The FINAL Episode

6 Figure Creative

The founder of Six Figure Creative reflects on the 400-episode milestone, detailing the company's evolution from a solo operation to a globa

Key takeaways

• The company has achieved consecutive annual revenue doubling in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
• Transitioning from part-time freelancers to full-time specialists was essential for maintaining marketing quality.

Main topics

• Business Scaling
• Team Management

Notable quotes

What got us here won't get us there.

Conclusion

The episode marks a strategic pivot point, emphasizing that long-term

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is the Six Figure Creative Podcast, episode 400. Welcome to the Six Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Welcome back to the podcast. This is gonna be a lot different than our own normal episode. This episode is gonna be just basically about how the company's evolved over time and what our plans are for 2026. And if you're new here, this is not the episode to start on. If you've been listening to the show for a long time, this is absolutely the episode for you because a lot's going to change this year. And I want to explain why those changes are happening, kind of how they came about, and what you can expect for 2026 and beyond for this podcast and just for Six Figure Creative as a whole. So just to kind of give you some background here, our team has grown. If you didn't know, our team has grown to like 14 people from all over the world. We've got team members everywhere from California to Nevada to one here in Nashville along with me. to multiple states in the US, one living in Brazil, one in Canada, one in Portugal, one in Romania, one in Israel, one in New Zealand. And I'm probably missing a couple, but they're from all over the world. And we just added three new team members this month, or I guess this airs early February. So just last month alone, three new team members hired. And actually the week this airs, I'm flying in my team from all over the world into Nashville to finally meet in person because we're 100 % remote team. So a lot of team members, most team members have never actually met each other before. in real life at least. And things have changed a lot in this business over the last few years. Like in the last three years alone, we've doubled the business every year in 2023, 2024, 2025. We've got really aggressive goals here in 2026 as well. And this is the actual, the first time I've ever really felt it, especially in January. This month has been rough on me, at least. I recorded this in January. If you're like, February, it's only two days in. How do you feel rough this month? Use your brain. The company shut down completely the last two weeks of December for Christmas break. Last year so coming back in january we started back on the fifth There was like a lot to catch up on from all the stuff that happened during the two weeks that we had to kind of like put out fires or like Just do things that we have to do as a company that don't basically stop just because we shut the company down That plus hiring three new people plus two of our coaches are out one is out because paternity leave One is out on his honeymoon and these are like all great things None of this is bad, but it's a lot for me to take on right now I've been surprisingly good about work-life balance despite the fact of our growth. I still to this day Typically only work like 40 hour weeks. I've probably gone over that quite a bit in January. Not a ton, but like a little bit more than the normal 40 hour work week in January. And it's not just time, but just like the mental workload of all this. I want to talk about a couple of things again, how we got here, what the plans are from this and what to expect from everything moving forward. So as the company has grown, my roles like obviously shifted. Like it first started as like a one man solopreneur operation where it's just me to now this team of 14 people. 2021 was like the first full year of like Six Figure Creative as a business. We had an O-Line before that, I'll talk about that and how this podcast has kind of evolved over time and the business has evolved over time, but mainly for Six Figure Creative. Started in 2021, one man show, had a part-time VA. We basically like had plateaued for the last four years amongst all my businesses. We had some growth, but it was like basically plateaued over that time. And I had started to basically set the vision for what Six Figure Creative would be. I did my first big annual planning retreat where I went down to Chattanooga, I got a hotel for myself for like three days or something like that. And I put together like a five-year vision, which has surprisingly held up over these last five years. Like we're on year five right now. And I just reviewed it again before this episode just to see. And it's like astounding how much I had gotten right and how much like the vision I had cast that we've built to the company that we have today. And at that time, I knew I'd need a team. I just didn't know what kind of team I need. And I was way wrong about what kind of team I would need at the time. My plan at that point was I would just have part-time team members. And I originally thought that like, with this being six-figure creative, talking to and working with his coaches and interacting with his podcast fans or people on our email list with a lot of freelancers. I originally thought that we'd hire a lot of freelancers part-time so they could like supplement their income as they build up their freelance businesses. That'd kind of be how the business is. We'd have like a bunch of part-time team members, all contractors. And this was flawed for multiple reasons. And I'll get into more of this in a second, but it's flawed because if we're helping people with client acquisition or doing marketing or any of that stuff, the stuff that we talk about in the podcast all the time, if I have to bring on freelancers who need to supplement their income, They're probably not very good at the marketing side of things, right? The thing that we actually need them for in this business. Second is the people who are best at what they do when it comes to marketing are not moonlighting as marketing. They're full-time marketers in some capacity, some way, shape or form. And that's the thing I had to learn over time. But that's 2021. Solo, set this big vision for myself, mapped out what the team's gonna look like, mapped out what the business is gonna look like, mapped out what the revenues and the product lineup and how we're gonna advertise, like everything mapped out early 2021. 2022, I'm still solo at this point, filling out what it was today. And it was a very slow process. I was basically just in a cave by myself for months and months and months of the year, overthinking, overbuilding, overplanning, had no real outside influence or help. And from a business perspective, 2022 was like one of my hardest years, but it was also like the last year I could really travel internationally. I didn't know it at the time, but it was like the last year I could travel internationally without the responsibility of a team. Because once you have a team who depends on you and you're like, actually having to manage people and they are waiting on you for things. You can't travel the