Ep 163: Stop Saying Yes on Feeling: Introducing the Capacity Cadence

SUMMARY

The Capacity Cadence: How to Know When to Stop Saying Yes

Most creative business owners don't have a scheduling problem. They have a feeling problem. Every "yes" to a new client ask, a new deadline, a new initiative, gets made on gut instinct instead of real numbers, and by the time the deficit shows up, it's already too late to say no gracefully.

Chapter 8 of Creative Work: 10 Systems Every Creative Business Needs introduces the fix: the Capacity Cadence.

What the Capacity Cadence Actually Is

In one sentence: capacity decisions get made on feeling instead of fact, and the Capacity Cadence replaces that feeling with a weekly question answered against real numbers that tells you when to stop saying yes.

It's not a new tool. It's not a new piece of software. It's a missing piece that sits between two frameworks you may already know, the DO vs DUE Framework and the Priority Framework, and it tells you, in plain hours, whether you have room to take something on.

Step Zero: Calibrate Once

Before the weekly rhythm can run, you need a real baseline. That means going through a Time & Energy Audit. If you've already done one, pull the existing data, there's nothing new to build. If you haven't, it's the only new ask in this entire framework: track your time for one to two weeks, purely as research. No judgment, no optimization, just a habit you'll revisit quarterly or annually as your business grows.

Step One: Name Your Four Buckets

Every task in a creative business tends to fall into one of four categories:

• Client-facing — active client work, calls, deliverables

• Deep work — strategic, undistracted creative or operational thinking

• Fuel — the creative input (reading, watching, listening) that refills what you spend

• Admin and meetings — logistics, internal syncs, notifications

The percentages differ by role. An owner might run roughly 50% client-facing, 20% deep work, 20% fuel, 10% admin. An editor might sit closer to 70% combined in client-facing and deep work, with 20% protected for fuel. An operations lead might land at 25% client-facing, 25% deep work, 20% fuel, and 30% admin, because that admin load is what keeps everyone else's number lower.

Step Two: The Weekly Rhythm

This isn't extra time on your calendar. It slots into whatever weekly preview or big-three planning session you already run. The math is simple:

1. What's already spoken for this week, in hours, against your real baseline?

2. What's coming in that wants a yes?

3. What's the gap? Margin, or deficit?

Step Three: Read the Signal

Every week lands you in one of three states:

• Healthy — committed hours stay within baseline, margin untouched

• Warning track — committed hours are eating into the buffer; still functional, but it's a signal

• Deficit — the buffer's gone, commitments exceed real capacity

Step Four: What to Do With a Deficit

This is deliberately simple. When the Capacity Cadence shows a deficit, stop before saying yes to anything new, and run it straight through the Priority Framework. No new decision logic required. The Capacity Cadence's only job is to catch the problem early enough to hand it to a system you've already built.

Scaling It to a Team

Once your business grows beyond you, the Capacity Cadence shifts from something the owner tracks personally (Layer One) to something your ops lead, COO, or project manager owns and surfaces every Monday (Layer Two). Everyone runs off the same four to six buckets, no new categories per position, and everyone hears the same three words each week: healthy, warning track, or deficit.

The Bottom Line

The Capacity Cadence isn't about tracking everything forever. It's one honest question, asked on a rhythm you already have, before you say yes to something you don't have room for.

If you want help landing on your own buckets, percentages, and cadence, that's exactly what we do at Chief Creative Partners. Grab our free resources at dustinpead.com/freeor head to chiefcreativepartners.com to talk it through.

You create. We operate.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Protect the fuel bucket like a deadline. It's the first thing to get cut when things get tight, and it's the reason quality erodes over time when it disappears.

• ⚡️ Round to the hour. This isn't meant to be a permanent spreadsheet. It's meant to become instinctive.

• ⚡️ You don't need new software. You need one more question inside a meeting you already have.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Think of your margin like an emergency savings account. You're allowed to dip into it when something unexpected comes up. But if you dip into it and never replenish it, it won't be there the next time you need it." (15:58)

• 💬 "At a certain point, the feeling under their feet changes from grass to a bit of gravel. That's a warning trigger. You don't have much time left before you hit your maximum capacity." (17:07)

• 💬 "If I know how broke we are, then I can create a plan to save. You know it to be true for your money. Let's make it true for your time inside your business." (24:13)

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️Download FREE tools here

• ⚡️Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners. This podcast is designed to help creative businesses unleash their best work by equipping them with the systems and efficiency they need to unleash their creativity at scale, over and over again.

It's been about four episodes since we stepped away from the book writing. Today we're back after testing and proving this system, the newest one in the book. I wanted to make sure we had it right before unveiling it to you. In our last episode I called it the Capacity Compass. That was an early name. It's actually going to be called the Capacity Cadence, and you'll see why as we dive in.

Here's the one-sentence overview: capacity decisions get made on feeling instead of fact. The Capacity Cadence replaces that feeling with a weekly question answered against real numbers that tells you when to stop saying yes.

My favorite part about this framework is that it fits organically with what we've already covered. We've talked about the DO vs DUE Framework and the Priority Framework. This isn't an additional thing to learn. It's the missing piece between those two, and how it fits into your business and your team so you know what you can say yes to.

There's a one-time step we're starting with. I'm calling it Step Zero, because we do it once and then we don't have to do it weekly anymore. Before your weekly rhythm can run, you need real numbers, not feeling, for what you actually have to work with. If a client asks "can you do this tomorrow," you need real numbers, not a gut instinct, to answer.

We start by going through the Time & Energy Audit. If you've done it with us or on your own, pull that existing data. There's nothing new to build. This is the T-Rex arms we've talked about in this journey, not making you redo work you've already done. If you haven't done a Time & Energy Audit, this is the only new ask in the whole framework. Go check out Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time, and track your time for a short window purely as research. He suggests two weeks. A week minimum, two weeks maximum. Purely research. No judgment, no optimization. Just a one-time tracking habit.

You will, as seasons change in your business and as you grow, want to recalibrate this quarterly or annually, but not constantly. The numbers get more instinctive over time as you use them. That's Step Zero: calibrate this cadence once.

Now let's get into the weekly cadence itself. There are four buckets I use as a rule. You could have more, you could have less, and you should rename them to whatever fits your world, but for the book we're using four generic categories I see over and over in creative businesses.

The first bucket is client-facing: active client work, calls, deliverables you're giving and delivering to them.

The second is deep work, borrowed from Cal Newport: strategic, focused, undistracted creative or operational thinking, whether it's for a client or for your business. This should probably make up about 20% of your time.

The third is fuel, or input. We cannot give out what we haven't put in. If we're constantly creating for others and never refilling our tank, we burn out, and it doesn't matter what our cadence is, our quality suffers over time. Creative fuel looks like reading, watching, listening, anything absorbing outside creative stimulus. It refuels the margin in your energy and creativity so you can put out. Protect it like a deadline. It's not optional.

The fourth bucket is admin and meetings: basically everything else. Logistics, internal team meetings, emails, Slacks, notifications.

At this point, ask yourself what these four buckets would actually be called in your business. "Production" might deserve its own category, separate from deep work. Split them up if you need to, but don't end up with more than five or six categories total. Any more than that and the cadence stops being usable.

I want to reemphasize the fuel category, because it's the one that gets sacrificed first when things get tight. When's the last time you protected time to just absorb, to read, to watch, to listen, without having to produce anything? If the answer is "I can't remember," that's the gap this part of the framework exists to close.

One more thing before we move to Step Two: these percentages will be different for everyone in your organization. This is where the book starts talking more about team, and understanding what your team needs, what the whole organization needs, to be able to accept new work.

For an owner leading the business, I'd roughly break it down as: client-facing about 50%, deep work about 20%, creative fuel about 20%, admin and meetings no more than 10%.

Say you're a video agency with an editor. Client-facing is probably close to 0%, but deliverables and deep work together are going to eat up about 70% of their time. We still protect 20% for creative fuel and input. If you're thinking, "I don't know if I want to pay people to just absorb creativity," go look at companies like Pixar, Apple, or Google and see how much time their teams spend on creative fuel and research so they can produce genius when it's needed. That's a goal worth aiming for. If you can only start with 5%, start with 5%. For that same editor, admin and meetings should be no more than 10%, same as the owner.

Now say you have someone running your operations, like we do at Chief Creative. About 25% of their time is client-facing, about 25% is deep work, about 20% is still fuel, because even in the ops world we need to be creatively thinking about how to streamline and improve for our customers and our team. And about 30% of their time, unfortunately, is spent in admin and meetings. That's what keeps the wheel moving and helps everybody else have a lower number there.

So think about what those percentages might be for you and each person on your team. Numbering them gives you a guiding principle and some guardrails as you use these categories week in, week out.

Step Two is the weekly rhythm. This happens at the same moment you already do your weekly preview or big-three planning, whatever you use to plan the blocks of your week. It's not additional time, it becomes part of that time. It's a simple math formula.

First: what's already spoken for this week? Simple planning, simple math, done in hours against the real baseline, not an imagined one. What's actually on your calendar? What percentage of each bucket is already taken up?

Second: what's coming in that wants a yes from you? New asks, new client work, new requests, new ideas, new initiatives. What's sitting on your plate, what's on the horizon that wants time from you or your team this week?

Then it's simple math: what's the gap? Is it a margin, meaning you have room? Or is it a deficit, meaning you don't?

I'd round your unit of measurement into hours. Things are more specific than that in reality, but a rounded number is faster and more instinctive with practice. It's not meant to feel like a permanent spreadsheet. You should be able to look at your week and go: what's already spoken for, what's coming in that wants a yes, is it margin or deficit. That's the heart of the Capacity Cadence.

Step Three: what do we do with it? We're not inventing a new threshold, we're reusing what we already know from the DO vs DUE Framework. Think of your margin like an emergency savings account. You're allowed to dip into it when something unexpected comes up. That's what it's there for. But if you dip into it and never replenish it, it won't be there next time. And if it's already empty, there's nothing there to use.

A healthy margin means committed hours stay within the baseline with your margin untouched. If you have margin, don't fill it just because you can. Keep it, so that when it rains, when it storms, when something breaks, you have it.

Or you're in what I call the warning track. If you're a baseball fan, you know the visual: an outfielder running back on a fly ball, eyes up, and at a certain point the feeling under their feet changes from grass to gravel or dirt. That's the warning trigger. You don't have much time left before you hit your maximum capacity. Committed hours are eating into your buffer. It's still functional, but it's a signal, not a crisis.

Or the third state: the dreaded deficit. The buffer's gone, commitments exceed your real capacity.

So after you go through Step One and Step Two, you look at your week and you're in one of three states: healthy, warning track, or deficit.

Step Four: what happens when you hit a deficit. This is the whole point of the framework, and it's deliberately simple. When the Capacity Cadence shows you a deficit, you stop immediately and run straight to the Priority Framework before saying yes to anything new. We already learned the Priority Framework earlier in this book. All we do is stop and say, "I have more stuff than I have time," put it through the Focus Funnel, the Eisenhower matrix, and know exactly what to focus on this week.

The Capacity Cadence doesn't need new decision logic. It just needs to catch the problem early enough to hand it to a system we've already built through the Priority Framework. We already know how to sort through this pile of competing demands. This just makes sure you catch it before you've made five more promises on top of it. Otherwise you keep saying yes because you don't know what you can say yes to, and hope it all works out. That's not efficient, scalable, or a healthy way to run your business.

So that's it, four simple steps: name your categories, get into a weekly rhythm of what's already spoken for and what's coming in that wants a yes, know the gap, and know what to do with it, healthy, warning track, or deficit, and go straight to the Priority Framework if it's a deficit.

Now let's talk about how this scales to a team, not just you. We already touched on how each category carries a different percentage for different people on your team. You want to run against the same categories across your whole company. Don't create new categories for every position, run your entire company off the same four to six buckets that already exist for you.

If you have a team, your ops person, whether that's a COO, director of operations, or project manager, needs to own the Capacity Cadence, not the owner. If you're a one-person operation, this is yours to own. If you have anyone else on your team in an ops role, this is the role that owns it. Side note: this is literally what we do for our clients every day at Chief Creative Partners.

Once that role exists, it becomes a Layer Two issue, not a Layer One issue. Layer One is the owner doing it personally. Layer Two is the supporting work that happens every week to keep things moving.

As for where this lives: there's no new tool. Solo creatives, use whatever you already use for your weekly preview, calendar, journal, notebook, legal pad, Post-its. For teams, it's whatever dashboard or pipeline tool you already run through, a CRM opportunity pipeline, your project management software, or a combination. Your ops person, or you, holds this 30,000-foot view at all times and surfaces it every Monday for your team. Route anything that needs it to the Priority Framework, and let everybody know: healthy, warning track, or deficit. You don't need new software. You just need one more question inside a meeting and a cadence you already have.

I want to close with this. The Capacity Cadence isn't about tracking everything forever. It's about asking one honest question, on a rhythm you already have, before you say yes to something you don't have room for. It's a cadence because it's a rhythm, a habit, a routine, ingrained into your way of thinking each week: are we healthy, are we at the warning track, or are we at a deficit?

If this feels like a lot to manage, this system is supposed to be light. If it feels heavy already, you're probably feeling the weight of already being at a deficit. It's the same instinct as not wanting to look at your budget because you don't want to know how broke you are. But knowledge is power. If you know how broke you are, you can create a plan to save. You know it to be true for your money. Let's make it true for your time inside your business.

That's the Capacity Cadence. A simple thought inserted into an already existing routine.

I hope you found this helpful. If you'd like our help at Chief Creative Partners implementing this into your business, whether you're a solo creative or building a team, head over to chiefcreativepartners.com and hop on our calendar. We'd love to talk through this process, help you land on your actual buckets, categories, and percentages.

That's it for this time. We'll be back next episode for Chapter 9 of the book. We're getting close to finishing this book, and it's going to be an amazing journey to release out to the world.

Remember, you are in charge of your capacity, or your business's capacity. You're either healthy, at the warning track, or at a deficit, and now you know exactly what to do. Get out there and do it this week. We'll talk to you next time on the Chief Creative Podcast.

Ep 162: Client Retention Strategy: Speak Their Appreciation Language

SUMMARY

You've got a client who loves a handwritten thank you card. You've got another who couldn't care less about the card but lights up when you show up to their launch party. Same appreciation, two completely different receipts.

Most creative business owners default to one appreciation move and run it on repeat. A gift here, a shoutout there. It feels generous. Sometimes it lands. Sometimes it just kind of sits there.

That's the problem worth naming: retention isn't a gratitude problem, it's a translation problem.

Where This Started

Years ago, Dustin read Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages. It's built for marriages, but the core idea travels well beyond them: people give and receive care differently, and assuming everyone receives it the way you give it is a quiet way to miss the mark.

Layer in Giftology, a short book on the practice of active listening in service of better gift giving, and you get the seed of an idea Dustin has been testing with his own partners for three years: what if client appreciation worked the same way?

The Five Business Appreciation Languages

Mapping the five love languages onto business partnership, four translate cleanly.

Words of Affirmation. Recognizing wins out loud. Complimenting the vision. Saying the great thing you noticed instead of just thinking it.

Acts of Service. Noticing a problem before they raise it, and solving it without being asked.

Gift Giving. Remembering meaningful details and marking milestones with something thoughtful and personal, not generic.

Quality Time. Investing in the relationship beyond the transaction. A coffee, a cookout invite, a lunch where the phone stays in your pocket.

The fifth, physical touch, doesn't translate. In its place, Dustin identified a fifth business-specific language:

Advocacy. Actively promoting someone else's work. Referring business their way. Treating their success like it's your own.

The Simple System That Surfaced the Real Answer

Rather than guess, Dustin built a short survey. Five categories, rated one to ten, plus one open question: describe a time a vendor, partner, or colleague made you feel genuinely valued.

The scale gave him the data. The story gave him the picture behind the data. Together, they told him something he didn't expect.

Why This Matters for Retention

This isn't a nice-to-have exercise. Dustin's read on it is direct:

Creative businesses are especially prone to silo. You're heads-down shifting between projects, and it's easy to let the relationship run on autopilot, assuming the work itself is the appreciation. It isn't. The people doing business with you and alongside you are looking for a signal that they matter beyond the invoice.

What Now

This system is still being built in real time, which is part of why it's worth sharing now rather than waiting for a polished version.

If you want to try it with your own partners:

1. Identify your five to ten most important client relationships.

2. Send a short, private survey: rate each of the five languages one to ten for how much it makes them feel valued.

3. Ask one open-ended question: describe a time someone made you feel genuinely appreciated in a working relationship.

4. Look for the gap between what you've been doing and what they actually rated highest.

5. Adjust one relationship at a time. Don't try to overhaul how you show appreciation to everyone at once.

The Bigger Picture

Creative businesses get siloed. You're heads-down on deliverables, shifting from one fire to the next, and you forget there are people who can link arms with you: clients, partners, adjacent colleagues. Appreciation, spoken in the right language, is one of the simplest ways to remember that you're building this together.

You create. We operate.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Not every partner receives appreciation the same way, and assuming they do is the fastest way to under-invest in a relationship you think you're over-investing in.

• ⚡️ The gifts he'd been giving were well received, but they weren't always the thing that made the relationship memorable. For several partners, the real answer was advocacy or quality time, not gifts at all.

• ⚡️ Appreciation that matches the right language is retention infrastructure, not a nice gesture on top of the work.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Sometimes people may not give you the full truth to your face, but if they can do it sideways on a digital form, they might be more apt to share how they really feel."

• 💬 "When we do that well, it's our best marketing tool, our best scalability tool, and our best longevity tool as a business owner, especially as a creative business owner."

• 💬 "I don't have an answer for this. I'm still wrestling through it, but I feel like we're onto something."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman

• ⚡️Giftology by John Ruhlin

• ⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️Download FREE tools here

• ⚡️Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here

TRANSCRIPT

Everybody, welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners, where you get to create because we operate for you. Today we're back on the front porch. If you've been around the podcast for a minute, you know that every now and then I do what I call the front porch editions.

If you haven't heard it already, we got a new wind chime for our 20th wedding anniversary this year, given to us by our amazing in-loves, as we call them. My goal with these front porch editions is to give you something I've been thinking about, something I've been wrestling with and trying to figure out the best way to go about, in life or business. Today I want to share something I've been tossing around with several of our partners, and it's this idea of business appreciation languages.

Where this came from was a mix of a couple places. Years ago I read the book by Gary Chapman called The Five Love Languages. If you don't know it, especially if you're in a spousal relationship, go check it out. It helps you understand how each of you give and receive love. Translating that into business for me over the last three years, because I always want to make sure I'm speaking the language of my partners in a way they feel the most valued.

We're business owners, especially creative business owners, and we value those relationships. We get to create together. We get to collaborate together. So how do we do that, and in which ways are they going to best receive it?

If you've been around the podcast, you've heard me talk about the book Giftology. It's an amazing short book that teaches you the practice of active listening so you can gift better to people, so you can show them you're really caring and paying attention rather than just handing out generic gift cards. You're really practicing active listening so you can show them real, true, valued appreciation.

I started practicing that in my business and had some fairly good feedback at first. But what I started to notice was that not everybody feels appreciated by gift giving. That's hard for me to understand, because I love gifts. I love to get gifts, I love to give gifts. If you're listening or watching this and you want to send me a gift, I would love it and feel greatly valued and appreciated by that. But there are other ways to feel valued and appreciated, and I think it's important for us as business owners to make sure we're speaking the language of our partners in the area of appreciation. It's not a romantic love relationship, but we do love working with our partners.

So what does that look like for us? I started thinking that if the gift thing isn't hitting everybody, maybe it's more than just gifts that speak to their level of how they receive appreciation, how they feel appreciated as a business partner of mine. We call our clients partners. But whether you call them clients, customers, or partners, it doesn't matter. What does it look like for you to actually appreciate the people you're doing business with, or doing business alongside?

I believe that when we do that well, it's our best marketing tool, our best scalability tool, and our best longevity tool as a business owner, especially as a creative business owner. So I began to explore and have conversations with some friends and partners about what if, instead of just Giftology, there were also other languages of appreciation. That took me back to the five love languages with Gary Chapman.

There's acts of service. There's words of affirmation, high on my list. There's gift giving, obviously right there in Giftology. There's quality time, spending quality time together. And in the five love languages, there's physical touch. That's where I thought, okay, we're tracking through the love languages, I can see how these match in the business partnership world, but physical touch, I don't know how we do that.

So I started having conversations and exploring, and everybody said, yeah, words of affirmation, acts of service, gift giving, quality time, I can see how all of those pair into our business relationships. Physical touch, not so much. But then I started thinking, what's missing out of those four already? And I think it's advocacy. What I mean by advocacy is actively promoting someone else's work.

If you follow the stuff I do, I love curating content. I love taking other people's content and pointing to it, pointing other people to it and saying you should read this, you should watch this, you should listen to this. More often than not it's not my content, because I believe everyone has something to say, something to share, something to contribute, and I want to point people to that. Advocacy is a way of pointing. Hey, my business partner, my client, my associate, they're really great at landscaping, do you need a landscaper, because I know a great one. You're going to connect those two, and you're going to become an advocate for your client to get more business.

So I started thinking maybe these aren't necessarily love languages, maybe they're appreciation languages. Words of affirmation: we recognize wins, we compliment the vision, we tell someone out loud when something is great, not just in our heads. Acts of service: noticing a problem and solving it before they even know about it, going out of your way to solve something that's going to serve them in their business. Gift giving: easy, read Giftology, learn all about that. Quality time: investing in the relationship beyond just the transaction. Hey, do you want to grab a beer after work, do you want to grab coffee, want to grab lunch, we're having a cookout this week, would you like to come over. That's quality time. And then advocacy.

I started thinking about what my partners are when it comes to these business appreciation languages, so I just started asking them. What is your business love language, what is your business appreciation language? I explained the five, and I sent out a form to them. I love forms, I love surveys, I love to collect that data so I can actually know, because sometimes people may not give you the full truth to your face, but if they can do it sideways on a digital form, they might be more apt to share how they really feel.

I asked them to rate each of the five, one to ten, on what makes them genuinely feel valued as a partner. Words of affirmation: does this person recognize my wins, compliment my vision, tell me when something looks and feels and is really great about what we're doing? Acts of service: do they notice problems I didn't ask them to solve and just go ahead and handle it anyway? Gift giving: do they remember meaningful details and acknowledge milestones with thoughtful, personal gestures? Quality time: do I feel the most appreciated when they invest in the relationship beyond just the project, a call to connect, lunch, genuine presence, not spending time on your phone while you're hanging out? Advocacy: does my partner actively promote my work, refer business my way, treat my success as their own success?

I ended it with this. After they rated each one to ten, ten being they feel most valued when that happens, one meaning it doesn't really move the needle, I asked them to describe a time when some vendor, partner, or colleague made them feel genuinely valued. What did they do? That gave me not just the context of the scale, which was eye-opening, but also a story example, a visual around how they actually received that appreciation.

I don't have this all figured out. I'm still wrestling through it, but I feel like we're onto something. I don't know what the copyright situation looks like for doing a book on this, and we're already in the middle of writing my other book right now. But I think there's something to business partnerships and relationships and true, authentic community and collaboration and growing and building our businesses together. We're better together. I think that's especially important for us in creative businesses, because we get so siloed into our own little world, having to shift over here and change this, and we forget there are people who can link arms with us, whether it's our clients or other business associates and colleagues adjacent to us.

So I wanted to share that with you. That's my front porch thought. I'll do these front porch conversations whenever there's a fifth week. You may have noticed we've shifted the podcast to the first and third Thursday of the month, with the second and fourth Thursdays being a segment or a clip from the podcast. That gives me a little more time to make sure I'm giving you the best possible content. I'm working on some more interviews for the show, so you're not always hearing from me, and we're able to curate some of those conversations for you.

I'd love to hear from you. Which one of these business appreciation languages resonates with you the most? I've already started getting feedback from partners, and some of it surprised me. What I realized after doing this is that some of the gifts I gave, they liked them, that was cool, but it wasn't the thing that made it the most memorable. When they answered the survey, I found out they're actually more advocacy and quality time, or more acts of service and words of affirmation, than they are gift giving. If it's gift giving, great, I've got that figured out. If it's the others, I'm wrestling with what the best way is to do that on a regular basis, and not make it solely milestone based.

That's the show today. Next week we're picking back up on the book I've been writing. I'm excited to bring you the next chapter, which we're calling the Capacity Compass. How do we, as a creative business, understand and navigate what our current capacity is on any given week as we begin to take on more and more work? If we say yes to everything, we're setting ourselves and our teams up for failure. So how do we actually put that in black and white, on paper, and say here's the capacity we can handle right now? Manufacturing industries have become brilliant at this, and I studied them a little to understand what makes a good capacity compass for a creative business. We're going to talk about that next time on the Chief Creative Podcast. Y'all have a good week.

Ep 161: Replacing Yourself with AI: Why Judgment, Not Knowledge, Is Your New Value Proposition

SUMMARY

I've been wanting to have this conversation for a while now, because it sits right at the center of something every creative business owner is wrestling with. AI. Is it coming for our jobs, or is it changing what our jobs actually are?

To dig into it, I sat down with Christian Brim, founder and owner of Core Group out of Oklahoma City. Christian's business is who I trust, and who we trust at Chief Creative Partners, with our own finances. Our books, our taxes, every money question we have about running a business. Core Group is built specifically to help creative businesses, so this felt like the right conversation with the right person.

What started as a chat about a chatbot Christian had been testing turned into a much bigger conversation about replacing yourself, why the age of the knowledge worker might be ending, and why experience and judgment, not raw knowledge, might be the new unique value prop for every creative business owner.

The Sandbox Isn't the Strategy

Christian had been testing a tool called Delphi, which builds an AI avatar trained on your own content: podcasts, Substack, whatever you've got out there. He wasn't trying to solve a problem with it. He was exploring.

"That's a great visionary term, by the way," I told him. It's exactly what all of us do. Somebody plays in the sandbox, and the ops person in the room goes, wait, stop, what are we actually trying to accomplish here.

That tension is worth sitting with. AI has opened up an enormous number of possibilities. The real question isn't whether you can do something with it. It's whether you should. As Christian put it, it's real easy to get enamored by what a new tool can do without asking if there's a purpose behind it.

Technology Doesn't Eliminate Jobs. It Moves the Value.

Christian shared a line from category design expert Christopher Lockhead that reframed the whole conversation for me: technology doesn't eliminate jobs, it changes where the value is created.

That's the shift. Knowledge used to be scarce. Now it's ubiquitous and free. Anybody can look up anything. But knowing something and knowing what to do with it are two different skills entirely.

Christian compared it to watching golf videos versus actually playing golf. You can watch a hundred videos and think, I can do that, that's easy. Then you get on the course and hook the ball so hard it hits the cart your buddy is riding in. There's no substitute for the experience, because experience is what gives you the context and the judgment to know if something even makes sense.

Judgment Is the New Job Description

This is where the conversation got real for creative businesses specifically. Christian pointed out that most creativity lives inside marketing somehow, and that shift is happening top down. Business owners are saying, I don't need to hire a designer, I can just use AI to build the thumbnails.

But here's the question nobody's asking: should you even be designing thumbnails in the first place? What does a good thumbnail actually look like?

If good enough is good enough for your business, that might be fine. But most creative business owners didn't get into this work to produce average. That's exactly why the unique value proposition is shifting. It's not what you do for a client anymore. It's the perspective, experience, and judgment you bring to the table.

Christian used a medical example that stuck with me. AI diagnostic tools are coming, and they might eventually be as good as or better than a physician at reading blood work and radiology reports. But nobody is going to read an AI diagnosis of cancer and schedule chemotherapy without a human being involved. That's the judgment part. The tools work best in the hands of someone experienced enough to know when to trust the recommendation and when to push back on it.

Play Is Part of the Strategy

One of my favorite parts of this conversation was about permission to play. I'd just finished Austin Kleon's new book, which points out that some of the most successful writers we'd recognize by name spend more time reading than writing. We live in a culture that tells us to constantly produce, but if we're not putting enough in, what we put out ends up shallow.

Christian's team explores AI the same way. Pick a problem, see what the tool can do with it, not necessarily to solve it, just to understand its capacity. That's play, not production. And play, without commercial intent attached to it, unlocks a different part of your brain than grinding toward a deliverable does.

We genuinely don't know where AI is headed. Nobody predicted how the steam engine would reshape society when it was first invented. If we stay locked into solving today's problems with today's tools, we miss the insight that only comes from sitting back and asking what if.

Protect What You Can't Get Back

This conversation also had a practical, sobering edge. Core Group is still finalizing their internal AI strategy, but part of it is defining what they're comfortable letting AI touch and what stays firmly off limits, especially client data.

Christian shared a stat that stopped me: the average time it used to take bad actors to exploit a software vulnerability was around seven hundred days. That number is now down to twenty-six. AI isn't just changing how we create. It's changing how fast our data can be exploited if we're not paying attention.

Where This Leaves Us

Ten years out is too far to predict with any confidence, and Christian said as much. But the next couple of years are clearer. The old model of "I have this skill, this is what I do" is going away. That doesn't mean videographers or designers disappear. It means the resources you bring to a client relationship need to be more varied than a single skill set.

Entrepreneurs are problem solvers. The problems are just changing. And that's not a threat. That's opportunity.

If you want to know more about what Core Group does for creative businesses, head to coregroupus.com. And if you're wrestling with where your own value is shifting as a creative business owner, grab our free resources at dustinpead.com/free to start building clarity around what only you can do.

You create. We operate.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Knowledge is no longer the differentiator. Judgment is. When anyone can access the same information, your value shifts to what you do with it, how you apply it, and whether you know when the AI-generated answer is actually wrong.

• ⚡️ Wonder is a creative engine, not a distraction. Christian's rule for brainstorming: no bad ideas, and start everything with "what if." That phrase depressurizes the room and opens up thinking that pure execution mode never will.

• ⚡️ An AI strategy isn't optional anymore. Define what you'll let it do, what you won't, and how you're protecting client and business data along the way.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "It's opened up the possibilities of what you could do. The question is, should you be doing them."

• 💬 "All AI does, all it ever can do, is drive to the mean. It's never going to produce anything exceptional."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️Download FREE tools here

• ⚡️Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here

TRANSCRIPT

So I don't know. Maybe we're moving into the age of the judgment worker, the experience worker. Those words are more applicable because that's where the value is, because the knowledge is ubiquitous. It's free. So what do you do with it?

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast, the show that equips creative businesses to unleash their best work. I'm Dustin Pead, your host, founder of Chief Creative Partners, where you get to create because we operate.

Today's conversation is one I've been wanting to have for a while now, because it sits right at the center of something every creative business owner is wrestling with right now. And of course, that topic is AI, and whether it's coming for our jobs or changing what our jobs actually are.

My guest today is Christian Brim. He's the founder and owner of Core Group out of Oklahoma City. Christian and I have known each other for a while now, and he's the guy at Core Group who I trust, and who we trust at Chief Creative Partners, with our own finances. Our books, our taxes, any money questions we have about operating a business. They're designed specifically to help creative businesses.

In our conversation, we get into a chatbot Christian's been testing out, and that turns into a much bigger conversation about Andy Stanley's idea of replacing yourself, and why the age of the knowledge worker might be ending, and why experience and judgment, not necessarily knowledge, might be the new unique value proposition for every creative business owner listening right now.

So if you've ever wondered whether you should be playing more in the AI sandbox, or whether your skill set is about to get eliminated, stick around. This one's a good one.

Christian Brim, thanks so much for joining me today on the Chief Creative Podcast. We're going to have a conversation around AI. You and I were chatting recently about a chatbot you'd started implementing and testing with your company, Core Group. Tell me a little bit about why you decided to do that. What problem were you trying to solve as we enter this conversation about AI and replacing ourselves?

I wasn't really trying to solve a problem. I was exploring.

That's a great visionary term, by the way. All the visionaries are like that. All the guys like me are trying to make stuff happen, and we're like, okay, here's the eight things we need to do, and you're like, no, I'm just playing in the sandbox.

That was exactly Chelsea's reaction. She was like, wait a minute, stop.

I'd been doing some work with category design, Christopher Lockhead, as we were discussing in the green room. As part of their subscription, they have these bots. The Christopher Lockhead bot, and then another guy, Mike Lee, I think his name is. You can go in and have a conversation with it about category design. Here's what I'm thinking, here's what I've come up with, tell me where I'm right or wrong. I was looking at the tool they used, a tool called Delphi. Essentially what it does is you can self-train it, or it can pull from various sources, including podcasts and Substack. Whatever you've got out there, it'll pull in and train on, and create this avatar for you. I figured I'd give it a try, see what's happening. It's been interesting. I haven't gotten enough feedback from it to really know if it's worth continuing. It's not expensive, but to answer your question, I wasn't really trying to solve a problem. I was just exploring what the technology could do.

Is it worth adding, you said. And my mind immediately goes to, in this world of AI that's opened up so many possibilities, I can't stand it when creatives say AI is killing creativity. I think it's enhancing it. It just gives you a different way of enhancing it. But is it worth adding to your tech stack, worth adding to your methodology, when in a world of distraction, simplicity is the answer? You almost have to look at software as a hiring decision. Hey, I'm going to hire this software to come in and do some things. So where did you ultimately land? This isn't an ad for or against Delphi, but where did you land? You said you're still testing it.

I'm still testing it. There's a free layer. I did the paid layer, month to month. I probably won't continue it. I'll probably downgrade. Delphi is primarily designed for public-facing personas. If you're an expert in something, a speaker, or on different media, it's there to enhance that presence. But before I go on, I think exactly what you said is right. It's opened up the possibilities of what you could do. The question is, should you be doing them? It's real easy for me to get enamored by, oh, look what this can do, look at these new toys.

Fun.

Really trying to say, well, is there a purpose behind it? Is there a problem you're trying to solve? And the answer in my case is no. But I do think, looking at it, I know you do a lot of AI in your SOPs, and what I think AI does a fantastic job of is categorizing data, and making the user interface more friendly so people can get the answer they actually need. I'm still trying to figure out why all the software companies still have help pages. Why am I looking at help articles? And how awful they are. You put it in the search bar, words you think it might key on, and you get ten articles and none of them answer your question. That's the application for AI. I think there's a ton of opportunity, both internally and externally, for that use case.

I think help pages now are less there for people to actually use in the traditional sense, and more there for AEO, answer engine optimization. So when someone Googles or ChatGPTs "how do I do XYZ," hopefully their website or their answer comes up, and people notice it was found on that website.

This whole conversation started, Christian, when we were talking about Andy Stanley, a pastor here in the Atlanta, Georgia area, who wrote a book a long time ago called The Seven Practices of Highly Effective Ministry. Me coming from the church world, there's a lot of overlap, for better or worse, from ministry to business and leadership and how to do things the right way. One of the seven practices is to replace yourself. I think that's a hot, very sensitive topic right now, because a lot of people are afraid AI is going to replace them. But I actually think it's good to try to replace about 80 percent of what you're doing day to day, so you can focus on the 20 percent only you can do. That's nothing new. That's old leadership, as old as John Maxwell. So how have you been using technology, AI or whatever, to start replacing yourself? That's kind of where we started this conversation with Delphi. Are there other ways you're doing that, to offload so you can level up, or do you see it as the opposite, where it's just coming and taking over and you can step out completely?

Christopher Lockhead had a quote I pulled and shared with the team. He said technology doesn't eliminate jobs, it changes where the value is created. I don't do a lot of routine things. What I've run into in my own implementation of AI personally is, oftentimes the juice hasn't been worth the squeeze to teach it what I need it to do, because it's easier for me to just do the thing, since I don't have a lot of routine tasks. However, I think the advent of agents this year has changed that paradigm, because someone else has already figured it out. I don't have to train it. Someone else has already figured out that agent, and I can download it for free and use it.

That's why, six weeks ago, I bought a mini Mac. I am now part of the cult, which was a strangely uncomfortable transition, going to Macintosh on a desktop. I figured it would work more natively with Claude agents and other AI than Windows.

How I use Claude Code is in helping me refine my thoughts. Usually what I do is give it a paradigm and say, okay, I want you to hold me to this paradigm as I'm thinking through these things and presenting ideas. Make sure I'm being consistent in achieving what I said I wanted to achieve, keeping me from wandering, or going down a rabbit hole that's wrong.

But here's what's wild. I built one Claude bot on Mike Damphousse. He's another category design guy. He wrote a book, I read it, and I took all the principles and created a bot. I'm not using the LLM, I'm using Claude Code. I wrote a bot with the principles of his book and said, this is what I'm trying to do, and I want you to push back where you see me veering off the paradigm.

What was wild was I had an hour-long conversation with Mike, uploaded the transcript to the bot, and it proceeded to tell me why Mike was wrong.

Hold on a second. He's the guy who wrote the book.

Right. Chelsea had been trying to use the LLM in a similar way, and I was sharing that experience with her. It's a powerful tool, but you really have to be careful. Thinking is even more important when using these things, because if you just accept what comes back, you're in trouble. You have to have judgment. You have to have context to know if what it's telling you even makes sense.

Or is applicable.

Exactly.

You mentioned perception, and now judgment. You and I have had conversations, on and off the mic, about unique value proposition, what problem you're trying to solve, your unique place. And the conversation now, in the landscape of all businesses, but certainly in creative businesses, is what is your unique value proposition going to be when someone can go on ChatGPT and create their own thumbnails? Why do they need a designer for that? I think the reason I use a company like Core Group, rather than some AI bot to balance my books and file my taxes, which I'm sure is coming, is because of your perspective, your judgment, and your experience. That's an interesting shift we're having to make, culturally, but even more specifically in our fields working with creative professionals. My unique value proposition is the perspective, experience, and judgment I bring. It's not necessarily what I do for you anymore. It's more about thought leadership. How have you seen that play out?

I'm not really trying to hype up Christopher Lockhead, but the guy is just brilliant. He wrote an article recently, or his AI did, about how the age of the knowledge worker is gone. That's been where we've been for the last sixty, seventy years. I don't remember who coined the phrase, it may have been Drucker. But it's been prevalent all of my adult life, this idea that we've moved from the industrial age to the age of the knowledge worker. The problem is that knowledge has been commoditized, democratized. Anybody can know anything now.

But it's the same thing as watching a bunch of golf videos and actually going out and playing golf. There's no substitute for the experience, because the experience gives you the context and judgment to say, does this even make sense? We all watch that and think, I can do that, that's easy, look at that. And then you get out there and swing, and the ball dribbles ten yards to the left. I hooked it so hard once it hit the cart my partner was in.

I've done that many times.

Yeah, that was an embarrassing moment. So I don't know, maybe we're moving into the age of the judgment worker, the experience worker. Those words are more applicable now, because that's where the value is, because the knowledge is ubiquitous. It's free. So what do you do with it?

And also the application, right? We talk all the time about giving your stuff away, giving away your frameworks, your methodologies, giving all that away. And someone young in business says, well, I can't give that away, that's the secret sauce, if I give it away people will just do it on their own. And I say, no one's doing it on their own. They're training AI agents to maybe do it for them, but no one's doing it on their own. The reason they come to people like Core Group or Chief Creative Partners is because, yes, they could do all the things we're doing, since the knowledge is out there. They can listen to Christian Brim's podcast, they can listen to mine, they can read books, they can figure it out. They probably can. But they don't have the time for it. Time is the commodity we can't get back. It's the one thing that's burning constantly. What we do with our time every single day matters, I think, now more than ever.

Yes. I think the shift for a lot of creatives that's really making them uncomfortable is, I learned a skill, I'm a designer, a videographer, a copywriter, whatever, and then all of a sudden people aren't buying that, or they're buying it differently, or not paying as much.

And that will happen to accountants. It'll happen to radiologists. In some form or fashion, this technology will impact everybody, because what it's doing is making predictions cheaper. But here's the thing. Do you have the judgment or context? Do you understand the limitations of the machine? Do you know where it has a blind spot and goes wrong, to actually act on that prediction? It makes much more sense for those tools to be in the hands of the experienced person, to leverage their time and say, yeah, that's a solid recommendation, that's a solid choice.

I've been using this medical example for the last two years. WebMD is eventually going to have some diagnostic AI tool, or somebody like them, where you upload your blood results and radiology reports and say, give me a diagnosis. And it will be at least as good, if not better, than a physician's diagnosis. However, are you going to say, well, I've got cancer, I need to go schedule chemotherapy? No, you're not going to do that without involving a human. That's the judgment part.

What I see out there specifically with creatives is this paradigm. Most creativity is involved in marketing somehow, and in the business world, it's shifting from the top down. People say, well, I don't need to hire a designer, I can use AI to do the design, do the thumbnails, whatever. But here's the thing they don't know. Should they even be designing thumbnails in the first place? What does a good thumbnail look like? Because all AI does, all it ever can do, is drive to the mean. It's only going to give you the average. It's never going to produce anything good. Nothing exceptional.

Nothing that stands out.

And if good enough is good enough for you, then maybe that's good enough.

Oh man, that's good. We've had this conversation too, before we started recording, about an AI strategy. When we're having a conversation around AI replacing us, whether on purpose, accidental, fearful, hopeful, whatever the psychology behind it, I think it's important, and you do too at Core Group, to have your own stance on who you're going to be when it comes to AI, because it's such a topic. Originality is such a thing. Great versus good is such a thing. Good service is such a thing. Talk to me about the evolution of the AI strategy you guys have been working through, and what conclusions you're coming to about its role at Core Group.

We haven't finished our AI strategy. I think that's part of the rock we're working on that we'll complete by next month, but we're pretty far along, doing exactly what you said. Defining how we're going to use AI as an organization, what we're willing to let it do versus what we're not comfortable with as far as its capacities. Structural things, like integrity of client data. Not exposing client data to the world. That's one of the other things people don't really talk about, that bad actors are using AI in nefarious ways to steal things, in ways we never contemplated.

I was reading an article about the average vulnerability window for software. It used to take bad actors seven hundred days, almost two years, to figure out how to exploit a glitch in security. That time is now down to twenty-six days. As far as your intellectual property, what you keep internally, and for us, our client data, that's a huge thing I don't hear a lot of people talking about, how to protect yourself.

What's interesting is the younger people in our organization are the most resistant to it.

Do you think it's because they believe it's coming for them?

I think there's an element of that. I think there's also a strong pushback related to the environmental impact and factors like that. But what we've asked the team to do is just explore the possibilities. Pick a problem, see if it can fix it. Not necessarily to solve the problem, it might not be able to, but just see what the capacity is. Kind of like what I did with Delphi. Just play around with it, get in the sandbox and play.

That's good. I wanted to make a point earlier, when we were talking about getting in the sandbox and playing around, that I just finished reading Austin Kleon's new book, Keep Going... actually it's called Don't Call It Art. Basically, what did he learn about creativity from his kids. He talks about how some of the most successful authors we'd recognize by name spend more of their time reading than writing. In our culture today we think we have to constantly produce or we'll get left behind. But what we're producing is so shallow, because we're not putting enough in. He talks about having work that looks like play. And you were talking about playing around in the sandbox with it, and your ops person going, okay great, here's the eight things we need to do, and you're like, I'm just playing, and your ops person is like, well when you play, please don't tell me, because I think it's something we're running on.

But I think, getting back to creativity and AI, that's where most of my time on AI these days looks like play. It looks like me trying to go, I wonder. And that wonder, that type of word, that type of stance, is the engine of creativity. When I lead brainstorm sessions I have two rules. Number one, there's no bad ideas. Number two, start everything with "what if," because it immediately unlocks and depressurizes the situation. What if monkeys jumped off the tree and swung around our house? It throws the whole sense of reality right out the window. I think it's interesting to think about AI and creativity, and consider there might be some play there, and that's okay, because we need to have that wonder. We need those what-ifs in order to actually produce good, human, genuine, better-than-standard creativity.

I would one hundred percent agree with that statement, but I'd take it even further. Maybe you're implying this and just didn't say it, but there's no intent behind it, specifically no commercial intent. If you think about the idea of play, and I know I don't play enough, play is like, you're doing it for the fun of it. When you're at recess playing tag, it wasn't to accomplish something. So often as entrepreneurs we get locked in. That was where we started this conversation. What are we trying to accomplish with this, should you even be doing this. Being able to just do something for the fun of it is wildly creative and helpful, because you unlock a different part of your brain.

You mentioned writing. I've resisted journaling for decades. I've started and stopped it. As I've been doing it, it's unlocked something in physically writing. There was a Norwegian study I read about right after I started again, where they gave students the exact same words to write or type, and tracked the neurological effect. It's not even close. Physically writing produces so much more brain activity in different parts of the brain. I don't know why, maybe it's because it's slower, maybe it involves different parts of you, I don't know. But I absolutely experienced it, because as I was writing through things I was gaining more insight.

Yes, I agree with you one hundred percent. We need more wonder, because, and this is what I'll conclude with, we have zero idea where this is going. I don't care who you are, you don't know. If you look back at the Industrial Revolution, when they invented the steam engine, they could not foresee how that was going to transform not just the manufacturing process but society itself. There's no way to predict it. If we're locked in trying to solve problems, we're not going to have any insight at all. But if we sit back and wonder and ask what if, that's where we need to be right now.

Oh, that's so good. To conclude the conversation, the people who listen to this podcast, who we serve at Chief Creative, are creative business owners, future CEOs. We just said we don't know where this is going, but let's take AI out of the picture, not completely, but let's focus more on the creative business owner for a second. Ten years from now, where do you see a creative business owner fitting in their business? Is it any different than today?

I don't know about ten years, that seems like a very long time. I can't see that far. I can see what's happening right now and what the next couple of years look like. And it's no more, I have this skill, this is what I do. That business model goes away. It's not like AI is going to create all the videos out there. Are there going to be videographers? Absolutely. But the transition is to understanding exactly what problem you're solving, and where that value point, like Chris said, is shifting. I see that the resources you bring to bear, maybe not personally, but the resources, are going to be much more varied and different than they are right now. It's not going to be just, I do this.

That's what I see. You pointed out, I've been saying for a long time, knowing what you solve, entrepreneurs are problem solvers, and the problems are going to change. And they are changing. And that's just opportunity.

That's good. That's real good. Well, Christian, thanks so much for your time today. If people want to find out more about Core Group and what you guys do, go to coregroupus.com. Is that right?

That's correct. Coregroupus.com. Don't trust your money to a box as a business owner. Let Core Group handle it. I promise you'll be happy with it.

I'm a user of Core Group myself. They do great work. Great people, always looking forward, never get stuck behind. Christian, super grateful for your time today, and I hope to have you back real soon.

Well, I appreciate it, and thank you for the endorsement.

Ep 160: Behind The Rebrand with PJ Towle

SUMMARY

The Real Reason We Rebranded From "Consultants" to "Partners" (And What a Fox Has to Do With It)

For the first two years of this business, it was called Chief Creative Consultants. It made sense on paper. I had twenty years of experience, and "consultant" sounded like the right word for someone with that kind of runway behind them.

It just never felt true.

When the Language Doesn't Match the Work

I kept noticing the gap every time I sat down with a client. We weren't handing over a strategy deck and walking away. We were in it — building systems side by side, staying in the work until it actually stuck. That's not consulting. That's partnership.

It took an event in Oklahoma City, a text to a couple of trusted friends, and one honest question — "What do you think about this word?" — before the language finally caught up to the work. Chief Creative Partners was born, and with it, the tagline that now anchors everything we do: You create. We operate.

Why I Called My Designer Before I Called Anyone Else

When it came time to rebuild the visual identity, I did something I'd recommend to anyone facing a rebrand: I asked my wife, Sarah — the original designer behind my very first logo — whether she wanted to lead this one or whether I should bring in outside help.

She didn't hesitate. "Seek outside help. Call PJ."

That's PJ Towle, founder of Forty:Three Creative, a client turned collaborator turned friend. What followed was a four-week process that taught me something I want every creative business owner to hear.

The Fox, the Triangle, and the Story Behind the Mark

PJ didn't just hand me a logo. He built a story into it.

The fox represents adaptive intelligence — a nod to Robin Hood, my favorite childhood movie, and to my own love of foxes. Small serif details on the letterforms became, almost by accident, fox ears. That happy accident became the direction we built the entire identity around.

The triangle — or delta — represents change. It's the mathematical symbol for it, and it's exactly what Chief Creative Partners exists to help creative businesses do. But the real story is in how the mark breaks into three sections:

- The first section represents Chief Creative Partners — working behind the scenes, shaping and supporting

- The second represents your business, out front, leading and growing

- The third, sitting beneath both, represents the partnership itself — the thing that ties it all together

Even the Tagline Was an Accident

Here's the part that still makes me laugh: "You create. We operate." wasn't a strategic brainstorm output. It came out of a mockup session where PJ was testing different phrases as sample text on a background image. He typed it once, almost as a placeholder, and I said, "That's it. I'm done."

The best brand language often works this way — it feels obvious the moment you see it, which is exactly why it's so hard to find in the first place.

What This Means If You're Facing Your Own Rebrand

If your business has outgrown its own language — if the words on your website don't quite match what you actually do for people anymore — that gap is worth paying attention to. It's not vanity. It's clarity.

You don't have to have the perfect word yet. Start by naming the gap out loud, the way I did with a simple text message: "What do you think about this word?" Clarity tends to show up in conversation before it shows up on a page.

If you want a framework for finding that kind of clarity in your own business — not just your name, but your systems, your priorities, and where your time is actually going — grab the free resources at dustinpead.com/free.

And if you're looking for a designer who brings genuine intentionality to the process, go check out PJ Towle at Forty:Three Creative.

You create. We operate.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ The right brand language isn't invented in a meeting. It's noticed — usually after you've already been living it for a while.

• ⚡️ A logo isn't decoration. When it's built with intention, it becomes a visual argument for how you actually work.

• ⚡️ Sometimes the clearest brand truth shows up in the margins of the work, not the center of the strategy session.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "I genuinely believe intentionality is a learnable skill, not an innate gift." — PJ Towle

• 💬 "We're allowing you to focus on growing your business while we operate your business."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️Download FREE tools here

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TRANSCRIPT

Today, I used it in a thirty-second pitch at Creative Mornings. You can kind of see the look on people's faces — they're squinting until I get to "what do you do?" And they're squinting, and then I get to the part where I go, "You know, at the end of the day, it's so that you can create, we operate." And they go, "Oh, okay. Oh, I get it now. Totally makes sense."

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast, the show equipping creative businesses to unleash their best work. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners.

So today's episode, we're taking a quick break from the book-writing episodes this week and next week while I put some finishing touches on the next system I want to share with you. This week and next episode, we've got two powerful interviews. I'm pulling back the curtain a little on the rebrand of my own business and how we went from Chief Creative Consultants to Chief Creative Partners. And I did not do this alone.

Joining me on the show today is PJ Towle, founder of Forty:Three Creative. He's a partner of ours at Chief Creative Partners and the designer behind this whole transformation you've seen. We'll get into the meaning of the icon, the triangles, the colors, the font choices, and why "Partners" finally felt true in a way that "Consultants" never did.

If you want to see how this all turned out, head to chiefcreativepartners.com. That's where it all begins — where you create and we operate. So let's dive into my conversation with PJ Towle. If you're watching on YouTube, you'll see some screen shares. If you're only listening right now, I'd suggest jumping over to YouTube afterward to watch it.

Alright, PJ Towle of Forty:Three Creative — thanks so much for being here, man.

Always glad to be here.

Today we're going to give a little behind-the-scenes look into the rebrand of going from Chief Creative Consultants to Chief Creative Partners. I'm just now realizing, PJ, I didn't pull up my old logo.

I can pull it up while we talk. Go ahead and set the scene.

So we went from Chief Creative Consultants — I started that business in 2023 and used the word "consultants" because for a long time I'd wanted to be a consultant. I thought, when my days in ministry are done, I'd love to do consulting work, because I'd never done it before. It sounds professional. But no one wants to consult with anybody who has less than twenty years of experience, and by that point I had twenty years of experience. So I figured, alright, I'll do the consulting thing.

As we started servicing our clients — and PJ at Forty:Three is one of our clients — I kept thinking, this doesn't feel like consulting to me. It feels more like a partnership. It took me a long time to land the language. I was at an event with a bunch of other creative business owners earlier this year in Oklahoma City. We were there to support a financial company we use — by the time this episode airs, you'll have already heard my interview with their owner, Christian Brim. Anyway, I was talking with people there and something clicked. In my mind I thought, "It's really a partnership." I texted PJ and another friend and client and asked, "What do you think about this word?" They both said, "Yeah, that's the word." I said, "Okay, great."

PJ, you can tell the tagline story if you want — it's my favorite.

Today I used it in a thirty-second pitch at Creative Mornings. Everybody's squinting until I get to "what do you do," and then, "at the end of the day, it's so that you can create, we operate." And they go, "Oh, okay. Totally makes sense."

So all that to say — I finally had that clarity after months of trying to figure out what was missing. The name change came immediately. I followed up with the tax people, had Core Group guide me through all of that. Then I realized I needed a logo change, because the logo my wife — who's a designer — put together for me quickly back when I started the business needed to evolve.

Let me pull it up. [Screen share begins.] This logo my wife did for me in 2023 was a direct reuse of a logo she'd designed for me back in 2015 or so, for my whiskey bar. The space I'm in now that I call my studio used to be my whiskey bar, called Chief's Whiskey Bar. "Chief" came from a dog I had — my favorite dog I ever had, and also a nod to Eric Church, whose nickname is Chief. So I called it Chief's Whiskey Bar.

I didn't know that about the dog.

Yeah, that makes it so much more endearing. People assume "Chief" is some kind of CEO or executive reference. I mean, sure, it plays that way now, but that's not really where it came from.

If you look closely at the old logo, it looks like a drink ring left on a table — because it was for a whiskey bar. I actually still have the etched glass vinyl sticker on my office door that says "Chief's Whiskey Bar." So fast forward to this year — I wanted to make the change from Consultants to Partners and needed a new brand. First thing I did was ask my wife, since she's the graphic designer, whether she wanted to do the rebrand or whether I should look for outside help — already half-planning to call PJ.

I appreciate that vote of confidence. Honestly, when you asked her, I was hoping you'd talked to her first — I didn't want to be the "designer he's having an affair with."

She didn't even blink. She said, "Seek outside help — call PJ." She felt a fresh perspective made sense given the scope of the rebrand.

I love doing consultations this way. Even when I'm not doing the logo work — which is my favorite part of the job — I love the process. The short version: we sent you through the same onboarding form I use with all clients, so I could get clarity on who Chief is, who you want to work with, who your competitors are, all of it. Then, thanks to my highest-valued employee, Claude — employee of the month, month after month — we ran some competitive analysis.

Some of what I loved about your old logo: that whiskey-glass ring read almost like a paintbrush stroke, which felt connected to the creative space. I liked the kerning on the font. And looking at your studio, there's orange everywhere — you'd told me orange was your favorite color. Knowing that going in was really helpful.

I always start concepting in black and white, because if a mark can't stand on its own without color, it's not strong enough. Some of the softer gradient logos out there get really difficult to reproduce across different uses. So we started from black and white, pulling in some of the rougher, creative edges while keeping the "Chief" ethos intact.

We landed on the fox. I knew you loved foxes — Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of your top movies. The fox represents adaptive intelligence in pop culture, going back to Robin Hood, which was your favorite movie as a kid. I did a few illustration directions: a regal, mascot-style fox, a modern heraldic version like a coat of arms, and a more minimalist, conceptual direction — even though you're not really a minimalist person.

I am not a minimalist. Anyone who's seen the rest of my studio knows that.

I used a triangle, or delta, because the delta symbol represents change — which is exactly what you help creative businesses do: grow, change, get better. Of the initial concepts, one looked almost like a church logo, one had a NASCAR-esque feel. But the direction that really got me going was a version where I put small serifs on the back of the "P," and they ended up looking like fox ears. Given how much you love foxes, that felt like the thread to pull.

When you showed me all of it, it didn't take me two seconds to land on that one. I told PJ, "This is the one." He'd deliberately put it in the middle of the lineup instead of leading with it, so I wouldn't feel steered.

From there we broke down logotype options — a distressed font to echo the whiskey-glass rings, an italic font to echo the original italic treatment — trying to keep some connective tissue to the old brand. We landed on a Gotham-based custom font, with small tweaks — including crossbar details on certain letters that ended up looking like little teeth marks, which felt right given the fox concept.

Then we moved into color. I like using a near-black instead of pure black in logo design — it displays better. We worked through several versions of orange until we found the right one — not too red, not too muted. Then came the accent color, which surprised me: an olive/OD green.

That's obviously more your world than mine, but I was genuinely thrilled with it — thrilled enough that I bought a pair of shorts in that color. I'm wearing them right now. My wardrobe is mostly black, OD green, and dark grays, with the occasional colorful plaid — a product of the nineties grunge era. We even played with blue at one point, but that started feeling too close to an NFL team's colors. Olive green just stuck.

We built out the full identity from there — brand assets, color patterns, font treatments — and then got to a media sample that really sold it. That's actually where "You create. We operate." came from — a total accident. I was mocking up sample text for a background image, trying different phrases, and when I typed "you create, we operate," you said, "That's it. I'm done."

I was relieved and a little annoyed, because that's how it always goes with the good ones — obvious in hindsight, like nobody wonders why the iPhone works the way it does once it exists.

From there we built out real-world applications: desktop mockups, Instagram handle treatments, a two-page visual identity quick-reference sheet so any future designer could pick it up and understand the system immediately. The whole process took about four weeks.

I've started seeing the identity show up everywhere — you mentioned mocking up a blanket in that pattern.

I did. I found the same shop where I get shirts made and mocked up a blanket in the OD green pattern. Haven't ordered it yet, but it's ready to go — I want to put it over the couch, maybe even do a big canvas flag treatment like the Chris Stapleton concert poster I have from a Birmingham show back in 2021.

Let me actually show you the icon in motion, since I had a motion graphic built. [Screen share.] One of the things that pulled me toward this mark in the first place — beyond the triangle-as-delta concept PJ described — is that it breaks into three sections. The first triangle represents Chief Creative Partners itself: we're behind the scenes, shaping things, letting your business grow up and to the right. The second represents the client's business out front, growing. The third section, at the bottom, ties both together — that's the partnership. It sits underneath both pieces. I had a motion designer animate it as one continuous line, connecting all three sections without lifting the pen — like one of those connect-the-dots intelligence tests.

I love that. When you first sent that over asking if I knew a motion designer, I understood the ask, but I wasn't picturing the story the same way you were hearing it — which I find fascinating. Some people look at the mark and just see "fox, got it, iconic, moving on." Somebody like you goes a level deeper and finds another story inside it, and then that story starts informing how you talk about the brand.

If you're thinking about the mark moving left to right: the business is out front, leading the charge. We're in the background, supporting. Together, that's the partnership — which felt like the whole point.

Brand design is genuinely my favorite part of the job, and I was honored you asked, and really happy with how it turned out.

I kept telling him it was better than I expected — way better. I'll say this to wrap the sappy part up: what makes a great designer, and I learned this watching my wife design too, is that when they present the work, people go, "There's so much intentionality behind this." That's why I wanted PJ — his bold use of color, his willingness to push boundaries. I told him upfront I wanted to push boundaries, since his own brand is vibrant. But I also knew he'd be intentional with the meaning behind every choice, the same way I've watched Sarah work over the years. If you're looking for design help, look for someone who brings that level of intentionality.

I genuinely believe intentionality is a learnable skill, not an innate gift. We've both been reading Save the Creatives by Brandon Triola, and the section on the soft skills of relationship, intentionality, and communication — I think that's such an underused force in creative partnerships. It ties back into why you moved from "Consultants" to "Partners" in the first place. If we stop looking at creative work as a project — here's a branding project, here's a website project — and start looking at it as partnership, that changes what we're actually offering clients.

I learned intentionality from watching you work, honestly. There's a hustle mentality a lot of business owners feel pressured into — constantly marketing yourself, marketing yourself. You and I are both Enneagram 4w3s, and when I've asked you how you approach it, you've said, "I'm just intentional with my relationships and partnerships." That's freeing. I've leaned into that same approach because of you.

PJ, thank you for your incredible work, and thank you for coming on the show. Hopefully this encourages other creatives and designers to bring this level of intentionality into their own work. Check out PJ at Forty:Three Creative — that's spelled out, F-O-R-T-Y, T-H-R-E-E, creative dot com. Go check him out for all your branding needs. He will elevate your brand.

Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Ep 159: Team One-on-Ones: How to Build Trust, Unblock Work, and Develop Your Creative Team

SUMMARY

How to Run One-on-Ones That Actually Build Your Creative Team

Most creative business owners either avoid one-on-ones altogether or turn them into status updates that drain everyone's energy. Neither approach is getting you the team you need to scale.

Here's the truth: when done right, one-on-ones are one of the most powerful systems you can build into your creative business. Not because they're fancy or complex, but because they're intentional. And intentionality is what separates businesses that grow from ones that just stay busy.

This is Chapter 7 of the live book series Creative Work: 10 Systems Every Creative Business Needs, and we're officially in Part Three: Team and Scale. Because growing a creative business isn't just about getting better clients or building better processes. At some point, it's about building people.

Why One-on-Ones Matter More Than You Think

The goal of a one-on-one isn't to check boxes. It's to build the kind of trust that makes extraordinary creative work possible.

When your team feels psychologically safe, they take creative risks. They share ideas they'd never say in a group setting. They tell you about the burnout creeping in before it becomes a problem. They grow — and then they help you grow the business.

That's the compounding effect of an intentional one-on-one cadence.

A few specific things healthy one-on-ones do for your creative business:

• They detect burnout before it starts to affect work quality or client delivery

• They surface brilliant ideas from team members who aren't comfortable speaking up in group settings

• They align individual growth with organizational vision — so your team is growing in the direction the business needs to go

• They create the mentorship layer that transforms talented hires into true leaders

Who, How Often, and What Format

Not every one-on-one looks the same. Here's a practical framework:

Direct reports: Weekly, 30 minutes. Non-negotiable. If you have so many direct reports that a weekly 30-minute meeting with each one is impossible, that's a sign you need to delegate leadership — not cut the meetings.

Horizontal peers / other department leads: Every other week or monthly. These are collaboration check-ins — making sure when one department turns left, the other knows how it affects them.

Freelancers and contractors on active projects: Beginning, middle, and end of each project cycle. Build it into your budget and your calendar before the project starts.

One-on-ones are strictly between two people. Adding a third person changes the dynamic and defeats the whole purpose.

The One-on-One Structure That Actually Works

Here's how to build a 30-minute one-on-one that leaves both people energized and clear.

Start with a personal check-in (3–7 minutes)

Start with the human, not the work. Ask things like: What's giving you energy right now, inside and outside of work? On a scale of one to ten, how are you feeling about your creative capacity? What's one thing outside of work that's inspiring you lately?

This isn't small talk. It creates psychological safety, acknowledges the whole person, and often reveals creative influences you'd never discover otherwise.

Move into progress review (7–10 minutes)

Focus on movement, not just deliverables. What progress are you most proud of since we last met? Where do you feel stuck? What roadblocks can I help remove?

You're positioning yourself as a creative enabler, not just a reviewer.

Then: growth planning (a few minutes)

This doesn't need to be a 30-minute training session. Ten focused minutes on: What skills are you most excited to develop next? How is your current work aligned with where you want to grow? What would help you level up?

Neglecting this moment is how you create a creatively stagnant team.

End with creative inspiration

Look outward and forward before you close. Share something inspiring you both found. Discuss an industry trend. Brainstorm a blue-sky idea with zero connection to current deadlines. Recommend a book or podcast.

Close with documented action items

What are you going to do? What are they going to do? When? Document it in your shared one-on-one document and come back to it every single time. Nothing kills team trust faster than promising something in a one-on-one and not following through.

The Mistakes That Kill One-on-One Culture

Even leaders with great intentions make these:

Turning them into status updates. If it could've been a Slack message, it should've been a Slack message. One-on-ones are for the conversations that require real-time human connection.

Dominating the conversation. You should be speaking less than 40% of the time. Your job is to ask questions that unlock thinking, not fill the space. Tools like Fathom can show you your talk percentage in real time — use them.

Inconsistent scheduling. Canceling regularly sends a clear message: your development isn't a priority. Protect one-on-one time like client deliverables.

Focusing only on problems. When every meeting becomes a problem-solving session, people start dreading it. Balance challenges with wins and possibilities.

Not following through. This is the biggest one. If you commit to something in a one-on-one — a resource, a piece of feedback, a connection — give it a DO date and deliver. Inspect what you expect.

Your Next Step

If you want to get started, Dustin has a creative one-on-one meeting template and 20 questions for your one-on-ones available. Reach out directly at chiefcreativepartners.com.

And for more free tools and resources for your creative business, head to dustinpead.com/free.

One-on-ones aren't about perfection. They're about creating a consistent space where creativity, trust, and growth can flourish. Start there.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ One-on-ones build the psychological safety that creative risk-taking requires. If your team doesn't feel safe, they won't create boldly. That safety is built in consistent, intentional conversation.

• ⚡️ Reliable consistency matters more than a perfect schedule. Your team needs to know these meetings are going to happen. The moment they become the first thing cut when things get busy, the trust you've built starts to erode. Protect them like client presentations.

• ⚡️ The quality of your one-on-ones depends more on what you ask than what you say. Great leaders ask at least three questions for every one statement. Open-ended, storytelling-inviting, curiosity-driven questions. That's where the real conversation happens.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "The key isn't having some perfect schedule — it's having reliable consistency. Your team needs to know that this sacred time is going to happen."

• 💬 "Ending on creative inspiration reinforces that our creativity goes beyond those head-down, deliver-on-the-project moments."

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TRANSCRIPT

When consistent and well-structured, one-on-ones in your creative team can transform transactional management into true creative leadership, creating the conditions where extraordinary work becomes possible. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners, where you get to create because we operate. This podcast is for all creative business owners and entrepreneurs who are turning their art and their creativity from a passion into more of a business, or have already established that business. What we do at Chief Creative Partners is we come alongside you and make sure that we focus on the operational side of things so that you can stay focused on the creative.

What we've been doing here in this podcast over the last several episodes is I've been writing my book live in real time with you on this podcast every single week. The book is going to be called Creative Work: 10 Systems Every Creative Business Needs. I've been walking through these different sections of the book.

In the first section, we called it Personal Survival. We talked about the DO vs DUE Framework. We talked about the Priority Framework and the Future You note-taking method. Then we moved into Part Two, which is more about the client experience — turning that chaotic delivery into a predictable, professional system that you can replicate over and over again. We talked about client communication, specifically the Pizza Delivery System. We talked about project kickoffs and how that's supposed to look. And last time we talked about client onboarding.

Now we're entering into Part Three, which is the Team and Scale portion of the book. We talked about personal survival. We talked about the business. And now we're talking about the team and how to scale the business. In this section we're going to cover one-on-ones, capacity management, process documentation, delegation, and effective meetings.

So today we're going to talk about one-on-ones and how to have effective and transformative one-on-ones with your team. Because as you grow your creative business, what you're quickly going to realize is that you need a team around you to help pull everything off. If you truly want to scale to a sustainable model, everything can't flow to you and through you. You have to build a team around you. And part of what comes with that is the management of that team.

What we want to talk about in these next several episodes and chapters of the book is how do we build a sustainable creative business that has equipped leaders around us — with systems that are required to delegate effectively, protect team capacity, and drive clarity across the organization.

I believe that starts with intentionality — my favorite word — the intentionality of an effective and transformative, regular one-on-one meeting cadence with anyone on your team.

I know that many of you may have had some great experiences, but probably a lot of you have also had some terrible experiences in one-on-ones before, whether you were leading them or being led through them — and they were a complete waste of your time and left you feeling more defeated than empowered.

Why One-on-Ones Matter

First, one-on-ones, when done right, build genuine trust and psychological safety, which is essential for creative risk-taking. If you don't feel safe, it's hard for you to create. If we want a thriving creative business, we need to build a business full of trust and psychological safety so we can take creative risks. We don't want our hands slapped every time we try to get creative.

Another benefit is detecting and addressing burnout before it starts to impact work. A lot of business owners are reactive, but a good, effective one-on-one meeting strategy is all about being proactive. We want to see that burnout before it actually happens so we can shift, pivot, give breaks, give inspiration, coach, build up — whatever we need to do.

One-on-ones also uncover brilliant ideas that might not ever surface in a group setting. Some people aren't comfortable sharing their ideas in a group setting, and that's fine. Not everybody is the same. Some people on your team are going to be comfortable sharing an idea one-on-one, but not with the group. Create a space where they can share those ideas, and a one-on-one is a great place to do that.

One-on-ones are also beneficial for aligning a person's growth with the organizational vision. Where is this team member growing and how does it align with the vision of our creative business? How can we continue to mold those two things and bring the person's growth into the trajectory of the business's growth?

And probably the biggest benefit and purpose of a one-on-one is to provide some personal mentorship or coaching that transforms your talent into true leadership so that they can replicate and replicate and replicate. It's the good kind of pyramid scheme that we want to have in our creative businesses.

When consistent and well-structured, one-on-ones transform transactional management into true creative leadership, creating the conditions where extraordinary work becomes possible.

Who Needs to Be in the One-on-One

Creative one-on-ones work best with a clear understanding of who should participate. Direct creative reports — anyone who reports directly to you needs regular one-on-one time with you regardless of their seniority. I also think it's important to have one-on-ones with other department leaders, leading horizontally rather than just vertically, making sure we're collaborating and growing together in the right direction.

Another great person to have a one-on-one with is promising talent — junior creatives who have high potential and could benefit enormously from dedicated mentorship and leadership attention.

And if you're not the actual business owner or top-level leader, start requesting one-on-ones with your leaders and model the behavior so you can ensure your own growth and the business's growth.

One-on-ones are between two people. Adding a third person fundamentally changes the dynamic and defeats the purpose of creating a psychologically safe space for open conversation.

Specific Outcomes to Target

Effective one-on-ones in creative teams should accomplish specific goals. Number one: alignment. Ensure the creative work meets strategic objectives while still fulfilling personal growth. Number two: unblocking. Identify and remove obstacles before they affect deadlines or creative quality. Number three: development. Use this time to advance skills that may not be exercised in a current work project. Number four: relationship building. Strengthen the trust between you and your team member that enables creative risk-taking. Number five: inspiration. Cross-pollinate ideas outside the constraints of regular meetings. And number six: detecting problems early — catching issues that might not surface in group settings, whether personal or professional.

Every one-on-one should produce clear action items for both participants. Here's what you're going to do. Here's what I'm going to do. Document it and revisit it every time you meet. Nothing kills culture or creative risk-taking faster than saying you're going to do something and then not doing it. Always inspect what you expect.

Setting the Right Rhythm

For direct reports, I suggest a weekly 30-minute session. It keeps frequency up without overwhelming your calendars. If you have more people reporting to you than your calendar can handle, look for who you can delegate some leadership to. We shouldn't have so many direct reports that leading them becomes our full-time job with no room for innovation, sales, or business growth.

For horizontal one-on-ones with other department leads, every other week or monthly is right — just maintaining connection and making sure when we turn left, we know how it affects each other.

For freelancers and contractors on project-only engagements, plan for quick 30-minute check-ins at the beginning, middle, and end of each project cycle. Build that into your budget and your calendar.

The key isn't having a perfect schedule — it's having reliable consistency. Your team needs to know that this sacred time is going to happen, and it's not the first thing sacrificed when deadlines come up. If you're constantly canceling one-on-ones because the week got away from you, go back and revisit the DO vs DUE Framework, the Future You method, the Priority Framework, and the Focus Funnel. Those are the things you need to go back and fix — not get rid of the one-on-ones.

Pre-Meeting Preparation

I recommend sending the agenda 48 hours in advance — two to three discussion topics or questions — to allow for thoughtful preparation. Not everybody is good at answering questions on the fly. If you're doing a 30-minute one-on-one, you don't have time for them to think about it. You need them to come prepared.

Include standing items and meeting-specific topics on the agenda. And these agendas are not just for the leader — invite your team member to put their items on it too. Make it a living document you both have access to.

Keep it concise. A bulleted list works better than a paragraph. Create one shared document per person for their one-on-ones and use tabs for each dated meeting. One document, always. No searching for "where's this week's agenda?"

A sample agenda: follow up on previous action items, check on progress of current projects, get thoughts on improving a specific area or process, time for both parties' questions and topics, creative inspiration, and then action steps moving forward for both of you.

Sending the agenda in advance respects your team member's time, allows your introverts and analytical thinkers to prepare thoughtful responses, and signals that you take these conversations seriously.

Environment Matters

For in-person one-on-ones, break free from the norm. Get out of the office. Go to a coffee shop — their favorite one. Try a walking meeting. Go to a gallery or museum. Create a dedicated corner in your office that feels artistic and inspirational. The less it feels like a formal meeting, the more genuine the dialogue becomes.

How to Actually Run the One-on-One

Good leaders ask great questions. The quality of your one-on-ones depends less on what you say and more on what you ask and how well you listen. Master the art of questioning.

Ask open-ended questions that can't be answered with yes or no. If all your questions could be answered yes or no, that's a form or an email — not a meeting. Follow the three-to-one ratio: ask at least three questions for every one statement you make. Consider personality differences — an Enneagram 5 may need more time to process, while an Enneagram 3 might respond best to achievement-focused questions. Phrase questions to invite storytelling: "Can you tell me about a time when...?" And resist the urge to immediately solve problems — ask them what solutions they've already considered first. That's where the coaching happens.

Active listening techniques for leaders: take brief notes, but use a recorder rather than pen and paper so you stay dialed in and making eye contact. Repeat back what you've heard. Watch for non-verbal cues that may contradict verbal responses. Eliminate distractions — no phones, no emails, no computers. Create deliberate silence after a question, even if it gets uncomfortable. And validate emotions before moving to solutions.

The moment you shift from curiosity to judgment, psychological safety is gone. Prioritize understanding over evaluation, especially in early conversations as you're getting to know each other.

The One-on-One Structure

Start with three to seven minutes of a personal check-in. Start with the human, not the work. Ask: What's giving you energy right now, inside and outside of work? On a scale of one to ten, how are you feeling about your creative capacity today? What's one thing outside of work that's inspiring you lately?

Then spend seven to ten minutes on progress reviews — moving from personal to professional, focusing on movement rather than just deliverables. Ask: What progress are you most proud of since we last met? Where do you feel stuck or in need of creative direction? What roadblocks can I help remove from your current projects?

Then move into growth planning. Development doesn't need to be hours of training — you can get meaningful development done in ten minutes. Ask: What creative skills are you most excited to develop next? How is your current work aligned with where you want to grow? What resources or experiences would help you level up in this area?

End with a few minutes of creative inspiration. Look outward and forward. Share work you both found inspiring. Maintain a shared inspiration board. Discuss industry trends or emerging creative techniques. Brainstorm blue-sky concepts totally unrelated to current deadlines. Recommend books, podcasts, or upcoming events. Ending here reinforces that creativity extends beyond the project deliverables and positions your team for continuous inspiration as an expected part of the job.

And then close with documented action items — what both of you are going to do and when. Follow up on those things every single time you meet.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Mistake one: turning one-on-ones into status updates. Status updates can be handled asynchronously. One-on-ones should focus on challenges, growth, and conversations that benefit from real-time interaction.

Mistake two: dominating the conversation. The best creative leaders should speak less than 40% of the meeting. Your primary job is to ask thoughtful questions that unlock new thinking, not to dominate.

Mistake three: inconsistent scheduling. Repeated cancellations send a clear message to your team that their development is not a priority. Protect these meetings as fiercely as you protect client presentations.

Mistake four: focusing exclusively on problems. When every one-on-one becomes problem-solving, you create a negative mental association with the meeting. Balance addressing challenges with celebrating wins and exploring possibilities.

And the biggest mistake: neglecting to follow through. Nothing will damage trust faster than promising resources, feedback, opportunities, or tasks during a one-on-one and then failing to deliver. Track your commitments. Give yourself a DO date. Let the other person know when it's going to be done so they know it's actually going to happen.

Remember: one-on-ones aren't about perfection. They're about creating a consistent space where creativity, trust, and growth can flourish together in your creative business. The most important ingredient is genuine trust — the kind that helps your team members become even better at what they're already doing well.

If you'd like a creative one-on-one meeting template or 20 questions for your creative one-on-ones, reach out to me, Dustin, at Chief Creative Partners, and I'll be happy to send it your way.

Next time on the podcast, we're going to talk about capacity management — Chapter 8 of Creative Work: 10 Systems Every Creative Business Needs. Get out there, make genuine, true, intentional, authentic connection with your team. Make one-on-ones great again. We'll talk to you next time on the Chief Creative Podcast.

Ep 158: Client Onboarding for Creative Businesses

SUMMARY

Why Your Client Onboarding Is Probably Missing the Most Important Part

Most creative businesses treat client onboarding like it's just a pre-project checklist. Send the contract. Get the login credentials. Schedule the kickoff. Done.

But that approach skips the most important part: actually getting to know the person behind the project.

On Episode 158 of the Chief Creative Podcast, I break down what real client onboarding looks like for creative businesses — and why confusing it with a project kickoff is quietly damaging your client relationships.

Onboarding vs. Kickoff: They Are Not the Same

Here's the clearest way I know to say it:

A project kickoff answers: What are we building, and how?

Client onboarding answers: How do we work together?

Your kickoff is project specific. It happens after the contract is signed. You align on scope, timeline, deliverables, and creative direction.

Client onboarding, on the other hand, is relationship specific. It introduces the client to your tools, your communication norms, your expectations. It defines the entire working relationship — and it should happen before the first kickoff ever takes place.

For most of my clients and my own business, I think about onboarding across the first 90 days. That gives you enough time to get to know each other, deliver something, and start to see the relationship take shape.

The Client Intelligence File: Know Your Client, Not Just Their Project

Inside every client folder in your file structure, I want you to have one document that lives at the top. I call it the Client Intelligence File — and it is the difference between knowing what you're building for a client and actually knowing your client.

The Client Intelligence File (CIF) is an ongoing, living document that builds over time. It captures everything you learn about how a client operates, what they value, and how they like to work.

Here's what it should include:

Who they are. How do they communicate? Are they a late-night responder or an early-morning person? What are their general preferences when it comes to collaboration?

How they feel valued. This is the piece most creative businesses miss entirely — and it's the one I've been personally thinking about a lot lately.

How you'll work together. Tools, workflows, access needs, revision processes, contact names, and titles. All of it.

The Five Languages of Client Appreciation

I've been exploring what it actually means for a client to feel valued — beyond just delivering good work on time.

It started when I read Giftology by John Ruhlin, which is a practice of active listening so you can surprise and delight clients with gifts that are meaningful to them. Then I connected it to Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages and started mapping those languages into a B2B client context.

Here's what I landed on:

Words of Affirmation. They feel valued when you recognize them verbally — complimenting their vision, celebrating their wins, acknowledging what they're doing well.

Acts of Service. They feel valued when you go above and beyond without being asked. You notice a problem and fix it. You bring solutions they didn't request.

Gift Giving. Not swag. Thoughtful, specific, well-timed gifts that prove you're paying attention. When a client mentioned his daughter just started playing soccer, we sent her a pink soccer ball. That kind of gift strengthens the relationship more than any logo tumbler ever will.

Quality Time. They feel valued when you're present with them — not just working for them. The check-in call that has nothing to do with a project. The occasional lunch. The personal visit.

Advocacy. This is the one that replaces physical touch when you translate love languages into a business context. They feel valued when you champion them beyond your engagement. You refer business to them. You promote their work. You treat their wins as your own.

When you understand how a specific client feels valued, everything changes. You stop just delivering projects and start building a relationship that leads to long-term retention.

Milestones: Knowing When to Show Up

Understanding how a client feels valued is only half the equation. The other half is knowing when to show up.

Inside Asana, I track milestones for every client: their contract start date, renewal windows, birthday, anniversary, how long they've been at their company — anything significant in their world. And I set those tasks to surface about a month before the date.

That lead time matters. It gives you space to actually do something meaningful. Send the right gift. Make the referral. Schedule quality time. Show up in the way that means something to that specific person.

Two Things You Can Do Right Now

You don't have to build this overnight. Here are the two moves that matter most:

1. Create a client intake form. Ask every new client to fill it out before the first kickoff. One question we use: Pretend you're a rock star for a second — what would be in your green room? That question alone tells you more about a person than a two-hour kickoff call. If you have existing clients, send it to them too.

2. Create a Client Intelligence File for each client. Start with one a week or one a month — whatever pace works. Mind dump everything you already know. Then let it grow from there. Every time you learn something new, add it.

The goal is simple: the more you know your clients, the better you can serve them. And the better you serve them, the longer they stay.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Key Takeaway 1: Client onboarding is relationship-specific. It should answer how you work together — not what you're building. Confusing it with a project kickoff means you'll always be managing projects without ever truly knowing your clients.

• ⚡️ Key Takeaway 2: The Client Intelligence File is the operational home for everything you learn about a client. It builds over time and becomes your whole team's resource for serving that client with excellence.

• ⚡️ Key Takeaway 3: Every client has an appreciation language. When you learn theirs — whether it's words of affirmation, acts of service, gift giving, quality time, or advocacy — you stop being a vendor and start becoming a trusted partner.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Milestones, and speaking their appreciation language on those milestones, is going to mean more than anything else you'll do in your engagement with them."

• 💬 "Observation over time, plus good onboarding survey questions, equals great client relationships."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️Download FREE tools here

• ⚡️Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here

TRANSCRIPT

Most new client onboarding is actually just project focused when it should be more about the relationship. Kickoffs handle the projects. Onboarding should handle the person. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners, where you create and we operate. This podcast is all about helping creative businesses unleash their best work through operational efficiency.

If you've been following along, we've been basically writing my next book in real time on this podcast. And today, just like all the other episodes, is going to be me just kind of talking it out. Here's what I'm thinking. Here are the things that I'm seeing. Here are the things that we've been inputting with my clients at Chief Creative Partners.

So we talked before about the Personal Survival section — how you might be drowning alone. The midsection of the book, where we're at right now, is: you have clients, but the delivery is chaotic. And then the last section of the book is where we're going to talk about when you have a team and how to actually scale the creative business, because you can't grow without systems in place.

In the last episode, we talked about project kickoffs. On this episode, we're going to talk about client onboarding. That may sound similar, but I want to start at the top of this episode by distinguishing the two.

Project kickoffs — that's the moment you and the client align on a very specific project. You talk about the scope, the timeline, the deliverables, the creative direction. It's project-centered. Project specific. And that happens after the contract is signed.

Client onboarding, however, is the process of bringing the client into how you work. Your tools, your communication norms, your expectations. It defines the relationship you're going to have with them as you grow together. It's relationship specific. And it ideally happens immediately before the first kickoff ever even happens.

Client onboarding for many of us — including myself and our clients — can look like anywhere between a week and 90 days. I like to look at the full scope of 90 days because that gives us time to get to know each other, put something together, start on a project, maybe see something through. We always talk about the client journey left to right, and we're usually looking at that first 90 days. But at the very top, before we get to a project kickoff, is client onboarding.

Before we get into that — if you are a creative business owner and you need help controlling the chaos of your creative business, things are flying all over the place, things are going out before they've been reviewed, and you're starting to see the excellence dip a little bit — I think you might need some processes and systems in place. That's what we at Chief Creative Partners are here to do. Go to chiefcreativepartners.com and grab a time on my calendar for us to talk about how we can help you unleash your best work yet. All right, now let's get into today's episode.

A simple way to think about it: the kickoff answers what are we building and how. The onboarding answers how do we work together.

So operationally speaking, we're always working toward this operational playbook for your business — a single document where everything lives. This is our standard on how we do project briefings. This is our standard on how we deliver. This is our standard on revisions. They all live in your operational playbook.

But in your file structure, you have a client folder, and inside the client folder you have different projects for the client. Right at the top of every single client folder, I'd love to have a document called a Client Intelligence File. This is going to be the difference between knowing what you're building for a client and actually knowing your client.

Most creative businesses do the former. What do you want? How can we get you the thing you want? But we completely skip understanding who they are as a business, as a person. What does excellence look like to them? What does a great job look like to them? And how are we going to grow this relationship into every creative business's favorite outcome — some type of long-term retainer relationship?

All the information we gather during onboarding should be slowly building and continuously building that CIF — the Client Intelligence File.

So the first thing we want to know is: who are they? How do they communicate? What are their general preferences? How do they like to work? Are they a late night person or an early bird? This is an expanded view of how we're going to ebb and flow as we create together.

You're also going to ask how they feel valued. This is something I've been honestly wrestling with lately. About a year ago, it was suggested I read the book Giftology. It's a short two-hour listen if you're going the audiobook route. Giftology is basically a practice of active listening to your clients and business partners so you can surprise and delight them with a gift that is meaningful to them — not necessarily meaningful to you.

The author talks about how many times we like to send a tumbler with our business logo to a client. Wouldn't it be better to send it with their logo on it? We're creative people. We have access to their brand. How about we give them a gift that's more personal and directed to them because we are practicing active listening?

I was thinking about this in the context of the book by Gary Chapman called The Five Love Languages. Gift giving is only one of the five love languages. I love gifts. If you give me a gift, I feel appreciated and valued. But that's not true for everybody.

So I started digging in and having conversations. Even this week as I'm recording this, I started sending a simple survey to my clients — asking, if gift giving isn't what makes you feel appreciated, what is? I think there's an appreciation language that hasn't been tapped into yet.

Gary Chapman also co-wrote a book called The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, which takes those love languages inside the organization. But what I'm talking about here is B2B businesses. Most creative businesses are B2B. And these are long-standing partnerships with other businesses. How do we let them feel that we're intentionally appreciating them? That we see them for the person they are and we're valuing the people we work with — not just the projects?

So I went back to the five love languages and started mapping them to client appreciation.

Words of Affirmation. This totally makes sense in a business context. They feel valued when you recognize them verbally — even more so if it's in front of a crowd. You compliment their vision, celebrate their wins, tell them what they're doing is great.

Acts of Service. They feel valued when you go above and beyond the scope without being asked. You notice a problem and fix it. You bring solutions they didn't request. That's acts of service in client appreciation.

Gift Giving. They feel valued when you remember them in a specific, intentional way with a thoughtful, well-timed gift. Not swag — gifts that prove you're paying attention. One of my favorite stories on this: we were on a kickoff call with a client, and he came in a little flustered. He said his eight-year-old daughter had just started playing soccer and they'd gotten home from her first practice. I immediately wrote that down in my reMarkable. After the call, I told my team member and we agreed — let's send her a pink soccer ball. It showed up to the client's house with a note saying, this is for your daughter who is starting her soccer journey. Thoughtful, well-timed, specific. That's what Giftology is all about.

Quality Time. They feel valued when you are present with them — not just working for them. A longer call. An occasional lunch. A ball game together. A personal visit. A check-in that isn't about a project at all.

And then in the five love languages, the fifth is physical touch — which obviously doesn't translate into a B2B context the same way. So I dug deeper. What is the missing language in client appreciation?

The word that kept coming back in my conversations was advocacy. They feel valued when you champion them and their business beyond your engagement. This often looks like a referral. You have a client who is amazing at what they do, and you have a friend who needs exactly that. You connect them and say, before you look anywhere else, look here — these people are the best. That client of yours will feel valued because you championed them beyond the engagement. You referred business to them. You promoted their work and treated their success as your own.

So when you're onboarding, remember these appreciation languages. When you understand how they feel valued, you can strengthen the bonds of that client relationship so much more.

The next piece is knowing when to show up. We call them milestones. In our Asana, for every client we have, we track a handful of milestones. Initial contract date. Renewal windows. How long they've been at their company. Their birthday. Their anniversary. Anything important in their world — we add it to milestones and date the task about a month before that thing comes up.

Because here's what happens: you sit down, look at your calendar, and realize it's Bill's birthday over at a partner business. If you had a system in place that reminded you a month ahead, you could begin to do something special. Maybe it's a gift. Maybe advocacy. Maybe quality time. Maybe words of affirmation. And maybe you do these things beyond the milestone dates too. Milestones, and speaking their appreciation language on those milestones, is going to mean more than anything else you'll do in your engagement with them.

The last part of the Client Intelligence File is how are we going to work together? What tools do they use? What tools do we use? What access do we need? Do we have passwords for platforms we need? What are the workflow norms? Does it go project briefing, round one, internal revisions, round two, client revisions? Do they get more than one revision? Names, contacts, titles, phone numbers — all of it lives in the Client Intelligence File.

As our business scales, that file builds. As our relationship with clients builds, we can serve them better because we have all that information in one central spot for our whole team. And as our team grows because our business grows, they can reference that file from the jump — and get it right without wasting time.

This is what effective client onboarding looks like. It's about the client, not the project. That's why there's a chapter on project kickoffs about the project, and a separate chapter on client onboarding — because it's about the client. If you have one without the other, you will fail in your relationship with your clients.

Here are a couple things you can do immediately. First, create a standard onboarding or client intake form to send to every new client. And if you need to, go back and send it to existing clients too. One thing we ask in ours: pretend you're a rock star for a second — what would be in your green room? That one question tells us favorite snacks, favorite aesthetics, favorite comfort styles. So much information. You're going to ask the dates. You're probably going to start asking the advocacy questions too. Create that form and have it ready for every new client.

Second, create a Client Intelligence File for each client and keep it in your client folder. If that feels overwhelming because you have six to eight clients or more — take one a month, take one a week, whatever works. Mind dump everything you know about that client into the file. Build your rhythm, then match that style across every CIF in your drive. And remember — the Client Intelligence File is an ongoing working document. Every time you learn something new, you add it. Observation over time, plus good onboarding survey questions, equals great client relationships. Which means when you do get to project kickoffs, they flow even smoother because you already understand each other.

If you'd like help with any of that in your creative business, reach out at chiefcreativepartners.com. You create, we operate. Let's actually build something that works together. Next episode, we're going to be back with another chapter from this book. I cannot wait to share it with you on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 157: Project Kickoff Process for Creative Businesses

SUMMARY

Why Your Creative Projects Are Starting Wrong (And How to Fix It)

You land the client. You're excited. You're ready to go.

That energy is one of the best things about running a creative business.

It's also the exact thing that gets you into trouble.

Most project chaos doesn't start in the middle of delivery. It starts in the first 48 hours — before a single question has been asked, before the scope has been confirmed, before anyone on your team knows what done actually looks like.

The fix is a project kickoff system. And it's more straightforward than you think.

What a Project Kickoff Meeting Actually Is

A project kickoff meeting is a focused, 45-minute conversation with your client before any work begins.

Not a brainstorm. Not an ideation session. Not a vague "let's align" call.

This is a structured meeting with one goal: leaving with a complete project brief that your client confirms and your team executes from.

It can happen right after the agreement is signed, or in some cases, before it — especially when the scope is complex enough that you need more detail to estimate accurately. Either way, getting clarity here protects both sides from surprises when the invoice arrives.

Who Should Be in the Room

On your side: whoever is leading the project. Whether that's a project manager, a lead designer, a client rep, or you — whoever owns the work from start to finish needs to be there.

On the client side: the person (or people) with final approval authority.

This part matters more than most creatives realize. If a client's boss has to sign off on the final deliverable, you want that person in the kickoff — not to go over anyone's head, but to capture their vision before a single hour of work is logged.

Scope creep almost always starts with someone whose expectations were never captured in the first place.

What to Cover in 45 Minutes

This is not a freeform conversation. Go in with a standard set of questions and ask them every single time, regardless of how well you know the client.

Here's what to cover:

Project Vision — What does done look like? Have the client describe the finished product as specifically as possible.

Timeline — Full start-to-finish. Are there hard dates? Are there production days or shoots that need to be on the calendar now?

Deliverables — What exactly are you producing? What does the final handoff include?

Revision Expectations — How many rounds? Who approves? What does that process look like?

Communication Standards — How often will you check in? What tool? Who gets copied?

Brand Assets — Collect logos, guidelines, passwords, and platform access during or right after the call.

Non-Negotiables — This is the question most creatives skip entirely. Ask it directly: what must be included? What would make this project feel like a failure if it were missing?

Key Contacts — Confirm names, titles, and email addresses for everyone involved in approvals.

If some of these questions were already covered during the sales process, ask them again. Let the client know you're confirming for the official record. That protects both of you.

Why Recording Changes Everything

Taking notes during a meeting pulls you out of the conversation.

Think about the last time a doctor typed through your entire appointment instead of making eye contact. They miss follow-up cues. They miss the thing you said in passing that turned out to be the most important detail.

Recording the meeting changes that dynamic entirely.

In person: a simple voice recording tool works. In a virtual meeting: use an AI note-taker to produce a full transcript. Not just the summary — the actual transcript. Then drop that transcript, along with any impressions from the conversation, into your prepared Claude project. If it's set up with your briefing template already, it will draft the brief for you in a consistent format every single time.

The Project Brief: Your Team's Single Source of Truth

The project brief is the output of the kickoff meeting — and it should look identical every time.

Same sections. Same flow. Same level of detail. Because when your team opens a brief, they need to find information immediately. Not hunt for it.

Once the brief is ready:

1. Send it to the client for confirmation. "This is what we agreed on."

2. Store it in your client project folder in Google Drive, Dropbox, or wherever your team lives.

3. Attach the link inside your project management tool — Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp, whatever you use — so your team can access it directly from the project without navigating through a folder structure.

Your Next Steps

Start here:

Build your standard question list. Every project type you offer should have a go-to set of questions. Don't rely on memory in a 45-minute meeting.

Ask your team what's missing. What questions do they consistently wish they had the answers to when a project lands in their queue? Add those to the template.

Invoke Future You. If you're a team of one, what do you always wish you had asked? That pattern is your gap. Close it.

Create one central home for all briefs. Folder in your drive. Link in your project management tool. Everyone knows exactly where to find it.

Project kickoffs aren't glamorous. But they are one of the most important systems a creative business can have.

When done well, they eliminate scope creep, reduce revision rounds, align your team from day one, and produce clients who feel heard before the work even begins.

That's not just good operations. That's what it means to unleash your best work.

Ready to build a project kickoff system that actually works for your creative business? Visit chiefcreativepartners.com to learn how we partner with creative businesses to implement the systems that let them scale with confidence.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Key Takeaway 1: A project kickoff meeting is not a brainstorm. It's a structured, 45-minute question session with one outcome: a complete project brief.

• ⚡️ Key Takeaway 2: Recording the meeting frees you to stay fully present, ask better follow-up questions, and capture what was actually said — not just what you remember.

• ⚡️ Key Takeaway 3: Every project brief should look and flow the same so your team always knows where to find the information they need to execute with excellence.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Start each project by asking the right questions. Ask your team what questions consistently come up that aren't captured in the current brief."

• 💬 "Recording ensures you capture what was actually said — not what you remember."

• 💬 "It's all about saving time, being efficient, and having the information you and your team need to execute with excellence at your fingertips."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️Download FREE tools here

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here

TRANSCRIPT

You've won your client's business, and you're so excited to get started that you start racing down the highway in a direction that the client doesn't really want you to go. Has that ever happened to you? Today we're going to talk about the importance of project kickoffs. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners, and we're here to help creative businesses unleash their best work.

We've been going through this podcast series called Creative Work because I'm writing my next book called Creative Work: The 10 Systems That Every Creative Business Needs. And we're doing it in real time here on the podcast. We're talking through each one of these chapters. It's going to help me get all my thoughts written down for each of these 10 systems and topics.

The book is broken up into three different sections. The first section is personal survival — the first problem we need to solve. You started a creative business and you're just trying to survive. The second section is all about client experience. You have clients, but the delivery seems chaotic. And the third section covers your team and how to scale, because you can't grow without these systems and processes in place.

Today we find ourselves in the client experience section, talking about the very important topic of project kickoffs. Creative businesses get so excited that they've landed the client that they jump into the work immediately — without fully thinking through the scope of the project, the timeline, the client's expectations, what done is going to look like, and what the actual deliverables are. What is it going to take to pull off this project the way the client wants it, within the time and budget constraints they've given you?

A project kickoff meeting is simply a 45-minute meeting. It could be in person or digital — it doesn't matter. But we're going to spend that 45 minutes doing nothing but asking questions.

We're asking about project vision. We're painting a picture of what done looks like. We're covering the full timeline from start to finish. Are there critical dates that need to be honored? Are there shoots or additional production days that need to get on the calendar now? We're communicating and reiterating expectations around what revisions look like. And we're establishing what our communication standards are.

I want to be clear: the project kickoff meeting is not a time to ideate. Keep idea time separate. If ideation is needed, budget for it in the scope of the project. The goal at the end of this meeting is that we have a full project brief to hand to the client to confirm their desires and to hand to our team so they can execute the vision with accuracy and excellence every single time.

Who should be on that call? Whoever is leading the project on each side of the agreement. On your side — whether that's a client rep, a project manager, a lead designer, or you — whoever is going to see it through from start to finish needs to be there. On the client side, it's incredibly helpful to have whoever will have final approval input. If there are checkpoints or a final that has to be approved by someone higher up in the organization, have them in that meeting. You want to capture what they're thinking and what they're envisioning from the start. That keeps scope creep from happening and keeps clients happy because you're delivering closer to what they envisioned from day one.

I like to hold these project kickoffs in one of two spots. Either right after the agreement is signed — you've agreed on the general scope and it's a known product or service — or before the agreement is signed, so you can better understand the scope and estimate accurately. Having those details up front sometimes really helps prevent scope creep and surprises when the invoice arrives.

Where you hold the meeting doesn't really matter, but you need the option to record the audio. Recording ensures you capture what was actually said — not what you remember.

Here's how these meetings should go. Have a standard set of questions for every type of project category you offer. Whether it's wedding photography, video production, podcast production, layout design, website builds — whatever it is. If you know what you're going to need to know, ask those questions every single time. That way, when you produce the project brief at the end, it's more likely to have everything you need because you didn't rely on memory.

Some essentials to cover: collect brand guidelines and logos. Get access to the website, social platforms, or wherever the work will live. Talk through logistics — schedule location walkthroughs before production day. Ask about the purpose of the project and what the end viewer or consumer should do, feel, or think when they encounter it. That's the ultimate end goal action. Ask them to reference anything they've seen or been part of before that reflects what they want this project to ultimately look or feel like. Ask if there's anything existing they want to incorporate. Confirm key contacts — who gets approval notifications when drafts are sent, with names, titles, and email addresses.

And ask the question many creatives forget: what are the non-negotiables? What are the must-include elements? If it's a wedding, is there a specific person, item, location, or moment that absolutely has to be captured? Knowing the non-negotiables now lets you plan for them when it comes time to execute.

Some of these questions may have been discussed before. Let the client know you're asking again to confirm and to notate everything on the official brief you'll provide after the call.

Now, why record? Because you want what was actually said — not your memory of what was said. Think about a doctor's visit where the doctor types the entire time instead of making eye contact. They miss follow-up cues. They miss the thing you said in passing that turned out to be the most important detail. Recording frees you to stay fully present in the conversation and ask better follow-up questions.

If you're meeting in person, a simple voice recording tool works. If you're meeting online, there are AI note-takers that will produce a full transcript. Take the exact transcript — not just the AI summary. Then drop that transcript, along with any context notes or impressions from the conversation, into a prepared Claude project. The project is already set up with your briefing template — the sections, the essential questions, everything. It will draft the brief for you. When you're done, every briefing looks and flows exactly the same, every time.

That consistency matters because when your team opens a brief, they need to find information instantly. They shouldn't be hunting through the document trying to figure out where things are. All briefings should look exactly the same and flow exactly the same.

Then send the brief to the client for transparency and accuracy. This is what we agreed on. Add the briefing to your client project folder in Google Drive, Dropbox, or wherever you store client files. And attach the link inside your project management tool — whether that's Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp, or whatever you use — so your team doesn't have to go hunting. They click into the project and it's right there.

It's all about saving time, being efficient, and having the information you and your team need to execute with excellence at your fingertips.

A couple of action steps as we close. Start each project by asking the right questions. Ask your team what questions consistently come up that aren't captured in the current brief. Maybe it's Future You — maybe you're a team of one, and you need to make sure your future self understands what was actually asked of you during this project. If you find yourself consistently wishing you had asked a certain question, go back to your question template and add it so next time, it's already there.

Start each project by asking the right questions. Keep those project briefings in one central place where you and your team know exactly where to find the vital information needed to execute with excellence.

That's project kickoffs. That's project briefings. It's a system I believe every creative business needs to have so they can execute with excellence every single time and unleash their best work.

If you'd like help implementing project briefings in your creative business, reach out to us at chiefcreativepartners.com and let's build something for you and your business that actually works. I can't wait to continue this conversation as we keep writing Creative Work: 10 Systems That Every Creative Business Needs. We'll do that next time on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 156: Summer Momentum Prep:

How to Keep Your Creative Business from Losing Momentum This Summer

SUMMARY

The Summer Slump Is Real. Here's How to Get Ahead of It.

Every January, creative business owners set goals with energy and clarity. By the time summer rolls around? That clarity is often gone, and so is a lot of the momentum.

It's not a motivation problem. It's a planning problem.

Every spring, before leaving for in-person sessions with clients, I walk through the same half-day agenda, what I call the summer momentum prep session. It's one of three annual in-person sessions I run each year, and it's designed for exactly this moment: before summer starts, while there's still time to do something about it.

Whether you work with Chief Creative Partners or not, this framework is yours to use. Here's how it works.

Why Summer Is the Danger Zone for Creative Businesses

Summer feels lighter. Vacations get scheduled. Clients go quiet for stretches. The pace slows, and that can feel like relief.

But almost every time, fall arrives and it hits hard. You're playing catch-up on work that slipped through the summer, and you're also trying to finish out the year strong on goals you set in January. Managing all of that at once is a multi-car pileup on the interstate of your mind.

The solution isn't working through the summer without rest. The solution is planning for the summer before it starts.

The Summer Momentum Prep: 5 Blocks

This half-day session is broken into five blocks. Here's what each one covers.

Block 1: Momentum Check

Before planning forward, you need to understand where you actually are. This block is a quick but honest SWOT. What's working? What's not? Where's your burnout risk? What's draining you most right now?

Review your annual goals. Which ones are on track? Which ones are slipping? Be honest. This isn't about judgment. It's about knowing your starting point before you plan the next four months.

Then shift into the summer mindset: what do you want summer to actually look like this year, compared to previous years?

Block 2: Summer Challenge Planning

This is where the DO vs DUE Framework becomes especially critical. When team members and clients are in and out, you need more margin built into your projects, not less.

Map out who's taking time off and when. That includes you, your team, your key contractors, and your clients. Figure out how that impacts your delivery timelines. Identify where handoffs or coverage plans need to be in place. Ask whether any projects should be intentionally paused or slowed for the summer.

It's also worth asking: what boundaries that mattered to you at the beginning of the year have started to slip? Reinforce them now, before summer makes everything harder.

Block 3: Priority Derailment Prevention

What typically pulls your business off course in the summer? Shiny objects? Scope creep? Urgent but unimportant tasks eating up your days?

Name your non-negotiables. No more than five. Count them on one hand.

When summer hits and the distractions come in fast, those five things are your filter. Every shiny object, every scope creep request, every urgent-but-not-important ask gets measured against that list.

Intentional procrastination is a real strategy here. Not everything needs to happen right now. If something isn't as urgent or important as your non-negotiables, it can wait until fall.

And if you've already drifted from the goals you set in January, use this block to build a refocus plan. The goal is to arrive at fall ready to finish strong, not scrambling to remember what you were even working toward.

Block 4: Q3 Capacity and Project Planning

This block maps out July, August, and September before you're actually in them. What needs to happen, in what order, for your annual goals to still be achievable?

Plan for reduced capacity. If your team operates at a nine out of ten during normal months, plan for something closer to six out of ten during summer. That's not pessimism. That's smart planning.

Identify which projects can be front-loaded in May and June so you're not scrambling in August. Look for projects that have been sitting on the eventual list and ask whether the slower pace of summer is actually a good time to bring them back.

Be intentional with your team too. If you have a remote or distributed team, define how you'll stay connected. And before summer starts, set clear communication expectations on all sides. What can the team expect to hear from you while you're on vacation? What can you honor for them when they're out? Getting those expectations defined in advance is what actually makes them stick.

Do the same with clients. Are there delivery timelines that need negotiating now, before everyone is hard to reach?

Block 5: Your 30-Day Action Plan

Now it gets practical. What has to happen in May to set up a successful summer?

Are there client communications that need to go out now? If you know a client won't absorb the message until the third time they hear it, start sending. Are there open projects you can close before summer begins? Getting those off your plate creates real room for what's coming in Q3.

The One-Page Summer Strategy Action Plan

After working through all five blocks, document everything in a one-page summary:

• Time off schedules for the owner, team, and key contractors

• Capacity commitments through the summer and into early Q3

• Priority protection agreements — your non-negotiables in writing

• Immediate action steps for the next 30 days

One page. Everything you need to enter summer with a plan.

Take the Next Step

If you haven't done your summer prep yet, set aside a half day with your team before the end of May. Walk through the five blocks. Build your one-page action plan.

If you'd like support walking through it with a partner, Chief Creative Partners offers a free 30-minute discovery call. Visit chiefcreativepartners.com to book yours.

For free tools and frameworks to help build sustainable systems in your creative business, head to dustinpead.com/free.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Planning for summer is just as important as executing through it. Most creative businesses lose momentum not because they stop working hard, but because they never made a plan for the season.

  ⚡️ The DO vs DUE Framework is your most important tool during high-distraction months.When everyone around you is in and out, you need extra buffer built into every project timeline.

  ⚡️ Your non-negotiables are your summer strategy. Five items. No more. Keep them visible. Let them guide every decision about what gets your time and what waits.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "If we're not intentional about culture, then culture will happen with or without our intentions."

• 💬 "What can we intentionally pause or delay until fall? It's okay for intentional procrastination here if it's not as urgent and important as other things."

• 💬 "Whether you work with us or not, enter the summer very intentionally. So that by the time fall arrives, you're not drowning."

EPISODE RESOURCES

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey everyone. I want to take a break from the book writing series we've been doing to share something super important and super timely with you as you prepare to go into the summer season. Are you ready? Is your momentum built up enough to sustain you through the summer in your creative business? Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners, where we help you create because we operate. Today I want to share some insight, because I'm heading out tomorrow morning for one of my spring trips to see a couple of clients. We specifically do three annual half-day sessions in person every year to make sure that we are defining, sustaining, and ultimately meeting our goals as a business, operationally speaking.

At the beginning of the year, usually in the first six weeks, I'll spend a half day with my clients and we will define what success looks like for this year. What are our markers of success? How are we going to measure that this year was a win for us? We'll story that out, dream a little bit, and then get really realistic about mile markers throughout the year that are going to help us achieve our goals.

We all know that goal setting is well and good, and it's much needed. But usually what happens, sometimes by March, but definitely by the time summer hits, is we've lost a ton of momentum. So the second session I do in person with my clients is right around now, in the springtime, sometime between the beginning of April and the end of May. I just call it summer momentum preparation.

Here's what's required before we get into it. We bring the annual goals from our first session of the year, a status update on each goal, our vacation and time off schedules both internally and on the client side, and any big summer project commitments that are already booked. Then we break the half-day agenda into five blocks.

The first block is a momentum check. How's the year going so far? What's working? What's not working? It's a bit of a SWOT analysis. We review annual goals: which ones are on track, which ones are slipping. We do an energy check: how's your burnout risk? What's draining you most right now? And then we start to get into a summer mindset. What are you hoping summer looks like this year compared to previous years?

That leads us into block two: summer challenge planning. If we just let summer happen, everybody goes their separate ways, communication gets hard, and then we get into fall extremely overwhelmed. We're playing catch-up on all the summer stuff that got dropped, and we're also trying to end the year strong on the goals we set in January. It's a multi-car pileup on the interstate of your mind.

Block two covers who's taking time off and when. That includes the owner, the team, key contractors, and clients, and how that impacts client delivery. This is where the DO vs DUE Framework really comes into play, because now we need even more margin when team and clients are both taking time off. What coverage or handoff plans do we need? Should any projects pause or slow down intentionally? Sometimes that's completely okay. We'll also look at burnout prevention strategy: what are the patterns from past summers we should avoid? Are we protecting our renewal and fuel days? And what boundaries have started to slip since the beginning of the year that we need to reinforce now, before summer starts?

Part of that summer prep is also capacity planning for Q3. What's realistic given summer schedules? If our capacity typically runs at a nine out of ten during normal months, maybe we plan for something closer to six out of ten during summer. Around 60% capacity, because we know that distractions will come for us and for our clients.

Block three is priority derailment prevention. What typically pulls us off course in the summer? What are the shiny objects most tempting to chase? Are there any projects with scope creep patterns we need to address? What are the urgent but not important items that tend to dominate the summer, and where do they actually belong?

To protect your priorities, identify your non-negotiables. No more than five. Count them on one hand at most. Those become your rally cry through the summer months. What can you intentionally pause or delay until fall? Intentional procrastination is okay when something isn't as urgent or important as everything else. And if you've already gotten derailed from your beginning-of-the-year goals, now is the time to build a refocus plan so that when fall hits, you are ready to finish strong. Try to keep your meeting rhythms as much as possible throughout the summer. Even if not everyone can show up, keep the structure. That accountability matters.

Block four is capacity and project planning for Q3, meaning July through September. We create a roadmap month by month. What needs to happen, in what order, for what we said at the beginning of the year to still be true? What projects can we complete before summer distractions even start? We've worked hard to build margin. Let's use some of it now to get ahead before the distractions kick in.

Which projects are best suited for a slower summer pace? Maybe there's a project that's been on the eventual list for a while. The pacing of summer might be the perfect time to bring it back. Are there opportunities you need to front-load your work in May and June to be ready for July, August, and September?

Your team needs coordinating too. How do we keep a remote or distributed team connected through the summer? If we're not intentional about culture, then culture will happen with or without our intentions. What team rhythms need adjusting for summer schedules? And what are the communication expectations during vacation time? As the owner, what can the team expect to hear from you while you're on vacation? And what can they count on you honoring for them when they're out?

Defining those expectations upfront is what sets up Q3 for success. The same goes for clients. Do any clients need proactive expectations set before summer starts? Get ahead of it now. Are there delivery timelines that need to be negotiated now, rather than when everyone is hard to reach?

Block five is the 30-day action plan. What must happen in May to set up summer success? What vacation coverage plans need to be finalized? Are there client communications that need to go out now? If you know a client won't absorb the message until the third time they hear it, start sending now. Are there open projects you can close out before summer begins? Getting ahead now creates the room you'll want all summer long.

We document all of this in a one-page summer strategy action plan. It includes vacation and time off schedules for everyone, capacity commitments through the summer and into early Q3, priority protection agreements, which are your non-negotiables in writing, and an immediate action plan for the next 30 days.

I share this with you because whether you work with us or not, I think it's important to enter the summer very intentionally. So that by the time fall arrives, you're not drowning in it and you're not so far behind.

Now is the time to be super intentional about planning your momentum and how you're going to keep achieving your goals during the summer, when it tends to be a chaotic time and people are scattered. Set a half day with you and your team, hopefully before the end of May, so you can get that done as you move into the summer months.

If you'd like more information about how to work with Chief Creative Partners, you can reach out at chiefcreativepartners.com and book your free 30-minute discovery call there.

Next episode, we'll dive right back into the book writing for Creative Work: 10 Systems Every Creative Business Needs. You'll experience that in real time with me as we continue to flesh out all of the ideas and frameworks we've put into place over the years with clients. Hopefully that book comes out in 2027, but we're writing it this year with you in real time. So if you have questions, reach out, and maybe that'll help us write it better.

Join us next time as we continue that book writing journey on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 155: Automated Client Updates:

How the Pizza Delivery System Works for Creative Businesses

SUMMARY

The "Just Checking In" Email Is a Systems Failure (And Here's How to Fix It)

Every creative business owner has received it. The email that starts with, "Hey, just wanted to check in and see where we're at on things."

It lands in your inbox while you're knee-deep in a project. It doesn't feel urgent. But it should feel like a signal, because that email is not a nuisance from a demanding client. It is evidence that your client communication system is broken.

On Episode 155 of the Chief Creative Podcast, Dustin Pead introduces the Pizza Delivery System, the first chapter of Part Two of his upcoming book Creative Work: 10 Systems That Every Creative Business Needs. This chapter is about how creative businesses can stop being reactive with client communication and start building a proactive, automated system that keeps clients informed, builds trust, and protects your most valuable asset: the relationship.

Why Your Clients Are Confused Right Now

Most creative businesses are excellent at doing the work. The quality is there. The talent is there. What is often missing is the bridge between what you are doing and what your client thinks is happening.

That gap is what destroys trust faster than any missed deadline.

When clients don't know what's happening next, they start to worry. And worried clients send "just checking in" emails. They call at inconvenient times. They start to question whether they made the right decision hiring you. Not because of the quality of your work, but because of the silence in between.

The reactive approach, scrambling to respond every time a client reaches out wondering about their project status, is a tax you pay on every engagement. That tax shows up as anxiety, scope creep, and relationship repair work that should never have been needed in the first place.

Start With the Client Journey

Before you can build a proactive communication system, you need to map your client journey. Think of it like a storyboard: where does your client enter, and where do they end up as a loyal, raving fan?

Most creative client journeys move through these major stages:

• Discovery: They find you and decide to move forward

• Onboarding or Acquisition: Contracts, deposits, initial setup

• Project Kickoff: Aligning on scope, deliverables, timeline

• Production Phases: The unique work that defines your business

• Review and Revision: Feedback loops and refinements

• Final Delivery: Handoff and completion

Once you can see that journey from left to right, you can identify the moments where your client is most likely to feel in the dark. Those moments are exactly where your system needs to show up.

Introducing the Pizza Delivery System

The pizza delivery industry was one of the first to crack a problem that every service business faces: customers hate not knowing where their order is.

Before real-time tracking, ordering a pizza meant 45 minutes of uncertainty. Then the industry figured out that keeping customers informed, by showing them exactly where their order was in the process, didn't just reduce anxiety. It built the kind of trust that brought people back.

Your clients are no different.

The Pizza Delivery System is a CRM-based, semi-automated client communication framework that notifies clients at every major project milestone, without requiring you to manually write and send updates for every active project on your roster.

Here is how it works:

Step 1: Build your production pipeline in your CRM. Convert your opportunity pipeline into a project pipeline. Each client project gets a card with the client name and project type. The stages of that pipeline mirror the stages of your client journey.

Step 2: Create templated milestone emails. For each stage, build an email template. Each template includes a simple graphic that shows the client where they are in the overall journey, with their current phase highlighted and upcoming phases visible but faded. The email tells them what just happened, what comes next, and how to reach you with questions.

Step 3: Trigger communication with a click and drag. When you move a project card from one stage to the next, the CRM triggers the corresponding email automatically after a short buffer (about 60 seconds, to allow for accidental drags). Your client is notified within the minute.

When to Send Updates

Consistency matters here as much as the system itself. The day you move projects through your pipeline is the day your clients receive communication. Be deliberate about that.

Dustin's recommendation: do it once a week, either on a Monday or a Friday.

Think like your client. On Monday, they're starting their week with a fresh mind and they want to know where things stand before they dive in. On Friday, they want to close out the week with a clear picture before stepping into the weekend.

Pick one day. Stick to it. Your clients will come to expect that consistent rhythm, and that consistency is what earns trust.

What This System Actually Protects

The Pizza Delivery System protects more than your client relationships. It protects your time. It protects your team's focus. It removes the interruption of reactive communication from your workflow. And it positions your business as the one that clients come back to, and the one they refer others to.

If you are ready to build systems like this inside your creative business, head to dustinpead.com/free for frameworks and resources you can start using today. And if you are ready to work with a team that will help you build them alongside you, visit chiefcreativepartners.com to learn what partnering with Chief Creative Partners looks like.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Mapping your client journey is the foundation of the Pizza Delivery System. You cannot build proactive communication without first knowing what your client needs to hear at each stage.

• ⚡️ What could take you one to two hours per week in manual client updates now takes seconds. One click and drag triggers a professional, branded, stage-specific communication to your client.

• ⚡️ The Pizza Delivery System is not just about what you communicate. It's about the consistency of when you communicate. A reliable cadence tells clients you are organized, professional, and on top of their project.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Clients don't leave because your work was bad. They leave because they feel ignored, confused, or surprised by different parts of the journey."

• 💬 "We are a society that needs to know what's happening with things that affect us. Your clients are expecting the same thing from you."

• 💬 "Think like the auto mechanic that put the TV in the lobby showing you exactly where your car is. Those are the businesses that earn your repeat business over and over again."

EPISODE RESOURCES

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• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

You remember that feeling when you used to order a pizza for delivery and 45 minutes would go by and you had no idea where it was? You weren't even hungry anymore. You were just waiting, and the waiting is the worst part. That's your client right now on every project you're running. They signed a contract, they paid the deposit, they handed you their vision, and now they're just sitting and waiting.

So they shoot you an email. You know the one. It starts with, "Hey, just checking in to see where we're at on things."

That email isn't a nuisance. That email is a systems failure. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners, where you get to create and we operate. I'm so excited to be with you on this episode where we're continuing through the live, real-time writing of my next book called Creative Work: 10 Systems That Every Creative Business Needs.

Today we're getting into Part Two of the book, which I'm calling the Client Experience. Before we dive into these next few chapters, I want to lay out something that is super important to define before we get into each one of them, and that is what we call the client journey, or the customer journey. We have to define what that journey looks like for our clients so that we can better understand where the systems will actually help us provide them with a better experience.

The way I explain this to all my clients is to think about it like a storyboard. Most of us are creative professionals, so we understand what a storyboard looks like. You have your subject, your hero of the story. This is where they start, and this is where they end, and it goes from left to right. You can draw it out visually, and visual is more than acceptable here. What we're looking for are the highlighted, big, major moments for your client. Not for your business, but for your client. From the moment they first discover you all the way through until they are a loyal, raving fan, a repeat customer, a repeat client.

Typically that looks something like: discovery, then acquisition or onboarding, then a kickoff situation, then into the unique production phases of your business, and then all the way through to what it looks like for them to become that loyal raving fan. One of the most important things this journey map allows you to see is where you are dropping the ball. Where are the touchpoints, from left to right, where your client wishes they knew what was happening next?

As I said in the intro, we have to be intentional, yes, my favorite word, we have to be intentional about making sure the client understands what's happening every step of the way. That can feel really overwhelming. If you have to stop what you're doing every single time there is movement on a project and reach out to that client to say, "Hey, just want to let you know this is where we're at," that time adds up. Whether it's you doing it or an admin assistant doing it, that's time that could be spent making their project better. But it's still necessary.

We've all been clients of other businesses. When we don't know what's happening, when we don't know what comes next, we've all sat in the auto mechanic's waiting room wondering what is going on with our car. But some of those businesses have figured it out. They put a TV in the lobby that shows you exactly where your car is in the process. Those are the businesses that earn your repeat business over and over again, because they've earned your trust through transparency and communication before you even have to stand up and ask.

Here is what I want you to understand: clients don't leave because your work was bad. Your work is great. That's why you have a business. That's why people pay you to do what you do. Clients leave because they feel ignored, or confused, or surprised by different parts of the journey. That happens in the gap between what you are actually doing and what the client thinks is happening. That gap is what destroys trust faster than any missed deadline.

So what do we do? We get reactive with our communication. Because they send us that email asking where things stand, and we scramble to respond. That reactiveness is a tax you will pay on every single project. And that tax looks like anxiety, scope creep, and relationship damage and repair.

This is why proactive, intentional client communication is not optional, it is a system. If you have ever received a "just checking in" email from a client, that is your sign that this system needs to be built.

Now, this system lives with whoever manages your client relationships. In a lot of creative businesses, that's you, the owner. And that's totally fine.

What I want to introduce in this chapter is something I've nicknamed the Pizza Delivery System.

We remember what it was like to order a pizza and have absolutely no idea when it would arrive, what they were doing with it, how many stops they had to make. We see that completely transformed now with Amazon, where you can track your order stop by stop, stage by stage. We are a society that needs to know what's happening with things that affect us. You can have a whole conversation about whether that's healthy or not, but the fact is, that's the world we live in, and your clients are expecting the same thing from you.

The pizza delivery industry was one of the first to understand: if we let them know where their order is at, we retain our customers. Trust and transparency build the kind of relationship that brings people back. That is the Pizza Delivery System. It kicks in from the moment a project kicks off all the way to the final delivery.

Let me use a video production company as an example. The client journey for a production project looks something like this: project kickoff call, then pre-production, then production or recording, then post-production, then the review and revision phase, then final delivery. Those are your major stages. During your project kickoff call, you tell them: here are the steps, here is the process, and you will be notified every step of the way, just like when you order a pizza and you know if it's being crafted, if it's in the oven, if it's being quality checked, and if it's out for delivery.

Here is how it works operationally. The Pizza Delivery System lives inside your CRM, your customer relationship management tool. It runs semi-automatically in the background so you and your team can focus on the work.

You start by mapping your client journey to your project stages. Then you build email templates that correspond to each stage. Each email has a simple graphic at the top that shows the client where they are in the journey, with the current phase highlighted and the upcoming phases visible but faded out. That email says something like, "Right now we're in the pre-production phase. Here's what you can expect to happen next. If you have any questions, just reply to this email and our team will be happy to respond." You're cutting off the need for them to wonder, and wonder leads to mistrust, which means they don't come back.

Those templated emails sit inside your CRM and are triggered by your production pipeline. Most CRMs call these opportunities or pipeline stages. You convert that opportunity pipeline into a production pipeline. Each project gets a card. A video production company might label theirs something like "Brand Story Video — Client Name," and it moves from stage to stage as the project progresses.

When you drag that card into a new stage, about 60 seconds later, the automation triggers and the client receives their update email. That buffer of 60 seconds is intentional, in case something gets accidentally dragged into the wrong column. After that minute, the email goes. The client knows exactly where they are. No need to stop what you're doing and write a custom email for all 15 active projects you're managing this week.

That manual drag-and-drop keeps a human in the loop strategically. It gives you a 30,000-foot view of where your projects are. Your project management system handles the ground-level, nitty-gritty task details. Your production pipeline in the CRM handles the strategic client communication layer.

What could take you one to two hours per week, reaching out individually to every client with a status update, takes you mere seconds because you've built this system.

One final thing I want to say about when you move things through the pipeline: be consistent about the day you do it, because the day you do it is the day they get communication. For most of my clients, once a week is perfect. I recommend doing it either on Mondays or Fridays. Think like your client for a second. When are they going to have the most questions? Either at the start of the week when their mind is fresh and they're thinking about what's ahead, or at the end of the week before they step into the weekend and want to know where things stand. Pick one and be consistent. Monday or Friday, every week, until the project is delivered.

That is the Pizza Delivery System. That is the client communication piece of Part Two.

Next, we're going to talk about the project kickoff, and why it is the most important meeting you can have with a client during the entire project. It sets the table for what success looks like, and it is your best defense against scope creep. We'll get into that next time.

If you're interested in working with us at Chief Creative Partners, head over to chiefcreativepartners.com and check out your very simple next steps for what it looks like to work with us. Grab a time on our calendar. We'd love to chat about how we can help you create while we operate. We'll talk to you next week on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 154: Future You Method

10 Systems Every Creative Business Needs

SUMMARY

Stop Losing 23 Minutes Every Time You Switch Tasks

Your future self is forgetful.

That's not a criticism. It's just human nature. And if you're not accounting for it in the way you manage your work, it's costing you more than you think.

The average creative professional wastes 23 minutes every single time they have to context switch from one task to the next — just figuring out where they left off. Six tasks a day. Over an hour gone. Five-plus hours per week. Compounded over a year, that's roughly $15,000 in lost productivity if you value your time at $75 an hour.

That's exactly what the Future You Framework is designed to solve.

What Is the Future You Method?

The Future You Framework is a simple, three-part note-taking method built around one core idea: treat your future self like a stranger who needs clear instructions to pick up where you left off.

Vague tasks kill productivity. They create context switching, which drains creative energy. And when creative energy is drained before you even begin, the quality of the work suffers.

This doesn't just play out when you come back to your own work. It happens in team handoffs too — pre-production passing to production, design handing off to development. When those moments happen without proper documentation, critical context gets lost every time.

The Future You Framework gives you a repeatable system to fix that. And it adds just 20 seconds per task.

The Three Parts of Every Task

Part 1: The What

Every task starts with clarity. Begin your task title with an action verb so it immediately puts you into motion.

Not "Johnson proposal." But "finalize Johnson proposal by adding the pricing section and executive summary."

In the task description, paint done. What does completion of this specific task look like? Not the entire project — just this task. Make it specific enough that anyone could pick it up and know exactly what they're working toward.

Part 2: The Why

This is the most important part of the framework.

Why does this task matter right now? What decisions led to this moment? How does it connect to the bigger project?

Using the same example: "Client wants a premium package focus based on the discovery call on May 15th — they emphasized quality over budget. Link to recording here."

That single sentence can shrink a 23-minute context recovery session down to about three minutes. Context isn't just efficient — it's respectful. Of your time, your team's time, and the quality of the work.

As Simon Sinek teaches, people connect with the why before they act on the what. Your future self is no different..

Part 3: The Where

This is your status update and your next steps.

Where are you in the project right now? What's the exact next action? What comes after this task?

Example: "First draft is complete and needs pricing. Next step: add pricing table, then send to client for review."

That's it. No novel required. Just enough that there are no "where was I?" moments when you or your team comes back to it.

The 20-Second Habit

Ten seconds to write down what you accomplished. Ten seconds to note the specific next action with context. One task wrapped up in 20 seconds.

In exchange for those 20 seconds, you get back 10 to 20 minutes every single time you return to that work. The ROI is hard to argue with.

Here's a simple template you can start using today:

Task Title: [Verb] + [Specific Deliverable]

Description: [What done looks like for this task]

Context for Future Me: [Why this matters + decisions made + next steps after completion + links to relevant resources]

That is the whole system.

Before you wrap any task, run the handoff test: Is it obvious? Is it actionable? Can someone else pick it up and keep moving? If yes, you've done your job. If not, add one more sentence.

The Business Case

If you save between 10 and 20 minutes per task, with six tasks a day, you reclaim five or more hours every single week. At $75 an hour, that's $15,000 a year in productivity that is currently being lost to context switching.

Context switching isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a bottom-line dollar problem — and it has a straightforward solution.

Be kind to future you.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Start every task title with a verb. Vague task names create hesitation. Clear action words create momentum.

• ⚡️ Always capture the why. Not a paragraph — just enough to explain the decision that led to this task and why it matters in the bigger picture

• ⚡️ The Future You Method doesn't require a productivity overhaul. It requires 20 seconds of intentional documentation at the end of every work session — and it pays you back in hours, not minutes.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 ""Context is the most important part of the Future You Framework. Without it, you have a task. With it, you have direction."

• 💬 ""Future you won't remember what present you was thinking. So be kind to future you."

• 💬 "Before finishing any task, ask yourself: can someone else pick this up and make progress right now? If not, it's not Future You proof."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️Future You Method

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever opened a task or a project that you started weeks ago and had absolutely no idea where you left off, or what you were thinking the last time you worked on it? That's what we're solving today with the Future You Framework. Let's get into it.

Welcome back everybody to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder, owner, and operator of Chief Creative Partners — where you create and we take care of everything that needs to operate.

I'm so glad you're with us on this journey. I've been fleshing out the stories and concepts for my next book, which is going to be called Creative Work: 10 Systems Every Creative Business Needs. Starting several episodes ago, we began laying out what these chapters look like, one at a time. It's helping me work through the thought process while also helping you along the way — before the book even comes out.

Today, I'm excited to talk about the Future You Framework. It's really a note-taking methodology. And this concept came to me in a joking kind of way.

Me and my friends — when we'd get together, and someone was maybe making a not-so-great decision — we'd always say, "That's not a you problem. That's a future you problem." You don't have to worry about the consequences right now. Your future self will. That got me thinking about how we as creative professionals often end our day, or end a work session on a project that requires multiple sit-down sessions, and we assume our future self will completely know and understand where we left off.

As I started doing research on this, I found a real problem: the average creative wastes 23 minutes every single time they have to context switch from one task to the next — just figuring out where they left off. That stat haunted me. Because that time adds up. And time is money.

The core concept of this framework is simple: your future self is forgetful. That's just human nature. We can't remember everything. So you need to treat your future self like a stranger who needs clear instructions to pick up where you left off.

Vague tasks kill productivity. They create context switching. Context switching drains creative energy. And when creative energy is drained before you even start, the work suffers.

This plays out not just when you're coming back to your own work — but in team handoffs too. Pre-production handing off to production. Design handing off to development. When those transitions happen without proper documentation, critical information gets lost every single time. The solution is simple.

Whatever you're using for task management — Basecamp, Asana, Monday.com, a sticky pad, a legal pad — it doesn't matter. There are three essential elements you need to include in every task so that you, or anyone on your team, knows exactly where to pick up. And they don't lose those 23 minutes to context switching.

Every task needs three parts. I put these in the description of the task. The three parts are: What, Why, and Where.

The first is the What. Every task has this by nature — it's defining what done looks like. Start your task title with an action verb. That's something I always tell clients: start tasks with action words because it immediately puts you into motion. If your task just says "workbook guide," you have to stop and remember what you were even doing with it. But if it says "draft the copy for the workbook guide," you know exactly what to do. You get right into it.

In the task description, paint done. What does completion of this specific task look like — not the whole project, but this task? A bad example would be a task that just says "Johnson proposal." A good one says "finalize Johnson proposal by adding the pricing section and executive summary." That paints done within the bigger puzzle.

The second part is the Why. This is the big one. Why does this task matter? What decisions led to this point? How does it fit into the bigger picture of the overall project?

Using our same example — in the description, I'd write: "Client wants a premium package focus based on the discovery call on May 15th, where they emphasized quality over budget." And if I have a link to that recording, I'll drop it right in there. That single sentence can shrink a 23-minute context recovery session down to about three minutes.

Context isn't just for you. It's for your team. It's for the next person who touches this project. It captures the decision rationale — not just what you did, but why you did it. As Simon Sinek says, people connect with the why before they act on the what. Your future self is no different.

The third part is the Where. This is your current status and next steps. Where are you in the project right now? What's the exact next action? What comes after this task?

Example: "First draft is complete and needs pricing. Next step: add pricing table, then send to client for review." That's it. No essay required. Just enough that there are no "where was I?" moments when you or your team comes back to it.

Here's a quick handoff test. Before finishing any task, ask yourself: Can someone else pick this up and continue to make progress? If not, it's not Future You proof. Also ask: Are all the context clues included? Not a long explanation — just enough for the next person to take action. And finally: Are all the steps obvious and actionable? If not, distill it further.

Most people think they don't have time for this. But you can do this by adding only 20 seconds to each task wrap-up. Ten seconds to write down what you accomplished. Ten more to note the specific next action with context. That's it.

Here's the simple template. The task title starts with a verb plus a specific deliverable. In the description, you paint done. Then you add a brief context note — "Context for future me" — that explains why it matters, what decisions were made, and the next steps after completion. When you pull it up later, you'll think: thank you, past me.

Let me give you a design-specific example. Task title: "Create three logo concepts incorporating rustic modern aesthetic." In the description: "Designing three distinct logo directions for Mountain Coffee — their brand focuses on rustic but modern aesthetic, per the client brief." Then the context: "Client emphasized approachable but sophisticated in the discovery call. They rejected overly trendy options before. Concepts are needed for internal review before client presentation. Next step after this: approval, then client presentation."

Now let me show you the math. If you save 10 to 20 minutes per task by reducing context switching, and you have six tasks a day, that's over an hour reclaimed daily. Compounded over a week — five-plus hours. If you pay yourself $75 an hour, that's $15,000 a year in productivity you're currently losing to context switching. This is a real, bottom-line dollar problem. It affects your time, your focus, and your money.

Now, how do we bring this to the team? Future you isn't always just you — sometimes it's other people. One of the biggest places I see things go wrong is in meetings, which we'll cover later in this series. But after every meeting, here's what I want you to do: record meetings so you have a full transcript and AI extraction available. Pull out the tasks with full context and assign the What, the Why, and the Where. Include the decision rationale. Why did we choose the color blue over yellow? If we've learned anything from Simon Sinek, it's that the why has to come before the what.

And before you hand off your part of a project to the next person in line, document the current status, explain the decision rationale, provide next steps with context, and link every resource you can. Your handoffs will go smoother every time — and smoother handoffs save time, which saves money.

A few common mistakes to avoid. First: too much documentation. Yes, document — but keep it concise. Two to three sentences. Second: skipping the why. Context is the most important part of this framework. Third: vague next steps. Be very specific about what the next action is. And fourth: missing resources. Always link files and contacts at every step.

As you start implementing this, track how many minutes you're saving on context recovery. Notice the reduction in "where was I?" moments. You'll need fewer clarification questions from yourself and from your team. You'll see faster project restart times every time.

Remember: future you won't remember what present you was thinking. So be kind to future you.

That's all for this episode and this chapter. I hope you have something you can take away and start implementing right away. Next week, we'll continue writing the book in real time — and we'll be talking about client communication. I can't wait to share that with you next time on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 153: Priority Framework

The 3-Step System That Clears Creative Task Overwhelm for Good

SUMMARY

Stop Drowning in Your Task List: The Priority Framework Every Creative Professional Needs

If you've ever sat down at your desk ready to work and immediately felt crushed by everything that needs to happen, you're not alone.

Almost every creative professional I've worked with over the past 20 years arrives at that same moment. Staring at a task list that seems to grow overnight, wondering where to even begin, and spending the first hour of the day just trying to figure out what to do.

Here's the thing: the problem isn't that you have too much to do. The problem is you don't have a clear system for deciding what actually deserves your attention first.

That's what the Priority Framework is designed to fix.

This is chapter two of the Creative Work book series I'm writing live right here on the Chief Creative Podcast. It builds directly on last week's DO vs DUE Framework. Where the DO vs DUE Framework helps you see the full scope of your workload, the Priority Framework cuts through the noise and gets you to what actually matters, right now.

What Is the Priority Framework?

The Priority Framework is a three-step system for clearing task overwhelm, identifying what genuinely deserves your time and energy, and creating focused work sessions that make meaningful progress possible.

It combines two established tools, the Eisenhower Matrix and the Focus Funnel, with an initial brain dump method of my own. It's not complicated. But it does require a dedicated block of time to complete properly.

Use this framework whenever you feel paralyzed by the gap between what's on your list and what you actually have time to do. Once a month or once a quarter is usually enough to stay calibrated.

Step One: Brain Dump Everything

Before you can organize your tasks, you have to surface all of them.

Set a timer for 15 minutes and write down every task, project, idea, concern, and "I should probably do this eventually" thought that's living in your head. Don't organize anything. Don't prioritize anything. Just get it out.

Include everything. Client work, business development, administrative tasks, personal creative projects, life obligations. If it's taking up mental space, it belongs on the page.

Our brains are not designed to be a task management system. When you try to carry everything in your head, you create mental tension that clouds your thinking and reduces your creative capacity. The brain dump is not about task management. It's about mental release.

After a thorough brain dump, most people experience immediate relief. Clear thinking, reduced anxiety about forgetting something, better perspective on what they're actually carrying. And almost always, you'll uncover tasks you forgot you were even holding onto.

Step Two: Ruthless Categorization Using the Eisenhower Matrix

Take that brain dump list and sort every item into the Eisenhower Matrix, four quadrants built around urgency and importance.

Draw a large square with a plus sign through the middle to create four boxes:

Upper Right: Urgent and Important. True emergencies and critical deadlines. Use the 24-hour rule: if it absolutely must happen in the next 24 hours and it's crucial to your business, it belongs here.

Lower Right: Important but Not Urgent. Strategic work, skill development, relationship building, system improvements. Critical to your growth, but not on fire right now.

Upper Left: Urgent but Not Important. Other people's emergencies that became yours. Interruptions, unnecessary emails, administrative tasks that feel pressing but don't actually move the needle.

Lower Left: Neither Urgent nor Important. Busy work, social media scrolling, perfectionist tweaking of already completed work, habits without purpose.

The key word is ruthless. Ask yourself about urgency: What happens if this waits 24 to 48 hours? Am I confusing urgency with anxiety? For importance: Does this directly contribute to my business or creative goals? Will this matter six months from now?

You know you're doing it right if 20% or less of your brain dump lands in the urgent and important quadrant. If more than that ends up there, go back. You weren't ruthless enough.

Step Three: Run Everything Through the Focus Funnel

Once your tasks are sorted, the Focus Funnel tells you exactly what to do with each category. For every task, you have five options: do it, automate it, delegate it, procrastinate it, or eliminate it.

Here's how it maps to each quadrant:

Urgent and Important (upper right): These get done. Now. Don't delegate what needs your direct attention, and don't eliminate what's actually critical.

Important but Not Urgent (lower right): Block time to do it, delegate it, or spend 30 minutes figuring out how to automate it. The time flexibility here is a gift. Use it.

Urgent but Not Important (upper left): Automate or delegate. These tasks feel pressing but don't require your specific creative expertise. Email templates, invoicing systems, social media scheduling, routine client communication: these are perfect candidates for a VA, a project management workflow, or a service provider.

Neither Urgent nor Important (lower left): Eliminate it or put it on a deliberate back-burner review. Revisit it once a month or once a quarter. If it stays in this quadrant long enough without ever becoming relevant, eliminate it entirely. You don't have 100 things to do. You have 20 things to do right now, and most of the rest can wait or go away.

What Now? Three Ways to Use the Priority Framework This Week

1. Schedule a 45-minute Priority Reset. Block time, set the timer, brain dump, build your Eisenhower Matrix, and run the Focus Funnel. One focused session can recalibrate your entire week.

2. Use the 24-hour rule consistently. Before you allow anything to live in urgent and important, ask: does this genuinely need to happen in the next 24 hours? Be honest. The answer will often be no.

3. Build a monthly review habit. The Priority Framework isn't a one-time fix. Build it into your regular rhythm so you never stay buried in overwhelm for long.

For more free tools and frameworks, visit dustinpead.com/free.

Chapter Three Is Coming

Next week, we move into chapter three of the Creative Work book series: the Future You Method. It's a note-taking system designed to keep your context intact as you context-switch throughout your day and week. If you've ever come back to a task and had no idea where you left off, this one was made for you.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ A proper brain dump creates immediate mental relief and gives you a full, honest inventory of what you're actually managing, not just what's loudest in your head.

• ⚡️ If more than 20% of your tasks land in the urgent and important quadrant, the matrix is telling you something: push back harder. Not everything that feels urgent actually is.

• ⚡️ Most of your task list belongs in the bottom two quadrants. The Focus Funnel gives you clear permission to automate, delegate, procrastinate, or eliminate, rather than treating everything as equally urgent.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Our brains are not designed to be a task management system. When you try to hold everything in your head, you're going to create mental tension that clouds your thinking and reduces your creative capacity."

• 💬 "Am I confusing urgency with anxiety? There's a big difference between urgency and anxiety."

• 💬 "I thought I had a hundred things to do. Only 20 of them are actually urgent and important for the next 24 to 48 hours. The other 80 are not."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️Priority Framework

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

You are likely feeling the weight of an overwhelming task list. You're juggling client work, creative projects, administrative tasks, new opportunities, all while trying to maintain the quality and creativity that defines your work. The good news is you're not alone. This is the reality for almost every creative professional I've worked with over the past 20 years. And the better news is there's a systematic way out of the chaos.

And it doesn't require you to work longer hours or abandon your creative projects. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners, where you get to create and we operate. So glad that you're with us here. If you haven't been with us the past few weeks, just to get you caught up, we are writing my next book called Creative Work: The 10 Systems Every Creative Business Needs. We're spending these next few weeks, the past few and the several ahead, writing that book in real time. I'm fleshing out my thoughts right here on the podcast, in efforts to write that book and share it with the world. So you're getting a sneak peek and early access as we talk about these things from week to week.

Last week we got started in chapter one with the DO vs DUE Framework. And this week we're back and we're going to talk about what I call the Priority Framework.

Now, just like every framework or method or application that I have in my tool belt, they have been derived over a long period of time, like I said, over 20 years. I've been taking different things from different people in the same space, productivity experts, organizational experts, business leaders, all these different things. And I've put them together and created my own template and use case out of them. And the Priority Framework is one that comes up time and time again, because I work with creatives and I help them first understand what the workload is that they have to do. That's kind of last week's episode in the DO vs DUE Framework. But then once they see, wow, I actually have a lot to do, now it's about organizing and distilling those things down into the priority for them.

What is the priority? It's going to help them clear the mental fog of task overwhelm that they're probably feeling right now. It's going to help you identify what actually deserves your attention. It's going to create focused work sessions for meaningful projects. And it's going to handle urgent requests without derailing your day, leaving you to feel confident and your energy put towards your most valuable work.

So let's get started in the Priority Framework. This framework is pretty simple, but it does take some time you'll need to set aside to get it done. I can promise you in the end it's going to be worth it. There are three steps to clarity that I lay out here in the Priority Framework. And you're going to see that there are a couple of already existing tools. They're not proprietary to what I have created. But we're going to put two of those things together with an initial method of mine, and out of it you're going to be able to understand what your priority is each and every day.

I encourage you to use this method anytime you feel overwhelmed by the amount of tasks relative to the amount of time you have to complete them. Hopefully that's not every day, but maybe once a quarter or once a month. And you'll be able to eliminate the noise as to what's landed on your to-do list so that you can focus on the things that actually need your priority.

Step One: Brain Dump Everything

Step one is to brain dump everything. Now this seems a little arbitrary, a little elementary, but in order for us to understand the parts we're working with, we have to get it all out of our head where it lives kind of rent free and jumbled up. We really can't make sense of up or down or left or right. We need to get all those things out and onto paper.

I would encourage you to hand write this if possible, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. Hand writing is good because it allows you to release the stress physically as you're emptying your mind. But all you really need to do is get the things that are in your mind out and onto paper.

Set a timer for 15 minutes. This way you're controlling the process and you don't end up lost in a mindless zone of brain dumping. Write down every task, every project, every idea, every concern, every "I think we need to," everything we should have, everything we think we should do right now. All that stuff floating around in your mind, write every single thing down. Don't organize it, don't prioritize it, just get it down on paper.

Include everything. Big projects, small tasks, client work and personal projects, ideas and concerns, things you should do and things you want to do. All of it. These things might include client work, which covers active project tasks, pending revisions, client communication needs, project planning requirements. It might be business development: proposals you need to write, networking activities you need to get on your calendar, portfolio updates, marketing tasks. It might be administrative: invoices that need to be sent, payments that need to be made, emails to manage, systems to update, files to organize. It might be creative projects: personal creative work, writing a book, executing a painting, taking more photography, skill development, experimental projects, learning opportunities. And there are also life and personal things: tasks affecting your work schedule, personal commitments that impact your creativity, health and renewal activities.

The goal is to get all of those things down. What you're going to notice is that most people, and you'll probably experience this as well, experience immediate mental relief after a thorough brain dump. You'll likely notice clear thinking, reduced anxiety about possibly forgetting something because now it's actually written down. You'll have better perspective on your actual task volume. And you'll start identifying tasks you forgot you were even carrying.

Step number one of the Priority Framework is a good brain dump. Set that timer and get it done.

Step Two: Ruthless Categorization

Step two is ruthless categorization. And here's what we use: the Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower Matrix is named after President Eisenhower, and it was what he used for his decision-making process to help him distinguish what was most urgent and most important. When you're president of the United States, there are a lot of things coming at you. You need to focus on what's most urgent and most important, not just urgent, not just important, and certainly not neither important nor urgent.

It looks like this: take a sheet of paper, draw a giant square, put a plus sign inside it to create four quadrants. Upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right.

Quadrant one, upper right: urgent and important. These are true emergencies and critical deadlines. I always say use the 24-hour rule. If it needs to get done in the next 24 hours and it's crucial to your business, it belongs here. Time-sensitive opportunities with real impact belong here.

Quadrant two, lower right: important but not urgent. This could be strategic creative work, skill development and learning, relationship building and networking, system improvements and planning. All important stuff, but not critical for the next 24 hours.

Upper left, quadrant three: urgent but not important. These are interruptions and unnecessary meetings, emails and phone calls, other people's poor planning that has all of a sudden become your emergency, administrative tasks that possibly could be automated. Things that need to happen in the next 24 hours but honestly don't move the needle.

Quadrant four, lower left: neither urgent nor important. This is busy work and time fillers. Social media scrolling, perfectionist tweaking of completed work, activities you do out of habit but not with purpose.

As you're taking your brain dump list and putting it in each category, ask yourself for urgency: What happens if this waits 24 hours, 48 hours, or even a week? Is this urgent because of my planning or someone else's poor planning? Am I confusing urgency with anxiety? There's a big difference. For importance, ask: Does this directly contribute to my creative goals or business success? Will this matter six months from now?

You know you're doing it right if about 20% or less of the things you mind-dumped end up in that top right, most urgent and important quadrant. If more than 20% of your list ends up there, I'd encourage you to be even more ruthless. You weren't ruthless enough with that categorization.

Step Three: The Focus Funnel

Now what do we do with each of these quadrants? This is step three, where the Focus Funnel comes into play. The Focus Funnel is essentially a way of understanding: do I need to do this, automate it, eliminate it, delegate it, or procrastinate it? Those are the options.

Take each quadrant and run it through the Focus Funnel. Urgent and important, that top right quadrant with 20% or less of your things: these probably can't be procrastinated, definitely can't be eliminated. These are the things that need your priority right now.

Quadrant two, important but not urgent: this is where we can look at automating or delegating because it's important but not super urgent. You have time to schedule it out. You can block time for these activities in your calendar. You can set up time to delegate to somebody else. Or you can spend 30 minutes figuring out a way to automate these important but not urgent things.

In the upper left, urgent but not important: this is where we definitely can automate or delegate. This is an opportunity to take tasks that feel urgent but don't require your specific creative expertise. It's perfect for automating tools and systems, delegating to team members or freelancers, standardizing things to reduce your time investment. Things like email templates, invoicing, payment systems, social media scheduling, project management workflows. You can hire a VA or admin assistant, use service providers for non-creative work, train team members to handle routine client communication, or partner with other professionals who complement your services.

And in the last quadrant, not urgent and not important: this is where we either eliminate it or procrastinate it. Eliminating means you realize things have changed and you actually don't need it. Or sometimes you're task hoarding, and it turns out you don't need eight things to pull off this project, you really just need three. I'll say here, if you're using AI to determine what tasks you need to execute a project and relying solely on that, I can tell you it's going to give you eight tasks where you really only need three. So always proofread that stuff.

Or sometimes it is something you need to do, but it's not urgent or important enough right now. So we put it on the back burner and revisit those tasks once a month or once a quarter. Maybe now's the time to move it into one of the other quadrants. Or after it stays in that lower left long enough, we can eliminate it entirely. We get to cross things off our list.

We get to feel the freedom of going: I thought I had a hundred things to do. Only 20 of them are actually urgent and important for the next 24 to 48 hours. The other 80 are not. And about 40 of those 80 actually belong in that lower left corner, not urgent or important, and I can either procrastinate it or eliminate it entirely.

Allow yourself 15 minutes on the clock to do a complete, full brain dump. I like to get the big two-foot by three-foot Post-it notes and hang them up on my office wall. Or I'll take my reMarkable notepad and go sit away from my desk, because I don't want to be influenced by anything in my normal work environment.

Then we identify where things actually live in the scope of urgency, which helps us figure out our priority. We know the things in that top right are our priority. Everything else gets eliminated, automated, delegated, or procrastinated through the Focus Funnel.

The creative professional's dilemma of balancing urgent client needs with important creative work doesn't have to be a permanent state of chaos. The Priority Framework gives you a systematic way to honor both the practical demands of running your creative business and the deeper work that makes that business meaningful.

Remember, clarity is a practice, not a destination. Some days you're going to feel completely in control of your priorities. Other days you're going to feel like everything is urgent and important again, and that should be an indicator that it's time to pull out the Priority Framework. It's normal, it's human, it's the creative professional's reality. The difference is now you have a proven system for finding your way back to clarity quickly, rather than staying lost.

That's all for this week in chapter two on the Priority Framework. Next week we're going to dive into chapter three, the last chapter of section one of the Creative Work book. We're going to be talking about the Future You Method. It's a note-taking method to help you keep context as you're context-switching throughout your day and throughout your week. I cannot wait to share that with you next time on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 152: DO vs DUE Framework:

The 5-Step Deadline System for Creative Businesses

SUMMARY

Stop Living on Due Dates: The DO vs DUE Framework for Creative Business Owners

If you run a creative agency, you know what it feels like to be owned by your deadlines.

Projects due. Proposals due. Client deliverables due. The DUE date becomes the gravitational center of your business — and everything else orbits it in varying degrees of panic.

But what if the problem isn't your deadlines? What if it's how you're relating to them?

That's exactly what the DO vs DUE Framework addresses. It's the cornerstone of Creative Work: 10 Systems That Every Creative Business Needs — the book Dustin Pead is writing live on the Chief Creative Podcast — and it might be the single mindset shift that changes how your creative business operates.

The Problem With DUE Dates

DUE dates are demanding, suffocating, and reactive. They tell you when something needs to be finished — but they tell you absolutely nothing about how to get there.

Most creative professionals operate exclusively off DUE dates. They see March 1st on the calendar and assume they'll "find time" to get it done. The result? Nights and weekends swallowed by work. Quality that slips under pressure. Clients who quietly stop coming back.

The more scalable creative business operates differently. It operates off DO dates.

DO dates are proactive, margin-creating, and grace-giving. They tell you when you need to start — not just when you need to finish. And that shift changes everything downstream.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ The framework doesn't change your DUE date. It changes when you start so you arrive with margin instead of panic.

• ⚡️ When your team focuses on what's DO instead of what's DUE, the work gets done before it's due — consistently.

• ⚡️ Margin isn't a luxury for creative businesses. It's the operating condition that makes your best work possible.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "DUE dates are all about reacting. DO dates are all about intentional, proactive responding."

• 💬 "If you don't plan and anticipate for the unexpected, your plan will inevitably be derailed."

• 💬 "The key to all that success was not working harder. It was working smarter by implementing strategic DO dates that created the margin creativity needs to flourish."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ DO vs DUE Framework

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TRANSCRIPT

Many of us are familiar with due dates — maybe even too familiar. They stare at us in our faces every waking hour. The projects, the bills, the schoolwork, the kids' field trip money. But I propose a shift in thinking. Instead of living in the marginless zone of due dates, let's flourish in the realm of DO dates. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners. Everything we do on this podcast, as well as in our business, is set to equip creative business owners to unleash their best work through operational efficiency. If you listen to more than one of our episodes — or even just one — you're going to understand quickly what we're here to do. That is to help creative business owners operate, function, and flow in their businesses so they can unleash their best work.

Today we're diving into chapter one of my new book. We're writing this in real time. If you missed that, go back and listen to the last episode where we walked through the introduction and laid out how this whole thing is going to go. The book is called — or will be called — Creative Work: 10 Systems That Every Creative Business Needs. Just a reminder, this is not an exhaustive list of all the systems a creative business needs. These are the 10 most important ones I've seen in over 20 years of helping creative businesses do just that.

Today we're diving into what I refer to as the cornerstone framework: the DO vs DUE Framework. Now, if you're not paying close attention, you might think I just said the same word twice. Both sound the same — DO and DUE. Well, it's D-O dates versus D-U-E dates we're talking about.

A lot of us live in the marginless zone of DUE dates. DUE dates come with limitations and constraints. DO dates come with margin and flexibility. DUE dates are demanding and suffocating. DO dates come with grace and freedom. DUE dates are all about reacting. DO dates are all about intentional, proactive responding.

I'm going to walk you through the five-part formula for this framework, and then give you some real, applicable ways to use it immediately. Everything we do from this point forward in the book — and on this podcast — is cornerstoned on the DO vs DUE Framework.

The Five-Part Formula

The first part of the formula is simple: when is the project or task DUE? Just like in Alcoholics Anonymous, our first step is acknowledging the facts — acknowledging that this thing is DUE on a certain date. We can't change it. For our example in this chapter, we're going to use March 1st as our DUE date.

Second: how long will it take you to DO this task? This is where the other DO comes in. If it's a project with multiple tasks, you'll create a work back schedule from there. Be realistic and honest with yourself about how long each task will actually take — that's going to total up your DO time. No false expectations here. If anything, we're going to err on the side of conservative, so we don't underestimate what we know and don't overestimate what we don't. For our example, let's say this task is going to take about three full working business days to complete.

Third: subtract the DO from the DUE. It's simple math. If it's DUE on March 1st and it's going to take three days to produce, you must begin no later than February 26th. You work backwards — March 1st back three days: February 28th, February 27th, February 26th.

Most people who use work back schedules stop right there. And honestly, most creatives don't even get that far — they just operate off the DUE date and figure they'll find time before it's due. The more organized creative, the more scalable creative business, understands they need to operate off DO dates, not DUE dates.

But here's where the DO vs DUE Framework separates itself from just a normal work back schedule. There are two additional steps most people skip entirely.

Step Four: Add 25 to 40 Percent Margin

Even when people do the work back, they're still up against tight deadlines. Here's why: there is always going to be something unexpected. It's not a matter of if — it's a matter of when. Just like Dave Ramsey says in his financial coaching, it's not if it's going to rain, it's when it's going to rain.

If you don't plan and anticipate for the unexpected, your plan will inevitably be derailed. You know this feeling. You've got good momentum. You're at the 80% mark of a project and something comes out of left field that you didn't plan for. Now you're behind the eight ball. You're going to be late. You have to call and make excuses to the client about why the work isn't delivered on time. When those things add up over and over again, the client goes and finds somebody else who can actually deliver.

So what does adding 25 to 40 percent look like? In our March 1st example, we said you need to start by February 26th. If we add roughly 33 percent — let's call it one additional full day — that moves our start date to February 25th. That one day of buffer is your insurance policy against the inevitable.

Step Five: Consider Your Calendar

This plan works great if your calendar is completely empty and you work seven days a week. But that's not very likely.

Step five: consider your calendar. You need to account for working days and how full your calendar actually is. Do you work five days a week? Four? Because getting something done is unrealistic when your calendar is already full. You know that feeling — you have your task list and your calendar, and they're both staring at you, competing for your attention. You don't know which one to choose.

Considering your calendar in advance means you don't have to choose. It means you work around your calendar so you're not stressed at the last minute before something is DUE.

In our example, let's say two of those days from February 25th through the 28th are non-working days, and one of the remaining days is completely booked with meetings. That's three more days to account for, which brings the real start date back to February 22nd.

So the complete DO vs DUE formula: when is it DUE? How long will it take to DO it? Subtract the DO from the DUE. Add 25 to 40 percent margin for the unexpected. Account for non-working or blocked days on your calendar. The result — instead of starting February 26th and hoping for the best, you start February 22nd and arrive at the DUE date with margin to spare.

Pro Tip: Use Your Project Management System Correctly

If you're using a task or project management tool, here's my challenge to you: put in the DO date rather than the DUE date. Or better yet — create the main task with the DUE date clearly labeled. Then break it into subtasks, each one assigned to the right person with its own DO date. When your team sits down and opens up their project management system in the morning, they don't have to think about what's DUE. All they have to think about is what's DO. And right there, in that moment, the work gets DONE before it's DUE.

Real-World Case Study: From Firefighting to Flourishing

Before implementing the DO vs DUE Framework, one client's creative agency was constantly in what the owner called the "firefighting load." Projects were starting too late. The team worked nights and weekends to get things delivered on time. Quality suffered. Morale suffered.

After a few months of using the framework, the results were measurable and immediate. Weekend work decreased by 90%. Client satisfaction scores jumped from 7 to 9. Team turnover dropped to zero because people weren't stressed all the time. Project profitability increased by 23% because they stopped wasting time and energy in crisis mode.

The key to all of that success was not working harder. It was working smarter by implementing strategic DO dates that created the margin creativity needs to flourish and thrive. That's what this framework does. It all goes back to serving your creativity so you can ultimately better serve your clients.

That's it for this week's episode and the first chapter of the Creative Work book. Next week we're getting into chapter two — the Priority Framework. It's probably the biggest complaint I hear from clients: they don't know what the most important thing is. There are all these things vying for your attention, and you don't know which ones are actually going to move the needle. Next week we're going to take a couple of well-known tools, marry them together, and give you a clear answer every single time.

Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of the Chief Creative Podcast. If you're interested in working with us at Chief Creative Partners, go to chiefcreativepartners.com and click the Schedule a Call button. We'll give you a free 30-minute call to understand your business and help you unleash your best work. Can't wait to be back with you next week on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 151: Creative Work: We're Writing the Book Live

Here's What It's About and Why It Matters

SUMMARY

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

A friend once briefed me for 30 minutes on a project. The problem? It was the wrong project.

That conversation launched Chief Creative Partners. And now, years later, it's launching my next book — one we're going to write together, live on this podcast, over the next 12 episodes.

The book is called Creative Work: 10 Systems That Every Creative Business Needs.

Here's the full story. Coming out of 2023, I was transitioning out of full-time ministry. I reached out to a friend in Indianapolis who had just started a video production company. He offered to brief me on a potential project. We hopped on the phone. He talked for 30 minutes. I asked questions. And then he stopped cold.

"I just realized I've been briefing you on the wrong project."

Half-jokingly, I said: "Well, you should just hire me to manage your operations."

He called me back five minutes later. He was serious. And so was I.

That's how this business was born — not from a business plan, but from a phone call about the wrong project.

Why Creative Businesses Fail (It's Not What You Think)

That story with Darren? It's not unique. Some version of it is playing out right now in every creative business.

Creative people are not failing because they lack talent. They have the talent. They have the passion. People want to pay them for it. The failure happens because of a lack of systems.

The cost of missing systems isn't small. It shows up as:

• Burnout that creeps in quietly, then hits all at once

• Clients lost to inconsistency that was completely preventable

• Revenue left on the table because the process couldn't scale

• Eventually, losing the love for the very work that started this whole thing

I watched that pattern repeat for over 20 years. In my own work. In the businesses I served. That's why I'm writing this book.

The question is never: Are you talented enough? The question is: Do you have the right systems to let your talent actually show up?

What Creative Work Is (And Who It's For)

This book is for creative business owners, designers, video producers, marketers, and agency founders who are sustaining their livelihood through their creative work.

More specifically, it's for people who are really good at their craft but feel like the business side is eating them alive.

This is not a marketing book. It's not about inspiration or quick fixes.

The reader I'm writing to is working nights and weekends, still loves the work, but genuinely hates how chaotic everything has become.

The 3 Stages of Every Creative Business

Creative Work breaks down into 10 systems organized across three stages of business growth.

Stage 1 — Personal Survival You're drowning, but you're drowning alone. These systems help you survive the initial chaos before clients and teams enter the picture.

Stage 2 — Client Experience You've landed multiple clients, but delivery is inconsistent. The middle section of the book addresses that directly.

Stage 3 — Team and People This is the truth most creative businesses avoid: it's not B2B, it's P2P — people to people. Scaling requires systems that can grow with your team, not just your workload.

The T-Rex Problem with Creative Systems

Here's something I've learned from years of building systems with creative teams: if the system is out of reach, it won't get used.

Todd Henry says creatives are like tigers. I think they're also a little like a T-Rex. Strong. Powerful. Loud. You cannot miss them. But they also have really short arms.

If I build a system that requires too much stretch to implement, a creative business owner will never touch it. That's not a character flaw — it's reality.

These 10 systems are designed to stay within reach. They're not complicated. They're not expensive. They live in your daily workflows, your client communication, your team meetings, your project scopes, and your onboarding process — not inside some elaborate software platform.

What's Coming in This Series

Here's how the next 12 episodes will unfold:

• Episode 151 (This one): Introduction to the book and why these 10 systems matter

• Episodes 152–161: One system per episode, built in real time

• Episode 162: Conclusion and your operating blueprint

By the end, you'll have a practical roadmap for the 10 most important systems your creative business needs — whether you're a solo freelancer or running a growing agency.

Next episode, we start with the DO vs DUE Framework — the foundational system that has saved my own sanity and the sanity of every creative business I've worked with over the last 20 years.

Your Next Step

If this is resonating — if you feel like your talent is being buried under the chaos of running a business — you don't have to wait for the book.

Chief Creative Partners exists to help creative businesses like yours unleash their best work right now. Visit dustinpead.com/free for frameworks and resources, or head to chiefcreativepartners.com to book a discovery call.

You create. We operate.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Talent is rarely the problem in a struggling creative business. Systems — or the lack of them — are.

• ⚡️ Creative businesses move through three distinct stages — and each one requires different systems to navigate well.

• ⚡️ The best system is the one that actually gets used. Simplicity isn't a compromise — it's the whole point.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "The reader I'm writing to is working nights and weekends and loves their work, but they really, really hate how chaotic everything has become."

• 💬 “If I build a system for a creative company or person and it's too far out of reach, they're never going to use it."

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TRANSCRIPT

A friend of mine once briefed me for 30 minutes on a project, and it turns out it was the wrong project. That meeting started my business and is now launching my next book, which we're going to be writing together on this podcast for the next several weeks. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners. Everything that we do here helps creative business owners unleash their best work through operational efficiency.

Today is a very special day. Over the next 12 or so episodes, we're going to be writing my next book together — a book called Creative Work: 10 Systems That Every Creative Business Needs.

I teased this at the beginning, but I want to give you the full story of what actually happened.

Coming out of 2023, I was transitioning out of full-time ministry and figuring out how I was going to make money. I knew I could edit video, and that job typically paid decently. I had a friend in Indianapolis who had recently founded his own video production company. I called him up and said, "Hey, I don't know if you'd have any editing work for me, but I'd love to if we can." He said, "Sure, let's talk next week about a project I have for you."

Next week came. I hopped on the phone with him, and he spent 30 minutes briefing me on this project. I was asking questions, we were moving right along. Then he suddenly stopped and said, "Oh, no." I asked what was wrong, and he said, "I just realized I've been briefing you on the wrong project this entire time."

Half-jokingly, half-seriously, I said to him, "Well, you should just hire me to manage your operations." We both laughed. He said he was sorry and would call me back. Five minutes later, very quickly, he did. And he said, "Are you serious about managing my operations?"

I said, "Yeah, man. I love that. That's what I've always done. I've always loved sitting in the in-between of the creative brainstorm and ideation side, but also the tenacity and galvanizing of getting things done. That intersection is where I thrive the most."

That's how Chief Creative Partners was born. It didn't have a business plan. I didn't have foresight into what it was going to become. It started with a phone call about the wrong project.

From that moment, I knew my calling was to serve creative business owners and entrepreneurs — founders of these creative businesses who got into it for the passion of what they do and loving their creativity, only to find themselves completely overwhelmed with everything else that comes with running a business.

Delivering consistent, excellent results over and over again while managing client relationships, documenting processes so they can actually scale as more work comes in — that's the hard part. And what I realized is that story with Darren is not unique. Some version of that story is happening right now in every creative business.

Creative people are not failing because of a lack of talent. They have the talent. They have the passion. People want to pay them for it. They're failing because of a lack of systems. And the cost of not having systems is burnout, lost clients, missed revenue, and eventually completely losing the love for the work that they started doing because they loved it.

I'm writing this book — and I started this business — because I lived it. I watched the same chaos repeat itself over and over again for over 20 years.

The question is not whether you're talented enough. It's whether you have the right systems to let your talent actually show up.

This book is for creative business owners, designers, video producers, marketers, and agency founders — anyone sustaining their livelihood through their creative work. Specifically, people who are really good at their craft but feel like the business side is eating them alive.

This is not a marketing book. Not a book about creative inspiration or quick fixes. The reader I'm writing to is working nights and weekends, loves their work, but really hates how chaotic everything has become.

Here's the structure. Creative Work is a book about 10 operating systems that every creative business needs. This is not an exhaustive list — these are the top 10 systems I believe every creative business needs to start with. And none of this is theory. These are real frameworks and systems I've tested with real clients for over 20 years.

The book breaks down into three sections based on where you are in your business.

The first section is personal survival. You're drowning, but you're drowning alone. We're going to give you systems to help you survive that initial solo chaos.

The second section spreads into the client experience. You have multiple clients, but delivery can be chaotic and inconsistent. The middle part of the book covers that.

The third section is about people. Even though your creative work often serves other businesses, this is people-to-people work. It's not B2B — it's P2P. You're bringing a team along to scale, and you need systems that allow your business to grow with you.

This book is going to give you a practical roadmap out of that chaos. And I believe you need it at any stage of your creative business, as long as you're relying on that income to sustain your livelihood.

The earlier you build these systems — this infrastructure, this foundation — the less painful growth will be as you add more on top. But it's also never too late. These 10 systems work whether you're a solo creative or running a large creative team or agency.

Once you implement them, these systems live in your daily workflows, your client communication, your team meetings, your project scopes, your kickoffs, your onboarding, your offboarding, and your contractor renewals. They don't sit inside expensive software or complicated processes.

Here's what I've realized over the years — creatives are a breed of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Todd Henry says creatives are like tigers, and I think that's true to a large extent. But they're also a little like a T-Rex. Strong. Powerful. Loud. Vibrant. You cannot miss them. But they also have really short arms.

What I mean by that is this: if I build a system that's too far out of reach, a creative is never going to use it. These systems are designed to stay within reach of our short T-Rex creative arms. They're simple, and that's the point.

The book will have 12 chapters: an introduction chapter — which is what we're recording right now — 10 chapters covering each system, and a conclusion. One episode per chapter. By the end of this series, you'll have an operating blueprint for the 10 most important systems your creative business needs.

Next episode, we're jumping into the foundational framework I've talked about many times on this podcast: the DO vs DUE Framework. The one system that saved my own sanity and the sanity of many other creatives over the last 20 years.

If you've ever felt like your talent is being buried under the chaos of running a business, this series is for you — and Chief Creative Partners is for you. If what I'm saying is resonating and hitting exactly how you feel each and every day, go to chiefcreativepartners.com. Let's get on the calendar for a discovery call so we can build something together that actually works for you and your creativity, so you can unleash your best work yet.

I'm incredibly pumped about this series, and I cannot wait to dive into chapter one next time on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 150: New Name, Same Focus

(Podcast & Business)

SUMMARY

150 episodes.

Three names. Two businesses. One book already out. Another one on the way.

And the most clarity I've ever had about what I'm here to do.

Episode 150 of the Chief Creative Podcast is a milestone — and it comes with some big news. Here's everything that's changing, why it's changing, and what you can expect going forward.

Why the Name Change

This podcast started as Five Questions with Dustin Pead, moved to Winning in Life Without Losing Your Mind, and then landed on Creativity Made Easy — which is the name most of you probably know.

Creativity Made Easy ran from episode 37 through episode 149. That's over 112 episodes. And the whole time, something never quite sat right with me about that name.

I kept telling clients and friends: I don't think this is the right title. The feedback I got was split — some said titles don't matter, it's the content. Others said it really spoke to the creative audience. But here's my honest take: I've been in the creative industry for almost 25 years. If someone told me they had an easy button for creativity, I'm not sure I'd want to press it. The name felt like it was cheapening the very thing I care most about.

The answer came from a client conversation. We were collaborating on a project and I mentioned I still wasn't happy with the podcast name. He said, simply, "Your business is called Chief Creative — why don't you just call it the Chief Creative Podcast?"

That was it. Simple, obvious, and exactly right.

Starting with episode 150, this podcast is officially the Chief Creative Podcast. The mission hasn't changed: equipping creative businesses to unleash their best work. The name finally matches.

The Rebrand: Chief Creative Partners

The name change doesn't stop with the podcast.

When I launched this business in 2023, I called it Chief Creative Consultants. The thinking at the time was that creative business owners needed a consultant — someone to hand them a strategy and send them on their way.

What I've learned over two and a half years of doing this work is that's not what they need at all. Creative business owners want someone to link arms with them. To come alongside them, build what they need, and stay in it for the long haul.

That's not consulting. That's partnership.

So Chief Creative Consultants is now Chief Creative Partners. My good friend and client PJ Towle of Forty:Three Creative is leading the full rebrand. The new home is chiefcreativepartners.com.

What Else Is Changing

The Newsletter

The newsletter is getting a full reimagination. Instead of a "here's what you missed" roundup, it's becoming a curated content experience — books, tools, ideas, and insights worth your time, with some of my own thinking woven in. Think Austin Kleon's newsletter or the Do Lectures. The goal is that when it hits your inbox, you're glad it's there.

The Websites

dustinpead.com is becoming the dedicated home for my books, speaking, and personal brand. Everything related to Chief Creative Partners — the podcast, frameworks, client work — will live at chiefcreativepartners.com.

The Book

My first book, Growing Upward: My Lifelong Journey with Mental Health, came out in 2025. It's a memoir about navigating mental health through the first 40 years of my life. You can find it at dustinpead.com/book.

This year, I'm writing my second book — and this one is built entirely around the mission of the Chief Creative Podcast and Chief Creative Partners.

It's called Creative Work.

The subtitle is still being refined, but it will center on the 10 systems every creative business needs to have. It'll be visually heavy, deeply practical, and straight to the point — no fluff.

Starting next episode, each episode will dig into one chapter. Over 12 episodes — an intro, 10 chapters, and a conclusion — we'll build the book together. Creative Work is planned for publication in 2027.

What Stays the Same

The format might evolve. The guests might change. The release cadence might shift to every other week for a season.

But one thing doesn't change: every episode of the Chief Creative Podcast will leave you with practical, actionable strategies you can take into your business right now. Not theory. Not conference-level ideas you can't afford to implement. Real frameworks, real methods, real tools — given away freely, every single time.

That's the commitment.

If you know someone who owns a creative business — whether they're a solopreneur in a home studio or running a team — send them this episode. Tell them you found a podcast that will light a fire in them to do their best work.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ — The best content creation doesn't happen in isolation. Building Creative Work in public — chapter by chapter on the podcast — is both a creative process and a community one.

• ⚡️ — The name your business carries should reflect what you actually do for people — not what you thought you'd do when you started.

• ⚡️ — Sometimes the clearest answers are hiding in plain sight — and it takes someone outside your own head to find them.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 —"Chief Creative sits at the soul of who I am. It just took someone else pointing out the obvious to get me there."

• 💬 — "People aren't looking for a consultant. They're looking for someone to come along with them on the journey and build the things they need to support their vision."

• 💬 —"We're going to flush out every chapter of this book right here on the podcast, in real time."

EPISODE RESOURCES

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TRANSCRIPT

Creative work isn't accidental. It's intentional. This podcast equips creative business owners with the systems and processes that help them unleash their best work — helping you scale without sacrificing quality or burning out. Each episode explores practical strategies, real client stories, and proven methods for doing your best creative work. Because great creativity requires great operations. Let's get into it.

Welcome back, everybody. Episode 150 is finally here. Welcome to the Chief Creative Podcast. I've been waiting to share this with you for quite some time, and I'm really excited about this change. I want to take a few minutes this episode to explain why the change, talk about whether the format will be any different, talk about guests, talk about the release schedule, and close our time today with what other changes are in the works. And fair warning — there are a lot of changes in the works.

Let's start with why the change. Why the Chief Creative Podcast?

This podcast has had a few names since it first came along. When I started, it was Five Questions with Dustin Pead, where I asked every guest the same five questions. We talked about creativity, the Enneagram, team culture, systems and processes. We did that for maybe 10 or 12 episodes. Then I tried another name — Winning in Life Without Losing Your Mind. Super broad. And people started telling me: you need to take this into more of a niche audience.

The more I thought and prayed through that, I realized the creative professional is really who I'm after — specifically the one who tends to overcomplicate things when they can be simple. So after 36 episodes across two names, I landed on Creativity Made Easy. We ran with that name from episode 37 all the way through episode 149. That's 112 or 113 episodes, depending on how you count.

Through that whole stretch, we kept guests on the show. We worked out new processes and systems, figured out what was working and what wasn't. I even recorded episodes about something I thought worked — and then came back three months later to say, no, that didn't work. Actually, here's what does. So in a lot of ways, you've been learning alongside me through all of this.

But in my soul, I always felt that Creativity Made Easy still wasn't doing it justice. I kept telling clients and friends: I don't think this is the right title. They'd either say "titles don't matter, it's the content" — which I agree with to a point — or they'd say "I think it really hits the heart of the creative." But here's the thing: I consider myself a creative person. I've been in the creative industry for almost 25 years. And if someone told me they had an easy button for creativity, I don't know that I'd be eager to press it. It felt like it was cheapening the creative experience — making it too approachable in the wrong way. It just never sat right.

The answer came on a phone call with one of my clients. We were collaborating on a project and I mentioned I still wasn't sure about the podcast name. He said, "You know what I never understood? Your business is called Chief Creative — why don't you just call it the Chief Creative Podcast?" I was kind of mad that he came up with it before I did. But I was also really relieved, because Chief Creative sits at the soul of who I am.

So starting today — episode 150 — this podcast is the Chief Creative Podcast. We are equipping creative businesses to unleash their best work. And I am so glad you're here.

If you know someone who owns their own creative business — whether they're a solopreneur in a home studio or they have a team working alongside them — send this podcast to them. Tell them: I think I found a podcast that will light a fire in you to unleash your best work.

Now, will the format be any different? I'm always tinkering. But my promise to you — whether it's just me or there are guests on — is that every episode will leave you with practical, actionable strategies and methods you can take into your business right away. Not something you heard at a conference and thought "I can never do that because I don't have the budget." I'm going to give away every framework, every method, every template. That part of the format doesn't change.

Will there be more guests? I really hope so. If you own and operate your own creative business — even if it's just you, or you have a team of 20 or 30 — I would love to have you on the show. Reach out at dp@dustinpead.com or find me on Instagram at @dustinpead. I want to build a community of creative business owners who are equipping each other to unleash their best work.

Are we still releasing every week? You may have noticed the last couple of weeks haven't been weekly. Honestly, I've been heads down on some really new and exciting things. My commitment is still to weekly episodes, but I may need to shift to every other week for a season to make sure I'm delivering the best quality content possible. My commitment isn't to a release schedule — it's to making sure that when an episode drops, it's something worth your time.

Now — the part I'm most excited about. What else is changing?

Four things.

First, the newsletter. I love curating content and sharing things I find genuinely useful — books, music, apps, technology, restaurants, all of it. The newsletter is going to shift away from being a "in case you missed it" link dump and become something more like what Austin Kleon and the Do Lectures do — mostly curated content for the reader, with some of my own insight woven in. My goal is that when it hits your inbox, you're actually looking forward to it. I'm hoping to have a fresh version out by end of quarter.

Second — and this is the one I'm most excited about — we're rebranding. When I started this business in 2023, I launched it as Chief Creative Consultants. My wife, who is a graphic designer, helped with the initial look and feel. But the name "Chief Creative" never had its own home. It's been spread throughout dustinpead.com, and people kept asking: am I working with you personally, or am I working with your company?

My good friend and client PJ Towle of Forty:Three Creative is helping me with the full rebrand. And with that rebrand comes a name change: we're moving from Chief Creative Consultants to Chief Creative Partners. The reason is simple. When I started in 2023, I thought people wanted a consultant. What I've found over two and a half years is that creative business owners aren't looking for someone to hand them a strategy. They're looking for someone to link arms with them — to come alongside them and build what they need to support their vision. That's not consulting. That's partnership. So Chief Creative Partners it is. The new home is chiefcreativepartners.com.

Third — dustinpead.com is going to become the home for my books, speaking engagements, and personal brand content. Everything else will live at chiefcreativepartners.com.

Fourth — the book. This year, I'm writing my second book. My first book, Growing Upward: My Lifelong Journey with Mental Health, came out in 2025. It's a memoir about my first 40 years navigating mental health. You can find it at dustinpead.com/book.

This new book is different. It's called Creative Work, and it's built entirely around the mission of this podcast and Chief Creative Partners. The subtitle will be something along the lines of "10 systems every creative business needs to have." It's going to be visually heavy, super practical, and straight to the point — no fluff. We're already laying out the outline and the 10 topics.

Here's what makes this even more exciting: starting next episode, we're going to flesh out every chapter of that book right here on the podcast — in real time. Each episode will dig into one chapter. Over 12 episodes — an intro, 10 chapters, and a conclusion — we're going to write this book together. The plan is to publish Creative Work sometime in 2027.

That's the news. All of it. And I have more clarity right now — about my business, about this podcast, about why I'm here — than I have ever had. I get out of bed every single morning excited to serve my clients and share content like this, because I care deeply about creative work.

Thank you for being here. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do. If you're watching on YouTube, ring the bell. It really helps me know the content is landing. I'm thankful for my clients, my family, and my friends who've walked with me through all of this.

We're just getting started. And we are more on target than ever — equipping creative businesses to unleash their best work. I cannot wait to talk to you next time on the Chief Creative Podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 149: The SOP That Changed Everything

SUMMARY

Every client has different preferences. Different communication styles. Different approval processes. Different brand voices.

And right now, most of that lives in your head.

Your team asks the same questions on repeat. You spend hours every week being the institutional memory bank for your entire agency. And every new hire takes months to get up to speed because the knowledge is locked inside one person.

There's a better way. It's called the individual client SOP — or as I like to call it, the client playbook. And it might be the most important document your agency isn't building.

Nathan's Story

I had a client — we'll call him Nathan to protect the innocent. Nathan was working 60 hours a week. Fifteen of those hours, every single week, were spent answering the same questions over and over again. "How does this client want this?" "What do we deliver for them?" "Who do we contact when there's an issue?"

He had seven to eight active retainer clients, and all the details about how to serve each one lived in one place: his head.

We implemented individual client SOPs across his entire roster. The result? Nathan recovered 10 hours a week. And his newest hire — instead of needing six weeks of scattered, on-the-job training — was productive by week one.

One document per client. That's it.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ If your team is doing work that's outside a client's scope because no one documented the boundaries, you're giving away time your agency will never get back.

• ⚡️ Building a clear approval process into your client playbook means your team never has to guess who needs to sign off on what — or when.

• ⚡️ If the answer is no, the knowledge is still trapped in your head — and your vacation, your focus time, and your ability to grow this agency are all paying the price.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Reaching out to a client in a way they don't prefer and not getting a response back — that's a friction point you created."

• 💬 "Custom illustrations only. Headlines under eight words. No stock photos. Boom — that's three lines that save hours of revision rounds."

• 💬 "Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. Stop being the human database."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️Claude (AI)

• ⚡️The Future You Framework

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Future You Framework

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Every client has unique preferences, communication style, approval process, brand voice, revision rounds, and all this info lives in your head, scattered emails, and random Slack messages. Your team is constantly asking the same questions: "How does client X want this again?" And you lose 10 to 15 hours every week being your agency's institutional memory bank. Today we're going to talk about the SOP that changes everything, and why every client needs their own playbook.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm Dustin Pead, your creative operations partner, and I'm so glad to be with you for another episode. Today, like I said at the top, we're going to dive into the one SOP that changes everything.

But before I do that, I want to remind you that I'm here to help creative businesses unleash their best work through operational efficiency. You can find out more about how I can help you and your team at dustinpead.com.

I'm going to tell a story here. To protect the innocent, we're going to call this person Nathan. Nathan was a client of mine, and he was drowning — drowning in trying to remember how his seven to eight plus regular, recurring retainer clients each wanted things done. He was working 60 hours a week, and 15 of those hours every single week was just answering the same questions over and over again. "How does this person like this? How does this client want this again? What do we do for this client?" Because all of that starts to get mixed up when it's all living in one person's head.

So what we did was implement what we called individual client SOPs — individual client playbooks. I love playbooks. The result was that Nathan was able to recover about 10 of those hours every single week that he was losing. And the bonus? A new hire he had brought on recently was able to start being productive in week one instead of week six, after long stretches of on-the-fly training. The solution was the client SOP — the client playbook.

Let me walk you through the five sections that every client playbook should have.

Section One: Communication Preferences

What's their preferred method of communicating? Slack, email, project management software, phone call, text — what is it? You may be thinking, "We make all our clients use one tool." And in a perfect world, I'm right there with you. But that's not always reality. Some clients prefer email. Some want notes in ClickUp or monday.com or Asana. Some say, "Just call me." Some say, "Just text me." Reaching out to a client in a way they don't prefer — and not getting a response back — creates unnecessary friction.

Also under communication preferences: response time expectations. Not every client gets the same response time. Larger clients with bigger scopes or longer relationships may have different expectations than a one-off project client. Notating that is essential.

Who's the decision maker? Who gets CC'd on communication? Is it one person, or that person plus their assistant? You need names and contact info documented.

Last thing in this section: meeting cadence. What are the best connection times with this client? Do you have a regular meeting schedule? Side note — if you don't have at least a 15-minute monthly check-in with each of your ongoing clients, stop this episode right now and go set that up.

A simple example of what this looks like: We use Slack for quick questions, email for approvals. Sarah is our primary contact; we CC John, the business owner, on anything that involves creative decisions. They don't take meetings before 10am.

Section Two: Scope and Deliverables

What's included in their standard package? How many rounds of revisions are included? What file formats do they need — working files or just deliverables, MP3 or MP4, JPEG or PNG? And critically: what's NOT included? This is where you protect your team's time and prevent scope creep. Having this documented means no one has to pick up the phone, send a Slack message, or interrupt someone else's work just to remember what's in or out of scope for a particular client.

Section Three: Brand Voice and Creative Preferences

What's their brand voice? Playful? Corporate? Edgy? Conservative? What are their design preferences — what do they love and what do they hate? What have their past feedback patterns looked like? A great example: "This is a conservative financial brand. No humor. They hate stock photos. Custom illustrations only. Headlines under eight words." Pro tip — link directly to their brand guidelines right inside this section so your team never has to go hunting for it.

Section Four: Approval Process

Who approves what, and at what point? Are there internal rounds of review before it goes to the client? Map this out simply, left to right, like a timeline. Make it easy to scan at a glance.

What's their review format preference? PDF? Live link? Video? Prototype? And is feedback batched or given immediately as things come in? A solid example: reviews go internally first with three days for revisions, then PDF mock-ups are sent to the client — no live links — and all feedback is documented in email, never verbal only. If you don't document feedback, you can't learn from it.

Section Five: Quirks and Context

This is the miscellaneous section — but it might be the most important one. What makes this client unique? What past challenges have you encountered with them and how did you resolve them? What are their personality tendencies?

An example: This client gets nervous about timelines, so we build in an extra 10% buffer beyond our standard margin. They're night owls who love sending feedback at 11pm. They love being involved in the creative process, so we invite them to brainstorms.

Why This All Matters: The Vacation Test

Without these playbooks, your team will text and call you throughout your vacation with questions that a playbook could have answered. With them, the team operates independently — and that means true freedom. The business can run without you, so you can focus on navigating it where you want it to go.

Here are your action steps. This week, pick your most complex client and begin building their SOP. It takes 30 to 45 minutes. Use the five-section template. What we do is mind-dump all five sections into Claude, then tell it to build the playbook and ask any clarifying questions as needed. We also keep a template in our Claude project knowledge so every playbook looks identical every time — easy to reference, easy to read.

Over the next 30 days, log every client question your team asks you. When someone asks you a client question, ask yourself: "Is this something I'll get asked again?" If yes, it goes in the playbook. Over the next 90 days, build those playbooks for every active client — one per week or one per month, your call.

Stop being the human database. Document your client preferences once in a five-section client playbook. It's your most important SOP. Your team and your Future You will reference it forever — without interrupting you — saving you 10 or more hours every single week.

Next week is episode 150 of the podcast and I cannot wait to share some special things with you. It's going to be a great episode. Until then, have a great week and unleash your best work yet.

Ep 148: How to Manage Contractors Without Losing Your Mind

(3 Rules Every Creative Agency Needs)

SUMMARY

If you've ever handed a project to a contractor and then spent the next three weeks wondering what's happening, this one's for you.

Most creative agency owners manage contractors the wrong way. Not because they don't care, but because nobody taught them the difference between managing an employee and managing a contractor. That gap leads to missed deliverables, scope creep, and that sinking feeling that you've become the bottleneck in your own business.

In Episode 148 of the Chief Creative Podcast, Dustin Pead breaks down three practical rules for managing contractors with confidence — without micromanaging every step.

Why Contractors Are Different (And Why It Matters)

Contractors are not employees. They're not on your W-2, they don't have benefits, and they're often in and out on a project-by-project basis. That relationship requires a completely different kind of leadership.

When you treat a contractor like an employee — expecting constant check-ins, unclear deliverables, and hourly billing without outcomes — you create frustration on both sides. You become the bottleneck. The work suffers. And you end up doing more management work than the job itself requires.

The fix isn't complicated. But it does require intentionality.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Define the sandbox before anyone steps into it.

  Before you bring a contractor on, you need to know exactly what you need them to do, what they don't need to do, and what success looks like. If you're figuring it out after they start, you're already behind.

• ⚡️ Structured communication prevents you from becoming the bottleneck.

  Once you've onboarded a contractor, the worst thing you can do is disappear for six to eight weeks and hope for the best. The second worst thing is checking in every single day.

• ⚡️ Deliverable-based milestones protect your budget and your sanity.

  The old model is paying contractors for time. The model that's winning right now is paying for outcomes.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Creatives want to be put in a box. It just needs to be a sandbox, not a shipping box." — Dustin Pead

• 💬 "You've given them the why, the what, and the when. The how? That's why you hired them." — Dustin Pead

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️"E-Myth" by Michael E. Gerber

• ⚡️"Buy Back Your Time" by Dan Martell

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Dan Martell says hire to buy back your time, not to create more management work. So today we're going to talk about managing contractors without losing your mind.

Welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, and today we are talking about managing contractors without losing your mind. Everything we do at Chief Creative Partners is to help creative businesses unleash their best work. This podcast is for all creative entrepreneurs, business owners, and agency owners as we're all out here trying to give the world a sense of who we are through our businesses. We're here to help you do that in the most efficient and effective way possible.

So let's talk contractors. No matter what phase or size of creative business you're in, we're all dealing with contractors. And it's important to distinguish the difference between contractors and employees. Contractors are not employees. They need totally different management. They're not on a W-2, not on the benefits plan, not on the longevity track. A lot of them are in and out on a project-by-project basis.

We need to trust them enough to deliver without micromanaging them. But the problem is that most of us treat our contractors like employees, which leads to frustration on both sides. We expect the world of them, but we haven't given them clear expectations. We've given them unclear expectations. We haven't given them enough clarity on what it is we're asking them to do, which leads to misdeliverables, scope creep, or over-managing. Then you become the bottleneck because you under-communicated, and the work doesn't meet your standards.

We all work with contractors, whether short term or long term. I've worked with short-term contractors to edit this podcast from time to time. I've had a contractor doing social media for an extended period that paid off really well. I also have a long-term contractor who is my VA. She helps with administrative support, podcast publishing, client communication, and client milestones. She's invaluable. That relationship feels a bit more like an employee relationship because it's ongoing. Whereas my other contractors are in and out by season.

So here are three pieces of advice on how to better manage your contractors.

Number one: Crystal clear scope before you hire them.

Before you hire a contractor, you need to know exactly what you need them to do. Otherwise you bring them in and say, let's figure this out together. Now you're dragging them along, and the longer they get dragged along, the murkier everything gets.

Figure it out. Get crystal clear. Paint done as much as you can before you ever hire them.

What they do should be specific deliverables, not vague responsibilities. Not "I need you to help with marketing." It's "I need you to edit four podcasts every month, delivered by end of day Monday each week." Define what they don't do as well. Set those boundaries up front. Their success is measured on the clear quality standards you set.

I was having this conversation with my assistant earlier today and we landed on something that clicked for me. Creatives don't want to be put in an Amazon shipping box with a lid on it. That suffocates them. But creatives do want to be put in a sandbox. They can mix, mold, and create all sorts of things inside that sandbox, but they're still within the parameters you gave them.

So the boxes we give contractors need to be sandboxes. Define the boundaries, share how success is measured, give them examples of what you're looking for, and lay out your revision policy up front. How many rounds of revisions? What triggers additional fees? All of that up front.

Number two: Establish a weekly rhythm.

You hired them, gave them the clear scope, put them in the sandbox, and then you let go completely. Six to eight weeks go by. You don't know what's happening. You don't know the struggles, the successes, where they need additional clarity.

Establish a weekly rhythm. It doesn't need to be more than 15 to 30 minutes depending on how many contractors you're managing. Once a week, you sit down and review completed work, address any blockers, assign next week's deliverables, and sync up on communication.

One of my clients runs a video agency based in Indianapolis. Every Monday at 1:30, for 30 minutes, the agency owner, his assistant, and all active contractors are on a quick call. Here's what we have coming up. Here's what we need. Does anyone have questions? Is anyone missing anything? Thirty minutes at most. Often less. It's structured communication built into the weekly rhythm. Not daily management. Just a clear, consistent check-in.

Number three: Deliverable-based milestones, not hourly supervision.

The old way: pay contractors for hours. The new way: pay for outcomes.

The most successful businesses are paying contractors for outcomes, not hours. Set clear deadlines tied to specific deliverables. "Edits are due by end of day Monday" not "work on this at some point this week." Paying hourly without outcome milestones racks up your budget and makes it nearly impossible to plan.

If you have crystal clear scope, you can set a project price and say — if you deliver this outcome, this is what we're paying you. It doesn't matter if it takes 45 minutes or 45 hours. You can quality check along the way. Everyone gets the exchange that was promised at the start.

This also lets you take your hands off the steering wheel. You've given them the why, the what, and the when. The how? That's why you hired them. Trust them with the how. Pay them for the outcome they produce, not for how long it took.

A quick note on documentation.

Every time you do something for a client, document it. That becomes that client's standard operating procedure, that client's quality standard. When you bring on a new contractor, they can reference those documents and know exactly what they're after. A Loom video is even better. "You're watching this because you're working on this project. This client likes A, B, and C. They don't like X, Y, and Z." Simple. Clean. The work doesn't stop when you're not in the room.

Red flags to avoid:

Don't hire contractors without written scope. Stop paying hourly without deliverable milestones. Stop managing contractors like employees — they don't have benefits or fixed hours, but they do owe you weekly check-ins. And stop assuming they know your standards. Document everything.

If you follow these three things and avoid those red flags, your contractors will deliver on time without you chasing them down. Quality will improve week over week. You won't be answering the same questions over and over because you've already documented the answers. And you can actually take a week off and the work continues.

That last part is the point. Do you have a business or do you have a job? If you have a business, you can take a week off and the work continues. If you have a job, it doesn't. I'm wrestling with that in our own business. But I'd encourage you to think through it this week as you're managing your contractors. Is the work going to continue if you go on vacation, or does it screech to a halt?

If it stops when you leave, you need the right people on the bus. And I would love for Chief Creative Partners to be the operations arm that makes that possible. Reach out to me at dustinpead.com or find me on Instagram at @dustinpead.

Action steps this week:

If you have current contractors without defined scope, stop what you're doing and define it. What they do, what they don't do, and what success looks like. For the next contractor you hire, create a deliverable-based contract, not an hourly supervision model. And this month, start your weekly check-in rhythm with your existing contractors. It might feel like herding tigers at first, as Todd Henry says. But that clarity will be invaluable for them to deliver the excellence your business requires.

Next episode, Episode 149, we're going to talk about the one SOP that will change everything in your creative business. Can't wait to see you there.

Ep 147: Meetings that Move Projects Forward

SUMMARY

If your team walks out of meetings feeling busy but not better, you're not alone. Most creative team meetings are just status updates in disguise — and they're quietly killing your momentum. In this episode of Creativity Made Easy, Dustin Pead breaks down the three-part framework for running creative meetings that actually unblock your team, move decisions forward, and get work done.

Here's the hard truth: the majority of creative meetings are structured around updating each other, not advancing the work. Teams spend 50 out of 60 minutes reviewing where things stand, and only 10 minutes (if that) making actual decisions. The result? Projects get discussed, but they don't get done. Team members leave unclear on next steps, ownership is fuzzy, and the same issues get re-litigated week after week.

The fix isn't more meetings — it's better ones.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Meetings should unblock work, not just report on it. Structure your agenda around blockers, decisions, and next actions — not status updates.

• ⚡️ Every meeting ends with: Who does what, by when? Vague takeaways kill momentum. Assign ownership and deadlines before the meeting closes.

• ⚡️ Fewer people in the room = better decisions. Only invite team members who are part of a blocker or a solution. Protect everyone else's time.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Most creative team meetings are status updates just disguised as progress." — Dustin Pead

• 💬 "Stop having meetings just to talk about the work. Make sure meetings are meetings to unblock the work, to make decisions, and to assign next actions — then get back to the actual creating." — Dustin Pead

• 💬 "We're not gonna park here. We're either gonna decide or we're gonna delegate." — Dustin Pead

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️DO vs DUE

• ⚡️Creative Meeting Success Framework

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

So most creative team meetings are status updates just disguised as progress. But real progress in meetings identifies blockers, makes decisions, and assigns next steps — then ends. Today we're going to get into the meeting that actually moves projects forward. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, y'all. I'm your host, Dustin Pead — creative process coach, consultant, partner, all the things. Look, there's a lot going on in my world right now and in the world of Chief Creative, and we've got some very exciting things coming up. But I didn't want to delay getting another episode out to you, so I wanted to get into today's episode talking about the meetings that move projects forward.

The problem that I see often with my clients and other creatives that I'm talking to all the time is that meetings just stay on the calendar continuously. We just show up and we don't know why. They feel productive sometimes during the meeting, but afterward there's nothing that actually moves the project forward. We spend an hour in meetings where 50 minutes of that is just updates, and then 10 minutes is actual decision-making. That leaves you and your team super frustrated. It leaves everybody unclear on what their next steps are and who owns what. And so the projects get discussed, but the projects don't necessarily get advanced.

What I want to offer you today is a simple solution to help your creative meetings actually move the project forward.

What I'm not saying is every meeting should get right down to business first. Take a few minutes, recognize there are real people in the room with real struggles and real things going on. Take a few moments there — but keep those moments tight. Otherwise, those moments can derail the entire rest of the meeting.

So with the three parts of a good creative meeting — what I call Creative Meeting Success — it's going to look like this. First, you're going to tackle blockers. Then you're going to handle decisions that are required. And from there, you're going to determine next actions. Let's break those down.

First: tackle the blockers. This is where we ask, "Hey, what's stuck and preventing you from progress on this?" It's a great open-ended question because it assumes there already are things getting them stuck and preventing their progress. Don't discuss solutions yet — this is just surfacing all the blockers. Get them all up on the table. Write down all the problems.

Examples might be: we're waiting on client approval, we're missing the necessary assets, or we're unclear on what direction to take this project. Those are project blockers. Identify those first. Take 15 minutes if you need to, to really identify those blockers. That will set the rest of your meeting up for success.

Once you do that, we move on to the second part: decisions required. We ask things like, "What needs a decision today in order to unblock some of the blockers we just named?" Are there decisions we can make right here in this moment? Is there information we can gather? Are there assets we can get? Make the decision, or assign the decision owner with a deadline right then and there. There's no parking lot. We're not going to just park here. We're either going to decide or we're going to delegate.

And then from there, every great meeting ends with: now what are we going to do? Every meeting ends with who is doing what and by when. I'll say it again — who does what, by when? That "by when" is the D.U.E. date. So who does the D.O., by what, by when — D.U.E. No vague "we'll work on that" or "we'll get that covered soon." None of that. Who does what, by when.

Take 10 minutes at the end of your meeting — and now you have a 45-minute meeting where you spent 15 minutes identifying blockers, 20 minutes making decisions required to unblock those things, and 10 minutes to determine next actions. Document those next actions in your project management system so they don't get lost right then, right there in the meeting, before you close your laptop and move on.

Now there are a couple of key rules I want you to remember to keep these creative meetings from failing — from falling into the trap of just another meeting.

Number one: no status updates. You can read those before the meeting. Status updates can be in an email, they can be in Slack — there's no need to have another meeting just for status updates.

Also: no attendees without action items. If you're not blocking or being blocked, or providing solutions, then you don't need to attend the meeting. Too many people attend too many meetings that aren't necessary for them. Reevaluate who you have in your meetings.

And another rule: action items must be assigned before adjournment. The meeting doesn't end until every blocker that's come up has an owner. No status updates. No one attends the meeting unless they are part of the problem or the solution. And the action items have to be assigned before the meeting ends.

When assigning things, we use the DO vs. DUE Framework. That's where we identify when it's D.U.E. so that we can work backwards and create the margin before it's due. Now we know when we're actually going to sit down and D.O. this thing. You're going to identify your D.U.E. dates — your deadlines — but you're also going to schedule your D.O. dates. That is proactive work. That is planning the work so that next time you sit down, all you have to do is work the plan.

The Future You Framework — the Future You note-taking methodology — plays a big role here as well. Meeting notes document decisions for your future self so that you don't have to re-litigate the same issue over and over again. Use an audio recorder on your phone, use PLOD if you're meeting online, use something like a Fathom note taker or Otter, or something like that to take good notes and have those transcripts at your ready when you need them. Put them in your calendar for the next meeting so that everybody can reference the previous meeting. Whatever you need to do — provide that clarity.

So this week, let's just go through your meetings. What percent is status versus what percent is actual decision-making? At your next meeting, try that blocker-decision-action method. What are the blockers? What are the decisions we need to make? What are the actions we need to take? Assign those. Just do that for one meeting. Try it out. And I promise you, you'll see a massive result.

Stop having meetings just to talk about the work. Make sure meetings are meetings to unblock the work, to make decisions, and to assign next actions — then get back to the actual creating.

Like I mentioned at the top of this short episode, we've got some amazing news coming up that I cannot wait to share with you. We're still fine-tuning all the little kinks, but stay tuned. We're coming up on our 150th podcast episode, and I hope on that episode I'm able to share that news with you.

If there's anything that we can do for you — me, myself, or my business, Chief Creative Consultants — feel free to reach out. You can email me at dp@dustinpead.com. I would love to help you and your team unleash your best work yet.

Ep 146: National Time Management Month:

5 Shifts Every Creative Professional Needs to Make

SUMMARY

Your business grew because you're an exceptional creative. But now that same creative excellence has become your biggest bottleneck. If you're working 60+ hours a week, can't take on new clients without burning out, and find yourself as the approval checkpoint for every decision, it's time to make the hardest transition in creative leadership: from maker to manager.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ 80% quality from your team beats 90% quality when you're burned out – Perfectionism isn't serving quality; it's serving fear and preventing delegation

• ⚡️ Administrative tasks offer the fastest ROI – Reclaim 20% of your time immediately by delegating emails, scheduling, invoicing, and client coordination at $20-30/hour

• ⚡️ Your buyback rate reveals what to delegate first – Calculate your hourly value, divide by four, and delegate everything below that threshold to create mathematical permission to let go

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Client satisfaction doesn't require perfection. It requires consistency and communication—and that doesn't always have to be you."

• 💬 "Your competitive advantage isn't that you personally touch everything. Your advantage is that you've built systems that deliver quality without you."

• 💬 "80% done by someone else is 100% awesome." – Dan Martell

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell – The delegation framework that revolutionizes creative agency operations

• ⚡️Creative Directions: Mastering the Transition from Talent to Leader by Jason Sperling – Research-backed insights on the maker-to-manager shift

• ⚡️ Time and Energy Audit Template – Free download at dustinpead.com/free

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Look, you became a creative director or an agency leader because you are great at creating. But now your business needs you to stop creating and to start managing. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their work without losing their minds. I'm Dustin Pead. I help creative agencies build systems that create margin, reduce burnout, and protect what matters most: your creativity. Whether you're a solo creative or leading a team, this show gives you practical frameworks and advice to go from chaos to clarity. Let's dive in.

In the beginning, you did it all and you were great at some of it and good at most of it. And so that brought in more work. And now you have a choice to make. You can either reject the new work because you're the bottleneck—you can't create more than you can create—or you can accept new work and learn to lead a team of others to do the work.

I want to talk through some signs that you might need to make this shift. If this sounds like you, these are indicators: If you're working 60+ hours a week and you can't afford to take on any new clients because you'll let them down. If you're the bottleneck in every single new project and every part of the project and nothing moves without your input. If your team is waiting on you for feedback, approvals, or decisions. If you're doing it all because you don't have a team to delegate to or you haven't built one yet. These are the signs that you need to make the shift.

Your business is successful because of your creative talent, but your business can't scale beyond your personal capacity. Every new client means that you personally work more hours. You're one client away from a serious capacity crisis.

Ask yourself this: If you were to take a two-week vacation with no phone access, no internet, would everything that you've built fall apart? If the answer is yes, everything would fall apart, then you're not running an agency—you're running an expensive freelance operation.

I take my clients through this book called Creative Directions by Jason Sperling. According to the research that he cited in this book, the skills that make creatives successful—like craft excellence, attention to detail, personal ownership—they're often the exact same barriers that prevent them from becoming effective managers and leaders. The reward for being great at your creative job is suddenly doing a completely different job that you weren't trained for.

The hardest part about the transition from maker to manager isn't delegation. It's accepting that done at 80% quality by someone else is better than perfect at 100% quality when you're maxed out. Because the truth is, it's probably not even going to be 100% quality because you are maxed out.

You might hear yourself say things like, "Nobody can do it as good as I can." That might be technically true, but equally completely irrelevant. When you're at 110% capacity, your work quality is going to drop below 80%. It's going to drop probably to 70, 60, sometimes even 50% quality. But when a trained new team member at 80% capacity delivers 80% quality, then guess what? You're ahead now.

80% quality with 50% less stress beats 90% quality with total burnout. Let me say that again: the math shakes out like this. 80% quality with 50% less stress is going to beat 90% quality with total burnout every single time.

Let's look at it from a cost perspective. Every hour that you spend on a $25 an hour task costs you $100 in strategic opportunities because your time is actually worth $125+ an hour. Your perfectionism isn't serving quality, it's serving fear. And what you call maintaining standards is actually just you avoiding trust to delegate to someone else.

Client satisfaction doesn't require perfection. We have to let go of that. It requires consistency and communication. I'm going to say that again. Client satisfaction requires consistency and communication and that doesn't always have to be you. Your competitive advantage isn't that you personally touch everything. Your advantage is that you've built systems that deliver quality without you. That's your advantage.

You need to shift in identity here. We need to go from finding our identity as the artist or the designer or the director. We need to move that to owner, leader, manager. Doing fewer creative tasks might feel like you're losing who you are, but in the reality is that your identity isn't in your task list anyway. It's not in what you do anyway. It's your impact that matters. And so this leadership, this ownership, this management, it's still creative work. You're just creating through people instead of through your software.

I love the way Dan Martell says this in Buy Back Your Time. We reference that book all the time on this podcast. He says that 80% done by someone else is 100% awesome. I love that. It should be a t-shirt.

Hey, I wanted to interrupt this episode to tell you if you're running a creative agency and feeling like you're constantly firefighting instead of leading, you're not alone. At Chief Creative Consultants, we don't just tell you what to fix. We roll up our sleeves and implement systems with you. We're talking project management that actually works, client workflows that create margin instead of stress, and team processes that scale without the chaos. We partner with creative agencies as your fractional COO team, building sustainable systems together. If you're ready to transform from reactive to proactive, visit dustinpead.com today and book a call. Okay, let's get back to the show.

So where do we start? Easy: low hanging fruit, administrative tasks. You can probably get 20% of your time back at minimum just from administrative tasks. These are also low risk and really, really affordable. Typical admin drains creative founders. We hate admin, but we have to do it—it's a necessary evil. Email and calendars and invoices and client billing and meeting notes and follow up tasks and file organization and project setup and client communication coordination. It takes up so much of our time and it's so cheap to get rid of.

Admin work has clear right/wrong answers unlike creative work where you have to use instinct. Admin work is "this is how it's done the right way, this is how the wrong way it's done." And affordable VA support, you can probably get it for anywhere between $20 to $30 an hour. I have an amazing assistant that works with us and she's super affordable and does incredible work.

You can start slow. You can start with four or five, six hours a week, work them up to 10 hours per week. You don't have to go to a full time hire. You can just give them a little bit. There are so many people out there who are ready to take this work from you.

If you want to go up further from that, the delegation ladder that Dan Martell talks about in that book, Buy Back Your Time, starting with that executive or virtual assistant for scheduling and administrative support. Right after that: How about delivery? How about client work execution for designers, editors, and producers? You can go up another level from that. How about marketing? How about lead generation and content creation? You can go up another level from that if you can afford it and go sales. How about client acquisition and relationship management? And then even further from that, that's where you live in the leadership. This is the strategic direction and team development.

Most creative founders try to jump straight up into marketing or sales because they're just like, "I've got to get rid of this stuff." But there are ways that you can inch your way through there through executive assistance, deliveries, marketing, things like that. Start small, prove that you can let go and then let go a little bit more and let go a little bit more and let go a little bit more and watch yourself begin to be able to lead and create bigger and better than you ever have before.

I didn't start by delegating client operational strategy. That's my highest level value work. I started with admin work and social media management. I use a clear process with defined standards. This is what I'm looking for. And then let them go from there and ask me questions along the way. Now that I've proved that I'll let go of that, next thing will be—we'll start delegating some client implementation. It's going to become a lot easier now that I've had success delegating those other pieces and admin and social media. And so now I'm working with clients and gaining new clients instead of editing audio for this podcast.

Let me just give you a little side pro tip here as you're beginning to delegate out things. We talk about this in many other podcast episodes as well, but record everything. And I don't mean record everything in the sense that someone's—you're going to need to set somebody up and you're going to need evidence. It's not like a conspiracy thing when I say record everything. I mean, record everything and how do you do what you do. Record that down.

Because as you bring on more people, you want to be able to say, "Here's how I do this. Here's how I check my email. Here's how I manage this content. Here's how I manage my calendar. Here's how we edit this podcast. Here's how we design these thumbnails. Here's how we organize files." As you're doing it, you don't need to go, "Oh, I got to find some time to write all that stuff down." Just as you're doing it, open up a Loom video and record it so that you have it saved so that when someone joins your team who you can delegate that to you go, "I've already documented the process for you, here you go." It's going to save you so, so, so much time.

So what now? First thing I want you to do, let's start calculating what Dan Martell calls your buyback rate. You're going to take your annual income, you're going to divide that by the 2,000 hours that you would typically work and that's how you're going to get your hourly value. If you divide that by four, now you have a buyback rate.

For example, if you have $120,000 annual income, which to some of us may sound like incredible, then you have a $60 hour effective rate. That means your hourly rate is 60 bucks an hour. If you charge $60 an hour and you work 40 hours a week, you'll make $120,000 annual income. If you divide that by four, you get a $15 buyback rate. That means that you can afford right now to start delegating any tasks that you could delegate out for $15 an hour.

Think of the young kids who are in college or high school who are looking for experience in your field who would kill to have a job to work from their laptops at $15 an hour. Any tasks that can be done for less than your buyback rate is the first thing that should be delegated. This gives you mathematical permission to let go.

Secondly, conduct a two week time and energy audit. This comes again from Dan Martell's book. I have a template on my site to help you go through this. If you go to dustinpead.com/time, or just the free resources page, dustinpead.com/free, you can download the two week time and energy audit. I have a video on there that shows you exactly how to use that.

Thirdly, make your first delegation hire sometime in the next 30 days. Start with a part-time VA four or five hours a week. Start delegating three administrative tasks like, let's just start with emails, scheduling, and meeting notes. Start documenting those processes now while you're looking for this person. Record yourself doing it, record everything, and that way you have it.

And look, you don't have to commit to this thing forever. You can just set a 90-day trial period to prove that the relationship is good and that the model works. And you know what, if it doesn't, then at least you know you tried it. So once you see this time recovery, you'll expand your hours and you'll be able to add more tasks to other people. So then after the 90 days, you'll start to see that time recovery. If you're like, "Hey, yes, I could see the value here," then you can start to expand the hours and add more tasks to that person.

A couple call out resources here. We talked about Buy Back Your Time a bunch by Dan Martell. Creative Directions, Mastering the Transition from Talent to Leader by Jason Sperling. And then there's different tools and frameworks on my website, like the Time and Energy Audit. You can find it at dustinpead.com/free.

Next week, we're going to talk about a little known fact about the month of February. Did you know that the month of February is National Time Management Month? And I love talking about time management. And I think all creatives whether you're a freelancer or an agency owner could use a freshener up on time management. So we're going to talk about that next week. We're going to talk about this national time management month, February. We're going to get into it right here on the podcast. I can't wait to talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.

Ep 145: From Maker to Manager

Why Creative Leaders Must Stop Creating to Scale

SUMMARY

Your business grew because you're an exceptional creative. But now that same creative excellence has become your biggest bottleneck. If you're working 60+ hours a week, can't take on new clients without burning out, and find yourself as the approval checkpoint for every decision, it's time to make the hardest transition in creative leadership: from maker to manager.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ 80% quality from your team beats 90% quality when you're burned out – Perfectionism isn't serving quality; it's serving fear and preventing delegation

• ⚡️ Administrative tasks offer the fastest ROI – Reclaim 20% of your time immediately by delegating emails, scheduling, invoicing, and client coordination at $20-30/hour

• ⚡️ Your buyback rate reveals what to delegate first – Calculate your hourly value, divide by four, and delegate everything below that threshold to create mathematical permission to let go

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Client satisfaction doesn't require perfection. It requires consistency and communication—and that doesn't always have to be you."

• 💬 "Your competitive advantage isn't that you personally touch everything. Your advantage is that you've built systems that deliver quality without you."

• 💬 "80% done by someone else is 100% awesome." – Dan Martell

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell – The delegation framework that revolutionizes creative agency operations

• ⚡️ Creative Directions: Mastering the Transition from Talent to Leader by Jason Sperling

• ⚡️ Time and Energy Audit Template – Free download

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here

TRANSCRIPT

Look, you became a creative director or an agency leader because you are great at creating. But now your business needs you to stop creating and to start managing. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their work without losing their minds. I'm Dustin Pead. I help creative agencies build systems that create margin, reduce burnout, and protect what matters most: your creativity. Whether you're a solo creative or leading a team, this show gives you practical frameworks and advice to go from chaos to clarity. Let's dive in.

In the beginning, you did it all and you were great at some of it and good at most of it. And so that brought in more work. And now you have a choice to make. You can either reject the new work because you're the bottleneck—you can't create more than you can create—or you can accept new work and learn to lead a team of others to do the work.

I want to talk through some signs that you might need to make this shift. If this sounds like you, these are indicators: If you're working 60+ hours a week and you can't afford to take on any new clients because you'll let them down. If you're the bottleneck in every single new project and every part of the project and nothing moves without your input. If your team is waiting on you for feedback, approvals, or decisions. If you're doing it all because you don't have a team to delegate to or you haven't built one yet. These are the signs that you need to make the shift.

Your business is successful because of your creative talent, but your business can't scale beyond your personal capacity. Every new client means that you personally work more hours. You're one client away from a serious capacity crisis.

Ask yourself this: If you were to take a two-week vacation with no phone access, no internet, would everything that you've built fall apart? If the answer is yes, everything would fall apart, then you're not running an agency—you're running an expensive freelance operation.

I take my clients through this book called Creative Directions by Jason Sperling. According to the research that he cited in this book, the skills that make creatives successful—like craft excellence, attention to detail, personal ownership—they're often the exact same barriers that prevent them from becoming effective managers and leaders. The reward for being great at your creative job is suddenly doing a completely different job that you weren't trained for.

The hardest part about the transition from maker to manager isn't delegation. It's accepting that done at 80% quality by someone else is better than perfect at 100% quality when you're maxed out. Because the truth is, it's probably not even going to be 100% quality because you are maxed out.

You might hear yourself say things like, "Nobody can do it as good as I can." That might be technically true, but equally completely irrelevant. When you're at 110% capacity, your work quality is going to drop below 80%. It's going to drop probably to 70, 60, sometimes even 50% quality. But when a trained new team member at 80% capacity delivers 80% quality, then guess what? You're ahead now.

80% quality with 50% less stress beats 90% quality with total burnout. Let me say that again: the math shakes out like this. 80% quality with 50% less stress is going to beat 90% quality with total burnout every single time.

Let's look at it from a cost perspective. Every hour that you spend on a $25 an hour task costs you $100 in strategic opportunities because your time is actually worth $125+ an hour. Your perfectionism isn't serving quality, it's serving fear. And what you call maintaining standards is actually just you avoiding trust to delegate to someone else.

Client satisfaction doesn't require perfection. We have to let go of that. It requires consistency and communication. I'm going to say that again. Client satisfaction requires consistency and communication and that doesn't always have to be you. Your competitive advantage isn't that you personally touch everything. Your advantage is that you've built systems that deliver quality without you. That's your advantage.

You need to shift in identity here. We need to go from finding our identity as the artist or the designer or the director. We need to move that to owner, leader, manager. Doing fewer creative tasks might feel like you're losing who you are, but in the reality is that your identity isn't in your task list anyway. It's not in what you do anyway. It's your impact that matters. And so this leadership, this ownership, this management, it's still creative work. You're just creating through people instead of through your software.

I love the way Dan Martell says this in Buy Back Your Time. We reference that book all the time on this podcast. He says that 80% done by someone else is 100% awesome. I love that. It should be a t-shirt.

Hey, I wanted to interrupt this episode to tell you if you're running a creative agency and feeling like you're constantly firefighting instead of leading, you're not alone. At Chief Creative Consultants, we don't just tell you what to fix. We roll up our sleeves and implement systems with you. We're talking project management that actually works, client workflows that create margin instead of stress, and team processes that scale without the chaos. We partner with creative agencies as your fractional COO team, building sustainable systems together. If you're ready to transform from reactive to proactive, visit dustinpead.com today and book a call. Okay, let's get back to the show.

So where do we start? Easy: low hanging fruit, administrative tasks. You can probably get 20% of your time back at minimum just from administrative tasks. These are also low risk and really, really affordable. Typical admin drains creative founders. We hate admin, but we have to do it—it's a necessary evil. Email and calendars and invoices and client billing and meeting notes and follow up tasks and file organization and project setup and client communication coordination. It takes up so much of our time and it's so cheap to get rid of.

Admin work has clear right/wrong answers unlike creative work where you have to use instinct. Admin work is "this is how it's done the right way, this is how the wrong way it's done." And affordable VA support, you can probably get it for anywhere between $20 to $30 an hour. I have an amazing assistant that works with us and she's super affordable and does incredible work.

You can start slow. You can start with four or five, six hours a week, work them up to 10 hours per week. You don't have to go to a full time hire. You can just give them a little bit. There are so many people out there who are ready to take this work from you.

If you want to go up further from that, the delegation ladder that Dan Martell talks about in that book, Buy Back Your Time, starting with that executive or virtual assistant for scheduling and administrative support. Right after that: How about delivery? How about client work execution for designers, editors, and producers? You can go up another level from that. How about marketing? How about lead generation and content creation? You can go up another level from that if you can afford it and go sales. How about client acquisition and relationship management? And then even further from that, that's where you live in the leadership. This is the strategic direction and team development.

Most creative founders try to jump straight up into marketing or sales because they're just like, "I've got to get rid of this stuff." But there are ways that you can inch your way through there through executive assistance, deliveries, marketing, things like that. Start small, prove that you can let go and then let go a little bit more and let go a little bit more and let go a little bit more and watch yourself begin to be able to lead and create bigger and better than you ever have before.

I didn't start by delegating client operational strategy. That's my highest level value work. I started with admin work and social media management. I use a clear process with defined standards. This is what I'm looking for. And then let them go from there and ask me questions along the way. Now that I've proved that I'll let go of that, next thing will be—we'll start delegating some client implementation. It's going to become a lot easier now that I've had success delegating those other pieces and admin and social media. And so now I'm working with clients and gaining new clients instead of editing audio for this podcast.

Let me just give you a little side pro tip here as you're beginning to delegate out things. We talk about this in many other podcast episodes as well, but record everything. And I don't mean record everything in the sense that someone's—you're going to need to set somebody up and you're going to need evidence. It's not like a conspiracy thing when I say record everything. I mean, record everything and how do you do what you do. Record that down.

Because as you bring on more people, you want to be able to say, "Here's how I do this. Here's how I check my email. Here's how I manage this content. Here's how I manage my calendar. Here's how we edit this podcast. Here's how we design these thumbnails. Here's how we organize files." As you're doing it, you don't need to go, "Oh, I got to find some time to write all that stuff down." Just as you're doing it, open up a Loom video and record it so that you have it saved so that when someone joins your team who you can delegate that to you go, "I've already documented the process for you, here you go." It's going to save you so, so, so much time.

So what now? First thing I want you to do, let's start calculating what Dan Martell calls your buyback rate. You're going to take your annual income, you're going to divide that by the 2,000 hours that you would typically work and that's how you're going to get your hourly value. If you divide that by four, now you have a buyback rate.

For example, if you have $120,000 annual income, which to some of us may sound like incredible, then you have a $60 hour effective rate. That means your hourly rate is 60 bucks an hour. If you charge $60 an hour and you work 40 hours a week, you'll make $120,000 annual income. If you divide that by four, you get a $15 buyback rate. That means that you can afford right now to start delegating any tasks that you could delegate out for $15 an hour.

Think of the young kids who are in college or high school who are looking for experience in your field who would kill to have a job to work from their laptops at $15 an hour. Any tasks that can be done for less than your buyback rate is the first thing that should be delegated. This gives you mathematical permission to let go.

Secondly, conduct a two week time and energy audit. This comes again from Dan Martell's book. I have a template on my site to help you go through this. If you go to dustinpead.com/time, or just the free resources page, dustinpead.com/free, you can download the two week time and energy audit. I have a video on there that shows you exactly how to use that.

Thirdly, make your first delegation hire sometime in the next 30 days. Start with a part-time VA four or five hours a week. Start delegating three administrative tasks like, let's just start with emails, scheduling, and meeting notes. Start documenting those processes now while you're looking for this person. Record yourself doing it, record everything, and that way you have it.

And look, you don't have to commit to this thing forever. You can just set a 90-day trial period to prove that the relationship is good and that the model works. And you know what, if it doesn't, then at least you know you tried it. So once you see this time recovery, you'll expand your hours and you'll be able to add more tasks to other people. So then after the 90 days, you'll start to see that time recovery. If you're like, "Hey, yes, I could see the value here," then you can start to expand the hours and add more tasks to that person.

A couple call out resources here. We talked about Buy Back Your Time a bunch by Dan Martell. Creative Directions, Mastering the Transition from Talent to Leader by Jason Sperling. And then there's different tools and frameworks on my website, like the Time and Energy Audit. You can find it at dustinpead.com/free.

Next week, we're going to talk about a little known fact about the month of February. Did you know that the month of February is National Time Management Month? And I love talking about time management. And I think all creatives whether you're a freelancer or an agency owner could use a freshener up on time management. So we're going to talk about that next week. We're going to talk about this national time management month, February. We're going to get into it right here on the podcast. I can't wait to talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.

Ep 144: I Stopped Using AI for Weekly Planning After 6 Months

Here's Why (And What I Do Instead)

SUMMARY

For six months, I let AI plan my week. It was efficient, it was optimized, and it was completely wrong for me. Let me tell you why.

About six months ago, I started having AI plan my weeks for me. In fact, I did a whole episode on it (Episode 125) with one of my friends and clients, PJ Towle from Forty-Three Creative. It was a long and clunky episode, but through the process of that episode, I realized that I was kind of forcing this.

Even when I was using AI (Claude, which I still use for a ton of things and love), it was super efficient. It did expedite the process of me planning out my weeks. If you're familiar with Michael Hyatt's Full Focus Planner, he has what's called the weekly preview. Me and all my clients do a weekly preview.

The appeal was being able to mind dump anything without organizing my thoughts first—which I still do that, I still use that tactic all the time. I would dump every thought that I had, every task that I had into AI, into Claude. And AI would take all that chaos and create structure out of it through the project that I built.

For months, it felt like a superpower. But eventually I noticed that I wasn't actually more focused. I was more efficient, but I was not more organized. I was still having to think of the context in which the things I had to do was so disconnected from what I actually had to do that week because AI did it for me and I didn't think through it myself.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Speed isn't the same as clarity. AI made planning faster, but when you skip the thinking process, you skip the clarity process. Sometimes the inefficient process has value because it forces you to engage with your priorities mentally.

• ⚡️ The physical act of writing creates mental commitment. The act of writing isn't just about the output—it IS the planning. The physical motion of writing connects to a part of our brains that AI cannot connect to, giving us deeper connection to what we're working on.

• ⚡️ Use AI for distribution, not decision-making. The 80-20 rule applies: AI excels at routine tasks (formatting, distribution, communication), but strategic work (priority setting, thinking, processing) should remain human.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "I think the human race made a big mistake at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We leaped for the mechanical things. People need to use their hands to feel creative." - Andre Norton

• 💬 "The physical act is what creates the mental commitment."

• 💬 "We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn." - Peter Drucker

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ Episode 125 - My original AI weekly planning experiment with PJ Towle from Forty-Three Creative

• ⚡️ Future You Framework - Note-taking methodology for clarity

• ⚡️ Full Focus Planner by Michael Hyatt - Weekly preview system

• ⚡️ reMarkable Tablet - Analog digital note-taking device

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

For six months, I let AI plan my week. It was efficient, it was optimized, and it was completely wrong for me. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, and all creative entrepreneurs who might be seeking maybe some practical or actionable strategies to grow their creative business through some efficiency.

I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process consultant, and I help creatives and agencies know themselves, their process and their teams so that they can create with efficiency as they scale together.

Now, I want to start today's episode with this quote from Andre Norton. He says, "I think the human race made a big mistake at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We leaped for the mechanical things. People need to use their hands to feel creative."

And that really hit me because about, I don't know, six months or so ago, I started having AI plan my weeks for me. In fact, I did a whole episode on it. Episode 125, I had one of my friends and clients, PJ Towle from Forty-Three Creative on. It was a long and clunky episode. If you made your way through it, thank you. But through the process of that episode, I realized that I was kind of forcing this.

And even when I was using the AI, which I was using Claude, which I still use Claude for a ton of things and I love it. Even when I was using it, it was super efficient. It did expedite the process of me planning out my weeks or if you're familiar with Michael Hyatt's Full Focus Planner, he has what's called the weekly preview. Me, all my clients, we all do a weekly preview. In fact, I'm recording this right now on a Sunday right before I do my weekly preview.

And what I used to do in the AI process, you can go back and watch Episode 125 if you want, it's super clunky. But let me just kind of take you through how I used to do it. And you'll probably pick up on a few things for me. The appeal I want to start with was being able to kind of mind dump anything without organizing my thoughts first, which I still do that. I still use that tactic all the time, right?

I would dump every thought that I had, every task that I had into the AI, into Claude, right? And AI would take all that chaos and create structure out of it through the project that I built, right? And for months, it felt like a superpower. But eventually I noticed that I wasn't actually more focused. I was more organized, maybe even then, maybe even not more organized. I was more efficient. Let me say that. I was more efficient, but I was not more organized.

I was still having to think of the context in which the things I had to do was so disconnected from what I actually had to do that week because AI did it for me and I didn't think through it myself. And that's the first thing I want to bring up today is when efficiency becomes the enemy.

You see, AI made planning faster, but speed isn't the same as clarity. So what I was doing is I was using AI to organize my weekly priorities for my brain dumps and take all my tasks and all my meetings and everything like that and give it to me straight. The promise was that it was going to save me time and it was going to get me organized faster, right?

But 87% of creators use AI daily, but creative agencies are cautious about over-automation and I think to a certain extent, rightly so. Because what actually happened in the end was that it was harder for me to save time during the week. It was harder for me to stay focused from week to week and day to day on actually what I was, because I was so disconnected from what I was actually supposed to be focused on.

You see, when you skip that thinking process, then you skip a little bit of that clarity process. We talk a lot about this in the Future You Framework, right? Sometimes the inefficient process is value because in the Future You concepts and the Future You note-taking methodology, we're writing notes down that we are with thoughts that we have right now that we know future us is going to want to know, right? And there's no AI involved in that. It's strictly a note-taking methodology.

And so when we kind of get our hands down to it, yes, it may slow down efficiency a little bit, but it will vastly increase clarity. Now this was just for me, right?

So what I went to, I kind of did a little bit of a hybrid approach. I still don't really use AI a ton other than I let it create a calendar for me for my team to have of what's going on and for my family to have to know what's going on. And I spit that out at the end of my weekly preview every week. Go, "Here's my calendar, create this in an easy-to-read format for my family and my team so that they can kind of quick reference it without having to have all the access to all my calendars." And not really because I'm trying to be private about it, but it's just overwhelming. There's a lot on it, right?

And so before the AI thing, I was using the Full Focus Planner. Now to back up a little bit more from there, I started using the Full Focus Planner from Michael Hyatt in 2023 when I launched Chief Creative Partners or Chief Creative Consultants. And it radically changed the way that I focused on what I needed to do. I've always been a real focused individual, very organized individual. That's what this podcast is about, right?

But it radically changed my focus and I was able to really focus and get narrowed in and get to just, "I'm not giving up until I see this thing come through." And then I ended up buying a reMarkable tablet, which if you don't know what a reMarkable tablet is, it's strictly for taking notes, right? It doesn't send email or it doesn't check your email, it doesn't have apps on it, you can't do text, you can't surf the web or anything like that. You can email yourself or other people some notes, but it's only one-way emailing. It's not like you can do all your work on it. It's strictly for what we would call analog note-taking.

And I bought the reMarkable because at the time I heard Michael Hyatt of Full Focus was working on a template for the reMarkable for his Full Focus Planner to be digitized on the reMarkable. And I thought, "Well, this is great, because I do love the Full Focus Planner, but I was carrying around that and I was carrying around all these other things. It just got to be so much to carry around." I was like, "I would love to carry one notebook that had many notebooks in it," which is why I use the reMarkable.

And what I love about the reMarkable, this is a key point of this entire episode that I want you to understand, is that the act of writing, that IS the planning. Right? It's not just about the output. See, I thought planning my week and the weekly preview was about the output. I thought it was about what do I need to create here so that I can clearly reference it throughout the week. But it was actually the process. The act of writing is what gave me the focus. It's what gave me the clarity. I needed to write it down myself. Right? I needed to put pen to paper or stylus to reMarkable as the first step in staying focused.

And this matters because the physical act is what creates the mental commitment. I want to say that again. The physical act is what creates the mental commitment.

All right, here's what AI can't replicate. It can't replicate your thinking. It can't replicate your processing. Or maybe I should say it shouldn't replicate your thinking. And it shouldn't replicate your processing and it shouldn't replicate prioritizing what happens while you write those things down, right?

It's the slower method ultimately made me faster in execution because I was more connected to the focus that I needed to have.

Hey, I wanted to interrupt this episode to tell you, if you're running a creative agency and feeling like you're constantly firefighting instead of leading, you're not alone. At Chief Creative Consultants, we don't just tell you what to fix. We roll up our sleeves and implement systems with you. We're talking project management that actually works, client workflows that create margin instead of stress, and team processes that scale without the chaos. We partner with creative agencies as your fractional COO team, building sustainable systems together. So if you're ready to transform from reactive to proactive, visit dustinpead.com today and book a call. Okay, let's get back to the show.

Don't overlook that value of mental clarity that doing things with our hands can bring. I love in psychology, I've been a big proponent of counseling for many, many years. And I've had a few counselors in my life, all of them have been amazing. I still go to counseling. And the one thing any good counselor will always tell you is you need to write this down. You need to keep a journal or a diary or whatever of your thoughts and your feelings.

And the reason is because it's been psychologically proven that there is power and clarity that comes when we can write things out with our hands. That physical motion of writing something out connects to a part of our brains that AI cannot connect to. And it gives us more connection to the thing in which we're writing and to be able to observe that thing.

We're writing, it's what they teach you in counseling is to write it out and to be able to observe it for what it is. That I am not the thing, I'm just feeling this thing and I need to observe it for what it is. So don't overlook the value and the clarity that comes from doing things with our hands.

All right, I don't want this to be like an AI-bashing episode at all because I love AI, I use it every single day, but I want to be clear here: AI is a tool for distribution, not a tool for decision-making. So I still use AI for weekly calendar emails, like I said, to my family and my assistant, my team, right? The difference is in that scenario is I'm using AI for communication, not necessarily for clarity, right?

Again, everything always comes back to this 80-20 rule. I don't know why everything in life is 80-20, 80-20. It's rarely 50-50, it's usually 80-20, right? The human for strategic and AI for routine. If it's strategic, we need it. If it's routine or automated or formatting or distribution, we can let AI do it. And that can be 80% AI and 20% human, there are times for that. And there are other times when it's flipped and it's 80% human and 20% AI.

So what now? I would love to just encourage you. Again, this is just for me, I just want to kind of share what I'm thinking about, what I'm going through right now as I'm moving away from this completely AI-generated weekly preview and back into a little bit more of an analog mode.

One thing I want you to try this week or a few things I want you to try right now, if you're up for it, is an analog test, right? Try one week of manual planning, whether it's on paper or iPad or reMarkable or any other kind of tablet. Just try one week of manual planning, legal pad, index cards, post-it notes, it doesn't matter. Just one week of planning out your week using something analog and notice what clarity it may or may not bring from the physical act of being able to write things down.

I'm willing to bet it's going to give you a ton of clarity. Then you can compare your week of AI-planned weeks and your week of focus from the analog way as well.

Second thing I want you to do is I want you to identify what your think work is versus your distribution work, right? Think work is priority setting, strategic decisions, what matters most—keep those things human. But the distribution work is formatting, sending, organizing, automating. AI can help for all those things. Use AI for distribution, not necessarily always for thinking.

The third thing I want you to consider is to create your own hybrid workflow. I'm not saying you need to totally throw out AI when it comes to your planning. And I'm not saying you need to only use AI when it comes to your planning. I'm saying there's some type of a hybrid and that's what I'm discovering right now. Right, AI for communication, but then the strategic connecting to the focus and connecting to the goals, giving me that clarity is going to come from my manual work. So figure out what the hybrid workflow looks like for you.

Peter Drucker said this, he said, "We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process. It's lifelong process of keeping abreast of change, right? And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn."

And that's what I'm called to. I love teaching people how to learn new things. I love teaching people things that I'm learning. And so if you're learning something along the same line as me and finding that balance between AI and humans, specifically when it comes to organizing your thoughts and having clarity and having focus on what you need to be focused on, I would love to hear from you.

Hit me up, email address: dp@dustinpead.com. You can find me on Instagram at dustinpead. That's D-U-S-T-I-N P-E-A-D. Again, you can go back and listen to Episode 125 if you want to. And you can hear me fumble my way through the process. There's definitely some good nuggets in there. You can find the Future You Framework or other things that I mentioned at dustinpead.com/free.

I want to leave you with this, though. AI is powerful, but it can't do your thinking for you. The clarity that you need, it doesn't come from faster organization. It comes from the act of processing, prioritizing, and committing to the act yourself. Use AI for what it's good at, right? Distribution, formatting, routine communication, automations. But keep the thinking work, the human work, for yourself and for your team and for the humans around you.

Don't overlook the value of that mental clarity that doing things with your hands can bring.

Next week we're going to be back with another episode of Creativity Made Easy. We're going to talk about from maker to manager. This is something that I just finished taking a handful of my clients through and I can't wait to talk to you about what do you do when your creative control becomes the bottleneck. And we're going to talk about the identity shift that creative founders have to face when it's time to lead people and not just make great work. Cannot wait to talk to you then. Have an amazing week. I'll talk to you next time on the Creativity Made Easy podcast.