Transcription
95% of all freelancers will never reach €100,000 per month. Not because they are too bad, but because they sell the wrong offer. In the last 6 years, I have had the privilege of accompanying over 1300 freelancers and agencies, and during this time, I have noticed a pattern. There are offers with which you will inevitably hit a revenue ceiling at some point, and there are offers with which €100,000 per month is absolutely realistic. In this video, I will show you which offers have potential and which do not. Let's start directly with web design. Web design does not have the potential to reach €100,000 per month. Why? Web design is transactional. I want a website. I build the website, goodbye dear client. And I have to acquire a new client again from next month or the month after. Many people do this wrong. That's why really good web designers get stuck at €20,000, €30,000 per month, and even if they are agencies, there are other services behind it. Therefore, if you want to reach €100k per month, I would not recommend web design to you. At the end of the video, I will show you what a much better variant for a web designer is. What do I base this on when I advise on these offers? I have these criteria through which I filter the offers. Does the offer have a high business impact? That is, does it generate higher revenue for my client or reduce costs? That is business impact. Is the offer well packaged? That is positioning. If you want to know what good positioning looks like, I'll bring up my AI now. You scan this, you enter your skills, and we will position your offer for you in less than 2 minutes. Point number 3: Can this offer be productized? Does it have the possibility to be productized at some point so that you can scale it? Fourth criterion, is there willingness to pay in B2B? This is also related to the first point. Fifth, is it scalable through team processes and retainers? This also goes hand in hand with this point, and sixth, is it easily replaceable. The simpler you conceptualize your offer, the more difficult it is to compare. We also need to ensure that it is difficult to replace. So, let's move on. I'll go through the board. These are the offers we will go through. Let's take copywriting. Does copywriting have the potential to reach €100k? No, not as normal copywriting. It's also very transactional. I know people who did copywriting and had to reinvent themselves completely in the age of AI. So, copywriting does not have the potential to reach €100k per month. This is really customer data that I have. This means we have clients who mainly fall into these target groups, and I will show you how they come to us, how we convert them, reframe them, not reframe them, but reposition them, so that these offers attract. What is really good is video production. If you just call yourself video production, there is no €100k per month potential. What is better than video production? You have to sell the end result. This means here I would really go and say lead generation through our XY method, and the XY method has video production as its vehicle. Do you notice what I'm doing? I'm packaging it differently. And here you have to go for retainer models. Please do not wait for someone who wants an image film. You can certainly make image films, but image films must always lead to long-term support. We have had clients here who previously said, yes, I always looked at what inquiries I received. We switched them to the point where they suddenly had a customer value of €60,000 because they sold customer retainers of €5k to €10k per month for long-term support. This means we have people in the video production sector who really bind clients long-term and reach their €100k per month. Recruiting and headhunting has the potential for €100k offers. This is important, especially since we have people in both areas, which is something very exciting. Especially when you move away from a small company and fill one or two positions at a large company, and they now want to build other departments, other units, it works wonders. An interview with Sonja is coming out next week. She is one of our clients who makes €100,000 per month with a recruiting offer, and she has also delegated it to the team and scaled it. This means it is an offer that is scalable and delegable. What is important here is that the payment models are correct, the pricing is correct. You have to make sure that you are not only paid upon signing in recruiting, but also upon the start of the project. If you are only paid upon signing, you have a very long lead time, and the lead time is in proportion to how long it takes you to fill a role on average. But recruiting and headhunting has the potential to make €100k per month offers. And what I see in recruiting, many people who previously did online marketing, meaning they previously did paid media, have gone into the sub-niche of performance recruiting. This means they have used their performance marketing skills to fill positions for companies that are not so digitally savvy. And this is again a really good example of a different positioning, a different niche. This means someone who does performance marketing but has broadened their reach in the recruiting field and has made €100k from it because clients stay long-term, and we have retainers of €5k, €8k, €10k per month, and now imagine you have eight clients like that or 10 clients like that, then you are already at your €100k instead of moving away from someone who bills hourly. Next service. LinkedIn Personal Branding. No €100k potential if you call it LinkedIn and Personal Branding. Unless you are really, really good, but even there, it is dying more and more. The client thinks, hey, AI can do this now, and the moat is getting smaller and smaller. This means it is becoming increasingly difficult, it is becoming easier to be replaced by AI with copywriting and personal branding. How can you do this here? I would package this whole thing differently. I would go more for "XY for CEOs." What have I done now? I am not even addressing LinkedIn Personal Branding, but more for CEOs on LinkedIn. I could also do this if I say I want to stay on LinkedIn, but with more business impact, XY, either employees or inquiries or keynote speaking, gigs, whatever, great. Business impact is in there. I know exactly who the target group is. Willingness to pay B2B target group. LinkedIn is a niche, a sub-niche. This means it works better than saying I do LinkedIn Personal Branding. Do you notice I'm moving away? This here is explaining the vehicle. This here is explaining the outcome. I will go into this a bit more later. Performance Marketing has the potential to reach €100k. What is so great about Performance Marketing? If you have good retainers, if you have good clients, you can really grow the clients here. This means you can build up clients step by step, and here you can have several clients at €3k, €4k, €5k, €6k, €7k per month. What happens to many performance marketers here is that with an increasing number of clients, the client quality decreases, they can no longer keep up, and the clients then churn. Therefore, I would recommend a performance marketer who really has an agency to have fewer clients and really good clients in the five-figure retainer range. It is much easier to serve five clients really well for €10k to €20k per month than 20 clients, 30 clients for €3k, €4k per month. The effort for 30 clients is much, much higher, even though they only pay €3k, €4k, instead of these clients who pay €15k, €20k. And especially with AI, you can leverage so much, you can do so much, you have extreme leverage here. And you can even use this as positioning. Here it is well packaged. As a very strong position, you are tired of your agency not delivering what it promises again. We are an agency that specializes in a maximum of five clients. We have four slots that are currently full. We have one fifth slot available. If you're up for it, tell us your product and blabli blop. So, this can work very well. A very, very, very strong thing. Geo, this is very strong, especially with Geo. Geo is being found by search engines, so that you are found by search engines, not search engines, sorry. SEO is being found by search engines. Geo is being found by Large Language Models. AI suggests you. Our strongest clients are active in this area, in the GE and SEO area. Why? There is a lot of dangerous half-knowledge. Really good people are hard to find here in terms of replaceability. And in Germany, the knowledge is not that advanced. You can achieve a lot here, and especially with Geo, if you tell an SME, I will ensure that AI outputs you, they go crazy. Great, yes, I'll give you my money. So, we have very strong clients in this area who also have six-figure monthly revenues. This is something where I say, great, thumbs up, it works. B2B Consulting, now we come to the exciting part, we also have clients in this area. B2B Consulting, many are in here. Do we have clients who also make it here? How do they make it here? How productizable is it? You probably don't think it's that productizable, I have to admit. Why? A really good consultant is like a Swiss Army knife, they solve different problems. A good niche can ensure that you have more specialized Swiss Army knives, which are easier to find than Swiss Army knives that can do everything. And these are areas, this is an expert consultant status where we can grow very well through man and woman power. This means someone here is usually so good that they reach the point where they say, Maron, I have more demand than I can currently cover. But the client has bought from you, and here we manage to support the client in such a way that they manage to place another person on the client's side. And the moving parts or the difficult thing here is to get the person placed with the end client, especially if there is an intermediary. We also manage this with our clients in the SAP sector. It's exactly the same. This means they then say, Maron, I'm in a project through a recruiter, and we manage to get this person to bring someone in and place them with the client. And now you say, Maron, isn't this person like an intermediary? No, the person also works in the project, so they have more project authority, but these people finally manage to break away from the time-for-money chain. They have hourly rates of €150, €160, €170, or sometimes daily rates of €2k, more than €2k, but they still sell time for money, and because we have good systems here where we scale through man and woman power, we manage to place them. The important thing here is that I eventually manage to tap into my own end-client business. This means here we manage to bring in employees through the recruiters and the networks they have, while we simultaneously build a productized service that has clear, fixed processes. There are also processes here, but the processes are more rhetorical and customer support in nature. This means how my onboarding works, how I collect customer feedback, how the customer rates my interaction, such things. This means I create light templates for consulting, rather than actually delivering an end result. AI and Automation. Super, super exciting, works very well. We have clients who were previously in the hourly rate range as developers, we have converted them, they have a customer value, meaning per client they get €100k order volume. And I spoke with one of them at the last event, who said, Maron, I think I need to raise my prices, I think the clients would also pay €200k spread over a year. So, in any case, a clear €100k per month offer. And as I said, this person no longer works harder than a software developer who clearly cannot reach €100k because they are still working on an hourly basis. And how can this software developer move away from this by occupying a niche like AI and AI automation? And you can go in two directions here. Either you go deep and do your own AI systems, databases, Large Language Models, which are built on-site for clients on their own servers. Then you have larger clients, longer projects, but also longer sales cycles. Or this person really goes in the direction of simple AI automation, where, let's say, a full-blooded developer would say, yes, this is not really development, but it doesn't have to be development. You are struggling to get €90 per hour, and here you have an offer that can reach €100k if you are well-versed in Nake, Sapia, Automation, these things. Even non-developers do this. And imagine, as a developer, you manage to pivot in this direction and create €100k offers. Clients pay their money for it. We are currently hiring such people for ourselves internally, and we pay them €3k, €4k, €5k retainer for a few hours a week, where they do a few automations for us. How easy is this for you as a developer? And this is a key takeaway that I would recommend to many developers. This is a switch that you can make very, very well. Clouds, DevOps, same principle as this SAP principle that I explained. If you have a recruiter in between, you can scale through man and woman power by getting people into these projects, whether permanent or freelance. I made a video about scaling to a million as a developer. I'll link it in the video description. You can watch it. I explain how to scale to 1 million as a developer who is actually in project business, because these are the topics I go into a bit more detail. Exactly. And Cybersecurity is also clearly a €100k per month offer. These are all trending topics. Social Media Management, only no €100k per month offer. Here you really have to go in the direction of building your brand with us, what is the messaging, what does it look like? We take care of it. You have to go more in the direction of leads. Here you really have to generate leads through social media. We have this month, we are already halfway through the month, and we have generated over €100,000 through content alone. I built the system internally with our people. If someone external came to me and said, I'll build the system for you, it's no longer social media management. Then it's someone who has business impact, who solves a business problem with social media as the vehicle, but they don't talk about social media at all on a marketing level, on a packaging level. Clipper, Reel Producer, no €100k per month if someone says I make Reels. These are entry-level things. Although here too, a really good clipper. Someone who says, Maron, I watch your podcasts and I clip them so that they go viral and are seen by the right people. How much is something like this worth? But that is very rare. The people have to be really, really good. If you trust yourself to do something like that, feel free to write me a DM. We are looking for exactly such people. But that is very, very rare. What you see here are offers with which we have no client who reaches €100k. Many clients come in through these offers, and we switch them to these. However, some also come in through these. This means this is a cross-section of our clients. Especially these clients here, they are doing very well with us. What you can do, a key takeaway again at the end. Please use AI. This is a trending topic that is being very hyped right now. How can you use it? Include AI in your positioning. I have an example. I have a UX designer client who said, Maron, my client built something themselves with the website, and it looked really good, and he says, why shouldn't I use AI? Then I said, put AI in your positioning. Then she said, okay. And then I said, because then the client has the feeling that they are buying AI in addition, and not that AI can do it, but AI can do it, therefore book it correctly. Same with consultants. They then say, Maron, yes, my client says, AI does that. All the consultants who write success stories with us are AI consultants. We advise you in the direction of AI. If you say, Maron, where should I know this from? Upskilling. Upskilling is on the agenda for you as a self-employed person. This must be on the agenda. These are the things we do for our clients. These are the offers that work, the €100k per month offers. And I'll tell you one thing, I was in this camp as a freelancer for a very long time. I did web design, I did WordPress, I did Scrum, I did UI, I did these things, and I worked very hard. Then at some point I was on this side because I suddenly did conversion rate optimization for online shops almost 10 years ago. I didn't work more, on the contrary, even less. And the offer was suddenly capable of €100k. It's not about how hard you row. It's about which boat you are rowing in, and that's how you manage to row in a different boat. I hope you liked the video. Give it a thumbs up if you liked it. If you want us to take a look at how we would tweak your offer, feel free to book a first consultation with us. We have advised over 1300 people. Thank you for tuning in. 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