Ep 145: From Maker to Manager

Written By Dustin Pead

Why Creative Leaders Must Stop Creating to Scale

SUMMARY

Your business grew because you're an exceptional creative. But now that same creative excellence has become your biggest bottleneck. If you're working 60+ hours a week, can't take on new clients without burning out, and find yourself as the approval checkpoint for every decision, it's time to make the hardest transition in creative leadership: from maker to manager.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • ⚡️ 80% quality from your team beats 90% quality when you're burned out – Perfectionism isn't serving quality; it's serving fear and preventing delegation

  • ⚡️ Administrative tasks offer the fastest ROI – Reclaim 20% of your time immediately by delegating emails, scheduling, invoicing, and client coordination at $20-30/hour

  • ⚡️ Your buyback rate reveals what to delegate first – Calculate your hourly value, divide by four, and delegate everything below that threshold to create mathematical permission to let go

NOTABLE QUOTES

  • 💬 "Client satisfaction doesn't require perfection. It requires consistency and communication—and that doesn't always have to be you."

  • 💬 "Your competitive advantage isn't that you personally touch everything. Your advantage is that you've built systems that deliver quality without you."

  • 💬 "80% done by someone else is 100% awesome." – Dan Martell

EPISODE RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

Look, you became a creative director or an agency leader because you are great at creating. But now your business needs you to stop creating and to start managing. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their work without losing their minds. I'm Dustin Pead. I help creative agencies build systems that create margin, reduce burnout, and protect what matters most: your creativity. Whether you're a solo creative or leading a team, this show gives you practical frameworks and advice to go from chaos to clarity. Let's dive in.

In the beginning, you did it all and you were great at some of it and good at most of it. And so that brought in more work. And now you have a choice to make. You can either reject the new work because you're the bottleneck—you can't create more than you can create—or you can accept new work and learn to lead a team of others to do the work.

I want to talk through some signs that you might need to make this shift. If this sounds like you, these are indicators: If you're working 60+ hours a week and you can't afford to take on any new clients because you'll let them down. If you're the bottleneck in every single new project and every part of the project and nothing moves without your input. If your team is waiting on you for feedback, approvals, or decisions. If you're doing it all because you don't have a team to delegate to or you haven't built one yet. These are the signs that you need to make the shift.

Your business is successful because of your creative talent, but your business can't scale beyond your personal capacity. Every new client means that you personally work more hours. You're one client away from a serious capacity crisis.

Ask yourself this: If you were to take a two-week vacation with no phone access, no internet, would everything that you've built fall apart? If the answer is yes, everything would fall apart, then you're not running an agency—you're running an expensive freelance operation.

I take my clients through this book called Creative Directions by Jason Sperling. According to the research that he cited in this book, the skills that make creatives successful—like craft excellence, attention to detail, personal ownership—they're often the exact same barriers that prevent them from becoming effective managers and leaders. The reward for being great at your creative job is suddenly doing a completely different job that you weren't trained for.

The hardest part about the transition from maker to manager isn't delegation. It's accepting that done at 80% quality by someone else is better than perfect at 100% quality when you're maxed out. Because the truth is, it's probably not even going to be 100% quality because you are maxed out.

You might hear yourself say things like, "Nobody can do it as good as I can." That might be technically true, but equally completely irrelevant. When you're at 110% capacity, your work quality is going to drop below 80%. It's going to drop probably to 70, 60, sometimes even 50% quality. But when a trained new team member at 80% capacity delivers 80% quality, then guess what? You're ahead now.

80% quality with 50% less stress beats 90% quality with total burnout. Let me say that again: the math shakes out like this. 80% quality with 50% less stress is going to beat 90% quality with total burnout every single time.

Let's look at it from a cost perspective. Every hour that you spend on a $25 an hour task costs you $100 in strategic opportunities because your time is actually worth $125+ an hour. Your perfectionism isn't serving quality, it's serving fear. And what you call maintaining standards is actually just you avoiding trust to delegate to someone else.

Client satisfaction doesn't require perfection. We have to let go of that. It requires consistency and communication. I'm going to say that again. Client satisfaction requires consistency and communication and that doesn't always have to be you. Your competitive advantage isn't that you personally touch everything. Your advantage is that you've built systems that deliver quality without you. That's your advantage.

You need to shift in identity here. We need to go from finding our identity as the artist or the designer or the director. We need to move that to owner, leader, manager. Doing fewer creative tasks might feel like you're losing who you are, but in the reality is that your identity isn't in your task list anyway. It's not in what you do anyway. It's your impact that matters. And so this leadership, this ownership, this management, it's still creative work. You're just creating through people instead of through your software.

I love the way Dan Martell says this in Buy Back Your Time. We reference that book all the time on this podcast. He says that 80% done by someone else is 100% awesome. I love that. It should be a t-shirt.

Hey, I wanted to interrupt this episode to tell you if you're running a creative agency and feeling like you're constantly firefighting instead of leading, you're not alone. At Chief Creative Consultants, we don't just tell you what to fix. We roll up our sleeves and implement systems with you. We're talking project management that actually works, client workflows that create margin instead of stress, and team processes that scale without the chaos. We partner with creative agencies as your fractional COO team, building sustainable systems together. If you're ready to transform from reactive to proactive, visit dustinpead.com today and book a call. Okay, let's get back to the show.

So where do we start? Easy: low hanging fruit, administrative tasks. You can probably get 20% of your time back at minimum just from administrative tasks. These are also low risk and really, really affordable. Typical admin drains creative founders. We hate admin, but we have to do it—it's a necessary evil. Email and calendars and invoices and client billing and meeting notes and follow up tasks and file organization and project setup and client communication coordination. It takes up so much of our time and it's so cheap to get rid of.

Admin work has clear right/wrong answers unlike creative work where you have to use instinct. Admin work is "this is how it's done the right way, this is how the wrong way it's done." And affordable VA support, you can probably get it for anywhere between $20 to $30 an hour. I have an amazing assistant that works with us and she's super affordable and does incredible work.

You can start slow. You can start with four or five, six hours a week, work them up to 10 hours per week. You don't have to go to a full time hire. You can just give them a little bit. There are so many people out there who are ready to take this work from you.

If you want to go up further from that, the delegation ladder that Dan Martell talks about in that book, Buy Back Your Time, starting with that executive or virtual assistant for scheduling and administrative support. Right after that: How about delivery? How about client work execution for designers, editors, and producers? You can go up another level from that. How about marketing? How about lead generation and content creation? You can go up another level from that if you can afford it and go sales. How about client acquisition and relationship management? And then even further from that, that's where you live in the leadership. This is the strategic direction and team development.

Most creative founders try to jump straight up into marketing or sales because they're just like, "I've got to get rid of this stuff." But there are ways that you can inch your way through there through executive assistance, deliveries, marketing, things like that. Start small, prove that you can let go and then let go a little bit more and let go a little bit more and let go a little bit more and watch yourself begin to be able to lead and create bigger and better than you ever have before.

I didn't start by delegating client operational strategy. That's my highest level value work. I started with admin work and social media management. I use a clear process with defined standards. This is what I'm looking for. And then let them go from there and ask me questions along the way. Now that I've proved that I'll let go of that, next thing will be—we'll start delegating some client implementation. It's going to become a lot easier now that I've had success delegating those other pieces and admin and social media. And so now I'm working with clients and gaining new clients instead of editing audio for this podcast.

Let me just give you a little side pro tip here as you're beginning to delegate out things. We talk about this in many other podcast episodes as well, but record everything. And I don't mean record everything in the sense that someone's—you're going to need to set somebody up and you're going to need evidence. It's not like a conspiracy thing when I say record everything. I mean, record everything and how do you do what you do. Record that down.

Because as you bring on more people, you want to be able to say, "Here's how I do this. Here's how I check my email. Here's how I manage this content. Here's how I manage my calendar. Here's how we edit this podcast. Here's how we design these thumbnails. Here's how we organize files." As you're doing it, you don't need to go, "Oh, I got to find some time to write all that stuff down." Just as you're doing it, open up a Loom video and record it so that you have it saved so that when someone joins your team who you can delegate that to you go, "I've already documented the process for you, here you go." It's going to save you so, so, so much time.

So what now? First thing I want you to do, let's start calculating what Dan Martell calls your buyback rate. You're going to take your annual income, you're going to divide that by the 2,000 hours that you would typically work and that's how you're going to get your hourly value. If you divide that by four, now you have a buyback rate.

For example, if you have $120,000 annual income, which to some of us may sound like incredible, then you have a $60 hour effective rate. That means your hourly rate is 60 bucks an hour. If you charge $60 an hour and you work 40 hours a week, you'll make $120,000 annual income. If you divide that by four, you get a $15 buyback rate. That means that you can afford right now to start delegating any tasks that you could delegate out for $15 an hour.

Think of the young kids who are in college or high school who are looking for experience in your field who would kill to have a job to work from their laptops at $15 an hour. Any tasks that can be done for less than your buyback rate is the first thing that should be delegated. This gives you mathematical permission to let go.

Secondly, conduct a two week time and energy audit. This comes again from Dan Martell's book. I have a template on my site to help you go through this. If you go to dustinpead.com/time, or just the free resources page, dustinpead.com/free, you can download the two week time and energy audit. I have a video on there that shows you exactly how to use that.

Thirdly, make your first delegation hire sometime in the next 30 days. Start with a part-time VA four or five hours a week. Start delegating three administrative tasks like, let's just start with emails, scheduling, and meeting notes. Start documenting those processes now while you're looking for this person. Record yourself doing it, record everything, and that way you have it.

And look, you don't have to commit to this thing forever. You can just set a 90-day trial period to prove that the relationship is good and that the model works. And you know what, if it doesn't, then at least you know you tried it. So once you see this time recovery, you'll expand your hours and you'll be able to add more tasks to other people. So then after the 90 days, you'll start to see that time recovery. If you're like, "Hey, yes, I could see the value here," then you can start to expand the hours and add more tasks to that person.

A couple call out resources here. We talked about Buy Back Your Time a bunch by Dan Martell. Creative Directions, Mastering the Transition from Talent to Leader by Jason Sperling. And then there's different tools and frameworks on my website, like the Time and Energy Audit. You can find it at dustinpead.com/free.

Next week, we're going to talk about a little known fact about the month of February. Did you know that the month of February is National Time Management Month? And I love talking about time management. And I think all creatives whether you're a freelancer or an agency owner could use a freshener up on time management. So we're going to talk about that next week. We're going to talk about this national time management month, February. We're going to get into it right here on the podcast. I can't wait to talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.

Dustin Pead
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