Why freelancers eventually burn out (and how to fix it)

I used to think that when I had lots of high-paying clients, I would be living the dream. But the truth was very, very different. I see a lot of freelancers and agency owners getting stressed, burnt out to the point where they just want to quit. And for me personally, I was also once making six figures as a solo freelancer. But I was also behind on everything and I was working 16our days. I see a lot of people believing the one person business that served online. And I personally think that is the worst thing you can follow. So if any of these sound familiar to you, please stick until the end of the video for me to show you a way out. So let's first get the elephant out of the room. Why are you burnt out? First, operations are eating up your days. So your calendar is getting filled with meetings for sales, marketing, finance, and a lot of those small tasks that you actually need to do in order to keep your business running. So you end up actually doing the creative work at 5:00 p. m. 12:00 a. m. 5:00 a. m. in the morning depending on your schedule. Then you have too many decisions to make. I mean like I also had days where I did not have to work a lot but I had a lot of decisions to make and my creative output was really low. And then finally is you don't have any leverage. I remember the days when I was a six-f figureure freelancer and I dreaded going on a vacation because I knew that when I come back from the vacation, all of the work is going to wait for me and it's going to be just there piling up and I'm going to have to work twice as much when I get back from the vacation. And why is that? Well, I did not have any leverage. I did not have leverage on sales, marketing, operations, and even sometimes I even lost clients when I went on vacation because they needed something urgently and there was nobody to respond to them. So, is there actually a way out? Well, today I run a 65 person business and it's actually much easier than when I was solo. And I know this might sound crazy. A lot of people ask me, "How are you living with 65 people? " where in reality I have people for every single specialization. When you're solo, you're going to do 10 jobs really badly. But when you have a team, even like a smaller team, you're going to have people which are better than you in roles which you don't like to do. I mean, you slowly start getting leaders and like people taking over something doing it better than you. And I strongly believe that it's better to risk a little bit of profits and start playing around with adding more people to your organization even if you're just a solo freelancer. And the reality is that you don't need 65 people in order to run your business. For me personally, I'm an entrepreneur. I like scaling things and business is a game for me. But for you and specifically for you today with AI, you can just have one, two, three people. You're going to have five, seven, and you don't have to scale to those abnormal heights, but you're also going to get a lot of benefits. You're going to sleep better and you're going to have more time with your family and like more time to go on a vacation in general. So, how to hire and who to hire? The first thing is I get a lot of people telling me, "Hey, Rosh, you know what? I cannot hire. I'm a pretty bad manager. " Well, turns out that you just did not learn how to be a manager. For me personally, my first hire quit after a week. Christina, she was our creative director at one point. And when I hired her for the first time, after a week, she sent me a message. Hey, Rush, I don't want to work for you anymore. This is too stressful. Yes, I can run a huge business right now. And when I started about 7 to 8 years ago, my first hire quit after a week. And then I started learning about leadership management books. I realized that I was just a douche in terms of managing people. And then I went back, told her again, hey, let's try this again. And that time that was a success. So don't get discouraged if you were trying to hire people and it did not turn out well or if people are telling you that you're a bad manager. If you want to learn how to manage people, it's possible and it's a skill. It's not something you're born with. Now that we know that you can hire, who should be your first hire? Actually, I personally believe that the first hire should handle operations. A lot of creatives, a lot of web design agency owners are going to go ahead and tell you, hey, hire first a developer or a designer or maybe a marketer or whatever your core service offering is, hire people to do more of that. Where I think you should do the opposite. You should hire for operations because realistically, even if you're a solo freelancer, when you add maybe another freelancer to help you out with work, you're just going to have more operations. you're going to have more sales meetings, more project management, more finance, more things to do on your front uh that are going to be eating up your time versus if you get somebody, even a virtual assistant to help you out with finances, operations, project management, and all of those small things, you're going to get the time back in your calendar. And if you're charging like 50, $60, $100 per hour

having somebody to do the low-level tasks for you or maybe $10, $15 per hour, $20 per hour, or depending where you live, uh it can be vast amounts of kind of hourly rates, you're still going to be in surplus, and able to earn more at the end of the month. And if you're thinking of how does this change with time, well, for me personally, that first hire that I hired like for operations, it was not the first hire. I mean like the third or fourth hire for operations was at one point my COO, my uh chief executive officer. So you can see how the small role can go into every single department and help you slowly build it up and get to the top point. Or if you don't want to scale, that's just going to be your best friend in business, I would say, because that's going to be the person who's going to be backing you up when you're on a vacation. They're going to be doing client communication and they also might understand that some of the scope you want to give out for free is not in the scope and they're also going to be able to allow you to earn more money on your front. And as you scale, there's a secret sevenerson rule, but not actually a secret, but something that I saw as I grew my business and as I have grown some businesses in my portfolio, uh, which are also agencies, and that is that every seven person your organization is going to change. So, you're probably going to be running from 1 to 7 and then at the seventh person, things are going to start getting familiar. I mean, you're also stressed out, burnt out, and you're going to feel like you felt like you were the only person running the business. But that's normal. You're just going over a transformation. And when you realize how to reorganize your company, you're going to be able to scale to 14, 28, and then kind of on and on and on afterwards. But more on that in a different video. So last thing, if I want you to take just one thing from watching this video, and that is to hire somebody to help you with operations. That can be your best friend, your wife, your girlfriend, a virtual assistant, anybody who's going to be able to take that part of your work off your shoulders and give you more time to work on client projects or growing the business, whatever you like. If any of these sound familiar to you and you are feeling stressed, burnt out, or you're just lost as a freelancer, an agency owner, ensure to go to visit the link down below where we have something special for