Ep 100: The Future of Creative Business

Written By Dustin Pead

From Creative Chaos to Sustainable Success

SUMMARY

In this milestone 100th episode, Dustin Pead reflects on the journey of the Creativity Made Easy Podcast while looking ahead to the future of creative professionals. He discusses the challenges creatives face in today's rapidly changing landscape, including AI advancements, workforce changes, and the need to stay relevant. Dustin shares strategies for building sustainable creative businesses through systems and processes that scale without losing creative essence. He also announces a new service - the Project Management System Optimizer - designed to help creatives streamline their workflows and reclaim time for creative work.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • ⚡️ Today's creative professionals face unprecedented challenges with rapidly evolving technology, growing anxiety about staying relevant, and outdated feast-or-famine business models that aren't sustainable.

  • ⚡️ Finding your unique creative voice is essential for differentiation in the marketplace. Excellence should be balanced with authenticity to remain true to who you are as a creative.

  • ⚡️ Building community with other creative professionals is becoming increasingly important, especially as many work from home offices and maintain primarily digital client relationships.

NOTABLE QUOTES

  • 💬 "I believe that it's in our creative systems and processes that allow us to scale our creative work and make it more and more special for our clients."

  • 💬 "Every creative has that unique voice because we're all made completely different so finding that unique voice is a key differentiator. You need to show your personality it's okay to be vulnerable a little bit it's okay to be authentic. I tell people all the time that I love authenticity I'm always trying to help people grow in their creativity with excellence and authenticity we want it to be excellent but we also want it to be true to who you are as well.

    I also think community is going to play a huge role in the next chapter of the creative professional’s landscape looks and many of us are sitting in home offices just like if you're watching on YouTube right now you see that I'm sitting in my home office, so finding that unique voice is a key differentiator."

  • 💬 "Success is going to come from having adaptable systems. You're going to have to have some structure, but the structure doesn't have to stifle innovation."

EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

100 episodes ago, I set out to solve a problem that was plaguing creative professionals everywhere. The chaos of creativity was stopping brilliant people from building sustainable businesses and creative professions. Today are 100th episode. We're going to look at not just celebrating a milestone, but we're going to look forward to what's next for creative professionals. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to the Creativity Made Easy Podcast. The podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. My name is Dustin Pead. Creative Coach and Consultant and I help creatives know themselves their process and their team so that they can create greater things together.

Y'all 100 episodes. I cannot believe it's finally here. I've been thinking about it. I've been dreaming about it and I am so pumped to get into today's episode with you. 100 episodes has been quite a journey. We've had some amazing conversations with all sorts of guests. We did an any-a-gram series. We spoke with creative coaches like Steven Brewster and Ben Armin's.

We've had a great time learning from countless creative visionaries. We've talked about client management, pricing strategies, workflow optimization, the whole due versus due, DO, DOE dates. We've talked about future you. We've talked about your messages and how to have review cycles in your creative process.

We've shared many transformation stories. All that to say, it's been an incredible journey. And I want to thank you specifically to everyone who has listened or watched or shared and implemented these strategies. It means the world to me. 2025 is going to be the best year yet for all that I have going on. We've already got two speaking engagements lined up already this year.

By the time this podcast comes out, I've already been a guest on a couple of podcasts as well. So tune in to my social media to catch those out. But we're going to be speaking at the salt conference in Nashville, Tennessee in early October of this year. And the other one I can't quite name yet, but I can tell you it's going to be in Oklahoma City in October as well.

So stay tuned for more information about that. We've got brand new service pages on my website service page for speaking service page for coaching and the other one for consulting. We are tightening up our processes and really kind of laying out. Here's what working with me looks like as a creative coach or consultant.

And if you're interested in having me come speak to your team, whether it be in person or digital, I would love to talk with you about that. Go to the aforementioned website, DustinPead.com. Click on the speaking tab and fill out that form. I would love the opportunity to speak some creative insight into the process and operations that you have on your creative team.

All right, let's look to the future on what creative professionals face today is a unprecedented time in today's creative landscape with things. Like AI, the growing and shrinking workforce. What does it look like for you and your creative endeavors as you begin to grow partnerships and opportunities in your own creative work?

There's like I said, the technology is growing rapidly. We're having to to to maintain our own education on what works and what doesn't. There's growing anxiety about staying relevant and maintaining the creative edge while also being profitable. There's the old feast or famine business models that just don't work anymore. They're not sustainable.

So how do we adopt losing what makes our creative work special? I believe it is within our systems and processes that allows us to scale those creative that scales are. I believe that it's in our creative systems and processes that allows us to scale our creative work and make it more and more special for our clients.

So some ways that we can do that number one future success. We always talk on here about future you right future you is simply just a mind. A mind approach, a mindset if you will of how you take notes when you're on a call with a client. When you find yourself need deep into situation and someone asked you to do something right future you is about having the opportunity to write that stuff down so that your future self will understand what you were asking it to do or what someone else was asking it to do when you come upon it.

We can leverage technology to enhance our human creativity and intuition and connection in that way by saying listen future self. I know you don't remember having this conversation but the client asked you for this very specific thing and if you want to wow them here's one quick idea that your past self lay down for you.

So let's let's go ahead and execute that now those are some ways that you can sustain and raise the level of your creative business here's what I think is going to have to happen in order for your creative business to grow in terms of your efficiency going along with it you're going to have to find your unique creative voice.

Every creative has that unique voice because we're all made completely different so finding that unique voice is a key differentiator. You need to show your personality it's okay to be vulnerable a little bit it's okay to be authentic. I tell the people all the time that I love authenticity I'm always trying to help people grow in their creativity with excellence and authenticity we want it to be excellent but we also want it to be true to who you are as well.

I also think community is going to play a huge role in the next chapter of the creative professionals landscape looks and many of us are sitting in home offices just like if you're watching on YouTube right now you see that I'm sitting in my home office.

And we're having these conversations with clients all digital and so having this community not only with your clients but with other creative professionals as well is going to make a huge difference and one thing that I'm committed to this year more than ever is to curate a creative community.

If that sounds like something you want to be a part of I'm still working out the kinks just shoot me an email dp@dustinpead.com tell me you want to be part of the community and I'll get you in right away we've been toying around with some digital community stuff already but especially are also I should say in the West Georgia area I'm working towards an event to build creative community that I cannot wait to announce later this year but you're going to need people you're going to need to surround yourself with people we've talked about partnerships.

On this podcast before we've talked about who you bring on your team all of that stuff is going to matter because it's going to take more than you at the end of the day in order to reach your desired creative dreams if you want to be able to build the business like you want to be able to build it if you want to be able to organize the structure of your creative team creative department or creative business is going to take some other people to come along side you success.

Will come but it's going to come from community as a big big part of it listen success is also going to come from having adaptable systems you're going to have to have some structure but the structure doesn't have to stifle innovation right we always laugh because creatives like to say well don't put me in a box when in fact creatives love to be put in a box they just don't want to admit it or label it as such

but if we can give some great parameters and say this is how I have met this clients needs time and time again I want to scale that to reach all the other clients as well it's going to come with some systems and processes for you to be able to organize that bring on more people to your team and scale that and I can help you do that we can help you do that

listen I'm not to into the weeds of the details to understand that every single creative person is unique in how they process their creativity how they structure it how they organize it or don't organize it

and I'm not here to say that that one size everything is going to fit everything you do that's why I want to come along side and work with you but I also understand that things evolve the things that I've brought my clients through a year ago look way different now

than they did a year ago because the landscape is changing the process is changing software is coming out new tools are at our disposal new education is at our disposal

there's all these things that are helping us grow at a rapid rate and so what me and my team are able to come alongside and do is to help navigate all of that organize it so that we can get it all together and basically free your time up to create because that's what you super love to do look

I'm committed to evolving this whole thing alongside you in this new era and with that comes a big announcement of a brand new product that I'm super excited to share with you it's what I call the project management system optimizer I know that's a lot of words going on I thought about a lot of words but listen to the end of the day

this is designed this product is designed to optimize your project management system and if you don't have a project management system I would argue that you probably do even if it's sticky notes or a mole skin you have some sort of project management system

and so with this optimizer does is it helps assess your workflow it helps identify bottlenecks where things are getting clogged up and not proceeding and it also helps to customize systems for your unique creative process and what you're going to get is you're going to get to work along with me and my team we're going to talk about client communication

we're going to talk about deadline management we're going to do a complete administrative overhaul to rid yourself of all the overwhelm that comes with the administrative of I got to keep up I got to keep up I got to keep up this client wants that client wants the deadlines are looming help me to maximize or I should say optimize your project management system by purchasing this kind of introduction package to what I can do for you the project management system

optimizer so here's where you can find that you can go to my store which is DustinPead.com slash store and you can click on the project management system optimizer right there and if you put in the promo code

episode 100 just EP one zero zero will be the code EP 100 if you're watching on YouTube right now I have it on your screen for you you put in that code I'm going to give you 20% off of this project management system optimizer

and I would love to get started with you on that we can expand that into our coaching program as well whatever you need I would love to set up a free consultation call you can use the link in the show notes for that

but I can tell you right now this project management system optimizer been testing it with some clients already and it's powerful stuff and I'm really convinced that if you give me an opportunity to work with you and your team in this that you're going to see a lot of gaps that are going to begin to close in a lot of hours that you're going to begin to buy back because you're using this optimizer

so some closing thoughts again I just want to thank everybody for listening and watching I'm going to remind you that I have a weekly newsletter that goes out every single Sunday a blog post that posts on my website and also gets emailed out every Tuesday

and of course the creativity made easy podcasts right here comes out every single Thursday on YouTube and wherever you can listen to podcasts I would love for you to share this with other creative professionals

and I'm not wait to be back with you in the coming episodes we've got some amazing episodes coming up I've got some guests coming up but specifically next week we're going to talk about how to go from this solo creator or this freelancer where you're kind of doing everything on your own to a creative leader

because as you're scaling your business and as you're scaling your creative process you're going to understand that you're going to have to go from the person that does it all to the person that leads some of it in cast vision

and go a little bit of leadership development specifically for someone who is used to being a solo creator of working on talk transition strategies

we're going to talk team building we're going to talk vision setting and we're going to talk growth management I cannot wait to talk to you about all that and all the future episodes

of the Creativity Made Easy Podcasts it's going to be a great time folks I'm so glad that you're with me let's continue the journey together we'll talk to you next week

Dustin Pead
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