Ep 115: The Sustainable Studio
How to Balance Client Work and Internal Projects Without Burning Out
SUMMARY
Here's a question that keeps most creative entrepreneurs awake at night: How do you find time to work on your business when you're drowning in your business? If you've ever felt trapped in an endless cycle of client delivery with no time for strategic growth, this episode is your roadmap to freedom.
In this episode of Creativity Made Easy, we're solving the sustainable studio challenge—creating systems that protect time for the internal projects that actually fuel your growth without sacrificing client work or your sanity.
The Hidden Cost of Working Only "In" Your Business
Most creative businesses default to working in their business rather than on it. The difference? Working in your business means day-to-day operations—designing, shooting, editing, client delivery. Working on your business means strategy, development, and growth initiatives.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Key Takeaway #1: The sustainable equation for creative businesses is 80% working in the business and 20% working on it—but you must actively protect that 20%.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #2: Internal projects aren't overhead—they're investments that compound into better systems, stronger offerings, and sustainable creative practices.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #3: Building a 15% capacity buffer into all projects creates the temporal margin necessary for strategic business development.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Sustainable businesses prioritize stability and intentional growth over rapid scaling that burns out teams and compromises quality." —Paul Jarvis, Company of One
💬 "Your calendar becomes the ceiling of your business."
💬 "Most sustainable creative businesses aren't the ones that work the hardest—they're the ones that work the smartest."
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️Time & Energy Audit Template - Track where your time actually goes versus where value is created
⚡️DO vs DUE Framework - Transform deadline-driven chaos into proactive work planning
⚡️Company of One by Paul Jarvis - Essential reading on sustainable business growth
⚡️Time Tracking Tools: Harvest or Toggl (both offer free plans)
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
Here's a question that keeps most creative entrepreneurs awake at night. How do you find time to work on your business when you're drowning in your business? Today, we're solving the sustainable studio challenge, creating systems that protect time for the internal projects that actually fuel your growth without sacrificing client work or your sanity.
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, all creative entrepreneurs who are seeking practical, actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency.
I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process coach and consultant. I help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together. If you are new to the podcast, welcome. We're so glad that you're here. I would love for you, if you're listening on an audio podcast platform, to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. That helps get this content out further to those like yourself who can benefit from it.
If you're interested in grabbing any of the free resources that I mentioned on these episodes or on my social media, you can grab those at DustinPead.com slash free. That's D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D.com slash free for all sorts of free resources built just for you. And speaking of social media, I'm dropping some daily insights there. You can follow me mostly on Instagram, but you can also find me on Facebook and LinkedIn as well at Dustin Pead. Again, that's D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D.
All right, let's get into today's show talking about working on the business versus in the business. And first, let's start about defining the difference between the two. Working in the business is kind of like what we do on a day-to-day basis, right? It's client delivery, it's operations. If you're a designer, it's designing. If you're a photographer, it's shooting and editing, right? Like it's these types of things. But working on your business, right, is the strategy or the development or the growth of your business. And most creative businesses default to working in their business.
And there are some fatal long term costs to only working in your business. The first one is that client demands will continue to trump strategy. Now creatives often build businesses for passion or skill, not necessarily for structure. But when client work rolls in, it feels urgent and tangible, right? The money's here. Right now we got to go. So strategic planning doesn't. And so the result is that you get stuck in a loop of constant delivery. You push off the big picture work until things slow down. It's just a busy season right now. If you're saying that to yourself, then you're getting caught in what is known as the client demands trumping the strategy.
Secondly, your identity can become tied to your output. This is especially true for us as creative people, that designers, writers, filmmakers, and creatives, that we often see our value in what we produce. And so what you need to do is you need to shift from maker, right, on the ground level, to builder, right? It sounds like the same, but it's different. And when you do that, you feel like you're abandoning your craft. But actually what's happening is you're evolving it. Right? So just shift the phrase, I'm a maker to I'm a builder. Right? Because I'm not only am I building the creative output that I'm doing, whether it be photography or books or films or whatever it is. Right. But I'm not just making those. I'm building those and I'm building the industry and I'm building my business along with it. It's just a little bit of a verb change or verbal change there that will help you long term.
Another reason you might default to working in the business than ever working on the business is there's a complete lack of systems. Now we talk about this on the show all the time that without systems or standard processes, you become the bottleneck, right? So everything flows through you. And so you spend your time putting out fires rather than building fireproof systems.
Another reason we work in versus on is team dependence is underdeveloped, right? You hesitate to delegate because training someone feels like more work than just doing it ourselves. I hear this all the time. I talk to creatives. It's just faster if I do it. It is in that moment. 100%. You are right. It is faster if you do it, but long term, having the team underdeveloped will cost you. It will cost you the precious time that you enjoy working on some of the things that you were like working on.
In that same vein, you think that maybe nobody can match your quality. And to the most extent, you may be right, but you can also build a team and surround yourself with people that are actually better than you in certain areas. Maybe you're really great at on-set work, and you need some people who are really good at the post-production work, or vice versa, right? The mindset of thinking that no one can match your quality is gonna keep you stuck in every part of the operation, in the admin, in the client relations, in the sales, in the pre-production, the production, the post-production, all of it, right? It's gonna keep you stuck in every part of the situation. So develop your team.
There's a long-term cost here of neglecting to work on the business. And number one is burnout. Number one is burnout. If you're creative, you've experienced this before, it's the feeling that you never rise above the work. And because of it, you burn out and you begin to grow to resent what you once loved.
Second cost is plateaued growth, right? You can't scale what entirely depends on you in your hands, right? Revenue is going to flatten out. It's not going to continue to go up into the left and opportunities are going to stall. Your calendar becomes the ceiling of your business.
Thirdly, the long-term costs of not working on your business is inconsistent client experience, right? Because you don't have the systems and the team aligned, then every project feels like you're starting from scratch. And that inconsistency can hurt your reputation and referrals, which we know are a huge lifeblood in our industry.
Fourthly, there's no exit strategy, right? Businesses that only work when the founder works, they have no long term value. That means no sale, no succession and no passive income.
So how do we make the shift? Let's talk about what working on the business means. First thing, it means defining, right? First defining scalable processes. What does that look like for you and your business? It means delegating. Secondly, without losing quality, it means creating space for vision and innovation. And it means building a business that serves you, that doesn't enslave you. It serves you, doesn't enslave you.
A great way to start this is to use the time and energy audit. It'll help you identify how much time that you're currently spending in each category. It's been said by many business professionals who are very successful at working both in and on that the sustainable equation here is that you should be spending about 80% working, especially if you're just a solopreneur, right? 80% in the work and 20% on the work. Use that as a starting target. Now as the business grows, those are going to shift a little bit and you're going to work less in and you're going to work more on as you begin to delegate and lead those strategies with your brilliance in mind.
Working on rarely has external deadlines, which means it gets pushed aside unless you create artificial DUE dates for the internal DO work. So do not push it aside. Plan the work and work the plan.
So now we know why it's important and we know what we're talking about here about the difference between in and on. So let's get into how do we do this. Let's talk about some first thing we need to do is we need to build some margin into the business model because without it we won't have the time right to be able to work on it as much as we now know that we need to.
So first you need to understand that margin is not just financial it's also time bound as well. It's temporal right. It's creative and strategic all of those things have margin built into it. So you need to price the client work to include some business development time so consider the 15% rule building a 15% capacity buffer into all of your project timelines and project budgets.
In the construction industry, they call these things contingencies, right? They usually build a 10% contingency and that's usually just financial but what I'm suggesting here as well is that with this 15% buffer that I'm asking you to build in is not just in the financial part of it as well, because revisions and whatnot are going to come and that we didn't expect, right? But also to build it into the timeline, the project timelines as well.
Another thing you need to do to build margin is you need to create some sacred time blocks that are protected from client demands. For example, one way that I do this in my business is I take the first Thursday of every month and I do nothing but work on the business. Now there are other times throughout the month where I have set aside as well to work on the business, but as far as like solely dedicated, we do not book meetings or any type of development of any other kind of for clients. For me personally, my team can still work on it, but for me personally, I take that first Thursday of every single month to block that time away from client demands so that I can work on the business and it pays off. Trust me.
And Paul Jarvis is a book company of one great book. He talks about how sustainable businesses, they prioritize stability and intentional growth over rapid scaling that burns out teams and compromises quality. I'm going to say that again. Sustainable businesses. That's what you want to be. They prioritize stability. Number one, and they prioritize intentional growth. and they prioritize those things over rapid scaling, that eventually is gonna burn out your team and compromises the quality.
So let's talk about some time management systems that can protect these internal projects. Number one, finding time does not work, right? You can't find time. You have to make time. Now I know you say, I can't create time. I'm not asking you to create time. I'm asking you to make, carve out, to think about yourself as a woodworker who carves into the big block of wood to make something beautiful. You're not trying to find it because it's not just magically going to appear, you have to do the work to carve it out, to make time to do this.
There's freedom and power in recurring calendar blocks for internal work, just as I said earlier. For me, it's the first Thursday. I don't know why it's Thursday. It's just the way my calendar naturally falls. I still have maybe Friday, I guess, to be able to kind of wrap up some stuff into the week. So Thursdays work for me. But first Thursday of every single month, I am working on the business. I know exactly when it's coming. It's blocked off every single time. It's actually put on my calendar so that nothing else can be added to it.
Secondly, you can try batch processing, which is grouping similar internal tasks for efficiency. We've talked about this before. You might need to have like, every second Monday from nine to 11 a.m. is going to be financial time and we're going to go over the financials. We're going to do the things that we need to do there, right? Working on the business, whatever it is, batch processing does help.
You can use the future you methodology that I talk about a lot. And what this helps you do is it will help you document internal project progress so that momentum isn't lost, right? So you have a set of time to work on the business, you're done with it, or the time is up and you have to go back to working in the business for the rest of the day or the week or the month or whatever it is, right? But when you pick that back up again, you don't want to lose that momentum. So the future you methodology, which we're going to talk about here in just a few weeks on even more detail on this podcast allows you to be able to document those types of things so that you can pick up where you left off without wasting too much time.
Another thing to help is to create internal deadlines. These internal deadlines need to be just as sacred as client deadlines. And I know we often go, well, let's just move this because it's more on the business and I'm the client here, right, in this scenario. So it doesn't really apply to me. But listen, it does matter. It does matter. Make time for the business just as much because if you don't feed that engine, then eventually it's going to die. So internal deadlines need to be just as sacred as client deadline.
Here's an idea that I often use and walk my clients through as well as to use some internal projects as client offering incubators. Here's what I mean by that. Whatever you're working on internally today, working on the business that can become tomorrow's service offerings. So ask your clients as you're developing, hey, I'm working on something like this. I would love your feedback on something like that. Would that help you? Would that benefit you? It's an incubator for client offerings.
And while you're doing that, you can create case studies from the internal work so that when you do launch it, you can attract those similar types of client projects. It allows you beta testing time, like a lot of we hear about in the tech space. It doesn't have to be just for the tech space. When you're working on internal projects, you can test out some new frameworks and tools internally before you fully implement it into ongoing clients. Maybe you have a client who's been with you since the beginning and they know that you test things on them and you give them discounted prices because you test things on them or whatever. Go ahead and test out and be upfront with them. Say, hey, look, this is something I'm working on. I'm testing this so it may be clunky. Just want to give you that caveat, this is not our normal way of doing things. This is kind of an in development mode right now. You're seeing the car go down the assembly line. And I would like your feedback on how that is coming together and how you're interacting with it.
Lastly, I want to talk about ROI, which we know means the return on investment. I want to talk about the ROI for non-client work. And here's why the traditional kind of ROI measurement is going to fall short when you start looking at internal projects. Number one, it usually only measures financial return. So you're going to miss all the growth of efficiency, team morale, or clarity in your systems. Number two, traditional ROI ignores long-term strategic value, like scalability, or positioning in the industry or market, or your brand alignment.
Thirdly, traditional ROI can't quantify creative benefits like innovation or speed or quality. Those are intangible, but they're very real. We feel them every single day. Fourthly, traditional ROI overlooks the cost savings, right? It gives you what your traditional ROI talks about what's coming in as the return, right? But you miss sometimes what it's saving you. It's saving you time, fewer errors and reduced burnout. Those are very real things. And lastly, traditional ROI misses the culture and the brand trust, right? The internal work strengthens what actually fuels your growth. You can feel it and your team can feel it around you.
So there are three types of internal project ROIs I want to close talking about today. Number one is direct revenue, right? That's the traditional. Hey, I worked on it, now we have new services and improved efficiency, thus we are making more money. That's the one traditional type of ROI. Secondly, but more importantly, I would say is the strategic value. The time that you spent on team development and process improvement, very important ROI to pay attention to. And then lastly, is this what we call, business owners call creative capital. That's what we're talking about. Innovation and market advantage. Competitive advantages. Those are three types of areas in which your internal projects can create ROI for you. Direct revenue, strategic value, and creative capital.
So what now? I want to give you three actions to build in sustainable internal project capacity. First way is this. Audit your current on versus in ratio. Track your time for one week and calculate what percentage goes into client work versus business development, not admin, not, I've got to track some receipts, but actual business development. Most creatives are going to be shocked when they look at that number, at the imbalance of how much they're working in versus on.
Secondly, I want you to block some sacred time. Schedule one day a month, one day a quarter, one day a week, one hour a week, whatever it is. and focus solely on internal projects. Mark it as business development and treat it like your most important client meeting. Do not cancel it. Do not punt it to next week because then you'll punt it to the following week and you'll never get it done.
Last thing I want you to do is I want you to work on creating internal project pipelines. I want you to list five internal projects right now that you think would move your business forward. And I want you to prioritize that list and start assigning realistic timelines. We all know here we do that with the do versus due framework.
Before we close, I want to remind you some resources that we mentioned in this episode. The Company of One Book by Paul Jarvis, pick that up for sure. The do versus due framework is available on my website, dustinpead.com slash free. There are lots of time tracking tools out there to help you, like Harvest or Toggle. You can do free plans with them to help you actually see what you're spending your time on. And then after you see what you're spending your time on, you can fill out the time and energy audit. I have a free template of that. It's a Dan Martell concept that I built a template for. So you can pick up that free template on my website as well. DustinPead.com slash free.
Listen, most sustainable creative businesses, they aren't the ones that work the hardest. They're the ones that work the smartest. And by protecting your time for internal projects, you're not just maintaining your business, you're evolving it. Every hour that you invest in working on your business compounds over time into better systems, stronger offerings, and ultimately a more sustainable creative practice.
If you're ready to build margin into your business model, go to dustinpead.com for free resources that I mentioned in this episode, as well as grab a spot on my calendar. I would love to give you a free discovery call where we can just kind of talk about the things that you're working on and how we can help build that margin so that you can spend more time working on your business.
You can follow me at Dustin Pead on social media for weekly insights on building sustainable creative practices. Next week, we're going to talk about systems that set you free, how processes create creative independence as we get closer to the 249th birthday of our great country. Can't wait to talk to you then on Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.