The Insurance Policy Your Business Desperately Needs
There is a storm coming for your business. Clients will disappear, industries will pivot, and disruptive technology will erode your revenue. This is not a possibility. It is an eventuality.
Futur founder Chris Do issues this warning frequently, yet most creative professionals only heed it in a state of panic after the fact. They operate in a perpetual cycle of feast and famine, chasing the next client to survive the next month, never building a cushion against the inevitable downturn.
“You need to start developing this today,” Do insists. “Not yesterday. Today.”
The solution is not to simply work harder or find more clients. The solution is to build an alternative, parallel stream of income that insulates you from market fluctuations. This is not about side hustles. This is about architecting a system that generates revenue without requiring you to build a bigger team or chase more projects.
Imagine your current client service revenue as a baseline. Now, assume you will lose 25% of it overnight. The goal is to build a secondary business that fills that gap. In the beginning, it might only generate a small amount. But over time, as it grows, it becomes your insurance policy. When it reaches 50% of your primary revenue, a new choice emerges: invest more in the alternative, or let it run in the background as pure profit.
This is the power of choice. It is the escape from the reactive state that traps so many creatives.
The Great Trade: Time for Money, or Money for Money?
Most service professionals are trapped in a simple, brutal exchange: they trade their time for money. They charge an hourly or day rate, directly linking their earning potential to the number of hours they can work. This is a finite game.
The wealthy play a different game entirely. They have mastered the art of trading money for more money. This is not a secret but a fundamental shift in mindset. Think of the most common examples:
- Stocks. You invest capital in a company hoping its value grows, allowing your money to make more money without your direct labor.
- Real Estate. You use capital to acquire an income-producing property that generates cash flow or appreciates in value.
In both cases, capital is the engine, not time. The principle is clear: the first order of business is to get your primary business profitable enough to generate surplus money. Once you have that surplus, you can begin to play the new game.
But the very first investment you must make is not in stocks or property. The first thing you must do with extra money is buy back your time.
The First Purchase: Your Own Time
How do you buy your time back? You hire people to do what you used to do. This is the first, non-negotiable step in moving from a sole proprietor to an entrepreneur.
Consider a freelance video editor. Do challenges the audience with a dose of reality. If you charge $2,000 for a project that takes a full month (20 working days), you are making $100 per day. In an 8-hour day, that works out to $12.50 an hour. As Do points out, this is often less than the starting wage at Starbucks. “We have to have this healthy, honest dialogue with ourselves,” he cautions.
The first step is to charge a rate that reflects your expertise and living expenses. Let's say a skilled freelance editor in Los Angeles commands a day rate of $500. To justify hiring that editor, you, as the business owner, must charge more. Perhaps your rate is $850 a day.
The trap is immediate and seductive. The freelancer thinks, “Why would I give someone $500 when I can keep the whole $850?” This is the mindset that keeps creatives small. They hold onto the money and, in doing so, give up their time.
You have to make the trade. You have to buy back your time. That $350 spread is not just profit; it's the price of your freedom. It's the capital you will use to build the next phase of your business. Your time is the most precious asset you possess. As Do states plainly, “You can make more money. You cannot make more time. So use your money to buy back your time.” This principle is a cornerstone of scaling, a lesson he explores in his conversation with serial entrepreneur Dan Martell.
From Maker to Multiplier: The Agency Model
Making that first hire triggers a profound identity shift. You are no longer just a videographer, a designer, or a writer. You are transforming from a solopreneur, the one who does the work, into an entrepreneur, the one who runs the business.
In this new role, you become an agent, a connector. Your job is to connect buyers of creative services with the makers who can execute them.
This transition comes with new responsibilities and risks. The price you charge must account for this.
- Risk of Failure: What if the person you hire flakes out or delivers subpar work? The client will not accept excuses. That is your problem, and the premium you charge is, in part, compensation for you assuming that risk.
- Management and Direction: The person you hire may not have your exact skill set or vision. There is often a talent gap that you must bridge through training, creative direction, and clear process documentation.
- Finding and Vetting Talent: You must build a roster of reliable makers. You cannot depend on just one person. This means creating a database of talent, cataloging their skills, rates, availability, and personality fit.
The process of building your team should be systematic. Start with a small trial project. Test for communication, professionalism, and attitude. If they prove themselves, advance the relationship to longer-term bookings. Eventually, for the best performers, you can offer a full-time staff position.
As your team grows, one person will show leadership potential. Promote them into a management role, where they begin to do what you used to do: art directing and managing other creatives. This frees you up to focus on the highest-value activities in the business: lead generation, sales, strategy, and vision. This is the difference between working *in* your business and working *on* it, a key theme for agency growth detailed in the path from freelancer to seven-figure agency.
Do issues a critical warning here. Some might consider delegating the sales and client relationship roles. This is dangerous. In a service business, the value is almost always in the relationship. Do tells the story of a friend who worked for nine years to build a company's brand, only to be kicked out by his partner. When he left, 100% of the clients followed him. Why? Because the loyalty was to him, not the company name.
“Where's the value in a service-based business?” Do asks. “It's almost always in the relationship.” If you delegate this function, you are handing over the keys to your kingdom. The person who owns the client relationships holds the power.
The Content Engine: Your First Passive Income Stream
Once you have bought back your time, the real work of building alternative revenue can begin. This is where you pivot from services to products and platforms. Do calls these alternative channels passive income. “It doesn't mean you don't have to do any work,” he clarifies, “but you don't have to work so hard for it.”
For many creatives, the most accessible starting point is a YouTube channel. The revenue here comes from views, driven by advertising (AdSense). The amount you earn is determined by your CPM (cost per thousand), which is the rate advertisers pay per 1,000 views.
CPMs vary dramatically. A video game streaming channel might earn $2 CPM, while a channel focused on finance and investing can command rates as high as $36. The principle is simple: advertisers pay more to reach audiences with money who are actively looking to spend or invest it. To maximize earnings, your content should target a relatively affluent audience (North America, Europe) and teach skills related to business, finance, or investing.
The Futur's own channel, for example, generates around $15,000 per month from AdSense alone, peaking at $360,000 in a single year. For many, that figure alone would be life-changing profit. But it's only the first layer.
The Double Dip: Affiliate Marketing and Sponsorships
The next layer is affiliate marketing. Companies like Amazon, B&H, and Adobe would rather pay creators to talk about their products than spend all their money on traditional advertising. When you review a product you use and love, you can include a special link. If someone clicks that link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission, typically between 4% and 7%.
The power of affiliate marketing lies in its scalability and the technology behind it. Amazon's tracking cookie, for instance, remains active for 24 hours. If a viewer clicks your link for a $30 book but ends up buying a $2,000 camera within that window, you get a commission on the entire purchase.
Do references a friend whose entire business is built on affiliate marketing, generating over $1 million a year. He employs a team of writers to create high-quality, SEO-rich blog content that ranks on Google for specific keywords. These articles are filled with affiliate links. It is a content machine built for conversion. Creating content that people actively seek out is a powerful strategy, a topic Do covers in his talk on sustainable content creation.
But here lies the masterstroke, the move most creators miss. Once you start generating significant affiliate revenue for a particular brand, say $5,000 a month, you have proof of the value you provide. You are literally sending them business.
This is when you pick up the phone. You call the brand.
“Hey Brand, you may have noticed I'm moving the needle for you,” Do scripts. “I have a channel. Would you like to sponsor it?”
Now you get to double-dip. You collect the affiliate revenue and a direct sponsorship fee. This is the move that turns a small side income into a major revenue pillar. You have started the relationship by providing value first, making the sponsorship conversation a natural next step, not a cold pitch. This ecosystem becomes a perfect loop: your content drives traffic, which generates affiliate income, which justifies sponsorships, which funds more content.
The Authority Flywheel: From Content to Consulting
As your content engine grows, something else is quietly building in the background: authority. When you consistently solve problems for a specific audience, you become a trusted voice in that space. This authority is an asset you can leverage into even more lucrative opportunities.
The first door that opens is often speaking. Conference organizers will seek you out, eager to have you share your insights with their audience. A realistic goal for an established authority is $10,000 plus travel for a single speaking engagement.
But the fee is only part of the value. When you are on stage, you benefit from what Do calls the stage effect. He breaks it down with a simple formula: The quality of your presentation multiplied by the size of the audience equals your level of attraction.
When hundreds or thousands of people are focused on a single person, that person is imbued with immense perceived authority. The moment the speaker steps off stage, a crowd forms. They want to hire you, book you for their event, or sponsor your channel. The stage is a powerful lead-generation tool.
This naturally leads to the next rungs on the value ladder:
- Coaching. People will want you to teach them your process one-on-one or in small groups. You can coach fellow creatives on how to replicate your business transformation.
- Consulting. Businesses will pay a premium for you to help them solve their problems directly. This is where you can command the highest rates, trading your expertise for dollars.
The economic leap is staggering. An editor might struggle to earn $500 a day. A consultant with established authority can charge $1,000 an hour. “People are going to pay for your experience and your knowledge to help them solve problems,” Do explains. You are no longer selling time; you are selling outcomes.
Productizing Your Process
At the top of the pyramid lies the ultimate form of leverage: turning your intellectual property into products. After years of coaching and consulting, you will notice patterns. You are answering the same questions and providing the same frameworks repeatedly. Instead of regurgitating this information one-on-one, you must document it.
This documentation can be transformed into a variety of assets that further build your authority and generate scalable income:
- Books: An eBook or a traditionally published book solidifies your expert status. Each chapter can contain calls to action, driving readers back to your website, courses, and tools.
- Digital Products: Courses, workshops, and templates allow you to sell your knowledge to many people at once. Frame the value against your consulting rate: “You can hire me for $6,000 for six hours, or you can get the entire system in this course for $499.” This is value stacking.
- Tools and Assets: This is the “sawdust” of your creative process. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of Basecamp and authors of Rework, note that in creating one thing, you create many things. The storyboards, shot lists, project calculators, and custom design rigs you develop for client work are all potentially sellable products.
Do highlights the career of designer Charles S. Anderson. Anderson, whose iconic retro style helped define brands like Fossil and the French Paper Company, built a business by redrawing and repurposing vintage illustrations that were in the public domain. He then created the CSA Images stock catalog, licensing these illustrations to other designers. Eventually, a large company like Adobe or Getty Images could acquire that entire library for a life-changing sum. He turned the assets he used for his work into a valuable business itself.
This is the final stage of the flywheel. Every piece of your business feeds every other piece. The content you create to attract clients also generates passive income. The authority you build from that content leads to speaking and consulting opportunities. The knowledge you gain from consulting becomes a course. The tools you create for your course become standalone products. It is a self-sustaining ecosystem designed for one purpose: to give you freedom.
This is how you escape the feast-or-famine cycle. You stop trading all your time for money. You use your money to buy back your time, and then you use that time to build a machine that works for you.
TRANSCRIPT
I want to introduce you to a couple of key powerful ideas one is how can you make sure you have some insurance in your business when business slows down and this is a really good idea because it helps you to get out of the feat and famine mindset to give you a little
cushion maybe a little extra spending money every month that doesn't require you to build a bigger team or to chase after more clients if you're interested stick around so this's this concept here is that we're we're building a company that is generating revenue for us so if we look at a graph it'll
look something like this and we'll talk about like this is the money graph and this is time so what we want to do is we're want to figure out another way to make income that insulates us against the fluctuations of whatever's going on and this is something I warn everybody about and they
never heed the warning and they call me in a state of panic after the fact so I say why weren't you listening to me when I warned you about this clients go away Industries changed disruptive Technologies emerged to take away your Revenue source and then now you're CAU holding the bag and there's
nothing in it so you need to start developing this today not yesterday today okay here we go so Chris Franklin you have a video-based business right and so you're going to earn money and this is kind of how your Revenue looks okay if you do well this number will go up if you
do poorly it'll go down so the way that we ensure against this because we should just anticipate it going down and act accordingly to assume that you're going to lose say 25% of your business how do you fill that so that that that doesn't cause you to come in State a panic and
if your business grows you have an extra 25% of money to sit on top of that we'll just call peer profit and so it's going to be some kind of graduated scale so your video business occupies this much in terms of Revenue over time so the question is what can we fill in
here that brings it back to that Baseline that you're looking at so previously we were talking about $300,000 a year in Revenue not in profit everybody in Revenue so what we have to do is fill it in so maybe the first year it's not making that much much but over time it starts
to make a lot and this is the really cool point when it reaches the 50% mark this alternative business that you generate you have to make a big boy decision at that point you can say to yourself should I invest more resources into this alternative business or should I just keep doing what
I'm doing and let this thing chill in the background and that's a great thing because you have choice choice is powerful okay now what can we do to generate more money without taking more client work have to think about this so historically speaking most of us do this we exchange time your time
for money so what we're doing is we're selling time for money makes sense right that's why we get into this mindset we're charging hourly there's an hourly rate so x per hour or sometimes we think about like x per day but what I found that especially in certain kind of communities let's just
call them rich people what people do is they trade money for more money it's a wild concept you trade money for more money what are some examples that you can think of where people trade money for more money some simple examples that everybody can understand stock stocks that's excellent stock so you you
buy a stock or a future right that's what they're called is you hope that the stock grows in value that you've done research you got a hot tip or you see trend moving so you might invest in a company like apple in 2007 the bottom of the market 2008 that would have been
a great time This brilliant genius sold his stock in 2008 okay back to the show guys my financial advisor says don't do it I'm like bro get me out the Market's terrible you remember when it crashed and it started crawling up when it got back to where I thought this is it I'm
out Steve job's going to die tomorrow this company's going to happened I did not see the genius and Tim Cook at that time brilliant don't do as I I do do as I say what's another thing that we can do because some people say you know stock is pretty volatile and the thing
about stock which will teach us a valuable lesson is this what stocks are most likely to go up faster than other stocks does anybody know tech tech tech is usually more volatile when we say volatility we talk about risk right the greater the risk the greater the reward so the percentage of risk
is often tied to the percentage of the reward we understand that right so if you do Blue Chip like IBM or one of the things they consider Blue Chip it's a pretty safe investment it's going to move a couple of percentages uh Blue Chip could be considered Disney to and now Apple's Blue
Chip it's not so volatile but if you got early in on Twitter you would have made like a bandit and the earlier that you can get in Pre IPO round a I I don't know all my my terminology here but you're taking the most amount of risk because they haven't proven Jack so
when I interviewed Gary vaynerchuk and I asked him what was the best investment you ever made what's the greatest return return of investment he said Twitter so they're talking about like a 100x return so if you put in 10 grand they're looking at 100% X in terms of their investment and that's how
they're able to use their money to actually buy more money so your job right now if we can think about this is to make enough money that you have Surplus money that then you can use that money to invest in other vehicles to make you more money here's another one that we all
understand real estate if you buy a rental property you have the capital and capital moves things because not everybody has money you invest in real estate and hopefully the property generates money for you such that the amount of money that you put in um you get more in return so you're going to
pay down your loan quickly or you can get cash over the money that you invested so it becomes um income property for you right that's what you do now if we just understand these two things we can apply this a lot of what we're talking about so the first order business is get
your business right side up so that you have excess money and the first thing you do when you have more money is you buy back what my time you back your you buy back your time so phase one is to make money so you need to you need to make enough money Surplus
money I'll just put this right you make extra money and you use that money to trade for your time back so you trade the money for time so now you have free time that would be the first thing how do you buy your time back because it sounds like an impossible idea how
do you buy your time back you hire people to do what what you used to do and in this that's right let's look at you as a a sole proprietor and we talked about this in our last video you do all the work you play you we all the hats okay and eventually
you make a little extra money and you have to think well would I be better off giving a percentage of that money to someone else to help me so that I can buy back my time so let's talk about the video or photography business we're going to keep it on that theme today
who else could you possibly hire to do what job for you that would then buy back your time Chris a video editor okay an editor that makes a lot of sense I think we listed something like six rols before editing seems like a pretty good thing so if you were to charge a
client let's use some hypothetical numbers but keep it based in reality what would you have to charge in order for you to cut the video $3,000 uh over how much time over four weeks oh that's a lot of time so four weeks is 20 days right so that's not a lot of money
right so let's use more round numbers okay I'm going to say let's say you're saying two grand cuz the numbers are easy easier okay and it takes you a month so that's four weeks 4 * 5 is 20 so it's $22,000 for 20 days worth of work now if we do the math
this sounds pretty terrible you're basically making 100 bucks a day so the first sign is this is not enough not in a in a developed country right so $100 a day if we work an8 hour day what does that work out to be mo like 15 bucks mhm that's less than that it's
like 12 12 a 12 and a half okay your basic working 1250 an hour now if you were to get a job at Starbucks how much money would they pay you at Starbucks depends on where you are sometimes it's it's like 50 bucks isn't it yeah sometimes what does Starbucks pay right now
we should know these things what does Starbucks pay just call it 15 I think is where they're at so essentially right now you're making less than you would if you were working at Starbucks right and we have to have this healthy honest dialogue with ourselves what we're really earning versus the fairy tale
that we tell ourselves that we're making $2,000 when we break it down is not that good so the first thing you need to do is you need to charge more to do this than what you can make a Starbucks right right okay all right so if we were to revisit this scenario how
much money do we need to make a day for it to be like reasonable given our living expenses what do you guys think I think the original question was how much would it take for Chris to be the one who both films and edits I would call it on one shoot 10 grand
that's just me well let's let's go so I don't have to do all the fancy math how much a day it's 15 a day yeah like just how going that be for two grand for for four weeks I I'm trying to figure out where the question was going and I was trying to
give you a general round number if the truth the truth of it is it takes us if we're doing this in pure hours I'm going to charge you $88,000 and I'm going to give you your video back within seven within seven working days is the is the like the actual numbers of it
all let's work the way the question the way I asked you because it's going to be too hard for me to sit here and unpack all this stuff okay if somebody wanted to hire you hey Chris stop shooting I need you to cut this video how much is it to book you for
a day for real for real the real number here $2,000 a day yes for editing how come your rate just keeps going up I don't know an editor I got to pay 2 Grand a day no editing a video is so vague to me that's why I'm trying I'm just trying I'm just
by your time okay how much does it cost to book you for a day if it takes you 17 days that's what I pay you okay that's what I'm talking about around okay what is the day rate for an editor I hired a lot of editors for a good editor it's about $500
a day that sounds about right they work anywhere from 8 to 10 hours a day perfect Richie bringing us back to reality beautiful okay thank you I live in value land over here like what problem don't try to get ahead of the game you killing me this this is what we need to
know average rate in Los Angeles is about $500 a day that seems about right to me you can get fancier you get a little scrappier you can go up and down a little bit but that sounds about right to me in Los Angeles okay cuz some people are going to freak out because
we have an international audience where people make literally $1 an hour okay so average is that so if they wanted to get you Chris Franklin what would you have to charge in order to make it make sense for you what would they have to pay you to get you versus an average guy
um proba if I have the delegate it's probably $800 to yeah I think that's about right so like 8900 let's Call 850 okay absolutely all right so you need to be here at 850 a day and everybody use these numbers scale them up and down it's all relative right it's not quite double
but it's not like a 50 B $50 more this is and people are a little silly like let me just add $10 to this I'm going to be rich it don't make any sense okay so this is what it gets what what you're going to have to charge to get Chris Franklin so
here's the Trap that people fall in like I'm getting $850 a day why am I give me some mother app for 500 I'm just going to keep it because that's a lot of money I'm going to do just fine and what else am I going to do you know mow the lawn what
am I going to do so you hold on to the money and you give up your time so what you have to do is you have to buy back your time because your time is the most precious thing that you've got okay the classic thing is you can make more money you cannot
make more time so use your money to buy back your time okay so if you know what the market rate is for someone who's good and good is just good enough to meet your standards not Academy award-winning editor you understand that okay and the spread between this number and this number is what
is going to drive your decision as to whether or not you need to hire someone I just want to stress the point that you made in case some people in the audience rewind again and listen to this you have to make a very critical decision here as a as a creative which is
you are no longer the one who does the work meaning there's a lot of video editors watching there's a lot of videographers watching designers watching it's like I'm the only one that can do the work no you were transitioning into becoming a business bus owner at this point cuz I think sometimes they
hear this and it's like well doesn't what am I going to do then like literally we're going to get into it what am I going to do Mo the LA but they there's like can you just stress the identity shift that one has to make when they enter this Arena of like you
are no longer selling the fact that you are the one who does the work you are selling the fact that you have the business that achieves the result of that work so cuz or else they're not going to be able to do this I don't yeah I understand he needs to move from
a sole proprietorship yes or so preneur to an entrepreneur to run an agency where he's the agent for a lot of different talented people and he's connector and there's a lot of value and Power in this and I think it's where you want to move I'm not going to get into the ethical
moral debates about whether or not you can profit from other people's labor that's a video for another hour not today Okay so we've we've made this decision we're going from solo prur to entrepreneur right and we're going to create an agency and we said in the last video You're an agent to connect
things okay so on one hand you have buyers of creative services on the other hand you have makers so you need to connect buyers and makers because they don't know each other this is you you're the agency make sense makes sense okay so in order for you to make this make sense you
have to cover the spread because there's some risk in here that's involved remember we talked about risk with risk comes reward why is it risky to hire this person what if flck out what if they don't do the work What If you hired the person that you thought could cut you uh funny
comedy videos and they turn out they want to do melodramatic films now you're screwed you can't go back to your client said I hired the wrong person they're going to say what that's your problem not my problem okay and they already accept this that there's a certain amount of risk as a business
owner as an agency that you take on that's baked into your price you don't even need to tell them telling them says I'm new in business I don't know what I'm doing or I'm going to patronize you and teach you how business is done the chances chances are if they could afford to
hire you they're better business person than you are meaning they've already mastered these principles not always but most likely unless they inherited a lot of money or they won the lottery okay so this is what you need to start thinking about so you're going to use your money to buy your time back
and so you're going to do something very valuable that move moves economies forward and I'll tell you why this is really important for you to understand so you give them money and they give you labor it's how it works and I'll tell you why it's important because some of you think it's exploitive
to do this well guess what if you're this person and you have no money you'll be thrilled and delighted and Overjoyed to be able to have the opportunity to work with somebody so we want to cover one other concept it's called the talent Gap so you're like well if you charge $800 or
850 there's no way this other person at 500 can do the same kind of work you can that that might be the case but I know there's lots of people who are really talented but don't have opportunity or don't want to work with clients don't want to manage things don't want to take
on risk or cannot afford to take risk but there is a talent Gap and what you do is you need to coach them up through ART direction or creative Direction and tell them here's how I like to edit videos here are my setups here's my process and the way that you manage them
is you ask them to Shadow you here's what I do and you're going to give them a couple of tests okay I'm going to try you out on a project just give me a day's worth of work I'm going to teach you what to do and the day let's review and you keep
testing testing until it becomes abundantly clear this person is easy to work with takes Direction well is prompt has great communication skills has a great freaking attitude and based on that you can say why don't we advance this relationship to the next level so we start start them out with a trial where
we train them and we advance them towards something where it's semi-permanent you can book them for longer periods of time and then at some point you're like why don't we tie the knot why don't we make this for real real let's put them on staff and you hire them full time and it
could be at some point you're going to hire two three of these people so we're going to clone them right staff two staff three is this getting cut off no you're good okay and one of them is going to show leadership potential one of them is going to show initiative it could be
multiple but based on a number of criteria ease of work professionalism um good client skills great communication skills you're going to promote one of them and th those that one person is going to manage the other two people so they're into a management position so they edit a little bit but they now
do what you used to do which is you know what your edits here here's what you need to do to make it here because we're selling a standard of quality here or a style or something like that does that make sense makes sense okay so now if you continue to do this you
look at every role that you do and you start to get rid of all non-essential roles non-essential roles is a role that only you can do right now everybody's going to think oh I can only it's got to be me to do all these things I know that it doesn't doesn't the essential
role happens to be over here it's usually on this side which is some things like leg gen sales strategy maybe like General Vision for the company mapping out where you're going to be in the next two to three years right those are roles that are hard to delegate to other people can I
jump in here and just ask for those in the audience that actually for even even for me like what if you what if that's not the role you want to play in is it okay for me to assume a role that is in the production Arena right and get somebody who can do
that other stuff just like I would hire an editor is that okay that is totally okay we were talking about um Noah Kagan he's like I don't want to run the company I'm not sure I'm good at it and I don't want to become a horrible person so I need to hire someone
else I don't hear that many stories where that works out and he's shrewd enough to set up a deal where both people were benefit from it I don't think he had to give up part of his company and he was able to compensate um amen for a period of time and nean was
able to help him build the company but more often than that you get people who aren't that good who aren't that motivated and you just run in circles basically right and then you get really frustrated I hear more stories where it doesn't work out than it does work out generally speaking here's the
problem if we say where is the value in the value chain is it someone who's closer to the buyer or someone closer to the maker what do you think it is the buyer for sure the buyer so if you hire people to do lead genen sales and strategy and vision they have all
the power because you know what they've been working with Mr and Mrs client and they're like hey you need to pay me more what are you going to do now soon you'll be working for them right what a genius setup you got okay one of the beautiful things that makes it possible for
Noah to to be able to do this is because he owns the IP and owns the brand it's a software sort of company right or it's a Marketplace so it's not dependent on any person but when we get into a creative service business it's really about the relationships no one is going to
the brand okay and I want to prove it to you because something has happened recently with one of my friends he had been working with his partner for a long time nine years it was understood that they would come to a partnership agreement where he would own a percentage of the company so
he wakes up one one day and he's like hey you know how we've talked about this we've never made it official I'm concerned what if you die right what happens to me I literally own 0% of this company and I've been for the last 9 years hustling to build the brand okay let's
call this company Acme that's not the real name of the company right the Acme Corporation okay so he thinks there's a lot of brand equity in this name and lo and behold after bringing up the issue with his partner the person actually owns the company the partner decides you know what you're not
my partner at all we're going to sever all ties unbeknownst to him he's kicked out all emails been shut off he hasn't even have access to service the people he already has a relationship with so he's kind of L that in the cold and so he and I talk and we're chatting he
goes Chris I've been putting all the work into this brand I said do you think that brand is valuable he goes I don't know what you mean well what is the strength of a brand the loyalty of the customer is the Loyalty in you so I'll draw representation of him or is in
the brand he goes I don't know I believe it's to me and so what happened is he reached out to all of his previous clients via a different Channel and let's say there's a 100 of them how many people stayed with Acme and how many people went with with this guy what what
is your guess 90% WR with him 90% 75% 75 good yeah 75 okay if you say 75% or whatever per that means the brand is worth something and he's worth something you know what how many people went with him 100 no 100 wow why do I want to tell you this story there's
a lot of things to learn from the story we think because there's a label in a company with a federal tax ID number that the value is there where's the value in the relationships in a service-based business that's almost always in the relationship I have story after story to tell you where somebody
gets screwed from the corporation they leave and the whole business follows them because it's in the relationship now you're like why are you telling me stories is it because I like to tell you stories well look at this you're here as the agency owner you're going to put somebody who's going to have
all the relationships that is the danger in which you are going to look at hey what's up featur donation I'm an eagle driven person it hurts me that there are other YouTubers who I think deliver less value consistently that are outperforming this Channel and you know why cuz they have folks on their
Channel hitting subscribe can you do me the one favor hit subscribe right now I'm not saying 100% that's what you're doing right because the salesperson sells you you're the star you're the hero but you're banking on a lot where the client understands that okay so that when you're or lead gen sales executive
producer type person leaves that they're going to say no this was always about Chris Franklin right it was never about you right the unique thing about my friend is he had the high touch he was the one servicing some them so it was no different right right so there is some trickiness here
so I believe when this person leaves because they'll leave because they're ambitious they're driven that's why they're in this position some will stay and some will go that percentage won't be 100% but it won't be great yeah because you know we're trying to hold on to every client that we work for this
is important so how you manage this this is this if you want to go down this rout we're going to have a non-disclosure agreement we're going to have a non-compete Clause okay we're going to have a non-poaching clause you cannot poach clients or staff if you do you've breached it I'll sue you
and they'll sign at the beginning because you have all the leverage but you're dependent on some pieces of paper to make this work work right right okay cuz that person could just sit there and if the other client calls them and they haven't solicited them oh called the non-solicit Clause they didn't solicit
I'm like I have done no wrong they reached out to me all I said is I'm leaving I'm no longer there so then you get into grade like I got to sue them and you're running a creative business not a legal service right so you have to think about that okay so we
understand the concept we're able to then charge more because we're taking risk we're managing people and your job now is to build relationship with buyers and to find more makers more qualified makers right does that make sense right is maker a bad word no I love maker okay personally okay that's what you
need to do because every once in a while you're going to need this specialist that specialist this person does this so you need to build up a database of people that you can call upon uh some people work weekends some people have families to manag and they're all degrees of talent so what
you do is you create a card this this is Mary and Mary gets this many stars for for skill and this many price tags for like what Mary cost and this might be primary and secondary specialty specialization okay and you might add in other information like availability uh any special notes about personality
and probably link to their work so you want to build these cards for as many people as you can because you cannot rely on one or two people to do the work make sense everybody makes sense all right mhm good good all right let's move on now the old model is we just
keep doing this again and again but we're talking about building a new model so what can we do as a creative services company to build something probably product based or something else that where we don't have to sit there and sell to anybody I'll give you a clue so Chris you already currently
do YouTube content so we know that you're creating a YouTube video or YouTube channel you have a YouTube channel right and you create videos and we said like maybe two or three a month yeah okay so he doing two or three a month you get good views on these videos yeah it it
varies but okay yeah decent decent decent views so there's a couple things that we need to do so what we want to do is we want to start to create alternative channels of Revenue more affectionately referred to as passive income okay and people are like w there's no such thing as passive income
kind of there is there is it doesn't mean you don't have to do any work but you don't have to work so hard for it okay MH so the revenue that you can create on YouTube via AdSense or any these other platforms like from Tik Tok to Instagram or Facebook comes from views
so what matters is views right it matters a lot the demographic that you attract and depending on who you attract you get this thing called the CPM a CPM is cost per thousand m is from Roman numerals I think m is a thousand right because you're like shouldn't be million I think it's
cost per thousand do you know what your CPM rate is I can look it up but I don't know the top of my head uh I can't guess I can't guess that's fine the channels that make the most money have certain things in common and I need to just tell it to you
okay number one they serve an audience that's rich generally speaking North America and Europe so if you happen to serve poorer countries where that's the majority of your audience your CPM is going to be really low because the annual income average is pretty low they know that so advertisers want people who can
afford to buy their products and services otherwise you have to do a giant volume so North America Europe that generally is the richest but you know and the other thing is if you teach them something your audience that's related to finance investment real estate those kinds of things they generally will pay you
more because not only do they have money CU they're living here they're actively looking for ways to make more money they'll get some really high cpms like $36 CPM if you contrast that with say um video game streaming they'll make $2 per thousand so you can see on on scales of magnitude if
you have the same views you need to have content that teaches people fundamentally business skills on how they can grow and make money because those people have even more money than the general populace okay make sense so you need to kind of look at that okay our channel does about $28 or something
like that CPM yeah so what we generate in just making content that we love to help the people we care about is somewhere in the neighborhood of like say $10,000 a month sometimes more do you know mo off the top of your head 15 15 okay it goes up and down yeah it's
seasonal it's all kinds of weird stuff so we do currently about 15K a month so if you multiply that by 12 mon what do we get because we do 12 months in a year 130 no 180 180 yeah Chris Franklin bringing the math dude you're breaking all kinds of stereotypes right now brother
hey yo no for real dude Mississippi guy making videos just CR he's like like Raymond over there he's like Raymond definitely 18 180,000 you are you a math wizard I love math oh my God this is freaking awesome I I didn't know this about you patterns yeah you were cracking out the numbers
before and now I'm like it's for real for real okay so the most we've ever made in a single year was 360,000 a lot of people watching this like it would be really nice to make 100K clean profit okay that's just AdSense okay here's where it gets really interesting there's something called affiliate
marketing which I think you do right right okay affiliate marketing is just a very simple concept companies like Amazon B&H and all these other people they don't spend a ton of money on Advertising they would rather pay you a spokesperson to talk about a product to review it to give your honest opinion
about it about what you like and what you don't like and you can sell that way here's the weird thing about how Amazon works I think it's like four or 5% right they'll pay you somewhere between four to 5% until you sell more they will then bump you up to the next range
which is like 6 to 7% and what's really cool is there's this thing like it's cookie technology so if you send a link to say a lens or filter they go there and they see other things as is the case often and you can even buy cars on Amazon now so your cookie
is active for a few hours it's not just for the time in which they just touch it so I don't know what it is these days right it's 24 hours okay that's a good bit Richie tells us it's 24 hours okay I have a friend who does who has an entire business model
built on affiliate marketing do you know what he does a year $1 million $1 million so what he does is he employs I think seven full-time writers this is making you upset isn't it yeah yeah I I see your body language you doing think about it what are you doing with your lives
okay so he hires six or seven full-time writers overseas who who basically make no money really but in their country they're balling right because they're doing like eight grand a year and they're they're like and I do a white collar work I just sit there and write right so he manages them the
agent who connects Talent right and so he winds up selling a lot of adobe subscriptions he's in the top tier of people affiliate marketers who sell Adobe subscriptions so not only does he get the normal pay he gets bumped to higher tier and guess what he has a direct relationship with Adobe this
is freaking cool okay now I'm going to introduce you the third concept and it's all related to this okay this I just learned this past week and I'm like oh my god I've not been thinking right I'm Chris Franklin like what what's wrong with me let's get this money why do I work
so hard for no freaking reason check this out you guys this is bananas Gwen Stefani ba give us the goods man hey no more half singing no more poorly constructed lyrics and off key notes okay here's what happens remember before when you were creating YouTube content and we said you know what you
need Omni Channel Omni presentes and you're going to create a blog page right yes okay the blog page is not really for readers but it is for SEO and it's also to warm your audience up for leads okay so what you have is you have your episode okay and you have all this
description and people reading it so you're getting lots of views to it what are we doing over here huh huh affiliate marketing down at the bottom call to action hey book me for this right so now eventually for certain keywords that you care about you're going to be ranked top 10 in Google
that's the goal and apparently it is not that hard to do that if you consistently put out good quality content that's rich with SEO that people want and are finding you for the goal everybody top 10 organic which we rank for for many many terms okay but we're stupid we just want to
work really hard for no money okay so you have this affiliate link I'll draw the chain here okay it's really cool So eventually you start moving the needle for the company and they will take notice they will and you'll know because all of a sudden every month you're getting a bigger and bigger
check and at first it will be nothing at first it was like it'll pay for lunch and eventually it'll pay for really nice dinner and then it'll pay your car payment and then your rent and now you're starting to move things imagine what kind of affiliate numbers you have to do to get
a million dollars okay so the math would be less than 100 Grand but pretty up there right so let's say you're doing like 5K in affiliate payout per brand well most of us would just be happy to do the rain dance we're pretty good but here's what you'd get really smart you would
call up cold hey Brand you know I just got this check from you I don't know where I rank in the tier of affiliate marketers for you but if you find valueing this I happen to have a channel would you like to sponsor the channel so now you get a double dip on
this thing this is the thing that blew my mind crazy this makes perfect sense and you don't have to do just one because you what these long articles have a lot of room for stuff do you know what I mean there's a lot of room and you know what people are like hey
Chris Franklin is an awesome guy the future they're awesome people well if I'm going to buy a subscription or do this or that and here's the thing do not get greedy here only promote and link to products that you like and use this is critical so we have to make choices we love
this brand we do not that's it okay if you don't love it don't do not do it because you will screw over the relationship with your consumers so like hey you recommended some books I talk about books a lot of times check this out Amazon affiliate to the book it's not going to
make me any money it's a $30 book but it lingers for 24 hours that's the key so I say keep shopping friends it doesn't hurt you it only helps all of us I can do this okay but the new move is to do the brand play and get them to sponsor you and
now guess what you have a relationship with someone somebody that you could not get any other way because you know what you started with an exchange of value first cuz if you're making 5K you could know that they're making 50k or 500k and it's proof of concept you're going to them literally giving
them money right so many of us are too busy like can you sponsor me no who are you again but if you move the needle for them you want to sponsor me absolutely okay let's keep moving on okay there's a lot of things that we can do here just just to generate money
one quick question so this kind of model here is based on if you have like a website where you're building a um like a Blog where you're posting the YouTube video on the blog you have the description you have affiliate links call to action at the bottom right this is p going further
than just posting on YouTube is that correct just am I understanding this correctly yeah this was this was what we had this was what we mentioned right when you stepped out it was doubling it was basically doubling down on how I can amplify my SEO on my website so people can find me
because people in my area and people outside of my area can't find me and so this is making me visible in the old days I'm talking about like six months ago beging R days you know you would have to like oh God I have to listen an episode I got to write the
article you don't have to do any of that in the old days you'd have to pay a transcription service of some you know whatever person sitting there typing it out for you making sure you you got quality assurance the new day it's happening for you semi-automatically for almost no money no money if
you use these these AI engines to transcribe this okay and then you try to figure out how to summarize in a way that's interesting for people to read not just for SEO but you know what it's there and so you have additional benefit from this how do you have additional benefit if you're
high an SEO for like podcast setups Dynamic videos to help you convert on events that you're producing or three things event organizers miss when they're looking at um video and social media content guess what that's gonna draw more clients it's almost like a perfect loop it's a perfect loop I try to design
ecosystems that once you figure it out it's Infinity okay and you know what when you call the brand to sponsor you things are working by the way do you need people to make your next Adobe Max video right cuz I see these things all the time who's making them for you happy with
them what can I do to so now you can be working with the roads and the mackys of the world right or the Cannons or the black magic or Sony call me okay you can do all that because you're proving to them I mve the needle for you guess what we're not done
yet check this out we're going to go back into the semi alternative ways of making money okay you start ranking you're moving the needle for a subject right for a subject that's aligned around a problem that people are trying to solve when you teach business owners not individuals business owners which just say
businesses on how to use this creativity to move the needle for their business guess what they're going to do they're going to ask for it they're going to ask for something else they're going to they're going to ask you to be a speaker we'd love to invite Chris Franklin to the stage uh
in the last year he's shown 10 businesses how to quadruple there their revenue their reach their engagement through the power of video etc etc and he's going to share his top five key insights now you make money as a speaker so you're going to become Authority in your space solving business problems not
creative problems using creativity and so at first you might not make a whole lot of money but eventually you start to make real money especially because your Channel's growing and your Authority is growing and those two are linked together so now they're going to pay you some money let's just say a good
goal right now is you get paid $10,000 to speak plus travel and hotel it's pretty cool okay so you get paid that kind of money but now you get to take advantage of something that Erica needs talks about something called the stage effect this is where it gets really interesting okay the stage
effect is this okay he says the quality of your presentation times the size of your audience equals your level of attraction would you like to be more attractive this is why there is this Allure that speakers have because the 500 of us the 2,000 of us that are in the audience the size
of the audience are looking at one person so you know what you've already figured out how to deliver the quality now that you're invited you didn't even have to chase the opportunities they're just going to come to you and you've seen this all of you have seen this some of you have done
this as soon as the speaker's done they step off stage and there's a small group of people who gather around them we'd love to book you for our event how do I work for you this helps you with uh this part okay right right hey can we sponsor you for something can I
hire you can you train my team so this will naturally lead you to other ways of making money naturally it's going to lead you to coaching and Consulting we love how you set up these things we want to automate our pipeline we want to leverage everything this is the way the world is
moving we want your help so now when you're doing consulting your rate will be on orders of magnitude more than it used to be for much less output too like let's look at it from a work production standpoint yes if I said to you Chris Franklin um I just want you to talk
to me and I'll pay you $1,000 a day would you rather do that work than sit in front of the machine yeah yeah easily okay I'm going to make it a little bit better because when you're a consultant you're going to charge $1,000 an hour not a day people are going to pay
for your experience and your knowledge to help them solve problems this is super powerful you want to say something I I live some of what he's saying about this and have taken his feedback on doing this even in my own world like you have to be prepared to assume a new identity for
this to work for this creative blueprint to work in your life so I I deliberately left coaching out for a reason okay because you can do one onone coaching which you may or may not be able to command that kind of rate but that's okay okay cuz we think Consulting should be a
little bit more than coaching okay but if you do one to few and you could decide how many of the few are it's called group coaching so now you have a choice to do a few different things you can coach the dear Sons remember the Dear Son the people who were like you
on how to transform their business the way you did it or you can teach or coach businesses on how to do this in mass and then you say well Chris this is not very scalable this is not passive income I said these are alternative ways to make money not all of these ideas
are passive income this you have to work for still you're still exchanging time for money but now you're changing exchanging less time for way more money right align with the things that you should be doing right and the great news is the more you do this the more well-known you become the more
confident you become the more tools and resources you you have this is a really big deal we're not even done with this model yet okay so you're like you know what I've been um Consulting and coaching I've noticed some patterns here I've noticed some patterns and rather than me try to sit here
and regurgitate the information over and over again I need to then document the insights that I have and we can convert that into other things so the arrow goes up here now okay I'm going to document it and what what can I do so the easiest way to doent something is you're going
to write so you can write a a white paper you can write an ebook or you can write a real book and you can publish it and guess what every book and everything that you write further goes to build your Authority in the space and if you put calls to action within the
book end of each chapter with some additional resources or tools that drives more traffic to the site more affiliate more all of this is just one giant bubble right whereas it tries leave it gets pulled back through the gravity back into the system and is an awesome thing well guess what when you
write something you have chapters you have organized things you might design some Frameworks or some mental models that then you can then package up teach and sell that or provide digital or analog tools you can create worksheets there's lots of things so now you're going to be able to create a lot of
products what was interesting um I think in the book re work um Jason freed and David Hansen Hein Meer is he said when you create one thing you create many things in the process very true we often forget the other things that we create and we only sell the one thing so in
creating a video for your clients you might have to develop ways of storyboarding creating shot list of calculating expenses and all kinds of things and those are the tools that you need in order for you to do the job but other people who do the same job might want to benefit from that
as well 100% you can design rigs that you can do 3D printing on there's a lot of things you can do well guess what you can make a course or video based on this which we touched upon last time which then you can sell so you can say you know what um many
people don't have the budget to pay me this kind of rate I recommend that you look at the course which covers everything that I know for like $4.99 or if you insist you can hire me for $1,000 an hour it's your choice the course is say six modules an hour each so you're
getting six hours of value so you say6 times $11,000 is $66,000 right right and then you put a slash through it or you can get it for $4.99 and guess what I'll include these Frameworks the white paper and all these things so you're doing what horos refers to as value stacking I'm going
to Value stack it so that it ridiculous a ridiculous amount of value for the price that you're paying for and then if you need to you can throw in a guarantee you can say you know what you purchase this you do the work you want your money back 30 days give your money
back no problem and a small percentage of people will return it because they're scumbags a small percentage will return it because they do get it and they got uh into this buying State fomo they bought it you just build that into the business model so if you assume 10% % will refund and
just build it into the price you can jack the price up by 10% if you wish and that way the people will return it no problem smart business people account for these kinds of things and they bacon into the pricing that's what you're paying for so when you go to a store and
you buy something it's not really the price of that thing what you're paying for is overhead staff return products bad products shipping you're paying for all of it they don't want to burden you with that so they just give you one price and you're happy to pay it or you're not happy and
then you don't buy it it so you're going to build this thing out as many different ways as you can well there's like a whole another meta layer here that I want to highlight because we started off this full day workshop session for getting clients in Leen every piece of asset that you
make as a document can then be turned into a lead magnet which is the sample or the tool or whatever to then get people back into your funnel for clients or to get people back in your funnel for consulting or coaching so it's like this constant sawdust example of like how do you
Leverage just saw us in so many different ways especially since it's digital too which is huge so you know what since we're in my office here let pull this out here you guys know this author of this company this book is called love sick and it is uh by Charles S Anderson and
Company okay and this is a bunch of illustrations that are kind of the 20s to 30s advertising things okay which have all expired in terms of their copyright so Charles S Anderson is a designer who came up in the 90s and somebody I look looked up to and still look up to today
but he started to be the big guy who was taking things from the past repurposing it with modern context so it has this beautiful look he worked with Fossil watches that entire brand is built on what he's done wow and the French Paper Company if you know the French paper promotions if you're
print design you know this so Charles used to do the illustrations or hire someone to do it and eventually he's like well people want to use illustrations that I have redrawn so they're worth something so then he hired illustrators presumably to do this and he creates a stock catalog which you can buy
and license per image wow so it's a beautiful thing so at some point a company like Adobe or Shutterstock or Getty Images will say you know what you have such a vast stock of these images we'll just buy you out $20 million $100 million we don't even know and then they can then
resell them for 100 bucks a piece they don't care because they own the library they have the sales vehicle for buyers and they'll do that so that is an awesome way for Charles to build a 401k plan based on assets he uses today how powerful is that concept everybody think about that so
when we say that we create all these things we're just leaving almost literally all these valuable things on the table that we cannot exchange for money so really look into what what you use to create your desktop your swipe files think about that so when we can charge enough money where is it
enough money that we can hire other people what should we be doing with her time making doing things like this thinking about how to connect these dots and we use the leftover money the $350 okay so now we've got somebody else to do the work we have free time but we also have
additional money we can hire some other kid in another country who's desperate for work give them that money said you're a good illustrator make this for me I'll take the risk yes I'll pay you for businesses I don't even know I can make on and you keep doing this and you don't have
to have hits after hit you could just get one hit instead of turning into something does that make sense that makes abundant sense okay and so this is where I want all of you to get out of this mindset that we always have to exchange our time for money we can document it
and once we document it in whatever form that you want there's other ways to hook into ways for us to make money and it's real important if you can start to build this if you see any value in here you're going to start to look at this it's going to look real pretty
really fast now when I say really fast that's all relative will it happen in 30 days no it's going to take time for you to build this it's going to take time for you to figure out what voice you want to have in the world how you want to show up and we
still have yet to figure out who you're serving and what you do to make them super happy but if you can answer that very difficult question make the commitment today instead of saying well I'm a journalist and that works better for me if you can do this kind of work you're going to
change your business and then ultimately change your life okay that's it for this video and I want to answer a question that you may or may not be thinking like was this all prescripted or was this just off as my friend MO likes to say off the Dome this is how my mind
works I obsess over Trends and connect dots that people just don't see if you got value from what we just talked about and you want more of this the only way that you can do that is to join the future Pro Group I do calls just like this where people are put in
a hot seat situation where I look at their specific problem and give them tactical advice just like what you just saw so check the link in the description right now it'll take to your sales page and you have the opportunity to talk to someone so you can have your questions answered or you
can just join us right away check the link in the description below see you inside the proog group
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