. " — [clears throat] — I'm so sorry about that. I have a button on my stream deck that has a mute button and I hit it when I coughed and I uh hit it again and it did not take me off mute. I really apologize about 45 seconds. Okay. Um All right, that's not so bad. 45 seconds. I didn't know how long before I had coughed. Anyway, so there's a few questions that I saw come in and I'm going to take this off the screen scroll back and answer some questions. So if anyone is um has any questions about Bonfire, about networking, about strategic partnerships, about how to get more clients without working harder, what we went through today, just hit me up in the chat. If you type question before um your question with all caps, I'll make sure that I can recognize it and um I'll come back and answer your question. Uh okay. So, Jorge had a question. I'm going to scroll back. All right. Jorge said, "How do you price properly to be able to bring someone in?

Do you have a percentage formula? " Sometimes the issue is the client budget doesn't allow to hire extra help. That's a good question, Jorge. Okay, so to get into the specifics of this, here's the process that I do when I am going to engage in a strategic partnership, I reach out, I make a network connection. I reach out to them and say, "Hey, if I get a project that you'd be appropriate for, would you be willing to white label your services under my banner, my agency banner? " Again, generally, if you can get the work, you can find people to work at the work. 90% of the time, they will say yes. The next thing that you do is you establish how you have to establish some legal understanding between the two of you. I have a non-compete agreement and a non-disclosure agreement. It's a single agreement that combines both, which basically says if I bring you in to work on a client project, you're going to have visibility to that client in their name. And if you do work with me, you can't accept direct work from this client or reach out and go around me and do your own independent work with this client for a period of a year, a year and a half, two years, whatever that is, whatever time you want it to be for you. So, they sign this agreement and it says they're going to white label their services under you and they can't work directly with the client without going through you. Okay. The other piece of that is a non-disclosure agreement which is that they are going to get information about the client's business, the client's project, um possibly information that is not public and they cannot disclose that information publicly. Right? So, it's a it protects you to make sure that they're not sharing things about the project, about the client without your permission and without the client's permission. And it also prevents them from going around you and doing an end run as soon as they figure out that they could work for this client directly and maybe make more money than they were. Okay. The second piece of this is after you get the legal thing in place and you get them to agree to partner with you, then you can establish the relationship or what the working relationship is going to be. The way I do it is that I will get an idea of what the project is from the client. Maybe they're saying, "Design a website, write all our copy, and I'm going to hire a copywriter. " I will quote I I'll go to the my partner and say, "Hey, how much would you charge me to uh to write the copy for a six to eight page website with these sorts of pages? How much is the copywriting going to cost? " They give you the quote and then you mark it up whatever it is profit on top of that you want to make. Is that 10%? Is it 25%? Is it 50, 100%, do you double it? That really is up to you. And then you build that in to your quote to the client. So the process is that you're going to meet with the client. You're going to scope the project. They're going to say, "This is what I need. " You go back and you say, "Okay, I'm going to charge the client this much for the design part. My copywriter is going to charge me this much for the copy part. I can either mark their part up or not. " and then I quote the client that cost and it allows you to take on bigger, more complex projects that then you normally would and work a wider and bigger range of jobs to a larger range of clients. Now, you said sometimes the issue is the client budget doesn't allow to hire extra help. You don't have to make this hiring extra help um visible to the client. They are just part of your team. So, as far as they know, you are just delivering the thing they want, a new website with new copy. You're not saying, "Oh, I just do design and I'm going to be hiring extra help and they're going to be it's going to cost this much more because I'm using a copywriter. " That's not how you position it. You position it as I'm going to deliver you a website with new copy and what happens on my side is side. It's what my agency needs to charge to do this work. You're not separating those two things out. And here's the key thing is you're not actually making what the copywriter is charging you visible to the client.

You're not separating those two things. When it comes to billing, you are paying the copywriter and the copywriter is delivering the work to you and then you are billing the client. Your copywriter may have to interact with the client. They may have to get feedback or be in on meetings, right? But you have an agreement with your copywriter that they won't discuss money and they won't uh what they're charging you or and you don't discuss with your copywriter what you're charging the client. They don't need to know that. All they need to know is they're getting paid for the copywriting and you're going to pay them. They quoted you the price and then you were quoting whatever the price is for the project to your client. And if this was going the other way and the copyrighting copywriter was hiring me for design and it was their client, I'd be perfectly willing to do it the other way around. They would just say, "How much you're going to charge me for designing this website? " I'd tell them. they would agree with me. They'd sign my contract and uh and then they can quote the client whatever they want for what the job is that they got done. I'm going to design the website. I'm going to get paid what I wanted if they decide to mark up what I'm offering them so they can make a little profit for the fact that they're it's there's a little bit more um you know communication that has to go on because there's a number of partners involved. They don't I I'm not going to talk about my agency. money or what I'm charging the client if I'm in a client meeting. So, there's a certain amount of visibility and lack of visibility that happens in this sort of relationship. And this is the sort of thing that we talk about in Bonfire all the time. The true logistics of how these things work and the best practices involved in engaging in strategic partnerships when it comes to white labeling your services under others or having other people white label their services under you. The visibility to the client, the visibility around fees, all that sort of stuff. But I hope Jorge that gives you just a little bit more of a general idea. Um, I there is a percentage formula, but there's also a level of discretion in it in terms of here's another thing. Say, say you're working with a copywriter who was a junior copywriter. They're very good, but they don't charge a tremendous amount of money for their copywriting, but you know that copywriting is excellent copywriting. When you contract with them to write the copy for the website, you might they might quote you a price and you're like, "Wow, that's extremely reasonable. I could feel comfortable marking that up another 50%. I can make 50% on top of what they're giving me and quote the client this amount. the client will be very happy, very comfortable, but I'm not making just what I'm making for my design part, but I'm making a little money on top of it because I marked up my copywriter's fee and I had the room and comfort to do that. Those sorts of things aren't written in stone. There's not a specific formula for every single engagement um when it comes to working with strategic partners. I hope that helps. All right, that was a very long answer, but that was also um a really important question because if you are going to engage in these sorts of things, there are legal agreements, there are communication best practices, there are um process be best practices on how to work with the client and how to articulate how your agency works and also how to communicate with your subcontractors and best practices in doing that. And that's like a whole another live stream. That's a great idea. Maybe I should do a whole live stream about that. Um I actually did a couple years ago, but I could give that one again and get a little more specific around the true like um dos and don'ts of that. Um okay, another question. Okay, this is a good question. Shen photo video curious your take on quality over quantity referring to clients. I would rather have a handful of higherp paying ideal clients rather than a huge client base. Your thoughts? Quality over quantity always. If you have higher paying clients, it's always good to prioritize the higher paying clients. This is what I have found in terms of either higher paying clients or lower paying very cost price sensitive clients. The more pr price

sensitive a client is, the bigger pain in the ass they can be. [sighs] And the higherp paying clients, the least price sensitive clients are generally the easiest to work with. They also have a tendency many times to value the work higher because they understand the value that the work is going to have for their business. If you're competing on price, that's a race to the bottom. And the the cheaper the client is, a lot of times the tougher it is that they are to work with. And so I generally don't chase, you know, kind of um a super budget-minded clients for that very reason. When [snorts] I am coaching my mastermind members and my coaching clients, it's generally better to court people who are less price sensitive and who value quality over quantity. Now that said, if you're hungry and you got no clients and no business, you take what comes along, right? This is a eitheror scenario we're talking about. But if you know, if you got nothing but a free calendar, sometimes you just have to accept what comes in. I've been there, right? The beginning part of my business, I was accepting much, you know, smaller projects and leaner budgets than I would have liked. But as you build your reputation, as you build that true meaningful network and that referral pipeline, those prices and those fees will go up. But ideal clients are generally ones with bigger budgets and less price sensitive because they have a tendency to value quality. That is my take on that. Um, he's not being paid to say this, but Corks, a member of Bonfire named Peter said Philip's mastermind mentorship was the best investment I've made in my decades long creative career. Literally, I'm not paying him to say that. Um, all right. Jorge, you have another question. Jorge asks, "Uh, I work mainly with agencies. How do I position myself to get started to start getting more direct clients versus getting subcontracted by agencies? " Um, you have to, well, if you're getting subcontracted by agencies a lot, you're going to have to raise your visibility and your authority in the digital sphere or the physical sphere. Either you're going to have to go to trade shows, conferences, or the sorts of clients that you've been working with through your agencies, hang out, so you can start introducing yourself, pressing the flesh, and developing relationships directly with clients. That's in real life kind of networking. more showing up digitally and raising your visibility and your digital authority in building your own personal brand and visibility online in order to attract clients directly. And part of that is delivering value online through content with no expectation of return. The other thing that is a possibility when I was mentioning the contract uh agreements is that if you are subcontracting and have to sign an agreement that there's a non-compete agreement when that non-compete agreement kind of um expires, you are free to contact those clients directly and pitch your services directly to them. Now, if you're working with larger agencies, a lot of times there's their non-competes go on for like five years or 10 years. So, if you work as a subcontractor for that agency, you're never going to be able to go around them and go directly to the client. But so that's one of the reasons why you have to kind of take it upon yourself to do those other two types of marketing which are ads or cold outreach or um content marketing and inbound um other than referrals. So these are referrals from your old clients or from your um for your agency clients if you're subcontracting through other agencies too. There's a possibility depending on how large that agency is and how open they are to your um looking for referrals from those clients.

the possibility does exist that you could reach out to those clients if it's okay with your agency you subcontracted with and say, "Hey, would you mind if I reached out to our, you know, our account manager at X company and see if he happened to know anybody who might need, you know, some video editing, audio editing, or whatever it is that you do. There are a number of different ways that you could approach this. Um, but if you've been primarily working and white labeling your services under other agencies, you'll have to start raising your visibility and your authority and your presence online or in real life in order to start attracting those clients on your own. And Jorge to my point today is if you start developing strategic partnerships with a broader range of partners you'll have a wider offering and therefore a wider chance of landing more clients because it gives you a you know a broader net that you can you know depending on the needs of the clients if you have a broader offering you have a broad a greater chance of landing more clients. Um, okay. Turn this one off. And here's a question from Steve Bikes. Steve Bikes995. All right. As a soloreneur, Steve asks, "As a soloreneur, my challenge is identifying the right size client. Small clients tend to go with DIY approaches these days. Large businesses want an agency larger than me. Yes. Um it is difficult sometimes to identify the right size client and as a soloreneur if you are offering like in my graphs at the very beginning of the presentation if you're offering one thing your chances of finding clients who want that one thing um are more narrow. And also if those clients are looking for that one thing, depending on what that one thing is, those can be sometimes smaller clients because they're more willing to go with a small soloreneur or freelancer. Mid, you know, small to mediumsiz businesses, these are businesses I'm talking about from a million to 100 million in revenue. Those sorts of medium-sized businesses will want to go with a small agency. So an agency that has a broader offer, a bigger team, little more maturity and process to how they work with clients because that's establishes a higher trust level with them. And this is one of those things, Steve, which actually is very gerine to what I was talking about today, which is that you may be a soloreneur offering one thing, but if you establish some strategic partnerships across a couple other very complimementaryary skill sets, you can go to market, go to clients and market yourself as a larger agency without actually being a larger agency. You have a broader offering and you can offer a greater number of services and a higher level of deliverables, but actually still for the most part be who you are. You just have a number of subcontractors who are making you appear bigger than you are. You guys know that super famous like um I think it was a New Yorker cartoon where you have two dogs and they're sitting at a computer terminal and the one dog is saying to the other one on the internet no one knows you're a dog and that is so true even today right is that you can be a soloreneur guy in your home office and you just do audio editing but if you establish some strategic partnerships with um you know a content strategy ist a copywriter, a Facebook ads person, a video editor, four people and you can have a much broader offering that allows you to represent yourself as a much larger agency with a greater capability set and therefore be attractive to a larger scale of client. If you are just going to offer your one thing, you are going to essentially limit yourself to the scale clients that you may be experiencing right now. So, it's not a lot more work. It's really establishing relationships and a little bit of process around how to architect your agency to offer more to more people and represent and communicate about yourself in a bit of a different way. This is exactly the sort of thing that we talk about in Bonfire all the time.

And I'm going to put this up because this is important for you guys to see. Oops. Nope, not that one. This one. If you are uh sorry I hit my lower thirds. Um if you're interested in Bonfire, go to phipvandusen. combonfire. Um because Steve, this is exactly the question that we talk about all the time, which is how do you architect what it is that you do to attract better, higherpaying clients and grow your business um beyond what it is that you're doing. You know the quote, right? If you always do the things that you've always done, you'll always get what you always got, right? So, you have to do things differently to get different results. And some of this is just building relationships in a network and communicating your offering in a visible way, in a different way. And it can completely uh evolve and morph your business into something that maybe you really even didn't consider was a possibility for yourself. So you guys, this has been really awesome. Um, it's been amazing hanging out with you guys today. Um, I hope you guys have a fantastic Friday, a killer week, and um, I'm going to go live again next Friday. And as I said, I'm going live next Wednesday with SEO Charity, uh, a charity organization for animals that have been displaced by the war in Ukraine. I'm going to be sending out uh, information on that on socials and LinkedIn and also in my newsletter on Tuesday. So, I hope you join me um on that uh on that charity broadcast, that live stream, because they're an amazing organization and 100% of what they uh what they bring in donations goes directly to the shelters and they don't take any salaries, nothing. It's an amazing organization. They're really, really great. So, uh get on my newsletter. Um watch for that information. And as I said, it's been awesome talking to you today and I hope that you take what I was sharing with you to heart about this idea of broadening your offer and broadening your network because that can lead to more clients with a lot less work. Okay, so Jorge, Steve, Peter, Justin Fine, um, who else? Shan, it was a great question. Chan, Robert, it's good to see all of you guys here today. I really, really appreciate um you're joining me today and uh hope you have a great weekend and join me here next week, Friday 10:00, we'll do a different stream. Okay. Um that's it. See you guys again soon.