The 11 Must-Have Tools For Growing And Running A 6 Figure Creative Business In 2023

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 232

Welcome to the 6 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.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. This is your first time listening to the show. First of all, thank you for giving the show a chance, checking it out at all. It means a lot that you would even trust me in the first place. Maybe I click baited you. Hopefully this isn't a click bait episode for you. I want to deliver on this. If this is your first time listening, this show is all about how to basically become a better business owner as a creative. Creatives were great at all of the creativity stuff, and that doesn't really translate well to business. So if you're trying to either crack 6 figures for the first time, or you're trying to grow to multiple 6 figures as a creative, this show has a lot of great things for you. So check our backlog, like 230 plus episodes that are 100% free.

Today's topic, if you couldn't tell by the title of it, is 11 tools that I use and love that will help you on your quest to grow to 6 figures and beyond in 2023 and beyond.

These are all tools that I use. These are all tools that I wholeheartedly endorse and recommend to everybody.

And the ROI, the return on investment, is massive if you use and implement these tools the way they should be used. The mistake a lot of freelancers make when it comes to actually choosing tools and using tools as creatives, we fail to invest into tools. We look at it as a cost or an expense.

And today, I want you to push that notion aside, get it out of here, it doesn't serve you. It's not helping anybody. It's not helping yourself. It's not helping your bank account.

It's only helping you maybe today not spend money, but that's the wrong thinking. Get that out of here. Think about this from the perspective of you're investing money now to make more money later. As creatives, that's literally what we do. We invest into our skills so we can make more money off of it later. We invest into tools so we can multiply our efforts into the future. And if you can't get away from the mindset of spending money is bad, and instead get more to the mindset of investing money is good in the right circumstances, then you will cost yourself thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost income and lost productivity in your business. And that's because tools are basically what has brought humanity to where it is today. Can you imagine if you didn't have running water in your house right now? That is not just a tool, it is a series of tools that created that entire system that you use every day to wash your hands, to bathe at the end of the day, or beginning of the day, whichever type person you are, to drink water, to water your plants.

That is a very important tool in most people's lives. Electricity, it's a tool you use every day, and it took a lot of people, a lot of tools over the years to build and deploy that for everyone to use. Wi-Fi, these are tools that you use. You're paying for all these, by the way. You're paying for your electricity, you're paying for your water, you're paying for your internet, or at least I hope you are. Hope you have these things. Otherwise, it's gonna be hard to listen to the show.

And you pay for these things because they are worth much more than you pay for it. I think I pay like 30 bucks a month for water. I think we pay $150 a month for electricity, depending on the month. We pay Google Fiber $70 a month for fast internet. And if I didn't have these things, I would be struggling massively. And I want you to think about these tools that I talk about today.

They may not be as valuable as electricity and Wi-Fi, but they are going to be hugely important to your freelance business, your creative business, whatever your business is moving forward, if you don't have these things put into place yet.

Now, way back in like episode, I don't remember what episode it was, but we did a replay of it on episode 154 of this podcast, where we talked about the five toxic mindsets that can destroy your business. One of those toxic mindsets is something called the blue collar mindset. And I'm from Alabama, so this is kind of the same mindset I grew up with. You feel like you can do everything yourself. You can do it better than anyone else.