Most freelancers love the idea of monthly recurring revenue.

Of course they do.

Predictable income sounds a whole lot better than waking up every few weeks and wondering which project, referral, or “just checking in” email is going to pay the mortgage.

But high-ticket MRR does not happen just because you want it. And it definitely does not happen because you slap “retainer” onto a proposal and hope the client doesn’t ask too many questions.

In this episode, Austin talks with Amanda Northcutt, founder of Level Up Creators, about what it really takes to create recurring revenue with premium freelance clients.

Amanda has spent more than 20 years in recurring revenue, starting as a freelancer, then becoming a consultant and fractional executive, before building Level Up Creators to help subject matter experts and thought leaders build high-value coaching and consulting businesses.

The conversation starts with what Amanda calls the expert’s dilemma.

When you’re good at something, solving problems can feel easy. And when the work feels easy, you may start wondering, “Can I really charge that much?”

That is usually when the head trash starts tap dancing.

Amanda argues that clients are not paying for your time. They are paying for expertise, judgment, outcomes, transformation, and the 20 years of pattern recognition that help you solve the right problem faster.

But she also makes an important distinction: not everyone is ready for high-ticket MRR.

If you’re still trying to be the Swiss Army knife freelancer for every kind of client with every kind of problem, premium retainers will be harder to sell. To create recurring revenue with better clients, you need specialization, proof, a clear methodology, a product ladder, and a way to consistently get in front of best-fit prospects.

Austin and Amanda also talk about what can actually go inside a high-ticket retainer.

Spoiler: it should not be “an endless pile of deliverables until both parties quietly resent each other.”

Amanda shares examples like advisory retainers, fractional work, coaching, consulting, quarterly priorities, strategic access, accountability, IP licensing, and long-tail packages that create predictable revenue while protecting you from scope creep.

If you want retainers that give you more leverage instead of building you a shinier hamster wheel, this episode is for you.

Key Points

• MRR requires more than a retainer label: Monthly recurring revenue works when the client understands the ongoing value, not when you simply repackage random tasks into a monthly fee.
• High-ticket clients pay for outcomes: Amanda emphasizes pricing based on transformation, value, and expertise rather than effort or hours.
• The expert’s dilemma causes undercharging: Freelancers often undervalue work that feels easy because they forget clients are paying for years of judgment and pattern recognition.
• Generalists have a harder time selling premium retainers: If you are for everyone, you become easier to compare, replace, and negotiate down.
• Five things need to be true: Amanda names positioning, ideal clients, methodology, product ladder, and client acquisition as essential ingredients for a stronger recurring revenue business.
• Your methodology is the linchpin: A clear method helps clients understand what you do, why it works, and why the engagement should continue.
• Voice-of-customer research sharpens the offer: Amanda recommends talking to best-fit prospects to learn how they describe their problems, what those problems cost, and what language will make your offer feel relevant.
• Brain work beats endless hands work: Advisory, coaching, consulting, and fractional support can create higher leverage than retainers stuffed with time-consuming deliverables.
• Good fences prevent scope creep goblins: Long-term engagements need clear containers, outcomes, boundaries, and expectations.
• The best MRR offers create stickiness: Quarterly priorities, access, accountability, relationships, measurable results, and strategic guidance make you harder to replace.

Notable Quotes

• “You should be pricing your services based on the value and outcomes and transformation that you’re providing to your client, not the inputs that you put in.”
• “If you are the freelancer that is for all people at all times that will solve any problems because you’re this amazing generalist, you are a commodity... If you’re for everybody, you’re actually for nobody.”
• “Your highest leverage and what you will get paid the most for, counterintuitively, is brain work.”
• “We always want to decouple our time inputs from our money outputs.”
• “The purpose [of longer consulting engagements] is to create predictable recurring revenue over a long period of months and also to protect yourself and prevent scope creep.”

Resources Mentioned

• Amanda Northcutt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/northcuttamanda/
• Amanda’s newsletter, Get the Level: https://welevelupcreators.com/
• Amanda’s email: amanda@welevelupcreators.com
• Freelance Cake Community: https://freelancecake.com/community
• Nir Eyal’s book, Beyond Belief: https://www.nirandfar.com/beyond-belief/

Watch This Episode

Transcript

00:01
Hey there, welcome to the Freelance Cake Podcast. I'm your host, Austin L. Church,  founder of the Freelance Cake Community. The goal of this show is to help full-time committed freelancers get better leverage. As the sworn enemy of busyness and burnout, I have no desire whatsoever to see you work harder. So I reveal the specific beliefs, principles, and practices you can use right away to make the freelance game more profitable and satisfying. So chill out, listen in,  because the best is yet to come.

00:40
Welcome to another episode of the Freelance Cake Podcast. If you're an experienced freelancer, you've probably noticed that doing great work isn't always enough. The real challenge is creating a business that's profitable, predictable, and able to command premium rates. My guest today is Amanda Northcutt. Amanda has spent more than 20 years in the world of recurring revenue, working as a consultant, fractional executive, and now the founder of Level Up Creators, where she helps subject matter experts build high value coaching and consulting businesses.

01:21
In this conversation, Amanda shares why so many talented freelancers undercharge for work that feels easy to them, and why expertise should be priced based on outcomes, not effort. We explore what has to be true before premium retainers and recurring revenue models actually make sense, including the role of specialization, positioning,  and a clear methodology. Another theme is client acquisition.

01:54
Amanda breaks down how voice of customer research can help you sharpen your offers, improve your messaging, and create marketing that feels  like you're reading your prospects minds. We discuss thought leadership, personal branding referrals, and why building a premium business often requires getting more visible and more uncomfortable.

02:17
Finally, we talk about client experience, how the freelancers who command the highest fees create memorable personalized experiences that make them difficult to replace and easy to refer. If you're looking to charge more, build recurring revenue and create a more sustainable freelance business, you're going to get a lot from this episode. All right, enjoy my conversation with Amanda Northcutt.

02:51
I am delighted to have this conversation with you, Amanda. Thank you for agreeing to chat.

02:58
I'm so grateful to be here, Austin, and hope this is super fun and very valuable to everybody tuning in today.

03:03
We are going to do our best, right? And I know that you have a background as an executive, so just start by telling me how you found your way from those leadership roles to what you're doing now and then we'll get into the really good stuff.

03:23
Absolutely. So we have to back up a little bit further. I've been in online recurring revenue for over 20 years. I mean, when it was, it was like selling air right in the early 2000s. And so that's an important point to kind of layer in there. I went from in-house at this massive collegiate sports media property to a health crisis and then was out on my own. And so kind of started as a freelancer, evolved into a consentant and a fractional executive.

03:50
And that is my market timing was pretty impeccable, which was serendipitous. My kind of health crisis and market timing for software as a service were very similar around 2010. And I was able to take all of that recurring revenue experience from that media property and layer it right in with SAS because you got all these brilliant engineers in Silicon Valley that had amazing products that they could not sell. And so my kind of full customer lifecycle experience was perfect at that time.

04:19
So jumped in there and did really, really well. But at the end of 2022, it's like, I love the work I'm doing. I love the people that I'm working with, but this is not the most meaningful work and not the way I want to spend kind of the last third of my career. So left Silicon Valley at the end of 2022 and gathered all my favorite people from all the teams I've built all over the world and started Level Up. And here we are three years later and rocket and roll and help a lot of subject matter experts and thought leaders build boutique coaching and consulting firms.

04:48
That was so good. So succinct, so sharp. First real question. When you crossed over into this world of helping subject matter experts build consulting firms, build agencies, what surprised you the most about these very talented people who despite their talent and their expertise, were still leaving money on the table?

05:18
I love that question. And I talk about this all the time. It is the experts dilemma. And typically if you are freelancing or coaching or consulting, you know your stuff. You've been at this for a while and you have a particular way of doing things. But the problem comes in when you are solving problems for people in organizations and it feels really easy for you to solve those problems to the point where  you're kind of messing with your mind a little bit around like, can I really charge this much for that? That was really, really easy for me to go in and do. And so we end up almost negotiating against ourselves in between our years before we even present a proposal to a client. And so it's mindset, really, and in not understanding the value and worth that we're bringing to the table as experts in a freelance capacity, right? Like you should be pricing your services based on the value and outcomes and transformation that you're providing to your client, not the inputs that you put in like they're not paying for your time. We don't pay brain surgeons for their time. We pay for their 20 years of expertise and doing the exact right thing in the exact right spot so that I don't die, right?

06:26
And we tend to not think that way. We tend to think that was easy  and I feel bad for charging a lot.

06:35
That's it.

06:37
So I agree first and foremost, like I think it is so common it's almost an epidemic. On the other hand, there are probably people who shouldn't be charging a premium yet. They shouldn't or it would be unrealistic for them to have high tickets, monthly recurring revenue. What disqualifies someone and the counterpart to that question is  what are the conditions that must exist in order for someone to start to stack high ticket monthly recurring engagement?

07:23
That's a great question. So backing up several steps, you have to establish a track record of success in a specific niche. And so if you are the freelancer that is for all people at all times that will solve any problems because you're this amazing generalist, you are a commodity. You are, it's very, very hard to go in and charge a premium because you're not known for anything. You're kind of just like the Swiss army knife person. And so you have a lot more competition. Whereas this is, we can get way into this, but if you're combining your thought leadership, with your methodology, which you can create intellectual property from. So if you have a personal brand and you know your stuff and you're talking about that stuff online. And even if you have to do some work for free, everybody gets a point in their career, especially if you're kind of restarting the clock on what you're pursuing. It's okay to go to your friends and offer to work for free in exchange for testimonials, case studies, statistics, things that you can talk about online and in sales conversations that will elevate your ability to charge more premium pricing because you've been there, done that and got the t-shirt.

08:31
But the conditions that must exist in order for you to really stand out in the marketplace, personal brand, very important. You need to be just as a proof point to you don't need a whole big bunch of followers in order to get started here, but you need to be a Googleable and people need to be able to see that you're a real person on the internet and that you're not crazy talking, but you're talking about things that are relevant to that niche in particular. All right. So there are five or go ahead.

08:59
Oh, I was just going to say, but Amanda, I like diversity. I don't want to pigeonhole myself. I would get bored if I did the same type of project over and over. What would you say?

09:18
That would not be fun. So the way that we remain intellectually stimulated in our work in an environment where we are higher ticket working with fewer clients and importantly selling productized services is that one, we are working with different people. Two, we have a product ladder that is ripe for expansion and there's a logical progression of offerings where you can maximize LTV, your customer lifetime value, how much each customer pays you on average by offering a, okay, I'm gonna come in and solve problem number one with this offer and that's gonna uncover problem number two.

09:51
I anticipated that problem and I have an offer for that and then problem number three, four, five, and so on and so forth. So you're working with different humans, which in an environment where you are niched down and can be selective about your clients because you have lead flow and therefore you have options, you're able to choose really, really  interesting, fun humans to work with. And then you've got a variety of packages and we're always evolving. You know, when you learn new information, you can have updated thinking, you can make new decisions.

10:20
And so you're not ever pigeonholed, but it's the personal brand that allows you to grab a hold to the next branch and swing to kind of the next thing. Because if people have a high affinity for you, they will  follow you. Unless you're, mean, massive left turn. Like if you're like, okay, I'm a executive coach and then I'm gonna go teach underwater basket weaving. We have a problem, we have a mismatch there. But if it's something adjacent, people will follow you through those twists and turns and evolutions of your career.

10:50
But to run a successful business, five things have to be true. And you can interchange this for products or technology or anything. But  number one, you have to have clear positioning. Who are you? What painful, pervasive, urgent, expensive problems are you uniquely equipped to solve based on your expertise, experience, passion, and wisdom? What do you actually like to do that you're good at? OK, that's the number one. Who are you? Number two, who are your clients? And I'm always encouraging people to work in a B2B environment because then the business is paying the bill  and you can charge more because your services are going to be worth more to an organization than they are to an individual or even a very small organization. So who has the painful, pervasive, urgent, expensive problems that you are uniquely equipped to solve? And they are feeling a lot of pain. I mean, like you've got to be selling must haves,  not nice to have. So we're looking for folks who you want to work with, you're well equipped to work with and can provide solutions for. Someone has stabbed them. They have turned the knife they are going to proverbially bleed out by your services. Yes So it's not just your positioning and who your clients are but it's at the right timing So we have to arrange this sort of almost like meet cute in your marketing for the right clients at the right time. Number three, how do you solve their problems? What is your method? What is your methodology or what is your product or what is your tool? Okay, what is the thing that gets results and this is you know how you take your clients from that  pain, that urgent, expensive pain to solution land. Okay. So this can be a way that you coach. It can be a way that you go in and perform as a fractional executive. It can be a way that you  put together a brand guide. It can be a way that you do copywriting. And that's another part of the expert's dilemma. Sometimes that can be hard to see, but AI is very helpful and can help you of extract what your methodology is. Four, product ladder. How are you packaging up your methodology in a way that is relevant and helpful and tenable to your ideal client? And then number five, how do you most efficiently and effectively acquire best fit clients? That's the hardest one, but these are in order for a reason. Your methodology is actually the linchpin here. But the number five, how do you acquire clients is always a moving target. We can certainly double click on that one today if that would be helpful.

13:12
I think we should. I do want to point something out, which is something I see a lot of, and that is this  fallacy of if I build it, they will come. And so I love that you talk about lead generation actually getting in front of those clients because there are a lot of  solopreneurs, fractionals, consultants, creatives who know they've got a good methodology. We know that the methodology helps them do good work.

13:42
And again, mistakenly believe that as long as they do good work, everything will work out okay in the end. And I don't  believe that's true. I believe you have to deliver great results, but also you have to  get in front of the right people. So how do these people, when they reach the fifth piece, get the clients?

14:10
Yeah. So if you are getting results for clients already, you have created potential leverage. Now, talking about that on social media, publishing case studies, using that information as fodder for conversations and sales calls, then you're creating actual leverage from the results that you've already created. So if you're not creating case studies, if you don't have testimonials, you need to get those. Even like I said a moment ago, if you have to do some work for free.

14:34
And that's okay. It's okay to have to do that as long as you don't waste the at bat there. If we're going to continue with the baseball and the field of dreams, for consistency sake, right? We're just going to be consistent. So, how do you get clients? One, you have to know who you are and who your clients are. You are not for everybody. If you're trying to boil the ocean, it's like, if you're for everybody, you're actually for nobody. And so you need to understand your prospective client base. And the way that we do that is by understanding how they talk about their problems and what's at risk for them. We're talking about individuals in an organization that are humans and we all have deep psychological needs for respect and we are all wanting promotions. We want to be likable. We want power. We want influence. We want money.

15:25
And so how are you helping those human individuals inside of companies get what they want by helping them accomplish their goals inside of the organization. So you have to think through the lens of your clients. So you need to put on a pair of glasses that your clients would wear. And you can't do that by guessing. You do that by actually getting to know who these clients are. You can't do that if you haven't defined them. But once you have defined them, do something we like to call network mining. Go through all your LinkedIn connections. If you're not on LinkedIn and you're freelancing in business, you need to be on LinkedIn.

15:56
Sorry if you don't like it, not many people do, but like you gotta be there. Okay? It's just part of part of the rules of the game at this point. Go through your phone contacts, your LinkedIn connections or followers. If you have them find people who match your ideal client profile. And if you have LinkedIn, like sales navigator, recruiter, Apollo or any kind of like lead sourcing technology, AI, you know, Claude can be really, really helpful at this as well,  but sourcing leads for you, okay?

16:26
And you're looking to basically make a list of people who work at companies who ideally you know or are one degree of separation from and can get a warm introduction to, to have what we call voice of customer calls. And these are not veiled sales calls. They are rich learning opportunities where you are looking to provide a mutual exchange of value with the person on the other end of the phone or the Zoom call and be a helpful human to them and ask them questions about what they think about where you're headed. Say, hey, I'm kind of repackaging my skills and hitting refresh on my business.  Here's what I'm thinking for positioning and the type of clients that I help and how I help them. What do you think about that? Are you experiencing those problems within your organization? How have you tried to solve those before? What is that problem costing you? What have you spent on that problem? Have you been burned before by other freelancers or coaches or consultants or fractionals? And figure out what the risk profile is for that ideal client and then refine every time you have a voice of customer call, you should refine your pitch.

17:31
Now, again, like I said, not a veiled sales call and you better be coming to the table to help these people. So make an introduction for them, give them helpful advice on that voice of customer call. This is called building relational equity. You can't like call up a favor from someone unless you have what I call putting mambas in the jar, you have to put something in the jar in order to ask for something to be taken out. So you come to that call and you come to interactions in general with you being ready to help and to serve. And then that reciprocity principle that think a lot of us are familiar with in psychology is if we do something for someone else, our brains kind of make us feel on the hook to repay the favor.

18:13
And so I share these tips making the assumption that you are an amazing person, whoever's watching this, we don't leverage psychological principles for bad things. This is all- Let it be known.  Yeah, values forward, genuinely being a helpful human. And there's three typical outcomes that result from a voice of customer call. One, you get really good feedback and you refine and sharpen your offer.
You're recording all these calls, by the way, and you're going want to plug these transcripts into AI and make sure that you're pulling out what are the most common words, phrases, pain points, how much is this problem costing? So you want to start to establish trends and sharpen your positioning and your offers and your content, all your marketing language, how you speak in sale, selling conversations. So that's thing number one, you get helpful feedback. Thing number two, the person you're doing the VOC interview with might introduce you to someone that sounds like your prospect, someone in their network. And you want to reduce friction in order for them to do that. That means you write the email that they can copy and paste to make that introduction. I've got about a hundred percent hit rate on intros when I just go ahead and write it for them because you got to reduce friction and make it easy to get what you want effectively.

19:25
100%. Yes. Yeah. Like writing it for them because then it's one less thing they have to do and they don't accidentally give you the wrong positioning or framing, but sorry to interrupt. You were saying?

19:39
Yeah, then you're also controlling the narrative a little bit. And that's very, very helpful. So that you're just representing yourself in the way that you intend to. The third thing, which is great outcome is the person says, Oh my God, this sounds perfect. Like, can you tell me more? I'm interested. You know, and they hand raise to put themselves into your pipeline. And that's that's a banger of an outcome. But again, not a veiled sales call. But it does happen if you're talking to the right people and you are getting the point of refinement where what you're saying feels like you have reached inside your prospects, had pulled out their innermost thoughts and fears and reflected it back to them. And then you're coming with a solution, obviously. Yeah.

20:20
I had a prospect one time, say I read your homepage and it was like, you were reading my mind. Yes. know it's like, yes, yes. But I think looking back on that experience, the thing that I didn't do was have those voice of customer conversations and then say, Oh, but, she said it wrong. I'm going to change the words that she used into the words she should have used because people in my industry, they don't talk  about websites that look good on iPhones. They talk about mobile responsive websites, or they talk about, you know, websites that automagically adjust to screens with different aspect ratios or blah, blah, blah. Like that was, I think that's the big mistake we make is our, our potential customers give us gold and they say, they described their pain and then we change the words. We translate for them. So  that's just an observation. I'm curious what advice you give your clients and this may be too tactical, but bear with me. when they say, but Amanda, don't know how to get, like I checked LinkedIn and I don't know how to get in front of enough people who are in my target audience. What should I do?

21:54
As for help from people who you know that maybe you're not directly in your target audience, start putting it out there and having conversations with people. Get together in person in your town or city with people. Put yourself out there. This is a vulnerable experience. This path of entrepreneurship and freelancing and going out on our own is tough and it is fraught with peril. And there is a playbook that works exceptionally well here. There is a known path to extraordinary success out on your own. And everything you want is on the other side of fear. And all of the good stuff in life happens when we are uncomfortable. And if you want to stay where you are, keep doing what you're doing, right?

22:34
If you want to get to a different place, you're going to have to roll out a different playbook. And what is really helpful and popular right now are in-person events of all sizes and types, whether you are hosting them or a guest or a speaker, but applying for podcast applications. Guess what? If you're a guest on a podcast, you have a new node into a new network. Go and look at everybody else who was a guest on that podcast. And now you know the host.

23:01
And so, you know, it's a warm outreach on LinkedIn or through email or another DM on another social platform or whatever. It's like, Hey, notice you were a guest on such and such podcast as well. I'm relatively new to this space and would you know, speaking to a non-competitor or that's important. I'm in kind of a tangential field and would be really grateful for the opportunity to pick your brain on a couple of things and see there's any ways I could be helpful to you. So create new nodes of your network in highly leveraged ways.

23:31
So one to one is low leverage unless that person basically like holds the keys to the kingdom to your entire target audience. Okay. That's a high leverage thing. But you know, podcast hosting webinar, roundtable workshop, all online. Those things can also happen in person. High leverage activities and they also serve as social proof. So it's kind of like both sides of the coin. You got to make sure that on your website, I was on this podcast. I spoke at this event, right? We're posting photos, screenshots.

23:59
And so you are creating something from nothing, but you can be really smart about doing 10 of these things and creating all the social proof and leverage that you need from which to build your business on. Or you can stay small, do things that are comfortable and keep making, you know, whatever you are or are not making right now.

24:20
You have a gift for divesting people of their excuses.

24:29
I've said them all and I've heard them all.

24:33
That was so good. And I appreciate you talking about fear. Fear is part of this paradigm shift. Like so many freelancers, even advanced ones, are sort of trapped in this cycle of project after project. It feels like a hamster wheel. You come in from this MRR background. So can you think of anything else that's worth mentioning around the mindset shift when people go from project-based to ideally high-ticket recurring engagements? What does that actually look like in practice and how do I have to manage my mindset?

25:17
Good question. So this is something that is personal for everyone, ideally. I think I'm sure we've all heard the quotes like we are the average of the, you know, people in our five people in our inner circle, for instance. And so who are you surrounding yourself with? Is it people who are you pulling you down off the rungs of the ladder or people who are extending a hand down saying, Hey, I've got this figured out. I'm going to pull you up here with me to be more successful. Or are you hanging out with a crowd of people who like live in mom's basement or playing video games all the time and you know, barely can rub two nickels together to use a very old expression and date myself. Who are you surrounding yourself? You can do a content audit. What messages are you receiving and from whom? And are they the type of people that you actually want to be like and emulate  or are they not  right? Beyond that, it's very important to be aware of your mindset and the, talk tracks that are constantly deeply embedded into your brain and that are running on autopilot, that you can kind of do an audit of your own thoughts and be aware of  intrusive thoughts and recurring thoughts that come up that are undercutting you at every possible corner. If you have a scarcity mindset, if you raised in a socioeconomic position where it was tough to make ends meet and there was never enough and you constantly heard the message that there was never, ever, ever enough. You have a scarcity mindset and that is a hard thing to work out of. So awareness is the next step. then going through, I mean, that's like psychological steps. I'm not a psychologist, but if you are aware of the thought, challenge the thought, what is the evidence for and against  the belief that has come up? And then from there, we want to apply new judgment. I've already said, when you learn something new, you can update your thinking. You can do a software update. And that's basically what I'm encouraging everyone to do is analyze the software you're currently running on and then can we skillfully install new updated software that gets you where you want to go or at least directionally correct. But as you're aware and starting to challenge the thoughts in your mind, you can shift them through, I mean, like cognitive behavioral therapy exercises and you can Google those and look them up.

27:40
I'm also reminded of Nir Eyal, a friend of mine's new book, Beyond Belief. It is phenomenal and exactly what hit the nail on the head of exactly the question that you are asking. He answers it way more eloquently and with a lot of research. So I definitely recommend that book. But Managing Your Mindset is easily 50% of success as an entrepreneur and then get a mentor. Who do you want to be like? And see if you can find someone who will bring you along with them and that will be able to challenge the negative thoughts and patterns that you're having. And then from an external point of view, get the proof points, get your receipts, get these statistics, testimonials, and case studies and podcasts you've been on and stages you've spoken on or webinars you've given for a specific audience. Write that stuff down. Put it on your desk. I have a massive monitor of three monitors. The one I'm looking at is massive, and they are all lined with Post-it notes with my favorite quotes like, find a way, stop shooting on yourself. I am calm, pleasant, strong and capable. Just do the next right thing. And so I'm like constantly surrounded by positive messaging that challenges my natural state, is massive amounts of anxiety. And so, it  takes a lot of work, right?

29:01
It does. I mean, and don't become an entrepreneur if you didn't want to evolve, if you don't want to evolve. But I think the thing that you pointed out, right, which maybe doesn't get talked about often enough is like the negative talk tracks. We already have them and then we are bound to pick up more just by osmosis, just by like it's in the dirt and air, right? So knowing that that's true, you have like, everybody who wants to graduate to the next level has to be proactive and intentional about replacing the negative stuff with positive stuff, replacing the half truths and the lies with full truths. Right. And it just, can never be passive. It always has to be active. And I don't know that I've ever quite thought about that, that if you want to graduate, you have to do it proactively. There's no person I've ever met who just has the right mindset automatically all the time. Anyway, thank you. You helped me.

30:15
That's the lizard brain, right? Like that's the old part of our brain. It's, it's wired to keep us safe and safe means small and not taking any risks. So we have to actively push against all of that evolutionary psychology, right?

30:28
Actively. Actively with all the Post-it notes. One of the negative talk tracks, I don't even know if I would call it that. Maybe it's just like an objection because like having monthly retainers or, you know, MRR sounds great to like every creative and consultant ever that retainers are kind of the Holy Grail. But one of the things I hear a lot is, but I don't even know what my clients would pay me for month after month. What does the client actually gain by giving me money every month? So what do you tell your clients when they are disqualifying themselves with that type of thinking?

31:12
Yeah, you have to take some uncomfortable action to be able to answer that question effectively. And again, that's through like voice of customer research. But even before that, if you're at this place where that you just named, you need to find people on LinkedIn who fit that profile and you're starting with a hypothesis. I think this is the group that I want to help and it has problems that I am uniquely equipped to solve. Go find content creators on LinkedIn that match your profile. What the hell are they talking about? What are they saying? What are they bringing to the table day after day and week after week? Then go look those people up, listen to podcasts, interviews that they've given, listen to TEDx talks if they've given them. And go do some freaking research and put your ear to the ground, do the hard work and learn about it. Also AI very, very helpful in this regard, but not a replacement for doing specific targeted research on individuals.

32:06
Amanda, what you're describing sounds like it may take some effort. Imagine that.

32:16
Yes, it does. It does take effort. But typically what we see with freelancers and coaches and consultants is they are putting in a lot of effort…

32:25
They're already working so hard. Yes. Great point.

32:30
So we want to just shift what you're working on is really the key here is like analyzing your calendar. And you know, if you are not, if you are hurting, for pipeline and money. And we can distill your calendar down to needing to do just two things. Client service delivery. If you have clients, that is thing number one, take care of your clients  because we want to get you to the point where you can say, I do X  for Y so that Z. You are niched down into this one pocket of the professional world and you solve very specific problems for them like a brain surgeon. So you can charge like a brain surgeon.

33:08
And if you take care of your current customers and even go above and beyond, which is another node we can talk about here on how to do that so you can raise your fees, you are doing inherently remarkable work and they would love to introduce you to their non-competitive peers for you to go and do the exact same work there. And you need to be asking for those referrals. You need to be writing the introduction email like we've already talked about. Same thing applies here, but you need to be taking care of your current clients and you need to be selling. And this is where things get really uncomfortable.

33:38
So it's hard to write content and publish it online if you haven't been doing that for a while already. That feels really, really vulnerable. But that is not even the ballpark of the level of vulnerability that you might feel in a one-to-one selling environment. And yet, the ability to sell in a consultative selling matchmaking motion, not a begging, subservient, weird sales relationship, but like, hey, I have a solution for your problem. Let's talk business. Yeah, you, need to be selling and delivering client services. If you need money, that's the only two things that you need to be doing. You can publish on LinkedIn once a week. So people know you're, you know, a  mirror fogging human being and intelligent, but you can get to the point where at one time posting content was a huge hurdle that felt like a Herculean effort. was very scary to hit publish, but now you're, might be using that to hide. And so it's very easy to post content, but selling is very, very hard.

34:37
But let me tell you what, you got to post a lot of content over a really long period of time on multiple different channels. So podcasts, webinars, being a guest in communities, LinkedIn and on and on and on and on in order to get inbound leads. That's a long, long game.  And a way that might be a little less intimidating is going to industry  events and meeting people there. You really want to be on stage, even if you're doing a workshop, not necessarily a keynote, but be the person at the front of the room and then everybody will want to meet you or you can organize your own small event over coffee even or a happy hour or a walk. It doesn't have to be I'm hosting an event. It's really actually these small niche invite only events that are really popular right now.

35:24
Something you're touching on is this need to evolve because there are so many creatives and consultants I know who don't actually like being up in front of people, who don't necessarily feel like they're good at speaking off the cuff. And what I hear you saying in effect is get over it. Like if you want to graduate to the next level and you want to have predictable monthly recurring revenue, then you have to evolve. What would you say to that?

36:04
Yeah, absolutely. And you're not going to be able to go unless you really have an amazing network and you can just get slotted in. Like you're not going to be the keynote speaker at the prime industry  conference for your  target audience. You're going to have to work your way up. So taking small actions that give you confidence to take the next action is kind of where the magic is. So podcast interviews are great, voice of customer interviews are also really helpful because that's like in a recorded environment and that there's an AI note taker in their podcasts can feel another layer of vulnerability because those are going to be public, right? But if you think about like laddering, like the laddering principle in psychology is like, okay, can I go from voice of customer interviews to a very small niche podcast interview? Can I parlay that into  five more podcasts interviews? And then I have a social proof to give a workshop or HACI or webinar in a community or mastermind that is full of my ideal client profile. And then can I meet, you know, you want to meet the guests of the podcast that you're a guest on. Very, very relevant. And then if you're hosting a round table or a workshop, you whoever is in attendance there, there's your new pipeline, you know, go do the workshop and then offer 10 one hour  free strategy calls. If you really need leads, that's a hell of a way, you know, to get people in the pipeline is just to provide value straight out of the gate. But yeah, you got to get uncomfortable, but take steps, right? We're not just don't just jump into the deep end without a life raft or anything.

37:30
Laddering up and then your confidence grows through doing not biting your fingernails. You've mentioned several times that doing it for free has value as long as you're doing it in a way that is strategic. Yes. Is there anything else that you see people who are quite comfortable charging five or $10,000 a month. Is there anything else that they're doing differently from people who are charging 500 or a thousand dollars a month? Like what are the other differences beyond deliverables?

38:14
Yep. Think about eating at McDonald's versus a Michelin star restaurant. McDonald's is commodity. They're everywhere. They're super cheap because it's a commodity. It's like toilet paper. Okay.  Whereas eating at a Michelin star restaurant, you're having this amazing experience. Everything is of, you know, utmost quality. It's been thought out for you, you know, from the moment you walk in the door to the moment you leave, it's designed. It's beautiful. The restaurant is very accountable to you because they have a reputation to keep up. They'll make special, you know, things for you once they get to know you. I the best restaurants in the world, they know something about you before you even walk in the door. Think about Danny Myers, restaurants in New York City and Shake Shack now everywhere, but  he's kind of the original, he's the OG designer of experience within fancy restaurants. And so take some notes from that playbook. I'm going to get into like some serious MBA level stuff here, but like stick with me. This is part of growth mindset.

39:19
I'm going to use some big words and terms that you might not have heard before, but you are capable of understanding them and you got this and I got you. Okay. It has been known for some time that a highly defensible strategy in business has four core components. And fortunately these translate directly to your ability to increase prices. Okay. So a business that is rare, valuable, inimitable not able to be easily imitated and non-substitutable those each have very different meanings y'all can go look them up after this or we can get into it if we have time. But the point is there's not another version of you and you continually find more white space in the market that you have selected for your ideal company targets and your ideal client profile  and you inch away at every turn from any potential competition so on the spectrum of commodity toward amazing business where you're making maybe even low seven figures per year, which is emphatically possible with productized high leverage services. Your business is rare, valuable, inimitable, and non-substitutable. Okay, that's been known and that's worked for decades. But now there's AI. The game has shifted significantly. And so having a business that is just those four things is not enough anymore.

40:42
You have to layer on top of this. This will land with everybody. This is my hear me framework, as in your customers are saying, do you hear me? Do you understand me? Do you see me? Okay. If your services are hyper-personalized, experiential, where you are providing accountability and results and a relationship with your client, H-E-A-R-R, you're going to win. You're going to be remarkable. You are going to be inherently referable. Your pipeline will fill because you are  ethically exploiting the leverage that you have created through case studies, testimonials, and statistics through your current client results, whether those are free folks or people who are actually paying for your services. And so if you're providing a hyper personalized experience, I encourage people to sell productized services because you can provide consistent excellence through productized services, but you're personalizing it for the individual.

41:37
Like a chef would personalize my meal at the Michelin star restaurant because I have celiac disease. Whereas McDonald's, they do not care. They do the thing that they do over and over and over again. bun. Good luck. Yeah. Go to the hospital, right? So hyper-personalized experience. This is really important and often overlooked. How are you making your client feel? How are you helping meet those psychological needs I talked about earlier about helping them be
respected, powerful, influential, promotable, make more money. How are you helping them get what they want? And how are you making this an above and beyond standout experience? And that can be a handwritten note. It can be a little bit of swag that is actually useful and not trash. It can be, know, if you pick up on something like kid's birthday is this weekend, you know, can you send cupcakes or something like gluten free cupcakes is the kid, if the kid has celiac, just demonstrate that you heard them and turn around and spend a little bit of money if you need to, but lots of things are free. what does it cost a dollar to put a letter in the mail? Just a handwritten thank you note or something like that. And you're providing accountability, right? Humans need accountability. We pay for accountability and we pay attention to what we pay for and helping them progress in their job or the project or whatever it is. And you're providing results and you are demonstrating those results. At the beginning of a project, you need to establish what success looks like quantitatively and qualitatively.

43:00
What will your prospect say at the end of the engagement that denotes that it was successful? And then what do the numbers tell us from a quantitative, measurable perspective that they can show to their boss? And what are you doing to facilitate the creation of those results that they can hand off  to their boss? And then you're providing opportunity for relationship. And if you have a personal brand and this client has high affinity for you, they know, trust, and like you because of the person you are online, they want to get in line to have a relationship with you. And so you're kind of like setting up all these dominoes  for yourself. And then it does require a lot of work. It requires discomfort. It requires vulnerability, but at some point you knock the first domino down and the whole domino chain falls and things just start working. But it takes a lot of energy to get that first couple of revolutions of that flywheel, but it does work.

43:51
I know it works. I have one specific coaching client right now who feels guilty because it's finally easy. He's making more money than he has ever made, but he has done all of the things that you described.  And now we're basically saying, okay, just don't blow it up because you're addicted to chaos. Like just don't blow it up. I'm sure you've seen the same thing with your clients where they actually, they intentionally put all the building blocks in place. And then they're almost surprised when it starts to work. I have a very tactical question. I'm kind of going off script. What goes into one of these packages? Like so many people, they don't even know what their retainer would encompass or what their productized service  would be. And I know it's different from one like discipline, like design or writing to the next, but can you just give me like a menu of what could go into a retainer?

45:04
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm again, thinking through the lens primarily of coaches and consultants, but if you want to tee up like some really specific copywriters or designers, I can definitely put that package together. So think about the continuum of hands work versus brain work on kind of the other side of the spectrum. Your highest leverage and what you will get paid the most for counterintuitively is brain work. Okay, so advisory type retainers where your clients kind of have that red phone access. You know, I've had a CEO call me from the bathroom at a boardroom meeting. That call was worth a lot, a lot, a lot of dollars and that was on a retainer basis. I'm sure my answer to that question paid for their retainer for the entire year.

45:47
So that's a very helpful device and advisory retainers don't just have to look like that. Typically that is  proactive one to two synchronous calls per month. They have access to you via WhatsApp or Teams or Slack or email or all of the above. And that's you're helping them accomplish very specific goals. Again, use that hear me framework in order to stay on the line, uncover more problems that you're able to solve. And so you're constantly setting quarterly priorities. So you're very sticky because you're helping them accomplish very specific things. So advisory retainer can be one. Fractional executive work or fractional not executive work, any, you whatever level you might be at in corporation. You could be a fractional copywriter or a fractional designer or a fractional director of revenue operations or whatever the case may be. And you're, you know, anchoring yourself from a pricing standpoint based on title, but fractional executive work.

46:45
And don't promise a number of hours, but you're promising output outcomes. We always want to decouple our time inputs from our money outputs. I hate charging by the hour. So we always try and find creative ways to get around that  coaching. So one-on-one coaching group coaching programs are very popular where you're enabling and equipping a team within an organization to perform a new function or to level up in a specific area.

47:11
And there's all sorts of consulting engagements that can happen over the course of, you know, six, 12, even 18 months where you're designing the container of what you do and what you don't do. The purpose of which is to create predictable recurring revenue over a long period of months and also to protect yourself, and prevent scope creep, which we are all privy to, but you've got to, it's like kind of a good fences, make good neighbors, kind of a setup. And if you make sure you're real clear at the beginning of the engagement. You do that. We also look at  licensing intellectual property from our clients and like using AI tools to license back co-created intellectual property. Like if you're consulting for an organization or you do a group coaching program, you know, over a of a couple of months or six months, you're co-creating recorded intellectual property. All conversations are recorded or documented in Slack or Teams or email. All your calls are recorded by your AI note taker. You can package up your intellectual property and method with all of those exchanges, loaded into the back of an AI tool, license the AI tool back to them in a way that basically like they have your brain on call 24/7 365. But then you come in and do a workshop once a quarter or maybe you're doing one on one coaching with, you know, one VP level person throughout that time and you have an advisory retainer. So we're trying to like stack high leverage things into long tail packages. So these are just a few, those are just a very, very few examples really.

48:40
When I was listening to you talk, I thought, okay, here again is why  like waiting a package toward more like head work and more advisory is so important. If your retainers include so many deliverables and so much hand work and all, all that hand work is time intensive, when are you going to have time to go get the next client? And so it seems to me like the design of your offers and  the design of a package is so important because you have to design it in such a way to have any time left over to go sell it. And I think that's like the perennial problem that a lot of us have is we set things up that are nearly impossible to scale because they're so time consuming.

49:37
Yep.  And if you are creating deliverables, you'd better be using AI very skillfully to create consistent, excellent deliverables for your clients. There's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way to do it. It's like crap in, crap out as usual. So becoming a master of how to wield AI tools is imperative at this point. It's not optional. It is like you are a dinosaur if you're not using AI at this point.

50:06
I have one more question for you. Yeah. And then I want to talk about how people can hear more from Amanda, because I know that people who have listened to this are going to think, well, she's brilliant and she made me uncomfortable, but in a good way. Anyway, before we get to that... What's one belief that quietly sabotages people's ability to create consistent, predictable monthly recurring revenue? What are the saboteurs?

50:46
I kind of come in full circle to earlier in our conversation, you know, the talk track of like, I'm not worth it. I can't do it. You know, this is for them. It's not for me. Yeah, I'm not capable. So that's one thing. And then typically, freelancers, coaches, consultants are really good at the thing that they do, but through no fault of their own have not taken the time to master marketing, sales, customer experience, design, AI, technology, copywriting, finance, accounting, strategy, everything, of all the puzzle pieces of what it takes to run a successful business. And so at this stage, it's like learning enough to be fast and loose with those things, running experiments, like putting on your fifth grade science hat, right? We have a hypothesis and we know what our materials are and then we go and execute the experiment and then we have a new data set from which to make the next right decision.  So thinking iteratively as opposed to going like whole hog on something that you don't have enough information to go whole hog on is really important to kind of combat that. But yeah, it's the mindset piece and then just the tactically like How do you put all these pieces together to make a business that works well? Those are major barriers.

52:00
It's so easy when you're on the outside looking in and on the outside, I mean, there's this consultant you admire and they seem to have all the pieces. It's easy to forget that they had to put the pieces together one at a time. And if they can do it, so can you. Right. Yes. Thank you, Amanda. If I am an advanced freelancer and very eager to sit at your feet and learn more from you. What should I do?

52:31
Thanks for saying that. I appreciate it. And no sitting at feet. We're looking eye to eye. We're all equals here.

52:39
That's fair. I was the one who used that language, right? I apologize.

52:45
No, all good. Amanda Northcutt on LinkedIn, two Ts at the end of Northcutt. Otherwise, pretty easy to spell. And then I've got a newsletter, Get The Level, that we publish weekly. It is extremely tactical, often comes with a toolkit. And we help a lot of people through that content and through  my content on LinkedIn. But for your audience, Austin, my email address is amanda[at]welevelupcreators.com. And if this resonates with you and you're looking for more help than that, shoot me an email. We host private invite only roundtables on a monthly basis. We do one-on-one coaching calls, gratis, from time to time. So if this feels like your jam and you want to learn a little bit more, just reach out to me directly. Let's chat.

53:32
I love it, Amanda. Thank you again. What a delight this was. And yeah, can't wait to see where you go next.

53:41
Thank you, Austin. It was truly a pleasure to be here and grateful. Thank you.

53:45
Hey, before you go, let me invite you to join our community for more established advanced freelancers. It's called the Freelance Cake Community. One member named Michelle had this to say, I'm just so impressed by the quality of the conversation that's happening in the group. The in-depth questions, experiments and thoughts being shared are just so refreshing. And the other communities I'm a part of, it's all beginner questions, which is fine, but it's awesome to find a more advanced space where it's okay to ask more advanced questions. Thank you, Michelle.

54:23
Here's a little more about the community. Each week we do live group coaching and live coworking. You get access to a massive resource library and obviously the community itself, which we host using Circle. Of course, the people are the best part of all this. It really helps to surround yourself with smart, accomplished, and optimistic people who are out there taking risks  and building the businesses they really want. If that interests you, visit freelancecake.com/community to learn more and apply. You can find that link in the show notes. I hope to see you there.

‍