How to Get Better Clients w/ Daniel Priestley (Fireside Chat)

I don't think you want more clients I think you want higher quality clients what you want is more opportunities to decide when you level up and you become more attractive higher profile clients will find you in my experience of working with a lot of creatives the quality of their work is not the problem normally what's difficult is most people make it so hard for you to learn about that think about what label you're putting around your work about who you are how you're framing your story I love finding problems that are worth solving I think that's the heart of every creative person the reason why you may not feel that spark inside of you is because for whatever reason you've not been rewarded for the value you've created in the world people really want to have better relationships with clients win clients that are bigger and better but it's kind of like you get caught in a in a rut you want better clients you have to be better welcome along do you enjoy being in London I do I haven't seen much of it but I do like it we normally do we normally do as londoners occasionally we don't but we do today well actually today's a bit of a strange one but anyway um if you're in business it's uh we've found out that all of our employees cost more and there's less point in selling our companies but other than that it's a great City tell us about three moments that help that have shaped you and three moments that make you who you are today great the first one I mean many of these are accidental so I don't want to tell you there was some kind of grand plan in fact I think if you try to find the plan the answer that you seek will be in front of you and you won't see it I think the the first big breakthrough for me was when an instructor said hey we'd like to include some of your work on in the after effects CD ROM Adobe just purchased it and they need some student work to Showcase that and I was initially resistant to it because they they give you a dollar to buy the rights of your work I was a little offended even though I was only like 22 I guess at that time it just felt strange to me but I said whatever so I do that that CD ROM gets sent all over the world I happened to be in Los Angeles and it was the birth of the motion design industry and so that allowed me to generate leads and I didn't know what the word leads was back then but basically strangers called you up and said hey I saw your thing are you available to do work and some of those relationships that have started almost 30 years ago are people that I still know to this day and have a relationship with so that was a really big breakthrough so the lesson there to learn is sometimes Opportunity Knocks but it doesn't announce itself as an opportunity often times it looks like a pain in the ass an obstacle things you got to do things have to change about your life and they they work out pretty good amazing yeah the second one I think is is probably just as big maybe even bigger is the first day I met my business coach I'm having lunch with a friend at fritto misto which is like an Italian pasta place and they were talking about like how great things were and how much their business had grown and I was sitting there thinking is it rude for me to ask who is this person and can I get their information you know like your friend is sharing something really great about their lives and the first thing you think is how can I benefit from your greatness but again was one of those things like H you do you mind telling me who this person is and and this person who told me his name is Hugh I think for a minute then he paused I'm really good at detecting pauses I was like should I tell him I'll tell you and that day I went home and asked my wife hey it's a pretty it's been a pretty good year I think this is the year we need to invest as much money as possible to hire the most professional people we could so that year we hired a CPA we moved from a a accountant to CPA hired a financial planner I hired my business coach who I worked with for 13 years I met with my business coach every single week for at least an hour and a half without fail unless there was something crazy happening we would meet so people often ask me like how do you know how to do business it's not from art school that's for sure some of it is from experience but a lot of it is because Kier he since passed away would say hey dummy why don't you do it this way now he didn't really say it like that but it felt like that for me and I have to tell you something like my wife was always super extra happy every Tuesday because that's the day that Kier would come into the office and he would just kick my butt so she was just happy somebody was doing it to me for a change she loves me dearly but it's fun to see me suffer I think the third and most impactful thing that's ever happened to me and you probably can see a theme that's happening here is an old classmate I can't even really describe him as a classmate because we've never had class together he's this Puerto Rican guy he he would wear literally an orange prison jumpsuit and walk through school with yellow tinted glasses and was crazy and loud we didn't have that much in common but for whatever reason in 2013 we ran into each other and we're talking about doing big things together what that led to was him saying let's go make YouTube videos together and I was thinking no why would anyone want to do that this is 2013 2014 the reason why I thought was the examples of people making content on YouTube were either a clout chasing or pretend professionals they were young people who definitely did not know how to talk about design and that irritated me so the last thing I wanted to do was to create content that would then put me in that category as a YouTuber that was offensive to me now I'm like I'm a YouTuber it's totally cool so doing going and making videos with him completely changed the course of my life and my business and I'm very grateful for that and and Jose is still around so he's he's he's a friend for life that's wild I think a lot of people were going to say think that you were going to say about winning an Emmy oh no was winning an Emmy not like one of the top three no it was one of the most stressful things I hate when that happens yeah I know when you're young and you think I need to win that award I need to be in that magazine it'd be like communication Arts print step I guess a step by step or something like that all the trades and I would submit our work and we would get in it's like it seems like you just pay money and you get the award I'm just assuming that they just sell these awards at this point so the awards don't mean anything and you're kind of disappointed because the first one you win and you're like okay nothing changes you win another one nothing changes so it doesn't feel great winning the Emmy was just an an award that my friends or cousins would know about that's all that really did for me didn't change my life at all you looked good in the suit I'm going to say that what was it like um blowing up on social media cuz I'm guessing you created a lot of content and it didn't blow up there was 100 views and that was like a moment where you crossed 100 views then there was a video that did a th000 views and you like that's pretty cool a thousand people watched it what was that like okay I know exactly what it was like because I remember the moment it happened so for years we would make videos and a couple thousand views a couple hundred views nothing ever blew up and I expected it not to blow up because we do really boring content we teach creatives like boring business Concepts I never thought anybody would show up for that especially creatives because that's the last thing they want to learn but as it turns out if you listen to your audience your community they kind of give the data as you mentioned in your talk you look at the data and I remember there's a guy his name is Brian and Brian says hey Chris there's this new thing that YouTube has launched it's called shorts I'm like yeah I've seen it what is it he goes you know what you need to get in on this because I think your content is going to do really well as shorts so I literally call up my team because at this point I'm working mostly from home I'm calling them up and saying hey I need you guys to cut some shorts for me and just pump them out for like 30 days let's see what happens we release one nothing happened nothing happened nothing happened and then one day I'm on the YouTube backend the dashboard I look at this video it's like hey man I think I was talking to Mo have you guys ever seen a video with mo mo is like a great guy he's an Egyptian American guy he likes to argue he's super smart he has a master's degree I think in philosophy and something else so Mo likes to argue we're sitting there talking to him and he's like do which one which one I said the one that has 300,000 views he goes there's no video here with 300,000 views like there is I just saw it he goes there's one with 48 80,000 views I'm like oh man my brain I don't know let me go find there must be two videos that are taking off and I check again it's at 750,000 views it just goes bananas this has never happened to me before where you release something and every time you check the numbers were staggering to date that video has over 40 million views our highest view video and here's the funny weird thing about this video it's a short right so it's a cut down from another video and when we originally released it we would letter box it so it's black on top and black on bottom and somebody else on the internet took the exact same video exact same edit and just zoomed in and they got a lot of views so I call the team up like what are we doing guys why aren't we doing that so we cropped into that same video and that video has over 22 million views every version of this video just takes off it's kind of wild so the lesson to learn there is when you have a hit this is what creative people do do something different so when we have a hit we just keep doing more of the same we try and stretch that little piece of content across as many platforms as possible it's the number one most viewed video on our channel it's the number one thing that people yell at me in the street for you're that guy you're that guy I'm like what guy the logo pricing guy I'm like that's me it's it's so true uh I've worked with some really big YouTubers and one of the first things I talk about is this idea of go back to the well that if you put a bucket down a well and it comes up with water go back to the well put the bucket down the well and do it again so Jess Jess who you know in La he did this one of throwing a football over the roof then running through the house knocking everything over and then running out the other side of the house and catching the football and this same sort of thing 20 30 40 million views and he's like what do I do next I'm like do it again and 20 30 40 million views right so he went back to the well put the put the bucket down the well okay I just want to give you guys some context I did not go into making content as a way to seek Fame I have a thirst inside my body a hunger to teach people and I just wanted to find a way to scale that content the reach I I taught at a private school for 15 years basically eight students at a time every semester and it was great work I loved it it felt like so enriching for my soul it's something I I just felt deep in my heart but you ain't going to change the world eight people at a time it's just not going to happen my wife called me out on it she goes I think you're you're not you're wasting your your energy you could do more figure out a way she didn't have the answer but she said figure out a way so it's still a delight and surprise to me that it almost seems like no matter where I go on the entire freaking planet some weird person could be one of you would spot me somewhere even just from a glance on a corner somewhere in the street and yell at me yo and some of the weirdest times that I've ever been recognized I just want to share with you this because it's so weird I'm in Australia your home country leaving going through the duty claiming what what do you call that we call it the shaza there's some really I just made that up there's some they believe everything you say Daniel there's some militant person behind there checking your receipts and your goods right you guys know and it's very intimidating go where's your receipts this is not right why'd you use this what where's your receipts right yeah Cy mate so I'm kind of getting all my paperwork together walk up and I give him my passport and all the receipts and he's looking through it he's like did you enjoy the conference and I was blown away I'm like does my receipt somewhere say a conference you can't he goes and just like with without missing a beat no my best mates really into your content it just stamps it see you later the dut's person recognizes you that's how crazy it is you've been a creative for decades how do you stay inspired I I love finding problems that are worth solving I think that's the heart of every creative person and I think all of you who are self-identified as creative have that same hunger and desire to solve a worthy problem the reason why you may not feel that spark inside of you is because because for whatever reason you've not been rewarded for the value you've created in the world and I feel really bad for you the reason why the future exists is because I want more creative people to to get the fruit of their labor because I think we need more creative humans and an accountant or a lawyer can be a creative person I'm not saying like you got to like cut and paste type faces together a creative person Herbert Simon is a Herbert Simon's definition of a designer is one who who uh devises a course of action to go from an existing condition to an improved one and pretty much everybody here does that except for you don't give yourself permission to describe yourself as a creative person so I'm a champion for you thank you alarm all righty so I have uh been talking to people all for the last few days about what do you want me to talk to Chris about what do we get how do we get the most out of the fireside chat so it all comes down to a few key categories so category one is what a lot of people want to ask about which is the quantity of clients how do I get more clients it's really really simple I want to get more people through the door I want a bigger audience um etc etc right so all of these questions relate to this idea of how do I get more people uh to know about my work um so why is it important to read reach a bigger audience how do we reach a bigger audience if we're creative so two questions right so number one I I'm going to just push against that question a little bit because I don't think you want more clients I think you want higher quality clients what you want is more opportunities to decide and David caker writes about this book The Business of expertise confidence as far as he can tells is when when opportunities exceed capacity it's O divided by C so if you have two clients and you have four capacity you're going to be more desperate in that sales call than you would otherwise does that make sense everybody but here's why I'm so Cocky and Confident because at the very early stages of my professional career more people wanted me than than I was available there was only one of me and so I always asked for more and it's this this thing that's pretty amazing right so if you live my life everything you do people want more of it are willing to pay more so of course I have the attitude and the mindset that I have which I'm trying to teach all of you so what you should be in the business is learning how to generate demand for what it is that you do and as far as I know the cheapest easiest most effective way to do this that's long-term sustainable is to increase your awareness and there's lots of things you can do to increase your awareness here's what hurts me you're like but I have to do that social media thing right I'm like well they're handing out gold over there I know it's heavy you might not want to do it most of us would get a wheel bear and start going but I know let's just do a quick poll here how many people are actively working on social media raise your hand keep your hand up okay and like doing it yeah they're going to start and are having the results that you want and are creating the kind of opportunities that put you in a position of expertise and Authority okay just a handful now but a lot more than I thought good for all of you kind of weird up front and back usually they either up front or all the way no people who are struggling always sit in the middle yeah um the messy middle that's the bell curve isn't it that's the bell curve exactly we just saw it you're in the dip you guys really what you're saying is that demand relatives to supply that there needs to be some tension there someone should write a book about that what here's a question because a lot of people think that when you become famous and when you've like got uh lot of recognition that you get a really high percentage of people buy and this is a bit of a myth that you and I have talked about um what percentage of your audience Buy Okay so let's look at our audience if you look at the numbers 2.6 million subscribers on YouTu YouTube I'm about to crack a million on Instagram 560,000 is on LinkedIn a couple hundred thousand here and there so whatever that number adds up to less than 1% of the people who follow us subscribe to what we do buy is an abysal amount because I'll tell you last year I think we did $ three and5 million doar in Revenue that's not even a dollar per subscriber okay and it's not all being spread out evenly because only a small portion of people actually say you know what thanks for changing my life here's some money yeah I'm I'm not about it I'm just telling you the facts okay totally okay with it I try and say to people all the time like do you know how many people walk into an Apple store and just walk out without buying anything it's like 99% um yeah three times this week right yeah um and uh oh yeah I want to see that new Mac Mini right I want to see have a look at it so this idea that as the audience gets bigger you actually uh exclude 99% of people there's only 1% of people who who buy before blowing up on social media what did your sales process look like and then how has it changed based on that okay if we're are we're talking about as blind or the future because there are two different answers uh however you want to take it okay I'll tell you about blind blind is a service designed company that ran since 1995 and retired in 2018 the website still is up but we don't do anything to it what was really interesting it was this little crossover between the founding of the future and growing some notoriety and how that impacted blind so I will tell you typically what happens is there's a new client inquiry new business inquiry and they find us it's very passive what we do we have some sales reps basically it goes through a whole vetting process because I only want to talk to a prospect that's been qualified so we formalize the entire process so are they talking to more than five people yes we're out um is this a real project or is just speculatively thinking about a project then we're out so we have all these rules and it's definitely a design flowchart that was given to our executive producers our salespeople don't bother me I value my time a lot so when they drag me into a call and it turns out they only have 10,000 or 20,000 whatever the prices I'm like really upset at the team because my time is valuable do not put them in the room with me right one call in particular somebody had said Chris they want to get on the phone with you they have a project it's all been vetted and they're big fans of the YouTube channel this is the crossover moment and not many of them have existed but this was a special story so I was like fudge they know all the techniques I'm going to do this then this happens I'm going to do that right cuz I've been very transparently telling people how I close clients how we talk about price and value so I'm like oh my God I have to do the best version of myself on this one you know no slacking off I've got to give them the right hook the left hook and the hook they didn't even see coming we get on the phone and there's four of us executive producer head of production and two creatives myself and somebody else get on the phone do you have any idea what they said on that call and what I did to close them have I told you guys story before okay so you have no idea right some of you might say oh my God the old man's going to get sucker punched I can't keep up with them so we're fearful of giving everyone our best most guarded Secrets because they're going to use them against us you guys feel that way a lot of you okay so I'm prepared for war just quickly who here has held back something they've not shared it on social media because you're like oh that's too good has anyone done that yeah exactly and the rest of them are not telling the truth so I'm on the call we on the call uh my executive producer introduces me hey Chris is the founder of the company happy to talk to you what do you guys have in mind and they talked and talked and just sold themselves the entire time we love Chris everything's amazing here's all our money and here's the most money we can give to you and we got the phone and my executive producer his eyes have never been bigger than that we kind of mouths a gap it's like a gape and it's like what just happened they knew what I was going to do so they did it to themselves you know what I did that's right that's how it happens and and it's how it works it's funny that cuz it's like Gordon Ramsey puts his recipes in the recipe books and sends the recipe books out to and then people like come to the Gordon Ramsey restaurant and they're like oh I want the recipes that I saw in the book yeah I mean you guys have bought a cookbook before you still eat the restaurant yeah in fact if you make the cookbook more people will come to the restaurant in fact if you talk about the recipes on YouTube Tik Tok Instagram on a cooking show more people want to go to the restaurant than you can serve than you franchise the whole thing have a think about what is your biggest secret that is like part of your secret source that it's like one of the most valuable lessons you've learned in your career think about it right get something who's got something in their mind big secret not that secret right get get like secret source and it's like okay what if I release that what if I put it out there into the world and how's your business model changed 10 years later so that was the moment that you noticed it change but how How is how's your business model and your sales model today okay so we completely phased out the service part we thought you know what making products is way cooler than dealing with crazy clients that want to ask you for some stupid change I love clients too I love clients way more than you do and it's still annoys me right you're on their schedule you're on whatever I'm done with that so I'm I'm done with service work now we're building products and products are a whole different animal we don't have clients anymore we have customers we don't have bespoke projects we create we create create systems and we designed things that can be used by lots of people so the entire mindset had to shift and a lot of my my my team couldn't make that jump they're like who's going to tell us what to do no one when's it due whenever we say so how do we get paid when we sell product it's a totally different model right so now you have to be really good at sitting there and listening for problems and creating products that people want and learning how to teach them about that the way it kind of works now and it's changing because I think I've seen a shift in the last year year and a half where we're moving away from people wanting to buy products and I don't know if anybody here makes a knowledge product the value on the knowledge product is dropping it's becoming harder and harder to sell to people because the price of information is getting cheaper there's saturation in the marketplace there's confusion and a lot of clutter a lot of people saying they can do something and then they spend the money because they're better at marketing than we are and then that that client is burned saying I'm done with this stupid thing people still want to learn they still want to have transformation but how you deliver it how you Market how you talk about it has to change so we're in the middle of like a really big change right now but the way that we used to Market stuff is I would show up I would probably do a webinar to talk about what it is I've learned from Daniel that you can't give it all away you have to make them hungry because if you if you give them a lot of little bites they're not hungry anymore and this is something you all need to know if you give people too much it's not that they're not appreciative is they feel like I can't do this I'll come back when I'm hungry again and very rarely do they come back yeah that's The Challenge and that's the that's the distinction between giving away the recipes in the recipe book versus giving people a pizza and saying here have a have have the thing that now you're not hungry so um let me give you the free pizza type thing so there there is a distinction between that um here's an easy question what's the best way to generate high quality leads uh probably kind of uh Create a quiz yeah and have something valuable at the end of that quiz and then segment your audience very nice I know I know that strategy all right next category is better clients so this is a big one for especially around you people really want to be able to have better relationships with clients do more meaningful work with clients win clients that are bigger and better um that have bigger budgets and a lot of the time people get pigeon holded or they get stuck at a particular level and they might be really comfortable doing 5 to 10 grand clients or they might be you know really comfortable with a certain price point or a certain type of use case and then they want to level up but it's kind of like you get caught in a in a in a rut or you get caught in um on a treadmill um how do we break out of that treadmill how do we like jump up a level of client there's a lot of things I have to do and the answer that I'm going to give you is going to be the hardest thing because I think the hard thing is worth doing you want better clients you have to be better yourself we just think oh I want to make four times as much money this year but I don't want to change a single thing about myself now I'm going to tell you something when I was going to college I was pretty broke probably not the brokest person there cuz there were people who like were they like from Tijana they had no money I had a little bit more money than that and it's not that my parents were poor at this point but I felt so guilty to asking for more money I was starting to live off credit cards because they were paying for part of the tuition and they were giving me a little bit amount of money to barely pay for rent not mention food and art supplies and so became really tricky right and so I got to tell you I did great things to survive I would sleep in my clothes sometimes sleep in the car because I I didn't even want to drive home cuz I was just grinding away at it I was not much of a catch so I was celibate by choice I guess for three years I was just going to school working really hard and that's all I was doing and I was this really hot girl who walked into the computer I'm like damn girl but she's like no no thanks so I wasn't a very attractive person at that point in time and I'm talking about physically attractive but I wasn't at a station in my life where I was attracting the right kinds of people into my life if you look at your business your business is not any different when you level up and you become more attractive higher profile clients will find you so the question for you to all think about right now is what's going to make you more attractive as a service provider or as a person who has products what do you think that is Daniel what do you think it is in my experience of working with a lot of creatives and creative entrepreneurs the quality of their work is not the problem normally it's not normally like a lot of them have done thousands of hours and and hundreds of projects and there's a lot of quality in their work what's difficult is they most people make it so hard for you to learn about that for you to discover it um the way they show up in the world is not uh it doesn't reflect the fact that they've actually you know it's it's almost like having a beautiful piece of jewelry and just handing it over in a in a normal Tesco shopping bag or something like that and it's not wrapped and packaged the right way um so I personally the thing I've noticed the most is I'm always when I get to know someone better I'm always always quite stunned as to what they've done in their past I'm like why have you not talked about that that's that's wild that's incredible okay so we need to be able to tell our story better and I think I was talking to Michael Margolis who wrote the book story 10x he said that basically a a product or service without a story is a commodity when and I would do this demonstration with you actually this I don't need to do demonstration with you okay uh this is San P right there's a label it looks Italian I think it's Italian and it's in a full glass bottle and this will sell for a little bit more than the next product right how much is this water worth there's a lot more of it how much is this water worth compared to do you think when you went to the store and you were to buy these two pretending that you you would would you pay more for the small bottle or the big bottle why because it's from fridge is that right I didn't know that why why else why else would you buy or pay more for that what what does that even mean just be real with me trust how so value it looks good okay that's an honest answer it just looks better more thoughtful design was put into this so if you're a designer or a photographer an illustrator you have the potential of making a piece of junk just feel more expensive and you undersell yourself all the time we undersell the value that people make decisions based purely on packaging and visuals now we don't know if this water was scooped from the river or if it just rainfall we just don't know we put a lot of trust into things that have almost no meaning do you understand this now the reason why you probably won't pay much and you might not even drink this bottle of water is first of all it's not sealed who got this water there's a reason why I'm not drinking from this bottle right now we have no idea if some Daniel you're drinking oh you put your right we don't know cuz this bottle has no story well you just gave it a story a very negative story you just brought a story Into the equation about that bottle I want to tell you something very real I was speaking at a conference and because of copyright reasons they removed all the labels off the bottles you need to do that we're not doing that here obviously and I was really thirsty I looked over like what are those no-name bottles of water over there and so I made a joke out of it it became like a point when there's no label it's not even worth what it is it's worth less than what it is think about what label you're putting around your work about who you are how you're framing your story this is really important for you to understand most of you compete on is my work better than the other person's work and it's completely subjective you can get 10 British designers in a room and say which is better and they argue all night long because there's no Universal standard of what is better but I can tell which one has a better story one that I relate to the one I can identify who speaks to my soul my pain points and my challenges and Promises the benefits I'm looking for they're better at telling a story you guys know who Virgil ablo is somebody like an incredible fashion designer fortunately discovered him way too late in my life but he has this video on the internet and he's holding up a crumpled piece of paper because there's two ways I know how to make this paper more valuable have you guys seen this video good I'll share something new with you today okay and he said he says what we can do is we can change the material to paper we can make out of platinum or something very expensive and that's how most of you think about how to make something more value to put more more real value into it but Rory Southern would look at it like how do people perceive value the intangible value so Virgil says you know what if I took this piece of paper and put on a white pedestal in a gallery that beautiful and pristine and put a little light on it that piece of paper is worth a lot lot now so he's basically saying you can change the frame or how it's presented or you can change the thing itself one of those two options is easier to do than the other one requires imagination the other doesn't you'll figure out which one it is how do we evaluate the quality of a client so that's how they evaluate the quality of us they hear our story how do we evaluate them and decide whether they're going to be a client or not how do we tell if someone's a quality client in advance so there's a gentleman his name is Ronald Baker Ronald J Baker he wrote a book called implementing value price and he says we have to be discriminatory sellers of services we're professional people we don't want to discriminate people in real life but we need to discriminate against clients we have to have standards have you sat there and said under only these five conditions would I accept you as a client have you ever done that you remember how I was telling you that our our executive producer salesperson would have to like make sure they're qualified those are some of the standards and we have rules so you need to establish your set of rules because you're not IND in your personal life are you you mean any person at the bar good to go home with I mean some of you are but you know no judgment you know what I'm saying you have to have some kind of standard so you probably should sit there like you did when you were younger like oh my dream X would be like this they would be this tall and they would do this and they would have these traits and I would love them for that somehow we forgot that basic rule we just take anybody and that makes you a very promiscuous business owner each one of you has an audience of people who who know who you are inside your audience of people who know your business the top 1% have 15% of the budget right so 1% have got 15% of the budget the next to 9% taking you to a total of 10% have got 45% of the budget so giving you a total of 60% of the budget is in the top 10% and then the bottom 90% have got 40% of the budget combined so essentially it's really interesting that you being Discerning if you can identify who's that 1% who's got 15% of the budget of the total budget um it's it's a superpower for your business if you can have a way of figuring that out if you could ask any questions and be able to like digitally and automatically have a device that would do that like a piece of software or something um that would be epic and then you could know Daniel I'm surprised you don't have tear away pants where you just stand up like this and score app score app you just you just ruined my big finale for The Show and you know what I just unbuckled my whole here what's going with your I don't know don't worry about it have an extra belt all right next category is Raising prices this is something you're known for right this is like a a viral piece of content that uh that people have watched with you so this is all about this idea of like the fear that people have about raising prices in the US the economy has actually grown uh in the last 15 years pretty consistently if you see the graph here in the UK the economy has only grown 4.5% in 15 years so since the 2008 um Global financial crisis the economy hasn't really grown um the costs of everything has grown but the economy hasn't grown so the feeling or the atmosphere that happens in the UK especially if you deal with UK businesses is this feeling that everyone is squeezed and that if I was to put my prices up you know that would be the worst thing in the world right I wouldn't be able to do it so can we talk about that sure how do we talk about it well you can't really because you're American and you have a growing economy don't you but I talk about sometimes we need to hear from someone who hasn't had that experience to kind of talk about how would you broach the idea of a bigger budget how would you okay raise prices and what I'm in particular what I'm not talking about is signing on bigger clients at the same rate like some people think about putting their prices up and they go oh well I currently sell 10 hours for 3,000 now I'm going to sell 20 hours for 6,000 it's like well it's the same rate right you're just selling bigger packages but like it's that moment where people have to place a higher value on what they do right you're saying the solution can't be to sell more units of time at a certain rate yeah essentially just packaging more more in at the same rate it's like actually genuinely putting the prices up right okay so I have noticed something if I may and I run the risk of offending a lot of people here that's our national language it's our love language offending each other yeah well there's a darkness that exists here I'm not talking about the skies it's just a general attitude about like what we're worth what we can charge and it's a lot of fear-based I guess scarcity mindset that for whatever reason I don't have and I don't even say Americans or even people in LA because there's still a lot of that there too so maybe we can just have a deeper conversation about this okay now here's one idea I want to share with you and I'll ask you this question and you can say true or false okay is price positioning true or false true so when you price yourself lower what is your position but that's what you do so when I go to look for water for anything I don't want to buy the discount version because I'm not a discount guy I'm not saying I want to overpay for something but I just I'm suspicious of discounted things some people are bargain hunters and that's all the do probably my dad he just wants to bargain for everything it's just like yes less less but you know my dad's tired so he has a lot of time and plus he escaped the country lost his whole culture and his you know there's a lot of things he lost so I can understand empathize why he has that mindset but even though I was born in Vietnam I didn't grow up there I don't have that mindset I'm here and it seems like every time I've asked for something things happen but you have to be bold enough to ask for it okay so here's how I look at at the game of finance and value and I deliberately chose that word game because for me it's just a game I just keep asking myself how ridiculous would it be for me to just charge this outrageous amount of money just stupid amount who would ever say yes to that let's try let's just try I'll share with you a couple little stories here okay Ben Burns is someone who I've coached I you know found him randomly off the internet on Facebook and he was suffering when I did the math with him the amount of work he was doing relative to how much he was being paid was less than minimum wage in America our minimum wage is very low it's not even something you can survive on but he never paused to look at how much he was working and what cost he was having on his physical health and on his relationship with his wife and soon to be daughter this was problematic so after working with Ben for a period of time Ben starts to get that Moxy to charge more money then he calls me one day he say Chris I'm like yeah I charge $18,000 for a logo I'm like damn it I wasn't doing local work but I was thinking how is it that my Mente is charging more money than me this is not looking good for the mentor it's kind of embarrassing I'm like oh it's on like Donkey Kong right now right so all of a sudden I said I'm going to charge 18 Grand I'm going to charge 30 grand and we just do this over and over again eventually what I do is I hire Ben comes to work for me and whenever we get a new lead in and there was a logo job for an East Coast Telecom company you know they're not ginormous but they do probably close to $100 million in revenue and they want a new logo so we sit around this game I love to play with my people it's what do you think the price should be Ben sitting across from me and they're kind of scared of me they don't want to say a low price because it'll be embarrassing where I'm like why are you selling us so low right so I just say what do you think it should be and we're sitting there thinking and I'm thinking in my mind it would be outrageous to ask for like $70,000 for a logo just for a logo no brand strategy no nothing no no identity guideline no letterhead no business card no nothing just a freaking logo whereas some clients would say just a font I'm thinking 70 would be just stupid outrageous and Ben looks at me he goes Chris I'm thinking 110 I'm like that's what I was thinking Ben good on you bro good on you you pass you passed the test and you know what we did the call there's that's the story for another day there's a funny call along with that and they just gave gave it to us they gave it to us and you know here's the crazy part we work on all this work we design the logo and it's like 10% different than their old logo we tried all these things and it just basically we just like skewed a little bit and add a little sah for a weird thing and like that's perfect so there's a lot of things to unpack from that but I just want you to sit on that which is this game of playing price I just keep thinking to myself how stupid crazy would it be for me to try this and you know what every every once in a while they say yes which is fantastic for me because I'm like somebody just set the new Benchmark now you're not going to laugh about this because you you know this part when home sell for record home and it's C comp it sets the new standard for the neighborhood we already instinctively understand this concept right a comparable that's what's happening now the question for you is why can't you be the comp that sets the standard the new standard and this is happening in La all the time record sell home price single most money every anybody's ever paid for a residential thing in LA and it's out of control there are homes that are $150 million here's the other thing I know about rich people they want what they cannot have same thing with promiscuity they want what they cannot have so by pricing it higher they tell them themselves a story like I could afford Chris I can afford Daniel you can't stupid then that tells me charge more just keep playing the game I can feel in this room people's brains have just been stretched a little bit in this moment while your head is being stretched I want you to think about what is a new crazy price how crazy could it be right I want you to write down a number put it in the phone something like that right right now while you're feeling it what is the crazy number that you want to go out and test right what do you want to what do you want to try what if this night like like ended up earning you tens of thousands of pounds just because you just had the guts to do it so I want you to think about what what would you charge for what would be the new crazy price that would totally excite you that if if you if you had someone say yes to that you would just be like right so let's everyone write down the price right I want to actually see some real life is that a hairball no no no I've not heard that that's a price that's a price that's a it's still a hairball it's no it's not a hairball it's a it's like a hairball okay it's when you get off the phone and they say let's go ahead and you go great I'll schedule you into my diary hit mute when you do that exactly yeah definitely yeah don't do that has everyone got a price everyone got a number right uh little bit of a challenge who's going to actually who's going to let that price roll off the in the next two weeks who's up for the challenge what is the number shout it out 45k 45k damn 45k 1 mil 1 mil will have got a 1 mil yeah 1.22 the gentleman has it with one does anyone have it higher than one it's Daniel we should have done this in kind of slow moving things we went from 45k to he did he Simon godam it s just got at 45 Grand God it one mil Simon you see block that one just letting you know now no one can say more than 1 mil come on fantastic so we got I mean with Simon's 1 mil everyone else is like oh maybe I pick two cheap right well you got to be Simon though very cool very very cool um all right what happens if it what happens if it doesn't work it's not going to work it's designed not to work right you understand this it's designed not to work here's the crazy thing about like dating life the minute you're dating someone you all of a sudden become much hotter you know this for 3 years ladies no one was looking my way at all as soon as I got to go for like dang it why are you telling me now don't be available next topic having more fun right how do we have more fun so I want to ask you the question how have you built your business now today so that it complements your lifestyle that you enjoy enjoy this business because this business has given you the lifestyle that you want how have you built that how have you deliberately designed your business in your life okay this one's complicated I have to share the truth with you guys right so you're like oh he's just having fun all the time because I worked really hard for a long time Daniel so from the time I was 22 until like 2018 I work like a dog like a dog like you don't know when you it's not a figure of speech I worked a lot oh by the way half the room still thinks that you're like 35 so we we'll get into that a little bit okay so literally the first 5 Years From 1995 to 2000 I didn't take a single vacation in my life right not at all no holiday no nothing Mom I'm not seeing you I'm just working because I was worrying about the business trying to make it grow and there were a lot of things I was Learning Without a coach just doing it on my own it is also some of the most profitable time in our lives because the amount of money we were being paid for the work we were doing was stupid I'll tell you how stupid okay because you're like how stupid Chris I used to animate titles for car commercials that's how we got really our first Big Break In Motion Graphics you know those dealer commercials then they're like oh 3.4 APR and only 0% down that kind of stuff that's what we did we animated those things anybody here do motion graphic work okay so it would slide in a little bit it would be transparent it would disappear and a new piece of legal copy would come in we did that you know what we charge to do one of those things $10,000 per title think about that and if you've ever done after effects work all you have to do is option drag the new typ set in that was another $10,000 you know that song money money money that was playing in my head this was crazy amounts of money so we made a lot of money so the first thing my wife and I do is we buy real estate and I I just remember this okay so you guys know what negative selft talk is right we love a bit of this stuff what does it sound like Daniel well it sounds like this if if two people well I know the difference because I'm Australian okay so two Australians move into next door to each other in Australia and and the way that they would bond is they would say looks like it's going to rain we need the rain rain's great love rain yeah your Garden's looking nice it must have had some rain before right so we're really super positive right and that's how we Bond and then both people would go into the house met the new neighbor great guy really great yeah great by the way it's going to rain good good news great in the UK we would bond in a different way so two neighbors move in next door to each other and they bump into each other mortified that they bump into each other and and and immediately like o um and then to make a little bit of awkward conversation look like looks like it's going to rain typical just when you want to go outside just when you've washed your typical it's raining right doesn't it always rain this time it gets it seems to be like worse every year yeah it's terrible so terrible do you find it terrible I find it very terrible right now they will then inside talk to their spouses and say met the neighbor lovely absolutely amazing so good right because that's how we Bond we Bond over a little bit of like negative bant up am I right yeah yes terrible ter I've watched comedians like British comedians just sit there and just talk about how horrible it is and just complaining and that negative talk starts to wear wear you down and you start to believe this is your new reality you just get more of what you pursue in your life so whatever you think about the most is what you're going to get that is such an LA thing to say resp la thing no I mean just think about that right so for for me it's like I I keep thinking like things always going to work out I'm always going to be paid more and so I start practicing a lot of positive selft talk and I'm the product of that my own design here so I'll tell you something I guess it was like 1998 1999 just a few years after graduating from school first of all I paid off my student loans within the first 6 months I'm receiving checks more one single check more than I thought i' would make in a year things are going well for me okay and then my wife and I we decide that we need to move to the west side and on our way to meet a real estate broker to look at a studio space we see a house for sale in Venice Beach literally one and a half blocks away from the ocean a dream that I had when I was in junior high watching 20 something they had an agency and they lived on the beach I was like freaking that's the life that's the life I want I don't say why would it ever happen to me that's not real it's like that's going to be my life not knowing how it's going to manifest itself into the future so we're late for our appointment so we miss seeing the studio but on the way to the studio we see the sign for sale do you know when the sign went up that day Serendipity yes but it was a good story right so we see the house we call the broker and the house was listed for $520,000 we're just a few years out of school that's more than what my parents paid for their house after saving all their life to buy their house keep this in mind long story short we bought the house I think four years later we sold it for $2.2 million pretty good for a kid out of art school so we just keep doing these kinds of things and making more money so at a certain point in my life I'm set up I don't need to make more money I don't need to be the world's richest XYZ I just need enough to pay for my kids college education to make sure my wife doesn't worry my primary goal is she doesn't have any money worries that's it so when we found that number I'm good this this was a long setup for the answer to your question which is I do not need to make money anymore I work for pure joy it just so happens I also make a lot of money but I just do it for pure joy so I tell the team just run the company so that we don't lose money that's all because the thing I care about is impact so you know that the history of Bezos and Amazon is they went for decades without making any money no profit but he was playing a different game he was playing the game of total Market domination to build a pipeline and a structure such that no one can compete with them and he had investors who believed in that idea for him to play that long I'm not trying to be Bezos but I'm going to play for as long as possible because the game is fun and along the way I get to help people and I get to make a buck that's pretty good and what would be the what How would how do you define the impact the impact is the number of people who who have been positively affected indirectly or directly from the content we've created either in valuing themselves more being able to renew their passion for design or creativity or maybe they they have started to build their personal brand I just want to share a quick story with you that I just found out about I think today or yesterday it was yesterday so a guy was out here I don't know if he's here right now from from Germany who was in my person branding Workshop is he here today oh you're right over there and you were telling me about this guy whose life completely changed I live for moments like this I want to be able to collect all these stories and just sleep on top of them every single night as a pillow for real he goes you know what Chris you did this whole personal branding thing and you told us lean into your vulnerabilities celebrate that embrace it because all the things you hate about you simultaneously is the most powerful thing about you so there was a designer there a creative who was a stutterer and it's tough to be a stutterer and he said he calls himself the stuttering designer bloop his count from whatever to whatever and it's completely changed his life all from a dumb concept that I shared with somebody who had the guts to do it and I live for those kinds of stories so those kinds of things light me up big stories small stories whatever that's what I live for I love that that's absolutely beautiful from that high point take us a little bit granula a lot of people have asked this question who do you have around you who's your team who is it that you have on your team that allows you to to shine in your way well there's a lot of people that I can name like basically in my life but I'm very excited about A New Concept that seems to be working really well can I share that yeah of course okay so normally when you set up a company you have people who show up to do a job they're competent they're smart they care about you they're they're diligent ethical people that's great but the the future our company has a very unique thing that we haven't tapped into we've created culture and Community around ideas with total complete strangers those strangers feel a need to reciprocate back to us because we've helped them in real and intangible ways we've given them hope we've given them money in the way that they're able to charge more so some of those people Rise Up from the darkness of the internets and say hey I'd love to just help you with stuff and they do it from a pure genuine place in their heart not because they want a job opportunity or recommend or they're clout chasing they just want to help us and some of them are here tonight and what they do is they find out where I'm going in the world after earning some trust and respect with me where they're like hey I hear you going to be in London I'm going to meet you there I'm flying out from XYZ and they become part of un official I know it's a dorky name the international travel posi okay where we just help each other because we feel the desire to build genuine human relationships and it makes me really happy so what they do for me is they help me do stuff and they really look at after me and I feel in my heart so what do I do I try to reciprocate 10x that so I'll sit down I'll design a business model with them I'll refer clients I'll do the stuff that would cost them tens of thousands of dollars to get from me and I'm staying up at night thinking about them I know that sounds like utopian like la la Kumbaya kind of talk but I want my entire company to be built from this international travel posi interesting want to make shirts for each other it's know as a super dorky thing I feel like I'm part of it um the uh just invite him to the party I was what are you talking about this guy's a Salesman I was seriously member number one how many people have been in more cities with you than I'm I'm offended that you wouldn't even think of me at the travel posy um what's the lesson for everyone in that though like cuz okay that's great for you travel around having Adventures roaming around with your posy yeah what's the what's the lesson for us in that uh in that story find your posy find your tribe I think there's something that's happening right now that I think you can all feel but you're not quite sure to put your finger on it as we grow closer as the digital Community we're growing farther apart as real people this is aided by AI social media and all the weird stuff that's going on in the world right this polarization of communities and it seems like hate sells so let's sell more hate and I don't want to be like some idealist dreaming about these things but I'll say to the posi my goal is to help you make as much money as possible such that you have not only the resource to go but the time and opportunity to go so whenever I say I'm going here I'll see you in Dubai I'll see you in New Zealand because that's where we're going and they're at a certain place in their life and their business such that the business runs on Rails that's the dream and I think all of you can have some of that you're here I think because you're part of the is it the dent Community the score app score up yeah you're here because of something Daniel has done or maybe you're here because you've watched a YouTube video and the two of us bring these two worlds together here's what I I shared at Adobe Max which is this new idea right what you want all all of you I think want some version of this which is you want to play with someone who's going to change your life but the problem is you bring no tools to the game they bring the diamond field they bring the balls the MS the bats they bring the the uniforms they bring the concessions you don't bring anything except for wanting to play so what winds up happening is you need a ticket to play or you're on the outside of the fence looking in hoping in wishing that's one way to play the way that we play is if you think about it Daniel do you like Batman or Superman more Batman so Daniel's Batman and let's say I'm Superman and we live in our own universes we have our own community and our world and ways of doing things but when there's a crossover fun exciting things happen the fans of those two people or those two worlds crossover seismic event so my challenge to all of you is if you want to play with the a-listers of the Justice League and not the Blue Beetle guy then you yourself have to build up your world in your Universe such that when you arrive to play the game you bring something to the table I'll be super honest with you right now Daniel and I are not having this conversation if I'm running my service design company I'm almost certain he would not even talk to me or want to be on our podcast or want to support what we're doing I'm almost certain of that I'm almost certain that many of the podcast guests that were able to get authors influencers and speakers and people that I would pay money to talk to are calling us up and saying how do we get our author speaker on your channel it's the game has changed everybody so I want you to think of yourself as not like the third Stringer in the Justice League you're not Teen Titans and even them they're pretty cool you want to be the Batman the Wonder Woman the Green Lantern maybe not Aquaman but everybody else but remember no shade I'm Batman what do you want to be celebrating 3 years from now the launch of a new company cool we need to build as you mentioned an AI company that has an army of robots to solve very specific problems for creatives you may have heard of him this guy named Alex Heros and other people have said it's not his original idea is give the information away for free charge for the implementation the problem with implementation is you need people previously you need people and you need a lot of overhead to run this thing and I'm not going to build another business that requires me to sit there and answer to clients but if I build robots to do things that I think our people are doing then maybe for 5 or 10 pounds you'll pay that and you'll have a problem solved it'll do the work for you so I want to build like 100 robots to do very specific things that would take me a long time to do as a creative human to do for the creative Community oh I love it so I've been talking to some of my friends how much would it be worth to you that after you get off a sales call and you think you totally bombed the client didn't call you back ghosted you to run your sales call through a trusted source to then grade you on eight different points how you did where you were in and out of Rapport questions you could have asked questions you should never ask or words you could have used instead of whatever words you use for 20 bucks for 40 bucks how much would you pay for that to get that kind of nuanced detailed feedback to what it is you're doing that's just one of the robots we're building i' I'd pay more if the robot was like looked like Chris that's that's what I want [Music]