[00:00:00] Welcome back to the podcast. This is gonna be a lot different than 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 gonna change this year.

Brian: And I wanna 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.

Brian: We've got team members everywhere from California to Nevada to one here in Nashville, along with me. Two. Multiple states in the us. One living in [00:01:00] 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.

Brian: 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. 'cause we're a hundred percent remote team.

Brian: So a lot of team members, most team members have never actually met each other before in real life, at least.

Brian: 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 20 23, 20 24, 20 25. 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.

Brian: This month. Has been rough on me at least, recording this in January. If you're like February, it's only two days in, how do you feel rough this month? User 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.

Brian: There was like a lot to catch up on from all the stuff that happened during the two weeks that we had to kinda like. [00:02:00] 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.

Brian: Plus, two of our coaches are out, one is out, cause of 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.

Brian: 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.

Brian: And it's not just time, but just like the mental, workload of all this.

Brian: I wanna talk about a couple things. Again, how we got here, what the plans are from this and what to expect from everything moving forward. so as the company's grown, my role has 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. And.

Brian: 2021 was like the first full year of like six figure creative as a business. We had an known one 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. It started in 2021. One man show. [00:03:00] I had a part-time va, we basically like had plateaued for the last four years amongst all my businesses.

Brian: 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. did my first big annual planning retreat where I went down to Chattanooga. I got a hotel myself for like three days or something like that.

Brian: 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.

Brian: And at that time I knew I 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, and working with his coaches and interacting with his podcast fans or people on our email list with a lot of freelancers.

Brian: 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 [00:04:00] bunch of part-time team members, all contractors, and this was flawed for multiple reasons.

Brian: and I'll get into more of this in a second, but it was flawed because. If we're helping people with client acquisition or doing marketing or any of that stuff, the stuff that we talk about on 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.

Brian: 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.

Brian: 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 20 22. I'm still solo this, point,

Brian: Building 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.

Brian: Overthinking, overbuilding over planning. Had no real outside influence or help. And from a business perspective, 2022 was like one of my hardest years. it [00:05:00] 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.

Brian: 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 same that you had before. And this is ultimately why I was a solopreneur and was so staunchly against having a full-time team. But at that time, 2022, later in the year I went to Southeast Asia for like 67 days with my wife, went to Bali, uh, Thailand, and I think Cambodia maybe some other spots too.

Brian: But it an amazing trip. But that definitely didn't speed up the progress of the business. And at the time I was okay with that, but 20, 22 year were just like another typical solopreneur year. But towards the end of that, I realized like something's gotta change. And 2023 is when I finally confronted what I felt like was my biggest fear.

Brian: The thing that was holding back for me, progressing me working fast to me, working better, working smarter, putting myself around smarter people. My biggest fear of 2023 that I had to confront was like actually hiring full-time team members. I had looked at my business. Figure out what it was that we needed.

Brian: We needed people who knew client acquisition, content marketing, [00:06:00] paid advertising, copywriting, basically all things digital marketing. And I just knew at that point that a team of freelancers wasn't the solution. And I had been listening to more and more about building teams. I had been. opening my mind up to the idea of like starting to build a team around me.

Brian: And again, looking at the vision I had basically renewed that vision each year since then. I'd do an annual retreat. I'd look at the vision update things, and I just knew I wasn't making the progress that I wanted to make at that time. Going from 2022 to 2023, it was basically a stagnant year, which is why it was so hard on me.

Brian: so I knew in order to change I was gonna have to finally start building a team out of people. So. I needed people with like a deep digital marketing background. And like I said earlier, the only people who were gonna need this were people who are in full-time positions. And just to kind of fast forward on the team that we have now, that assumption has proved a hundred percent true.

Brian: two of our coaches, our previous head of marketing for seven and eight figure SaaS companies. three of our coaches are previous or current agency owners. One of them runs a half a million dollar agency and he just loves coaching. So he's got a team that runs the agency and he just coaches for us full time.

Brian: ran and sold multi seven figure [00:07:00] a year agencies and they just don't ever wanna run a business again. So they work for me, which is awesome for me. two have actually previously sold a hundred million dollars or more of products and services as copywriters.

Brian: That's our, one of our coaches and one of our, email marketing strategists. And I knew that I wasn't gonna get that caliber of, talent for this company if I was hiring part-time freelancers.

Brian: And I knew the only thing holding me back was a fear around bringing in full-time team members. I had no idea how to do it. I didn't know how to find people, how much to pay them, how health insurance worked, how benefits worked, how paid time off workers' comp, maternity, maternity, payroll, like workers' comp.

Brian: All these things are things I just had so many questions in my head about and didn't know how to actually accomplish. But one of the things that I, it's actually one of our company, core values, we have five core values as a company. One of those is fit fo figure it the fuck out.

Brian: And there's more to it than that. But that's like the spirit of the value is just like no matter what, what your fear is, what you don't know as a company, you have to be able to figure it out. You have to get around every single roadblock that life throws at your way, or the business throws at your way, or that your role throws at your way.

Brian: And when I look back at my 20 20, 20 21 original five year [00:08:00] vision that I cast for the company, one of the things I put in there when I was looking at team members was what does the team around you look like? The first bullet point I put in there was, their ability to figure it the fuck out, to be able to fit foe, is hilarious.

Brian: 'Cause again, fast forward four years later and we have this as one of our core values as a company, but at the time I had to figure it out. That was basically it. I ended up hiring a coach in February of 2023. not like an employee coach, but like a business coach for myself to help me with this because I knew I needed help and I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

Brian: So he charged me this is February, 2023. He charged me $50,000 and it basically was two VIP days in Nashville, It was him, it was one of his team members. And we would basically go through my business top to bottom in two days, and then it was like a 30 minute call every two weeks for like 12 weeks.

Brian: So there's like six calls. And that was, that was it. That was the $50,000. and I think if you just looked at that on paper, like 50 grand for like two days and then six 30 minute calls, it's insane. And if you look at. Objectively, Eric, if you look at it just from that perspective, it's insane. And at that point of the year, I'd only made like $30,000 total from January and February, [00:09:00] Yeah. I only made like $30,000 that year total at at that point. So I was, by February, I was negative $20,000 in the hole. So it was like a leap of faith for me. But it ultimately proved out to be one of the best decisions I made. He helped me map out which hires I needed, hire to hire, how much to pay, how to find 'em, how to build a comp plan, a benefits package, all that sort of stuff, like all this stuff around hiring that I didn't know.

Brian: I just paid him. He taught me how to do it. He gave me resources and SOPs to do it, and then I went and did it. And I hired my first two full-time employees the spring of 2023. one is Joe, who's our lead strategies. He's still with us. Another one was Dan, who's our lead coach. He's still with us. And 2023 after five straight years of like an income plateau, we had finally doubled that year and 75% of our income actually came from the second half of the year alone.

Brian: That's how big of a jump it was. Getting past this like big fear I had of actually hiring and, bringing people on from the outside. Next year, 2024, we brought in three more team members. This is where we really started to kind of ramp things up, things getting into a nice routine rhythm, two more full-time coaches. One more strategists. again, 2024. We ended up doubling that year from 20 23, [00:10:00] 25. Just last year we brought on, I think five more team members. If I, if I'm getting this right, I might be off by one. It was three more coaches, plus another strategist, plus someone to run all of our email marketing.

Brian: In 2025, I get double the business again. And this was a tough year because that was when the things really shifted for me, where I was doing less and less of the stuff, like the deep work that I love to do and want to do and was doing more management. Because as you build a team up, you hit this point.

Brian: Ozzi calls the swamp. This is what I've heard. Ozzi Layla and Alex both call the swamp, and it's just like this revenue range as a business where you're large enough to have a big team, but you don't have enough revenue to hire out like department heads. And if you don't know what that means, like I didn't know any of this stuff meant, This is the largest company I've ever worked for, aside from like when I was 15 and 16 working at Burger King. I don't And then when I worked at GameStop when I was 20, don't really count those as jobs, so the only thing I've ever really worked for is my own business.

Brian: I have no experience in any sort of like leadership roles, management roles, corporate experience, nothing. It's just I went from recording studio where I didn't even really use LinkedIn or have a LinkedIn to now [00:11:00] where. I run a team of 14 and we look for people all the time on LinkedIn to hire for our company.

Brian: But going back to the swamp, the swamp is where you just don't have people in each department. So like every company has different departments from like, fulfillment, which is our coaching team, to sales, to marketing, to operations. HR department. There's other ones too. The larger your company gets, the more departments you have.

Brian: But I am the head of every department of this company, which means I have to oversee every single team. So really almost every single team member reports directly to me. When you have 14 people reporting directly to you, depending on you waiting on you, that takes its toll. You become the bottleneck. It takes you away from doing things.

Brian: You're in a lot of meetings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's kinda what 2025 looked like for me. At the time we record this, it's, end of January. So three more team members already this year. And it's looking to be more, like that until we get to the company, to the point where I can have ahead of fulfillment, ahead of sales, ahead of marketing, ahead of operations. And that's gonna come hopefully this year, if not early next year.

Brian: So that's kinda like the quick history of like. How the company's evolved over time. let's talk about the plans for the [00:12:00] podcast moving forward in 2026. ' cause we're 400 episodes into this thing at this point. This is episode 400 is insane. This started 2017 in a spare bedroom, originally called the Six Figure Home Studio podcast.

Brian: And we were called the Six Figure Home Studio podcast for 150 episodes. And we were only targeting like recording studio owners. I started a home studio. I was a music producer for like a decade. I ran a commercial facility in Nashville downtown for like a decade And the podcast was basically like talking about the new way to run your business, where it's all in the box, not so much gear, way lower overhead. It was basically like how the entire market was shifting and evolving. I ran a business podcast specific for those people at the time. I had a co-host back then and it was a blend of like dual episodes with me and my co-host plus like interviews with people in the audio space.

Brian: And it was a lot of fun. Like it was really, really cool. we only really targeted people in the audio space, but we talked about things that really were relevant to like any sort of freelancer, more or less. There were like talks of gear or talks of like studio specific things, but more or less the business philosophies and like the tactics and the strategy we talked about would work in any free business.

Brian: And that's when we [00:13:00] decided to rebrand a six Figure Creative. We took a short break for like nine months as we made this shift in this brand

Brian: because at that time we just knew that the stuff we were talking about would appeal to all creative freelancers, not just recording studio owners.

Brian: And I also knew that at the time. Talking to, like interviewing other studio owners, talking to other studio owners all the time, being around those people all the time. I knew that, that industry as a whole suffered from what I call like inbred business, which I come from Alabama. I can, say this, but like inbred businesses where you only look to other businesses directly around you, other recording studios, other, you know, brand designers, other graphic designers, other photographers, other people just like you for how you should render a business.

Brian: And what that starts to happen is you have this like inbred business. It is a really non-diverse genetic pool of people just doing really bad business practices And you would say that's just how you do it in this industry. That's basically like what I heard all the time, which is a stupid answer for anything.

Brian: And I knew that if we could bring in people from other industries, other creative fields where they have found better ways of doing things, then we could take that to the recording studio [00:14:00] industry. So that was what Six Figure Creative was originally created for as far as a podcast goes

Brian: and at Larger has done really well

Brian: in these eight years. Interviewed New York Times bestselling authors. founder of a billion dollar company or a multi-billion dollar company. Some amazing freelancers, some creatives, some influencers like Michael Jana and. Made by James there's also been like, probably a hundred duo episodes with my co-host and then now hundreds of episodes by myself.

Brian: I think in part of ways with my co-host, like episode 180, somewhere around there, he is going through a tough time in life. And then for the last 220 episodes, it's basically just been me, my editing team, I may have done a couple like client interviews or people just that I know really well in the last a hundred episodes, but like, I don't think I've done many interviews in the past.

Brian: But this podcast has been a lot of fun. I met so many amazing people. It's connected us with some awesome individuals. It has been a huge part of this business growth like The way this podcast fits into this business model, by the way, is it is a pure nurture play. We don't get new eyeballs on this podcast from just like organic growth.

Brian: Obviously people recommend us. Obviously people find us in Spotify, but that's like the minority of people. The majority of people who find us and most of our growth has come from paid ads. And it's not to [00:15:00] say that we could have just done it with paid ads and not done it with this podcast, it's like a one two punch.

Brian: People find us, they explore what we have to offer, they find the podcast, they get sucked in, and it's a wonderful kinda one-two punch. That leads to the struggle of the podcast. Podcasting as a whole has no built in innate discoverability.

Brian: and yes, a lot of podcasts blow up on, things like YouTube.

Brian: And our podcast is obviously on YouTube as well. But the types of podcasts that have success on YouTube are kind of one of two things. One, they're either, interviewing like a specific type of person and it's usually the type of person I don't wanna interview or two, it's a co-hosted podcast where the hosts have like great chemistry and.

Brian: love that model but no one that I know fits the bill or I would've gotten another co-host like years ago. I don't want this to be like a purely interview podcast. I also don't know of a co-host that would fit the bill of like, great chemistry that we could really up the level and I know there's a lot we could change on YouTube to like up things like actually having good thumbnails and things like that.

Brian: but I've decided that for this year, this is gonna be my, final purely podcast episode for a while. And I mean, God, like the chances of you actually having listened to over four oh episodes are like slim to none. And even if you have the chances of [00:16:00] you actually implementing everything that you learned from those episodes is basically zero.

Brian: So this year, 2026, I want to focus on a couple things that taking away from the podcast will allow me to do. The podcast isn't particularly a huge time suck for me. Even now, with as many responsibilities as I have and the team growing and me being the bottleneck in a lot of things, I still do have time to do this show.

Brian: but it's kinda like a couple different things holding me back from being excited about this podcast for 2026.

Brian: And that is one, a little bit of time suck, not a huge one, but a little bit of time suck for me. But two, it doesn't really help the brand out as a whole there's a quote that says like, what, got us here won't get us there? Or What got you here won't get you there. I know it's time me and this company to kinda level up what we've been doing from a front end marketing perspective. Alex, her Moey has been doing this for like the last few years to an insane degree, but he is. A hundred percent proven the importance of building a brand. And that is something we haven't exactly built with Six figure creative.

Brian: I did do YouTube for a little bit back in 20 21, 20 22. It was like six months stint and I did along with the podcast, so I know it's doable to do both. [00:17:00] And we got to like 10 to 12,000 subscribers, nothing huge. And then I stopped because at the time it didn't make sense. I wasn't like all in on the brand thing, I was just looking at it from like a lead generation play, which we had no issues with at the time,

Brian: but now it makes more sense than ever. One thing I want to get away from this year is I wanna diversify away from paid ads being our main driver of awareness as a company. When you get to our level, being dependent on one stream of, leads is ill-advised. It adds a risk to the company where you basically have 14 team members and all their children, one which was just born that we now have to support through our company to have all of those livelihoods, including my own, dependent on one stream of new leads and clients for us is ill-advised, and that's really only our size.

Brian: When you are a smaller company, the amount. Of risk you have on, depending on one source, it's not as bad as you think it is. Like until you're at like multi multimillion dollars, you likely don't have to think about this stuff when you're at like a hundred thousand, 200,000, 300,000 a year. You could just ride one source into the sunset and be fine with that.

Brian: But we're not at that [00:18:00] level where we can do that anymore. So building a brand, and we're gonna do it through two different things. One is YouTube and one is organic socials. Neither of those, especially organic. Neither of those have been things that we've really taken seriously. YouTube I did for six months and it was okay.

Brian: organic socials. All we do is take clips from the podcast. Never taken that seriously. It's just there. So there's new content on our feed so we don't look like a dead company, and I'll still post YouTube videos audio from that to this podcast feed for you people who were like podcast walk people or chore doers where you want to listen to this passively while you're doing other stuff.

Brian: It'll still be here. there'll still be new stuff happening on this feed, but it won't be audio first. And it was interesting to see, also see her mozy kind of test this out. He wanted to do audio first content for the podcast, and he did that for like. Three, four months, and I really loved that as a podcast listener.

Brian: But then he went away from it and he just stopped doing it. Now he does everything video first, YouTube first, and the only thing that's on his podcast feed is stuff from his like live events. Stuff that has from his YouTube content stuff that's more visual. And there's stuff that I really can't do when this is an audio first podcast, even though again, it's on YouTube, it's an audio first podcast.

Brian: It has been from the start, actually, [00:19:00] originally we never did video for this podcast. It was just audio only. And eventually we started doing video like when it became six figure home studio. But I want to do something that's visual. Something that's visual first. So we have an incredible team here at Six Figure Creative, and I wanna make better use of that in 2026.

Brian: So you'll see YouTube, you'll see organic socials from us. wanna get my team more involved where I can as well. But as far as audio first podcast is concerned, this is goodbye for now. It may come back. I don't see it disappearing forever, and it doesn't mean I won't just do random podcast here and there, but I've been militant about doing weekly episodes since 2017 with very little time off.

Brian: but. As the CEO of this company, which we're, we're almost to the point where I could legitimately call myself a CEO. We're not quite there yet, but as the founder of this company, I have to make big decisions and strategic bets on what I think is gonna help the company as a whole. And this is one of those things.

Brian: So hopefully you understand, hopefully you support this and hopefully you'll stick around to see kinda what we're up to in 2026 and beyond for six year creative. But for all of you who have listened for a long, long time, I just wanna say thank you so [00:20:00] much. I appreciate you. If you've just found us, you have more than enough to keep you busy content-wise.

Brian: More than enough. And, uh, for those of you who wanna keep up with what we're doing, just follow us on, all the socials, all the YouTube channels. Just go to six figure creative.com/ 400 slash 4 0 0 6, figure creative.com/ 4 0 0 for the show notes for this podcast, which will have links to all the things you can follow us on.

Brian: don't expect YouTube videos starting next week. It's one of those things where I need to sharpen the ax before I cut, and there's a lot of things I want to do to do it right, I dunno when we'll start the YouTube strategy in full, glory. But part of what we'll be doing as a team this week that you listen to this podcast as they're all flying in, is planning all that out and deciding how we want to roll all this stuff out as a company.

Brian: So that's all I got for you today. Thank you so much for listening for this, this long, and I will see you around peace.

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