Ep 106: Profitable Project Planning
Setting Timelines That Protect Your Bottom Line
SUMMARY
Have you ever found yourself working nights and weekends on a project that should have been profitable, but somehow isn't? You're not alone. Many creative professionals struggle with timeline management and project planning that protects their financial margins. In this episode, we dive into the art of setting realistic timelines that not only keep clients happy but also ensure your business remains profitable.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Key Takeaway #1: Creative professionals chronically underestimate timelines
Creative entrepreneurs tend to fall victim to optimism bias, imagining best-case scenarios while failing to account for administrative tasks and client communication time. This "planning fallacy" leads to underestimating project timelines even when we have past experience telling us otherwise. Perfectionism compounds the problem by extending project timelines through over-iteration and editing, draining both emotional energy and financial resources.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #2: Implement a change request protocol to manage scope creep
Scope creep—allowing the original scope of work to expand beyond what was initially agreed upon—is one of the biggest threats to project profitability. To combat this, establish clear project boundaries, overcommunicate expectations throughout the project lifecycle, and implement a formal change request protocol. Build in financial buffers of 10-20% to account for contingencies, just like builders do with construction projects.
⚡️ Key Takeaway #3: Create timeline visualizations clients can easily understand
Keep clients informed about project progress with simple, transparent timeline tracking. Dustin calls this the "pizza delivery system"—just as pizza chains now show customers exactly where their order is in the process, creatives should implement automated updates that show clients the project status. This proactive communication prevents misunderstandings, reduces client anxiety, and sets appropriate expectations.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Underestimating timelines can be a chronic problem that you need to address. There's a common challenge that creatives face, and that is underestimating time needs while overestimating the capacity of what it takes to deliver."
💬 "Small change adds up to big change real quick. It's a snowball effect."
💬 "Be proactive here. Profitable project planning is all about being proactive, not reactive. You need to protect financial margins. It's not greed, but it's essential for your sustainable creativity."
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️FREE LIVE Webinar: Join Dustin and Christian Brim (author of "Profit First for Creatives") on Wednesday, April 30th at 1 PM EST. Register here
⚡️ Connect with Dustin: Follow @dustinpead on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube
⚡️Free Guide: Download the free guide to eliminating project pitfalls at dustinpead.com/pitfalls
⚡️Book Recommendation: "Growing Upward" by Dustin Pead - Available at dustinpead.com/book or wherever books are sold
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
You ever found yourself working nights and weekends on a project that should have been profitable, but somehow isn't still today? We're tackling the art of setting realistic timelines that protect your bottom line while keeping clients happy. Let's get into it.
Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome, everyone, to the creativity made easy podcast where we transform Creative Chaos into Clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, all creative entrepreneurs seeking practical, actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative coach and consultant, and I help creatives know themselves, their process, and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together. And before we get into today's episode,
Got a really cool thing coming up and just under a week on Wednesday, April 30th at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. I'm doing a free live webinar with Christian Brim. If you don't know Christian, he is the author of Profit First for Creatives. And he is having a webinar with just me and him and is absolutely free to you. It's called they tell they titled it.
Smells like creative chaos. Organize it, claim it, and get it done. But I'm going to be sharing a lot of principles that I teach on here in this podcast, sharing a lot of those with you in a live format so you have an opportunity for Q&A and all that stuff. But you can register for free if you go to dustinpead.com slash live. That's dustinpead.com slash L-I-V-E to register.
Also want to remind you, you can follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, all the places at Dustin Pead, P-E-A-D. All let's get into today's episode. Today is all about profitable project planning. That's right. We said it last week, the triple P's. We're going to set some timelines that can respect your financial margins. So there was a time, not too long ago, I was writing my very first book. It is the only book that I've written to date.
I have working on my second book right now. And I had just a very ambitious. I didn't know it was ambitious at the time. I had an ambitious goal of releasing this book in October of it had been twenty twenty four. And I don't know why October. Maybe I just thought I needed some time to get it done. And so I gave myself nine months to outline, write, and market the launch of this book. And let me tell you the biggest lesson I learned, not the biggest reward, the biggest reward was getting it done and having the book available for my kids. It's a memoir called Growing Upward. If you want to check it out, it's on my website. Go to dustinpead.com slash book. You can buy it there or Amazon or anywhere audio books are sold. It's called Growing Upward. Just search for my name and you'll see it.
But really what I learned was a valuable lesson in setting timelines. Nine months is not a lot of time to start from just an idea of the book all the way to launching the book. That is not a lot of time. And I quickly found myself having to block out entire days to write just because I needed to be able to stay on some sort of timeline tracker to be able to launch this book even semi successfully. And it got a really good reception with local friends and friends across the country, a self-published book. I didn't put really any marketing dollars into it, just some time, some sweat equity really to get it out there. But what I learned in that is that there's a common challenge that creatives face, and that is underestimating time needs and underestimating time needs while overestimating the capacity of what it takes to deliver. And so today we're going to build on last week's discussion where we talked about structure, how structure enhances creativity. So let's dive right in here.
The first thing I need you to understand is why creative professionals chronically underestimate timelines. There's a bit of an optimism bias here, right? We naturally imagine the best case scenarios. Oh, the client's going to come in. They're going to be super easy to work with. They're not going to demand anything extra. It's going to be something that I can offload to a contractor and I can make 3X margin on this. And that's going to be great. The problem is that we've failed to account for the administrative tasks and client communication time as well. There's this planning fallacy, right? Psychological tendency to underestimate even with the past experience of success, right? We talked about last week how we've released the album before and it was a big success and we could probably just do it again. But that's a planning fallacy. It's a tendency to underestimate even with that past experience is not always the case over and over again, especially as you scale. Perfectionism plays a big role in this too. Perfectionism extends project timelines beyond initial estimates. And it happens by over iterating and editing. I'm not going to, we've, we've talked before about perfectionism on, this podcast before, and I'm not going to spend a ton of time on that today, but if you're struggling with project timelines and deliverables within your budget constraints, the first place I would look is inward and ask yourself, are you demanding too much of yourself or too much of your team in this project? Because you're constantly over-iterating and editing and it's extending the timeline and it's draining mental and emotional energy across you and the team and it's draining your account, your financial account as well. There's a compounding impact of multiple underestimations across a project lifestyle that can be devastating to your organization. So you need to understand before we move even past really into the bulk of today's episode. Need to understand that underestimating timelines can be a chronic problem that you need to address.
All right, the second thing to consider when profitable project planning the triple P right is you need to take into account the hidden costs that scope creep can bring and how to account for those. So if you're unfamiliar with this term scope creep, I've written about it before on the blog. I've mentioned it and passing a few times here on the podcast. But essentially scope creep is allowing the original scope of the project, of the work to creep higher and higher and higher or more and more and more than originally estimated. And this leads to confusion. It leads to smaller financial margins. It leads to bottlenecks with other projects and stress across the entire entire team and even stress with the client, even though they're the ones that are more than likely inducing this problem.
So to identify scope creep early, you need to have some clear project boundaries. And we're to talk about some of those today. But to over communicate expectations multiple times, it's not just one time, but throughout the project, over communicate those expectations. Never there's people might get annoyed that with the over communication, but you'd rather than be annoyed with over communication than frustrated by the lack of communication and understanding about what's really happening. There's this fallacy in creative work and really a lot of work. I mean, I have friends that are electrical contractors too, and they're constantly dealing with these change orders, right? And the customer or the client will come to them and say, hey, just a small change, just a small change.
So there's this small change fallacy, right? It's seemingly minor requests that can create major disruptions. We've all experienced this before. It's a snowball effect, right? I just got this one little small change and that leads to another small change, another small change. And the next thing you know, small change, just like your change jar when you're saving up for vacation, small change adds up to big change. Real quick, it's a snowball effect. So. You need to implement in your organization a change request protocol and that's going to help you maintain profitability. So this happens upfront internally with the team. First, you're going to to build out this SOP, this standard operating procedure for how you're going to handle change requests. How will you receive them? How will you come back with them, which we're going to talk about here in a second? How will you process those internally? How will you divvy those up? How will it affect them? The bottom line, all of that thing, all of those things need to be considered. And then also the protocol needs to be communicated and implemented with the client themselves so that they understand when there's a small change, here's how we go about doing it.
And so let me just give you some language to use when addressing some scope changes with the client. They come and they have, just a small change and it's more small changes and more small changes. The first one is let's let's talk through this and what this adds to the scope. It could sound like this, right? Hey, this sounds like a great idea. This could really enhance the project. But just to keep everything aligned, let's talk through how this impacts the scope and timeline and budget so that we can plan accordingly. You see, there's some enthusiasm there. You're reinforcing. This could be a really great idea, but you're setting the tone and the expectation clearly, another way to say it is, look, I'm happy to explore that. Let's revisit, though, the agreement first. So the way you can say that is, hey, that's a great suggestion. Before we dive in, let's take a look at our initial agreement and see what adjustments need to be made to accommodate this shift. Again, staying positive up front, but clearly communicating this is what it's going to take in order to make that happen.
And then a third one, hey, we're outgrowing the original scope. It might be time to scale the plan a little bit more than we originally expected. And the way you can say that is, hey, it looks like the project has evolved beyond the initial scope, which is a good sign of momentum, positive reinforcement. But I recommend that we scale this plan to match. And so I'll put together some options and we can discuss those next steps. It lets them know that we're getting past that original scope. And we're going to need to build, we're going to need to kind of reevaluate the circumstances so that we can still hit your original goals, which we're going to talk about here later as well. You need to build this, build these appropriate, what we're calling like scope buffers into the initial project timeline. And I suggest using anywhere from 10 to 20% time and financial margin. As you're thinking about your financial margins, part of those financial margins isn't just profit.
Part of those financial margins is like a, what, what a lot of people will call in contracting world contingency, right? Our family loves to watch hometown, um, Ben and Erin, Erin Napier out in Laurel, Mississippi. It's a huge, uh, hugely popular show. We'll watch that show and they'll say, all right, your budget is a hundred thousand dollars. We're gonna, um, find you something for, uh, $90,000 and we're going to have a 10% contingency in there or they'll say, Hey, a hundred thousand dollars plus a 10% contingency in there because things are going to happen. Things are going to come up that were unexpected. And so same for you when you're building these scope buffers into your project timeline and project proposal, just think about like, Hey, part of that margin, part of that financial margin we're talking here, you need to account for some contingency here in that.
All right, so we talked a little bit of financial systems and things to consider there with the scope creep, but let's talk about the buffer, the scope buffers that we talked about. Let's talk about systems that we can implement to protect your team without inflating the estimates and getting in. And next thing you know, you're having to charge $30,000 for a $3,000 project just because you have all these buffers put in, right? So there's a difference between padding, right? Which is that financial profit margin, and then some strategic buffering, which is that contingency that we talked about. so, but when it comes to the physical product project itself, implementing the critical chain method for creative projects is super important, meaning, hey, who is critical in this project? And at what point are they critical in this project? And that will allow you to build out your system of time.
As well as financial margin as you plan in those scope buffers. You need to consider using time blocking to create some forced work sessions that might reduce some context switching. We've talked about this many, many times on this podcast that, today is a podcast day or today is a design day or whatever today might be for you and your team. Today, we're going to block off this day to do this type of task or totally work on this one project so we're not constantly context switching between projects. You can even use a ratio rule if you wanted to with your time. You could say, hey, only X percent of our available time is going to go to planned tasks and the rest of it we're going to leave as a contingency for those unplanned tasks. You could use a 60 40 rule, a 70 30 rule. It doesn't matter. But going into it, understanding that, OK, I have a contractor, I really want to plan out about 70% of his time and I want to leave about 30% margin there because I know things are going to come up that I need to throw on his plate. And when I do, I want him to have the margin for it. So it's planning that, that team capacity because that team capacity accounts for energy cycles, not just hours. need to think about, okay, we have a lot going on right now.
So that 70-30 right now may need to be more like an 85-15 just in this season. And we're gonna look at that. We're gonna keep our eye on that as we help lead and manage this team towards sustainable, creative success. And the last thing I wanna mention here is some time tracking tools can actually help you learn the actual time that you and your team are using versus the estimated time. This is something that I implement with my clients all the time, whether it be harvest or toggle or whatever time tracking tool you want to use. can use a timer on your phone. It doesn't matter as long as using something consistently to say this is how long it takes to do this type of project with this type of client so that when you go to make your next proposal, you can look at it and say, I know exactly how long this is going to take this contractor or this or our team to really pull this off. So here's how I'm going to estimate that project.
All right, so let's get back to some client communication strategies for this timeline management, because that's really where the profitable project planning really starts to come into play. And we really start to see things flesh out a little bit. It's in this timeline management strategy, right? So the first thing you need to do is set expectations from the very first client interaction. This is what we're going to do. This is what we're about. This is the timeline that it's going to take in order to do this type of project, because Listen, your clients don't know what it takes to get these types of projects done. That's why they're coming to you. So educate them without talking down to them. Just educate them about your creative process and the timeline. It's so, so valuable here. And when you're doing that, be sure to present timelines that include review cycles and revision periods. When we're looking at our tracking system, which we're going to talk about here in a second. we're thinking about the customer journey going from left to right. What we learned really quickly is that there's this time here in between the editing or the working on it. In between that and in between that and the deliverable, that there's this review revision time for us to say, OK, well, Maybe maybe maybe change this, maybe edit that, maybe maybe take this away, maybe spawn the new idea scope creep that I'd like to maybe add in. So being sure to present the timelines of OK, listen, we're going to have this X amount of time, two weeks, two days doesn't matter for review and revision. And that's how much time we're going to spend on review and revision. If we go past that, then we're going to need to reevaluate this whole project. And there's there's certainly ways that we can do that. So let's talk about how to do that.
Let's talk about when and how to push back on unrealistic deadline expectations. All right, so here's some times when you need to push back. You need to push back a little bit when the deadline sacrifices quality. Understanding that you know that the work is gonna suffer if we rush this. You need to push back when it affects other client commitments, that you risk dropping the ball elsewhere. You need to push back when resources aren't available. That, hey, I need input, feedback or approvals that don't match this timeline. So we're going to need to push back a little bit here. And then you need to push back if it wasn't part of the original plan. Hey, this is a brand new ask and there's no buffer built into this brand new ask. And then lastly, probably the most important, you need to push back when your gut says, this is not sustainable. Trust that gut. The more you do it, the more the gut will the more your gut and your instinct will be reliable because it'll be like, yeah, this just doesn't feel sustainable at all. And that's when you know you need to push back.
So let's talk about how to push back on some of these timeline things, right? So number one, be clear and calm. Just simply say, hey, look, I want to ensure that we meet your expectations without sacrificing quality. And Based on our current workload, this timeline would put that at risk. here's what I suggest. Clear and calm. Number two, offer a win-win solution. Or if you're like Michael Scott, a win-win-win solution. You do this by saying, hey, to keep the quality high, I can either extend the deadline or prioritize this piece and shift the other deliverables. Which would you prefer? Put the ball on their court.
Another way that you can communicate this kind of pushback, right, is to use data to support your case. Hey, we've had similar projects like this where we've seen that rushing this phase leads to a lot of rework, which could ultimately delay your launch time even more. So I think a realistic timeline would actually save us time overall in the end, right? It's using that data case, the use case, the business case before of what you've seen happen before. Another way to communicate this is to anchor back to their goals. hey, I know that this goal of yours that we talked about in the very beginning is a top priority, and I want to help you hit that in a way that lasts. And so to do that, we're going to need to adjust the timeline just slightly. And last way to kind of bring this up is to just keep it collaborative, don't be defensive about it. Say, hey, look, I'm on your team and I want to see this succeed because when you succeed, we succeed. So let's map out what's doable together so that you are set up to win. Creating that timeline for them is massively important so that they understand where they're at in that process so that when they come at you with some pushback then or with some scope creep, you can push back on them in some of these ways that I mentioned.
Last thing I want to talk about here today is to create a timeline visualization that clients can easily understand. A lot of times as I'm working with clients, it's like their clients are in the dark. They have a project kickoff meeting, everything's so exciting, things are getting rolling, and then they don't hear anything and they don't know what's going on or they don't know what's supposed to happen next or if there's something that they're supposed to be doing, right? And so something that we've started to implement across several of my clients right now, we've been nicknaming it the pizza delivery system. Listen, we know that pizza delivery is a thing already, but think about when you order a pizza, whether it's for delivery or for pickup or whatever, there's a pizza tracker across the top now with just about any major fast pizza chain, right? Unless it's some local place.
There's a pizza tracker across some hate we received your order and it's got a little Checkmark that we received your order writer some little pizza icon. Hey, we're preparing your order. We're putting together the pizza That's what that's what's happening right now and then goes into the oven and then it goes moves over there You said hey, we're putting this in the oven now Just once you know You don't need to know that they had to walk into the freezer to get the cheese and extra pepperoni and all these other things, right? You just need to know that things are progressing and then right now there's nothing required of you, but but the project is moving along all the way through your pizza being out for delivery and delivered to you. And so we've started working in our automated email systems through our project management to be able to let our clients know this is where your project is at right now. Just so you know, it's moving right along. Here's the details of your project. Here's what's happening with your project right now. Here's what you can expect next. We can attach things to those emails to let them know, to give them the information that we need if we need to.
Very very simple very easy way to do but it creates a timeline visualization So you want to go over that at the very beginning in your project kickoff meeting you you're gonna want to talk about Here's the steps and here's kind of the timeline that you can expect on those things and you're get updates throughout the project right and so implementing something like a pizza delivery system would go a long long way, so let me just Recap a few things here you remember to to know it and plan for it before you see it. You need to be proactive here. This is the project, the profitable project planning is all about being proactive, not reactive. You need to protect financial margins. It's not greed, but it's essential for your sustainable creativity. If we're here to sustain this creative organization, this business, right? We have to protect financial margins at all costs. then remember that realistic timelines lead to better creative work and happier clients.
So that's today's episode. Next week, we're going to talk about the Digital Studio Toolkit. We're going talk about some automation systems. We touched on a little bit of those today, but some automation systems for your creative teams where we're going to focus on essential digital tools and automation workflows that eliminate the repetitive tasks and increase your creative output. I want to remind you Then I have the free live webinar with me and Christian Brim, author of Prophet First for Creatives, will be on Wednesday, April 30th, I believe, at the time of this podcast recording that's only six days away. Wednesday, April 30th at 1 p.m. Eastern, you can register at dustinpead.com slash live. You can follow me again on the social media handle at Dustin Pead, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, all those places.
I would love for you to review and share this podcast in a way that you can. I want to remind you that you can get your free guide to eliminating project pitfalls at dustinpead.com slash pitfalls. Cannot wait to be with you next week on the podcast. You'll have a great week and I'll see you live on Wednesday, April 30th on the webinar with Christian Brim. Take care.