Ep 103: Q1 Review & Q2 Strategy Session
Transform Chaos Into Clarity
SUMMARY
In this strategic episode of Creativity Made Easy, I walk creative professionals through an essential quarterly business review process. Looking back at Q1 achievements and lessons while mapping out Q2 opportunities, this episode provides a practical framework for evaluating progress and setting actionable goals for the months ahead. Whether you're a freelancer, agency owner, or creative entrepreneur, this systematic approach to quarterly planning will help transform insights into focused action steps for sustainable growth.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Separate Emotions from Outcomes: When reviewing your Q1 performance, it's essential to objectively assess your results without emotional attachment. Look at the data, identify patterns across projects and clients, and measure results against your original objectives.
⚡️ Track the Right Metrics: Creative businesses should measure four critical areas: revenue versus projections, time allocation reality versus plans, client satisfaction indicators, and personal creative fulfillment. These metrics tell the complete story of your business health.
⚡️ Strategic Focus, Not Addition: Q2 planning isn't about doing more—it's about strategic focus and choosing key opportunities that align with your long-term vision. Use the 12-Month Outlook framework to organize projects through the 4D Creative Process (Define, Dream, Design, Develop).
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Your Q1 achievements aren't just metrics—they're evidence of your systems either working or not working. When something succeeds, you need to document that process."
💬 "The most valuable lessons don't come from what went right always either, but sometimes understanding why certain initiatives fall short of expectations are some of the most valuable lessons."
💬 "Quarter two is not a time to go wild, right? You kind of went wild at the beginning of the year, but quarter two is for beginning to narrow that focus."
EPISODE RESOURCES
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TRANSCRIPT
If your creative business feels like it's running you instead of you running it, then you're about to discover the quarterly planning system that will change everything. In this episode, I'm going to show you exactly how to transform your quarter one insights into a strategic quarter two action plan. That's going to bring clarity to chaos and purpose to your creative work. 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. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative coach and consultant. And I'm here to help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams so that they can create with efficiency as they scale together. And part of scaling and efficiency is review and strategy. And it's that time of the year we've ended the first quarter of 2025 already. I'm not sure where the time has gone, but we're there and we are reviewing quarter one and now we are intentionally and strategically planning out our second quarter.
So if you're a creative of any kind, designer, photographer, writer, all creative entrepreneurs, this episode is obviously for you. Every episode is for you and I'm excited to dive into it with you today. So we're going to dive into how to review your Q1 performance and create a strategic plan for Q2 that will help your creative business go to the next level. But before we dive into that, I want to remind you that if you are watching on YouTube, I would love for you to hit the like, subscribe and ring the bell, all three buttons so that you can be notified every time we drop new content just like this every single Thursday, release a podcast here on YouTube and all audio podcasting platforms.
So if you're listening there, whatever your platform allows, I would really appreciate a five star rating or review that helps get this content out further to those like yourself who can benefit from it. Every Sunday I release a newsletter with kind of top five insights from the week. And then every Tuesday I release a blog post style article to kind of help some of the things that we're talking about as well for creative professionals. You can sign up for that newsletter and blog posts that comes out, each once a week, Sundays and Tuesdays. If you go to dustinpead.com and click on the newsletter button, or just go to dustinpead.com/newsletter.
All right, let's get into it. So we have finished quarter one before we move into quarter two, let's pump the brakes just for a second. And let's do some reflection here. No, I'm not talking about the kind where you meditate and close your eyes, which if that's your thing, go for it. I think it can certainly help some mindfulness practices, but that's not what we're talking about today. Today we're looking backwards so that we can move forward with intention. Your data or your insights from quarter one, it's gonna tell a story. And the question to ask yourself right now is, are you listening to that story?
Are you paying attention to it? Are you understanding the nuances, the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities, the threats, right? The SWOT. SWOT is just a methodology, right? It's just a way to objectively assess things. So there's three things I want you to remember no matter what system or methodology you use when you are trying to objectively assess some past occurrences or patterns or results. Number one, you have to separate emotions from outcomes. Now this is super difficult for me. Enneagram Four noted here on this podcast for a long time. I really love my feelings and my emotions and it's hard for me to separate my emotions from the outcomes that I've seen.
There's some things in my business over this last quarter that have been blown me away. Wow, I didn't think we could do that. There's other areas of my business in the last quarter where I go, man, I feel like a failure because of that lack of outcome, but we have to learn to separate those emotions from the outcome. That's the first thing. Number two, you have to be able to identify patterns across projects and clients, right? So what are the kind of the same things that come up over and over and over again, whether it's internally with your team or with your project. Then thirdly, you have to be able to measure those results against the objectives.
So what are the patterns and what are the results that came out of it versus the original objectives that you had for the quarter? And if you didn't have any objectives for the quarter, this is a great time to start for next quarter so that you do have some objectives, some key metrics that any creative business should be tracking is right. Revenue versus projections. We're in this to make money. We're in this to provide for our families and for ourselves and grow our mission and our vision for what the company could be. So you have to measure, right? The actual revenue versus what you projected, right?
And so this is a great opportunity for me to plug the core group, not being paid by them in any way, shape or form, but I use them. The core group uses a profit first financial model and they specifically help creative businesses with their finances and they will handle all your bookkeeping and your payables and all these different things, right? But they will be able to show you your revenue versus projections. I just got my stuff in recently for a couple, about four weeks ago to show me, this is what actually happened, right? But they also know what I'm trying to project as well. So we were able to kind of analyze that.
Another metric that you need to be analyzing is your time allocation versus how much you actually planned for. The time allocation reality, versus how much time you actually planned for. So this is where the do versus do process comes in handy. Where I teach a lot of my time margin when it comes to projects is are you allocating for the time that it's actually going to take, not the dream land of, I can do that tonight. I can complete this whole big long edit tonight and I'll have it to the client first thing tomorrow morning. They're going to have no revisions. They're going to love it. And so there, everybody's going to leap with joy and dance and Lily fields.
We all know that's not going to happen, right? There's going to be things that come up. There's going to be revisions that come up. And so allowing yourself that margin time. And so did you allow yourself that margin time or did you not? And how can you better do that in quarter two? I would argue you could do it with my do versus do framework, DO versus DUE. You can look that up later. All right. Another thing you need to be measuring as a creative business is client satisfaction, right? Client satisfaction is a big deal. One thing that I've been working on just this week as the time of this recording is putting together just a short survey of, over the last 30 days, what has the journey of working with me been like for you?
And that's gonna help me see that. And as I do that every month, every 30 days over time, I'm gonna be able to see with individual clients and with the business as a whole, I'm gonna be able to see client satisfaction. And I'm gonna be able to see up seasons and down seasons. And I'm gonna be able to ask the questions why, and I will be able to lean in, keep my foot on the gas on the strengths and be able to lean in on the weaknesses that I can grow client satisfaction. We are here to serve our clients, so client satisfaction is ultimately what pays the bills.
And then lastly, you need to be measuring personal creative fulfillment. Now I know this is something that most businesses don't measure because it's just about getting the thing done and the bottom dollar and can we win that project bid? But listen, if you're not personally fulfilled in the creativity in your creative business, all the other projections and all the other metrics don't matter. And so you need to find the space for you that really fulfills you creatively and sit there as much as possible.
Now, if you're an owner, I understand there's other things that come along with this, or maybe you're a mid-level manager, or maybe you're at the bottom and you don't get to choose what you want to do. But at the end of the day, if your personal creative fulfillment isn't up part of a metric that you're measuring, then you're going to be miserable and your business is going to suffer for it. All right. So we talked about what we need to be measuring when we look back at our previous quarter, whether it's quarter one or whatever quarter you find yourself in right now, looking back at the previous quarter, we understand that your quarter, your previous quarter achievements, they're not just metrics. What they actually are is evidence of your systems either working or not working.
And when something succeeds, you need to document that process. Yes, you need to celebrate it when something succeeds, but you need to document the process because you're like, Hey, that really worked. Why did that really work? Let's document it so that we can do it again and again for not only the same client, but for all the rest of our clients, right? The most valuable lessons don't come from what went right always either, but sometimes understanding why certain initiatives fall short of expectations are some of the most valuable lessons.
So two major parts of this kind of extracting some valuable lessons, right, is externally with your clients and internally or retrospectively with yourself or your team. Right. Maybe you are the team, right. But maybe just having a time for yourself and you can reflect what worked, what didn't, why did it work? Why didn't it work is important, but also creating client feedback integration strategies are going to be huge for you as you grow your creative business, because you won't be able to identify always what worked and what went so well.
Maybe for you, it was just kind of average and okay, but the client really was wowed by it. Why were they wowed by it? Was there something, was there a part of the process that took it to the next level for them? And if so, maybe that's an indicator for other clients as well. I was recently sitting in a potential client meeting and I was sharing some things that I thought were extremely kind of average, mundane, like, yeah, everybody knows this, right? And the potential client was like, wow, that's, I never thought of that before.
And I'm going, what? You never thought of that before. And then it dawned on me as I was leaving that meeting, like not everybody sees that, not everybody thinks like that. And that is a unique value that I can bring. That's unique value that you can bring when you see that a client has a light bulb go off that was not a light bulb for you, right? That's a moment there to lean in, but really asking for their feedback. Don't overwhelm them with a 40 question survey, right? Send them five questions once a month at the most, right? About how they have, how they felt about working with you, what they felt about the outcomes, what they wish was better, what they really love, you know, all these things, right?
Those things as you track those along, whether you use it like a Notion board or Excel spreadsheet, it doesn't matter. As you track those, you're gonna really start to understand the meaningful insights and the valuable lessons that you need to grow your business from one quarter to the next. All right. So we talked all about looking back at the previous quarter quarter one, if you're listening to this episode or watching this episode in real time, when it comes out in April of 2025, whatever quarter you're looking at previously versus the next quarter coming up.
But specifically, I love the momentum from Q1 to Q2. It's very, very unique. And so let's get into talking about what Q2 can look like after you've reflected on Q1. All right. What I love about this moment in time, when we go from the end of the first quarter, which is the end of March, into the beginning of April, is this, by this time, you have probably faltered a little bit on your personal and professional goals. You set some high lofty goals back in January or the end of the year and now you're starting to see how it's actually shaping out, right?
Anything worth trying is worth trying for 90 days. Well, you just tried it for the past 90 days. How is it working for you? Do you need to shift some things? Are there some goals that need to be completely redone and re-changed? Is it the same objective as it was three months ago. Are the things that were super important to you three months ago, are they still the same things that were super important to you now? Sometimes they are, and that's great. Sometimes they're not, and that's okay too. But quarter two planning isn't about adding on, right? It's about strategic focus and choosing some key opportunities that align with your long-term vision rather than pursuing every possible direction.
Four areas here that I want you to think about as you're looking ahead at quarter two and you're stepping into it out of quarter one. We've learned some things, we've recognized some strengths, we've identified some weaknesses, some opportunities, some threats. And so now as we go into quarter two, there's these four areas I want you to think about as you make decisions about what you're going to focus on in Q2. Number one, strategic alignment. Your strategy changes, right? But your vision doesn't really change, right? How can you align strategy even more narrowed and even more focused and even closer into where you're headed with your vision?
I think a lot of times we start Q1 with this big wide list of all these things we're going to tackle. But I think as the year goes on, I see that road kind of narrow and narrow and narrow. And that's not a bad thing. That's a great thing. You can continue to shave off and rid all the fluff of the stuff that you wild ideas that you had in January. And you can begin to get really strategic about the alignment that your decisions are going to have in quarter two. Number two, profit potential. Profit potential.
This is what keeps the business financially moving forward. Are there some things in your business that are just making more money or that should you be charging more for certain things? Market change for that or clients coming too easy because you're so cheap. And do you not have enough money to pay the help that you need to get these things done in a scalable way? So look at the profitability potential as you move into quarter two. Number three, like I said earlier, creative fulfillment. This is a major factor in how you're going to be able to continue to push forward and in Q2.
If you're drained creatively from Q1 and you have no change in sight for Q2, by the time you get to the summer, you're going to really be wondering if you should just fold this whole operation or not. So find a way and find a strategy around creative fulfillment for your second quarter. And lastly, long-term business building value. Let's not just think in this only quarter two mindset, right? At some level, we want to look a little macro or a sorry, a little micro. But I think always in every quarter, there needs to be a hint of macro.
I know for me and my business right now, over the last three to six months, I've been working on a three, five and kind of a three to five year business plan with some long term goals and the 10 and 20 year time frame. Right. And I'm always kind of keeping those in sight as I'm adjusting. But as the road narrows and narrows and narrows, as I get closer to those things, then we understand we have strategic alignment. We have profitability potential. We're keeping creative fulfillment a factor, right? But we're also focusing on those long-term business goals and long-term business building value.
All right, there's one tool that I have used for many years that I just created one day on a spreadsheet because we needed it and I was just kind of fed up with having to constantly remember what has to happen each time every year in order for us to propel the momentum that we need to, especially in Q2 as we go into the summer, which we're going to talk about here over the next few months on this podcast and on the blog. But this is called the 12 month outlook or the 12 month rhythm, what are the 12 month planner, whatever it is.
And in every planner you get, you're going to open it up. And then somewhere you're going to see some type of an annual planner where it's going to have 12 months in there and it's going to give you an opportunity to kind of jot some things down. On my 12 month outlook, I pair it with the 4D creative process, which quickly, if you don't know what that is, it's a creative process that walks you from very beginning of identifying the problem all the way through delivering the final results.
So number one of the first D of the four Ds is to define the problem, right? Creativity is problem solving, nothing else. We got to define what it is that we're trying to do here. The second D is to dream. This is the brainstorm session. This is where creatives really love and thrive and they have all sorts of ideas. It's about quantity of ideas, not quality of ideas. And then there's the third D, which is to design. And this is where we're taking that big bucket of ideas. We're picking out the things that are work and we're putting together the blueprints of how we can see solving this problem coming to life.
And then the last D is to develop. And this is where we take those blueprints and we begin building out the solution that we worked towards over the 4D creative process. Now I use this 4D creative process on my 12 month outlook on the left hand kind of vertical. I'm not sure if it's the X or Y axis. I can never remember. I guess it's the X axis. I can't remember, but vertically on the left hand side, I have each stage of the 4D creative process.
And then horizontally across the top, have each month of the year. And so every single month of the year, there's an opportunity for me to be defining something, to be dreaming about something, project to be designing projects and solutions, and for me to be developing those. And so every single month of the year, I'm always doing at least one, I'm always moving towards at least one direction in on those creative process every single month of the year. And so you see that on the left versus the months across the top.
And what it allows you to do is just take a 30,000 foot view and be able to see, well, if I want to see my, just take this, say you want to write a book. If I want to see my book release in October, or let's just say December to get to the end of the year. If I want my book to release in December, this is the same method I used to plan out how I wrote and released my first book last year, growing upward. Check it out on my website. It's a short memoir about mental health.
If I want that book to come out in December, then I have to be developing it or writing it, right? Probably for a good six months. That takes me back to June. Now, the design phase of that would be really kind of narrowing down in my stuff and see how I'm working backwards, right? So if I need to start developing the last D in June. That means I probably need to be designing and kind of narrowing things down in mid April or May. And then that probably means I'm going to brainstorm about what this book could be in February or so.
And then January, I'm going to really kind of define the structure, say this is what I think the book needs to ultimately accomplish. And so as I'm walking through the year, by the time I get through December, I've walked through the entire 40 creative process using this 12 month outlook and staying on track. And I'm just looking at one month at a time. So when I come to May, I'm looking at all my projects that I'm defining, all the projects that I'm dreaming about, all the projects that I am designing and all the projects that I or the team are developing and having that strategically throughout the year will help.
Make your quarters in your months, the months and the weeks add up to months and the months add up to quarters and the quarters add up to years, right? And it comes, you know, as you get older, it comes faster than you think. And so there are opportunities there for you to kind of put your milestones in along the way so that you can remain focused. So every month on my whiteboard, I've got the four D's written out. What am I defining this month? What am I dreaming about this month? What am I designing or creating blueprints for this month? And then lastly, what am I developing this month?
And as I move across the timeline of the 12 month outlook, it moves along with me. And so as you're preparing for quarter two, maybe you're like, that'd have been great if I'd have had that in quarter one. It's okay. You can start it now in quarter two. Not all things have to end in December. You could have some shorter term things that end in September and you don't have to have a whole month for each D. It may only take you a week to really define it or less. It might only take you a day to define it, right?
Then you can spend three or four weeks dreaming it, and then you can spend a couple of weeks designing it and kind of laying out what it's gonna be, and then you can spend the bulk of your time, right, actually doing the work and making the thing happen, which we know again is where the do versus do framework comes in. So can grab your 12 month outlook sheet from dustinpead.com/free. That's dustinpead.com/free and click on the 12 month outlook and start using that today as you plan through quarter two and beyond.
All right, before we wrap up, I want to just kind of give us an action plan through quarter two here, because I think often what happens is we start our quarters out strong. And then by the time we get to that seventh or eighth week of a 12 to 13 week quarter, we're like, what am I supposed to be doing again? And so I think, yes, having these quarterly goals are a good thing, but you need to break them down into monthly milestones and you need to review those milestones and what we call like review, built in review checkpoints, right?
So every month, throw yourself a task, a monthly task on your project manager or a reminder on your phone or a post-it note that someone walks into your office and sticks on your forehead every 30 days and says, Hey, just review the milestones of what you said you were going to do this month. Where are you at on the 4d creative process? Where are you at in the 12 month outlook? Where are you at?
And what you said you were going to be narrowing in towards for Q2. And whether you have a team or not having a solid project management tool or system that's going to work for you is key here because you can't be expected to remember everything at all times and to be constant on everything at all times. So having those triggers to go off when they need to go off and remind you when they need to remind you are going to be big.
Now, if you do have a team, whether it's just plus one or plus 20, it doesn't matter. Some communication protocols here are going to be in place and you're going to need to remember in your one-on-ones. You're going to need to remember in your weekly you know, huddle ups, whatever you have, you're going to be able to, you're going to have to remember to communicate those on a regular basis. So that's the, if that means the old school way of writing it down on the palm of your hand so that you can remember it when you get in class, do that, whatever it takes, do it because the consistency is what's going to get you there in the end, every single time consistency is what wins.
And then you need to set up the systems and your, in your world and your business to be able to create that consistency. And that's what I help teams do every single day. We're creating systems and processes so that we can be consistent because consistency breeds excellence and breeds scalability. Quarter two is not a time to go wild, right? You kind of went wild at the beginning of the year, but quarter two is for beginning to narrow that focus, some focus metrics for Q2. That's what I want you to focus on in the next week as we're entering into this time period.
Create some time blocks for you to move towards those strategic priorities, right? We don't just happenstance come across success. It's because we planned time to move towards it, right? If you want to work out, that's a goal of yours is to work out every day. If you don't plan the time to do it, if you don't put it in your calendar, if you don't block out time in your day, then it's not going to happen. You're not just going to magically stumble into, look, I happened to work out today. Great. That actually lines up with my goals.
It's intentionality. So time blocking for these priorities is going to be big for you in quarter two. Don't let the month happen to you. Don't let the quarter happen to you. You can take a whole take hold of it with time blocking to pursue your strategic priorities. All right. You have to say no to some things and that's okay. But saying no, create space for some very strategic yeses.
All right. So remember reviewing Q1 and reviewing the past quarter is going to be key for you to understand how to move into quarter two the best. You can use my free tool, the 12 month outlook. You can get that at dustinpead.com/free. If you have any questions or comments about this, I would invite you to do that. Reach out to me on social media @dustinpead, P-E-A-D. You can email me, dp@dustinpead.com. You can find me anywhere online, my website as well. You can fill out a contact form or even schedule a call and we can talk about these things.
But I wanna thank y'all so much for joining me through this quarterly review time. Cannot wait to be back with you next week. We have a very special guest in next week's episode that I cannot wait to share with you. You're not gonna wanna miss it. Talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy podcast.