The FINAL Episode

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 400

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. 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 is gonna 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 6 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 actually 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? 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 5th. 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 through 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 40-hour weeks. I've probably gone over that quite a bit in January. Not a ton, but a little bit more than the normal 40-hour work week in January. And it's not just time, but just the mental workload of all this. I wanna 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's grown, my role has obviously shifted. It first started as a one-man solo-preneur operation, where it was just me to now this team of 14 people. And 2021 was the first full year of 6 Figure Creative as a business. We had a know-in before that. I'll talk about that, how this podcast has evolved over time and the business has evolved over time. But mainly for 6 Figure Creative, started in 2021, one-man show, had a part-time VA. We basically had plateaued for the last four years amongst all my businesses. We had some growth, but it was basically plateaued over that time. And I had started to basically set the vision for what 6 Figure Creative would be. I did my first big annual planning retreat where I went down to Chattanooga, got a hotel for myself for three days or something like that.

And I put together a five-year vision, which has surprisingly held up over these last five years. We're on year five right now. And I just reviewed it again before this episode just to see. And it's astounding how much I had gotten right and how much 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 with this being 6 Figure Creative, if talking to and working with his coaches and interacting with his podcast fans or people in our email list with a lot of freelancers, I originally thought that we'd hire a lot of freelancers part-time so they could supplement their income as they build up their freelance businesses. That'd be how the business is. We'd have 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 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 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, 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, everything mapped out early 2021