Podcast 14 min read

Scaling A Solo Creative Business w/ Matt Essam

with Matt Essam

Matt Essam and Chris Do explain how creative founders build businesses that stop depending on their constant presence.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · August 26, 2026

The founder becomes the ceiling

A creative business can look successful while barely paying the person running it. The work keeps arriving; freedom does not. Matt Essam, a coach and author of The Creative Studio Roadmap, brings that contradiction into focus through his work with creative business owners, including one who believed every film shoot required his presence.

That owner was stressed, taking little salary, and preparing for a second baby. Yet attending shoots remained nonnegotiable in his own thinking. The activity that appeared to protect the business was also preventing it from becoming sustainable.

Essam's response was not another productivity technique. He asked the owner to consider what the business would look like in three years if nothing changed. The question connected a familiar working pattern to an increasingly untenable personal future.

The owner had not built independence. He had employed himself.

In a live conversation with Chris Do, Essam uses that distinction to examine what scaling actually requires from a solo creative. The central issue is not simply whether more work can be sold. It is whether the business can create value without making its founder personally responsible for every action that produces it.

A founder owns the business rather than being the business. That separation can exist even when the founder is the only employee. It begins with recognizing that the company has requirements beyond the owner's immediate workload.

Do distinguishes between a freelancer booked for time and a solo operator responsible for finding clients, negotiating terms, preparing proposals, and managing the commercial relationship. These are working definitions within the conversation, not universal categories. Their usefulness lies in exposing responsibilities that creative people can acquire without consciously acknowledging the change.

Essam recognizes that confusion from his own career. He moved between agency contracts and his own client projects, treating them as essentially the same activity. Looking back, he connects some of his difficulties to failing to distinguish the business demands of one arrangement from the other.

The distinction carries practical consequences:

Being booked for time is different from building a pipeline of clients.
Being paid for personal labor is different from earning business profit.
Delivering excellent work is different from creating an operation that can repeat it.

That boundary also sits behind The Futur's Staff, Freelance or Entrepreneur?: choosing a working arrangement means choosing its responsibilities, not merely its title.

For Essam, differentiation, communication, and delivery are the operating pillars. But none works reliably if the founder keeps making decisions as though personal effort is the business's only legitimate source of value.

The first constraint is therefore unusually close to home. Before the business can function differently, its owner has to stop defending the conditions that keep it dependent.

A better fee meets an old story

Changing how work is priced makes that dependence easier to see. Under an hourly arrangement, revenue follows time sold. A project fee changes the commercial unit: the client buys a defined job rather than a quantity of the founder's availability.

In the conversation, project pricing becomes a way to distinguish compensation for work from what the business earns beyond that compensation. The shift makes margin visible. It also introduces a possibility that hourly thinking tends to obscure: delivering value and spending time need not remain interchangeable.

This is not a claim that putting a fixed price on a project automatically makes it profitable. The point is the separation. The founder can begin asking what the business retains, rather than treating every payment as personal wages.

But a new pricing model can collide with an old account of what selling means.

Ray, an audience member with marketing agency experience, wants enough freedom to take three months off and make creative work. His obstacle initially sounds financial: better clients, money for leads, and the ability to bring other people aboard. As the exchange develops, another difficulty emerges. He dislikes sales because he experiences it as forcing someone into a purchase.

Do identifies the narrative underneath the objection. If sales means coercion, avoiding sales becomes a way to remain a decent person. Quoting an hourly rate feels safer because it demands less negotiation about the value of the outcome.

The commercial decision is carrying a personal meaning.

Essam calls these recurring patterns phantom loops: often subconscious ways of thinking that keep producing familiar behavior. He explicitly states that he is not a psychologist or trained therapist. The term is his coaching language, not a clinical diagnosis.

Its practical value is the distinction between understanding an idea and acting on it under pressure. A founder can agree that constant involvement is unsustainable, then accept the next request to attend a shoot. Agreement has not yet changed the decision.

Essam describes the work of coaching as returning to those small moments repeatedly. The familiar choice is comfortable now; the alternative serves a future the owner says matters more. Neither a compelling explanation nor a single uncomfortable conversation guarantees the new choice will hold.

The pricing issue belongs beside the concerns explored in 99% Of Creatives Lose Money With These Pricing Mistakes, but Essam and Do's exchange exposes something deeper than fee mechanics: the founder's interpretation of the act of charging.

The two also differ productively over Ray's goal. Essam first asks whether employment or a sabbatical could deliver the creative freedom Ray wants. Do sees project billing as a more direct route to separating earnings from hours.

That disagreement protects the conversation from becoming an automatic argument for entrepreneurship. The desired life comes first. A business model is useful only insofar as it helps create it.

The experience the portfolio leaves out

Once the founder's role changes, another problem becomes visible: clients still need a reason to choose the business. Excellent work alone does not explain why one capable studio is a better fit than another.

Essam challenges the familiar claims of attentive service, thoughtful problem-solving, and strong creative execution. These qualities matter, but competitors can claim them too. Some become apparent only after a client has already made the decision to hire.

Differentiation has to operate before that decision.

His strongest example concerns Toby, a former veterinary surgeon who started a film production company. According to Essam, Toby was making work for clients including mountain bike companies and breweries, yet still faced comparison with other production businesses and resistance to the fees he wanted.

The film work was visible. The relevance of his previous career was not.

Toby had left veterinary practice because he did not want to continue doing it. Bringing that experience into the new business initially felt like returning to a life he had rejected. Essam saw another possibility: the old career could supply insight without dictating the new job.

During an exercise mapping Toby's life, several experiences came together. He had struggled with dyslexia in school, trained and worked as a vet, and developed an interest in cinematography and storytelling. Separately, those facts formed a biography. Together, they suggested a problem he was unusually equipped to address.

Essam describes the resulting positioning as educational training for neurodiverse learners in the veterinary industry. Film was still the medium. The business was no longer asking clients to buy film in the abstract.

It was offering a way to teach material Toby understood, informed by learning difficulties he had experienced himself.

The important distinction is between the person benefiting from the work and the organization paying for it. In Essam's account, students were the learners; veterinary colleges, governing bodies, and pharmaceutical companies were among the relevant institutional buyers. Understanding the learner made the commercial offer more specific, not less.

Personal history becomes positioning when it explains a relevant advantage. The story is not valuable merely because it is unusual. It becomes useful when it establishes why this business understands this problem and can offer a credible response.

That separates strategic storytelling from autobiography. It also creates a useful companion to Storytelling Is A Superpower: the story's role here is not entertainment, but an explanation of fit.

Essam reports that Toby subsequently attracted significant veterinary-sector clients. The conversation does not supply independently documented financial results, so the example is best understood as his account of a repositioning, not a quantified growth study.

Even without a revenue figure, the mechanism is clear. A general production company competes with other production companies. A former vet using film to address a specific educational difficulty gives the buyer a different basis for comparison.

Not every experience belongs in public

The argument for personal history becomes more complicated when the history is painful. A useful business story is not necessarily a comfortable one. But discomfort alone does not make an experience suitable for public consumption.

That tension surfaces when Hector, another audience member, explains that he witnessed a murder as a teenager. He worries that discussing his upbringing will invite prejudice in professional settings. The concern is not hypothetical to him: a post about volunteering in prison prompted responses that reinforced his fear of being judged through assumptions about his background.

Essam resists turning that single disclosure into instant positioning. He compares a person's history to a combination lock. One event is only one digit; the distinctive combination emerges from multiple experiences.

The distinction matters. A painful event need not become the opening line of a sales pitch, a public identity, or the centerpiece of a business. It can instead suggest a theme to examine alongside others.

Essam names possibilities such as resilience or trauma without declaring which one defines Hector. The actual work requires a broader view of the person's life. It cannot responsibly be completed through a few minutes of stage conversation.

His exercise, the river of life, asks clients to map their history from birth to the present on a large sheet of paper. High points, low points, memorable events, and recurring interests become visible together. The purpose is to identify patterns that a conventional professional biography leaves out.

The material includes:

Experiences that shaped how someone sees a problem.
Difficulties that required developing practical tools or methods.
Skills carried across jobs, interests, and earlier careers.
Recurring themes that connect seemingly unrelated parts of a life.

Do's contribution is to notice the knowledge hidden inside adaptation. Someone who has overcome a difficulty can regard the resulting tools as ordinary because those tools are now habitual. Another person facing the same difficulty can find them highly valuable.

That does not mean suffering should be romanticized or converted automatically into marketing. The useful question is what was learned, developed, or understood, and whether it serves a relevant problem.

Do also places an explicit limit on public disclosure: “Please don't start dumping your trauma onto the internet.” He recommends help in framing the material so it supports a coherent larger story rather than becoming a disconnected sequence of disclosures.

The distinction is editorial as much as commercial. A story needs a point of view that determines what belongs. Without it, more detail can make the meaning harder to see.

Hector's example does not resolve into a ready-made offer. That unfinished quality is useful. Some experiences need interpretation before they need distribution, and a founder's willingness to share is not a substitute for knowing what the sharing is meant to accomplish.

The client does not speak studio

A distinctive position still fails if the buyer cannot recognize its relevance. Essam's communication argument begins with a common mismatch: creative businesses describe their capabilities while prospective clients experience the consequences of problems they have not yet named.

A studio talks about strategy, positioning, animation, or branding. A client sees work coming back wrong, projects stalling, or colleagues arguing about priorities. The studio's diagnosis can be accurate and still fail to connect.

Essam distinguishes between people actively shopping for a service and people who recognize a problem but have not decided how to address it. In his decision-making model, these are different stages. Service descriptions speak most directly to buyers who already know what category they intend to purchase.

His alternative is to engage earlier, before the buyer has translated a frustrating situation into a request for a particular service. The task is not to manufacture anxiety. It is to describe what is already happening accurately enough that the person recognizes it.

Describe the symptom before naming the service.

The difference becomes concrete when an agency owner tries to explain his ideal client's difficulties. He names unclear strategy, weak positioning, and the absence of a shared direction. Essam keeps asking what those problems look like in daily work.

The answers initially remain abstract: frustration, lack of clarity, friction with vendors. Do eventually supplies the scene. A client writes what seems to be an excellent brief, sends it out, and receives something that looks nothing like the intended result.

Now there is an event, not a category.

The same translation can reveal other recognizable symptoms:

Projects keep starting, but nothing gets finished.
Internal arguments repeatedly return to who the customer is.
A supposedly clear brief produces the wrong work.
A Friday client email makes switching off feel risky.

Each example points to something the intended client can remember. The language does not require the buyer to agree with the studio's technical diagnosis first. It establishes shared ground through observation.

Do states the principle plainly: “Everybody use their language, words that they would say.” Expertise has to translate itself rather than expecting the client to become fluent in the expert's vocabulary.

This emphasis on the buyer's experience belongs alongside The Skill You Need To Win Clients That No One Talks About. Here, the practical test is whether the language sounds like something a client would actually say after a difficult week.

The point is not to abandon the service or hide the method. It is to choose the right opening. Naming the capability becomes more useful after the buyer recognizes why that capability matters.

Essam wants the prospective client to experience recognition before receiving more advice. A clear description can create the feeling that the business understands the situation. That is a more meaningful starting point than another declaration of creative excellence.

Give the promise a working mechanism

By this point, the founder has a richer account of relevant experience and a clearer understanding of the client's situation. Those pieces still need a commercial structure. Otherwise, the business has an interesting story and empathetic copy, but no clear connection between the problem and the promised result.

Essam organizes that connection through the four Ps of positioning. The framework keeps personal history from becoming an end in itself. Its purpose is to locate a person with a problem and explain how the business can help.

Person: Who is uniquely suited to receive this help? Identify the person at the intersection of the relevant themes.
Problem: What difficulty does that person need resolved? Define the issue the business is equipped to address.
Promise: What result does that person actually want? Describe the desired destination, not merely the service.
Process: How does the business move from the problem to the promise? Explain the sequence that makes the offer credible.

In Toby's example, the intersection included veterinary practice, education, film, and storytelling. The person was a learner struggling with how material was taught. The commercial buyer remained an institution with a reason to improve that learning experience.

The framework prevents an easy mistake: treating everyone who can afford the work as equally suitable. If the business's advantage comes from understanding a particular difficulty, that advantage is strongest where the difficulty actually exists.

It also exposes why communication and delivery cannot be designed separately. A promise draws attention, but the process has to explain how it can be kept. If that explanation reduces to the founder being talented and personally involved, the original dependency remains intact.

Essam's delivery principle is to stop selling individual people and start selling the process. The same vulnerability applies whether clients are attached to the founder or to an exceptional lead designer. If the offer rests on one person's participation, that person's absence becomes a threat to the offer.

The founder's challenge is that the process often feels invisible. Years of practice have made decisions automatic. What appears obvious to the expert is not obvious to a colleague being asked to reproduce the work.

Essam compares this with learning to drive a manual car. Initially, coordinating gears, clutch, steering, mirrors, and traffic demands conscious effort. With experience, much of that coordination becomes automatic, making it easy to forget how much a beginner must learn.

Creative expertise can disappear into the same kind of fluency.

That is why handing off a task is not equivalent to handing over the knowledge required to do it. An instruction that feels complete to the founder can omit the judgments that make the difference between acceptable output and the promised result.

The commercial resolution is not to pretend those judgments do not matter. It is to make them visible enough that the business can teach, communicate, and repeat them.

Get the method out of the founder's head

Essam's extraction method is deliberately plain. He asks the founder to begin at the client's problem and explain what happens first. Then he asks what happens next, continuing until the desired result is reached.

The standard is not an impressive presentation. The founder should explain the sequence as though speaking to a ten-year-old with no knowledge of the industry. That constraint exposes professional shorthand and skipped steps.

When the founder cannot explain a decision, Essam does not fill the gap with a generic procedure. He asks the owner to observe the next real instance of the work. What actually happens when that problem appears on a shoot or during a client engagement?

Documentation follows observation.

The sequence he describes is practical:

Start with the client's current problem and intended result.
Describe the first action, then each action that follows.
Identify decisions that remain too vague to explain.
Observe those decisions during actual delivery.
Turn the account into a clear, limited sequence of steps.

Essam says AI can help organize a transcript of that explanation into a process. He typically requests a maximum of nine steps so the resulting structure remains manageable. The tool arranges the founder's account; the account still has to contain the knowledge.

That distinction keeps the exercise anchored in the business's real method. A polished sequence is not useful merely because it sounds systematic. Its value comes from accurately expressing how the business gets a client from the identified problem to the promised outcome.

Making that method visible serves two audiences. Internally, it gives other people a clearer understanding of how the work proceeds. Externally, it gives the buyer something more concrete to evaluate than a claim of talent.

The client can see how the result is approached rather than being asked to trust a personality. The founder can begin separating responsibility for the method from personal execution of every step.

This is the point at which the original film company's difficulty changes shape. The owner does not simply need permission to miss a shoot. The business needs a credible account of what the owner's presence has been providing and how that contribution can be carried into the work without requiring attendance every time.

Do puts the challenge in one sentence: “You're trying to figure out your formula and not make it a secret.”

The next client engagement therefore becomes more than another delivery deadline. It is an opportunity to notice the instruction never written down, the decision no one else understands, and the moment when personal intervention substitutes for an explicit method.

A founder can keep treating those moments as evidence of being indispensable. Or the business can finally learn how the work gets done.

If every successful outcome still requires the founder's presence, the dependency has not been solved. It has been sold again.

TRANSCRIPT

There are subconscious patterns that are either moving us closer towards what we want or they're moving us further away. So you're stuck in your phantom loop. Everyone has a version of this. My name is Matt Essam and you are listening to the future. Welcome back to the future with Chris Doe. Today's guest is one you're familiar with. His name is Matt Essam, and he recently published the Creative Studio Roadmap, and he's here to walk through the pillars of building a creative business that scales. Now, this is for solo operators specifically, and here's the pillars, differentiation, communication, and delivery. Now, the cool thing is this episode was recorded live in front of a studio audience, and And Chris and Matt were able to pull members into the hot seat and work through it live. Now, you know, they thrive off helping people solve those problems in real time, but it helps us as well as audience members. So we really hope you enjoy it. You can leave comments on Spotify. You can take screenshots and put those on IG, anything you want, but we'd love some feedback on this and hopefully you get a ton of value from it. Let's get into the episode. A freelancer is typically someone who goes into an office or works remotely, but sells their time by the hour. They're not really competing. They're not writing proposals or bids and procuring clients. Somebody books them and it's usually hourly, daily or something like that. And when they're done, they send an invoice and they're good. So they don't have to deal with contract negotiation. None of that. You're a work for hire. You're a freelancer. You're a mercenary. Once you transition from freelancer to solo business owner, you actually have to acquire those business skills like marketing, bidding, negotiations, contracts, terms and conditions, things like that. Invoicing, accounts payable. You're operating as a business, but you only have one employee. That's you. So now we're going to move from solo operator to what's the next level? Founder. Founder. What is that? Well, if I identify as a founder, I founded this business and therefore I am kind of the owner of the business rather than being the business. Okay. So can a solo operator be also a founder? Yes. Okay. So there's a condition that we need to move them. What's the thing that separates a solo operator? Mindset. Oh, what is the mindset difference between a sole operator and your business as a separate entity to you and you treat it as a separate entity to you? You don't see yourself as that business. Okay. So you created and founded a business that's separate from you. Yes. You are not the business. Yes. You are the owner operator founder. Yes. And you realize that that business needs certain things in place in order for it to run and survive. And interestingly, that definition of freelancer is important because when I first started my career, I had a long time where I was going between going into businesses, freelancing on kind of like a contract for big agencies and having my own clients. And I kind of saw that as all one and the same. But if you had said to me that at the time, it would have made a lot of sense because I think a lot of the problems I had in my solo operator career were caused by the fact that I thought those two things were one of the same. Chris, do you want to say something? Just one quick thing. The big unlock for me as a mindset shift was going from charging hourly or by the day to by the job. And when you charge by the job, you build in margin and that job has value so you're getting profit through the value you you're providing and that was the door that going from that's good to be an answer into owner founder so there's a system in place so you're absolved from feeling like oh i'm an idiot why am i doing that because There are a lot of models out there where people are charging hourly. And when you talk about this, Chris, when you shifted from charging hourly to project-based, which is decoupling it from the time in which you work on something, you then become aware of profit margin. Outside of the hours I put into this, what is my business actually earning, not just paying me? Let's get back to the example. You said you were working with a business owner and it took a lot of time and energy for you to convince this person they don't need to show up to the shoot. What is it that you said or did that allowed them to change their mind? They were experiencing a lot of stress. They were experiencing a lot of financial difficulty personally because they weren't taking much of a salary from the business. And so I just kept leaning on those things. If you want someone to change their behavior, you basically have to show them that what they're doing is going to lead to more pain than the thing that you're suggesting. So if you want someone to get into shape, you've got to show them that getting in shape is going to feel better than not getting in shape or staying as you are. There's gonna be more pain in your current situation than if you change and do these things. And so I just showed him, I just played out this scenario of what does business look like in three years time if nothing changes? What does business look like if you keep showing up to these shoots? And he was due to have a second baby. I said, how is this gonna work? And then he kind of had this realization that it wasn't sustainable and that this wasn't really a business. It was like he just employed himself. So you're using his own logic against him in this case. Yeah. You helped him to see his undesirable future state. Yes. And if that worked, why didn't you just have that conversation with them at the beginning? I did. See, this is the conversation we were having the other day, right? This concept of we'll just tell someone what to do and they do it and it's that simple. He had this programming. And this is one of the things I talk about in the book. I call them phantom loops. They are patterns of thinking which are often subconscious that keep us in a particular behavior or a way of being and is very difficult to break. That's why it's very difficult to change your life because You know that going to the gym and eating healthier or whatever is going to get you that thing. But why you keep having the ice cream or why do you keep going, oh, actually, I'm quite tired today is because there's something deeper there which you haven't resolved. Like you keep saying to me about the personal brand. Like, I don't believe you're bought into it. I don't believe you're bought into this idea of growing your personal brand. You sense that I'm not fully committed. I haven't made that internal change. So you're stuck in your Phantom loop. Everyone has a version of this. There are subconscious patterns that are either moving us closer towards what we want or they're moving us further away. So you said at the beginning of the coaching session, he understood that. Then he reverted to the phantom loop, to default mode network. What breaks him out of it then? The way I've heard thinking patterns described is a little bit like a highway versus a dirt road. So the highway is built and there's loads of traffic going down it. And now you want to try and divert the traffic down this dirt road. Like you might drive down there temporarily, be like, oh, this is a little bumpy and the highway is way better. I'm just going to carry on driving down here. Right. So our neurons, the way that we and by the way, just for caveat, because I know this is on the Internet, right? I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a trained therapist. I just geek out on mindset. And so you're a new media guy. Yeah, exactly. Right. So from what I understand about how the brain works, our neural pathways are strengthened through certain patterns of thinking. So if we think about a particular thing or we think in a particular way a lot, the actual neurons in our brain, the pathways are strengthened. So just clicking your fingers and going, right, well, I'm just going to behave like this. I'm not going to think like this anymore. I'm not going to think like a freelancer is very difficult for people to do. We have to actually create new pathways and we have to strengthen new pathways. So part of the coaching journey and one of the reasons that I typically ask for a minimum of a 90 day commitment from my clients is because I know that it takes time to change behavior and it takes time to get people thinking in this new way. And generally there's a point where you see the penny drop and you see it click and they go, ah, I see what you mean now. And then they stop doing that. And it's these micro choices. Every time you have a decision. So this client says, hey, we need you on this shoot or this client calls and this thing happens in that moment, you are making a vote for what future you want to create. And so my job as a coach is to constantly get people putting the token in the right tube, even if it feels scary, even if it feels difficult. And that's my definition of courage is you're voting for a future that you want, even if you don't feel confident right now, or even if it feels scary right now. What else do we need to know about mindset? Are we ready to move on? I think that's the main thing. That's the thing that I kind of preface the book with, because if you don't make those internal shifts, then the other three things we're going to talk about don't work. like i have literally tested that so if i don't do mindset work with people and i do the differentiation and we redo their positioning and all of that it just doesn't seem to work whereas if we get the shift first and then do this so i talk about it as mindset and strategy and i stole this from tony robbins but i really believe it's 80 mindset and 20 strategy so what i want to do is just kind of test the whole mindset shift here so i want to start with our freelancer so we just take little steps here So Ray, you're a freelancer. What would it take for us to get you to move away from charging hourly towards doing project-based fees? Where are you stuck in that loop? Well, I've worked at a marketing agency for the past like five years. And so for me, honestly, I feel like it's more like a money thing because I would rather be running leads and ads. I think being in that marketing field, like you just learn all the systems and things that work and for me it's just finding better clients to be able to put money into leads and then also to be able to hire other people to be able to bring them on so what would need to happen in order for you to take that leap so the hardest part for me has always been talking to people especially when i get like leads and The selling process is so difficult for me because I don't like having to force myself into get a sale. I just dislike that whole sales process. That's what's difficult for me. And that's probably maybe I don't know how to like explain that. I think it makes sense. So the first thing I always want to know from anyone is what do you actually want? Because everything else is kind of irrelevant until we know what you're actually trying to get. Like, so Chris said what would happen, but maybe he doesn't want that. So like, let's fast forward 12 months. Imagine we're sitting here having this exact same conversation and you've had the best year you've ever had in life slash business? Like what are some of the things that would have happened for you? For me, I think what would be really cool is just be able to take like three months off and just create stuff would be like super fun. I love the whole process of just like being on set and just like shooting things and just like being in that team dynamic. That's so fun for me. Yeah. And I think a lot of like the commercial stuff that I do, like Sometimes it is fun, but it's not like passion projects. So that's kind of what I would like to do. Would you say that's your main priority? That's the number. If you only could achieve one thing in the next 12 months, is that the most important thing? I think so. Yeah. Okay, cool. So in this situation, right, we might say, well, what are all the ways that we could achieve that? Is there a company out there that you would love to work for that would allow you to do that kind of work? Yes. Okay. Ideally. Is there a company out there that might allow you to take a sabbatical for a month or two and go and just do whatever you want? That would be beautiful. Okay, cool. So it might not be that he needs to shift from freelancer to operator or solo operator. It might be that actually he's better off now based on what he actually wants staying where he is. - I don't think so, but I'll go with that. Okay, I don't wanna do, should I derail this for half a second? - You can if you want, yeah, yeah. - You want to have three months where you just get to create. - Yeah. - Without the burden of making money. - Yeah. - So if you are selling time for money, do you see a future where you can actually take months off and still have money? 'Cause those two things are tied together. When you stop working, you stop making money. That's how selling time works. - Yeah. So if I could tell you that you can have the money and not have to work for it, would you be open to that idea? - Yes. - And the most obvious way there is to start billing by projects so that you're making more money than the time in which you're selling, therefore you get your time. Are you interested in that future? - Yes. - Okay, then we'll stop there. Does that excite you now? I've seen the responsibilities of owning a business is also like... I didn't ask you that question. I just... Nothing else has to change except for changing how you charge. Right, right, right. Yeah. But you hinted before of old stories, childhood-ish, maybe poor money mindset. Yeah. You said the most difficult thing for you is actually talk to the client during the sales process. Yeah. You framed it as this thing I'm trying to force people to. No, I don't teach sales to force anybody to do anything. Yeah. So you've told yourself a narrative that sales is a forcing act, and so therefore you're gonna continue that narrative. And the easiest path is just charge hourly. There's no friction in that. You just tell people your rate, they either decide yes or no. Only friction there is, well, it's 300 hours, clients, and they're like, "What? Why is this so many hours?" Otherwise you're good. So if you do progressive billing, that won't be a surprise. So right now, the pattern I see for you is you would rather not fight with a client and do anything to avoid any form of perceived conflict at your own detriment potentially next step so the first of the three pillars is differentiate if we go back to the concept that once you get to a certain point you look fairly similar to most other businesses How do you differentiate yourself so that you're not constantly in a pitch fest with other agencies, other studios, so that clients aren't saying, oh, well, 50,000 pounds is a lot of money for a rebrand. This guy over here does it for 20. Why can't you do it for 20? Right. These kind of conversations. You have to be able to differentiate yourself in a way where it feels like you are a market of one or like we were talking about the other day, a blue ocean. from the outside my agency looks exactly the same as yours but if you say to someone what makes your agency different it's oh it's the way that we treat our clients it's the way that we solve problems it's the and all the things they list you only get to experience once you've started to work with them so i'm like okay but how do you communicate those things to the clients and they're like well we say all of those things i'm like okay go on any other website do you see anyone else saying like we've done amazing work and we treat our clients really well and we respond you know they're not differentiators everybody does that the only thing that's truly unique about you and your business is your story the things that you've done in your life the people that you've met the places that you've been and that is the kind of code i suppose that is the thing that is unique So the greatest lever for differentiation is your story. Yes, I will focus on that. Yeah. What is the high level version that we need to understand? The high level version we need to understand is that everybody is in a unique position to solve a problem for somebody. Can you give us an example? Yeah. So one of my clients, Toby, he came to me. He'd been a vet, a veterinary surgeon for I think maybe almost a decade. And he had basically quit that job because he hated it. And he had started a film production company and that's what he wanted to do. And so it was about three or four years into this film production company. And he was making films for mountain bike companies and breweries and lots of different people. But he was really stuck with a lot of these symptoms that we've already talked about. So being compared against other video production agencies all the time, not being able to charge what he wanted. And so we go through this exercise with clients called the river of life. And it basically, we get a massive sheet of paper and we get them to draw their life from when they were born to where they are now, the highs, the lows, the things that they can remember and map it all out. And from that, we find themes. And so I was listening to his story about him being dyslexic at school and really struggling. But in spite of that, getting into one of the top veterinary colleges in the UK and then graduating, being a vet for all this time, but always having a passion for cinematography and film and all of these crazy. And I was like, wow, this is such a rich tapestry of story. And I said to him, I'm just curious, why don't you bring any of your veterinary stuff into what you do now. And he was like, well, I don't want to be a vet. That's my past life. I was like, what about if it's all related? And so again, took a while for him to come around to this idea. But when he eventually started to see it and join the dots, he realized that it wasn't just about making films. It was about solving a problem. And the problem that he was uniquely positioned to solve is the way that vets educated. Because he himself had struggled with education. He himself had been a vet, so he knew exactly what to do. And he had a unique mechanism, which was film and storytelling. And so we repositioned his business from I'm a film studio to we create remarkable educational training for neurodiverse learners in the veterinary industry. And he now has some of the biggest clients, colleges, pharmaceutical companies within the veterinary world. And he is uniquely positioned to do that because he's been a vet. So he understands what needs to be taught. He understands the nuances of that, but he also knows how to make great film. And he also understands how to tell stories and help people learn in a way like he probably wanted to learn back at school rather than the traditional way. And so that company has just absolutely exploded because we were able to bring his story into his business and demonstrate how he's uniquely positioned to solve this problem. So I want to throw this over to the audience who's in the room here. If you're mapping your river of life, Are you leveraging all of you in your story or positioning, which has its own definitions and I don't know why we could use positioning but not niche, but okay. Are you using that and if not, tell me why. Hector, you wanna go? - I am not. - Good, 'cause that's a truthful answer. Only truth here, everybody. - Yeah. - So do you see an opportunity now, have heard Matt say this? - I love what you're saying, man. It's insane. - Get a room. - I've got, yeah, I've got. - There's some yeah buts. There's always some yeah buts. - No, no, no, hold on. Is there a yeah but? - I've got a crazy upbringing, which has nothing to do with my business. - So you think. - Yeah, that's what you think. - So you think. - Yeah. - Can you give us one of those crazy things? Can you share, Hector? - I witnessed a murder. - Perfect. - When I was a teenager and it ripped my life apart. had target on my head just because of where i was at okay i was already two years into a job i loved a career i loved in design and everything changed okay were your life decisions leading you to a place where you would witness a murder don't yeah i think read between the lines or was this out of left field that you witnessed a murder we'll call it random violence really yeah okay that will pretty much mess you up matt spin your magic well unfortunately this isn't the kind of process that you can do in five minutes because the way i think about it is you imagine like a combination lock right everything that's happened to you so that event is just a digit in that combination. That's why it's unique. It's a unique string because nobody else has the exact same combination that we do. So it might not be that that specific event, you're going to open your TED talk with this, but we just take that as a theme. And the theme might be violence or the theme might be trauma or the theme might be resilience right whatever it is right and so that was one part of your life and then there's gonna be another part of your life and so we build up this picture of themes and then what we're trying to look for is what is the intersection of those themes and who lives there and so i talk about the four p's of positioning and person problem promise and process so what i'm looking for there is is there any person and sometimes it's a younger version of us that lives at that intersection of those themes. And so my example with Toby and his business, who lives at the intersection of education, veterinary practice, film and storytelling. And he was like, well, it's me. It's a student who, and that might not be your end client because the people that pay him aren't the students. They're the governing bodies that need to get the students through veterinary school or the pharmaceutical companies who want to be. So it's not always necessarily the end client, but the problem he's solving is these people with all this potential who could be really good vets but they aren't able to progress or they're struggling in some way because the way they're being taught and the things that they're being taught aren't helping the way that they learn so i almost guarantee that there will be a version of that for you and so i would encourage you to just box that and just think of it as a theme sure and whatever theme comes up for you and then just keep going through the process and there'll be there'll be other themes And then there's kind of this little circle that we start to form. And we're looking for like some ideas around what lives at the intersection of these themes. So who are you uniquely positioned to help? What problem do they have? The second P, what is the promise that you could offer them? So IE, what is it that they actually want? And what is the process that you take them through in order to get from problem to promise? Most of us are busy ignoring all the things that we've considered as negative parts of our story. We only try to focus in on what's good. And sometimes we have pretty rough childhoods that there's not a lot of good there. But what we don't realize in this largely ignored area of negative things that have happened to you, with you, for you, it's actually where the gold is. Because everybody talks about what they're good at, and then that doesn't help you differentiate. But within everything that you might think is bad, there's some benefit to it. So in the case of your friend Toby, who was dyslexic, that would be considered a learning disability, and he struggled and may have been teased and ridiculed over it emotionally, like very sensitive subject. But the benefit of that was he understands how to learn despite being neurodivergent. He can help a lot of other people. So people who are able to overcome adversity develop tools, resources, systems, and frameworks that they don't think about because It's normal to them. So in your traumatic murder situation, it wrecks you, but you learn something from it. And that's where we dig for the gold. You processing that now? Did you want to contribute? I did a post where I said I went to... I totally put a hook in there and said... there's only one way to say this but i'm going to prison but i'll be out soon and i was going to volunteer but i used the hook and you know it was the most viral post i've ever made of course but people said oh i figured it was you you know i figured you might have a past like that before they read so i that sticks with me that stigma of me growing up in the hood do people prejudge me and so that's why perhaps in a white collar world, I don't really dabble in that too much. - Oh, that's a mistake. It really is. - Okay. - You can tell, or as soon as you talk about your past, your story becomes richer and more interesting. It's like your rice, you got no seasoning. - Yeah. - What you consider not appropriate to share is the seasoning. Otherwise it's super bland. It's like rice with white cheese. - Got it. - Not flavorful at all. - Yeah, I am doing it. I have spoken about it publicly for the first time two years ago. I've got a chapter in a book, but it still, I'm leaning into my uncomfortableness. - Here's the thing I'm gonna tell everybody to do. Please don't start dumping your trauma onto the internet. People don't want that, they're not ready for that. I would say work with a coach to figure out how to frame that so it doesn't trigger other people, but it also is in alignment with the bigger story. If you have the plot to your story, then you know what to include in the details. But if you're figuring out beat to beat, the story's very disjointed and we can't follow. So I would encourage everybody to work with somebody who knows what they're talking about to help you mine those stories, to build your river of life, and so that you have a 30,000 foot view that's like, it's cohesive, it makes sense. Let's get into the next, is it pillar? - Yep. - Number two, it's four things, but pillar number two is communicate. - Yes. - What does that mean? So once you've figured out what your unique value is, how do you actually communicate that value to your idol clients? So you've uncovered all this stuff and many people experience this. They know, for example, one of my clients was a VP at Disney for 20 years. Other than saying I worked at Disney for 20 years, how do you compress 20 years of experience into some kind of communication, a verbal pitch, copywriting on your website, on your LinkedIn? And so we use those four Ps. in our communication but the part that most people miss is the creative studios that really are at the top of their game creatively they're typically talking about their service so you go onto their website and it says we are a branding studio we are an animation studio we offer great design and when they post on social media they talk predominantly about design and animation and branding. And that's fine if people are out in the market looking for design, animation and branding. But I have got some research linked to this in my book, but there are quite a few research studies to say that at any one time, there's only about 8% of the total addressable market who is at that point looking for a particular service. So you are missing the majority of your market. And not only that, but when people are at that point where they've made a decision that they need a new brand, they're out there looking for something. What are they genuinely comparing people on? Well, when they're making that decision, they're making decision based on three factors. Usually number one is price. How much do I want to spend on this? Number two is quality. Do I believe this is actually good and is going to get me the thing that I want? and number three is how quickly can i actually get this how quickly is this going to be effective and so if if we talk about our services we attract people at what i call stage four of the decision making process so there are six stages in total i won't go through every single one of them i'll just talk about the what are t's the two most important ones which is stage four which is where people are actually making a decision hey i'm gonna by this day i'm going to do this thing and by the way if you all think about a considered purchase that you've made recently whether it's a car or a phone or something where you didn't just go out and buy it you probably went through every single stage of the decision making process so your clients are currently at one of these stages and so my argument is that stage four is the worst place to engage with your market So when we talk about communication, the way that we stop engaging at stage four and start engaging at stage two, which is where I have an awareness of a problem, but I haven't yet decided that I'm going to act on that problem. So if you imagine there's a room full of people, let's say there's 100 people and you say, who right now in this room is looking for a personal trainer right now? And they're ready. They've got their credit card and they're ready. They will sign up if the right personal trainer is in this room. Maybe what, three or four people might raise their hand. But if you said, hey, who in this room isn't in the exact shape they want to be? They know they could be a little bit healthier. And this year they're on a mission to make their life a little bit healthier, to get in shape. I imagine what, maybe 50 or 60% of the people might put their hand up. And so they're all people at stage two. They have a desire, they have a challenge, but they haven't yet said, I'm going to go and buy this thing. And so the way that we communicate our value or our unique value to our ideal clients is that we swap our services for symptoms. So I tell Creative Studio, stop talking about branding, stop talking about the thing that you do and start talking about the symptoms that your ideal client is facing right now. And that's the kind of premise of the communication pillar is how do we use language and how do we talk about our business and our offer in a way that speaks to those stage two symptoms not stage four let's pull chris tobiko back into this chris three years ago started out creating his own agency yeah - Yes. - Chris, what are the symptoms that your ideal clients have? - I would say that my focus is mostly on strategy and positioning. So I'm looking for, my ICPs have, they have problems with strategy and positioning, foundational strategy. They're confused, they don't have a clarity of message, they don't have a north star. - Let's do this. Pretend you're on stage and there's a thousand people that potentially could be your clients. And you would start the statement with, raise your hand if you have Raise your hand if you are confused about what you're selling. Raise your hand if your leadership team can't agree on what North Star messaging is. Raise your hand if your positioning isn't clear and influencing all your pillars of your business. So I would go one layer deeper and I would say, let's take your leadership team isn't clear on the north star is that what you said okay how would they know if their leadership team wasn't clear on the north star what would they be experiencing day-to-day week-to-week that they could tangibly point to and i can help you if you're stuck i know the answer they are having a hard time in their day-to-day because they don't know what to do because they aren't clear on their day-to-day goals because the mission of the company is not So that's their problem from your perspective. So the analogy that I use is like a doctor and you come into my office and you start throwing loads of medical jargon at me and you come in and I'm like, well, this is happening and that's how and you're like, well, I don't know any of that stuff. The doctor needs to be able to say, okay, How often do you have headaches? And do they get worse when you do this or do they get better? And do you wear glasses? And so he's asking you all these questions. So what could they tangibly point to? Because you're saying the problem is that they don't know, but they don't know that that's the problem. Because if they did, then they would be at stage four. The easy flip would be they don't know how to brief a vendor. Okay. So how many people in this room right now really struggle when you have to brief vendors and when What do they specifically struggle with? Tell me something that comes up in their day to day that they go, oh my God, that happened to me last week. For me, it gets back to the clarity of the frustration that they feel that they don't have clarity on how to lead a vendor or talk about their own. So what happens as a result of that? What do they experience as a result of that? well they're internally frustrated but they also create some friction with their vendors and their relationships and that there's there's people don't know what they're doing one layer deeper how does that show up i want you to say something that we could all point to okay chris this is perfect almost everyone who's been doing this for what i would consider too long you use your language you're not using their language So that's the hack. Everybody use their language, words that they would say. So you have to use your creativity and your empathy to like forget that you're Chris and be them. Because the way I would have said this is how many people have written a really great brief that you think is spot on only to be horribly disappointed that what comes back is the opposite of what you asked for? because that's what they would say yeah for sure that's the kind of language you want to use and there's a ton of things when you're misaligned how many of you uh raise your hand if you have so many projects you start but nothing's ever completed and you're no better off today than you were a year ago that's a sign of like we don't have clear positioning right we have good direction yep and how many people are constantly having internal arguments about what we should be doing or who our customer is and what their problems are. I learned this from a guy called Travis Sago, and he's a brilliant copywriter. And his thing is, if you can't point to it, like physically point to it. So in the first example that he used, right, how many of you have sent off a brief that you think is amazing, but what has come back is nothing like you thought it was going to be. Like I can point to a thing that I've sent and that has come back and in my mind isn't how I want it to be. Like that's something I can show you. I can show you an email that comes in. How many, like, so if I was doing it for like my audience, right? How many of you want to close your laptop on a Friday night and spend time with your kids. But an email comes in from a client and you really feel like you need to address it. And you've got these two voices in your head. One says, I should switch off and spend this time with my family. And the other says, if I don't address this quickly enough, I might lose this client. So I want to be able to describe something almost like I'm in my ideal client's head. And so there's this phrase that's quite famous in the marketing world that says, when you can articulate your clients problems better than they can, they subconsciously credit you with having the solution. And so we're all trying to give people more ideas and more things. But I found the secret is being able to articulate what's actually going on first in their language. Something that's actually, if you can get it to the point where it's like, oh my God, I had that thought the other day and that thing actually happened to me. Then they're like this person, I need to speak to this person. They've got something that I need. You're trying to create this thing called the that's me moment. Yeah. When you describe it and they're like, that's me. Yeah, I couldn't have said it better. Number three, the pillar is deliver. So the key principle around deliver is that most founders are still trying to sell themselves. So that example we used at the beginning of the founder who ran the film company, and he thought that he had to be at every single shoot. He thought he had to be dealing with the clients. He thought that his work was the thing that got him to where he is now so his work is what will get him to the next level so the idea of handing that work off to other people was very scary because like well what about if it's not the same quality and what about if people don't do the same job as me so founders become stuck in their business because they feel they have to micromanage they have to oversee things they have to manage people in general so the principle of deliver is that we want to stop trying to sell people and we want to start selling process so of the four p's person, problem, promise, process. And process is how do you get your ideal client from stuck, all these symptoms they're experiencing right now, to solution where they actually want to be. And so that journey of A to B usually is stuck in the founder's head. So it's a little bit like driving a car. We'll go back to another metaphor analogy. I learned to drive a manual or stick shift car like you guys say in the States. And I remember my first driving lesson. I just had no idea how I was going to get this car to travel along the road and not crash into someone because I had to put the clutch out. I had to then change gear. I then had to bring it up to the specific point where it was biting. So the car started moving forwards all while checking my mirror, making sure I wasn't crashing into anyone and turning the steering wheel. And my brain's going, how on earth are we going to do this? Six months later, I'm driving down the road, music, what songs on? I'm having a conversation with my friend and my brain is doing this whole thing on autopilot. And so it's the same for founders. They've spent the last 10, 15, 20 years getting really good at this thing. And it all happens subconsciously. And so they start to build this business and they know how to get results for their clients because they go, oh, well, just do this. And then we do this and then we go over here and obviously, right? just like it is obvious driving a car. But to somebody who's never driven a car before, it's like, what do you mean? How do I know when to indicate? How do I know when to turn the steering wheel this way? And so in order to grow and scale a business that doesn't rely on you, we have to first of all take those ideas out of our head and we have to map them out into a process. And that process should be a really clear description of how you get your ideal client from A to B, where they are now to where they want to be. And it should be in a way that anybody could execute that and the client still gets the results. Is there, are there tools and we can help people to excavate this? So the process that we use is pretty rudimental. To be honest, we get the founder to start at problem. So if I was talking to Chris, I'd be like, okay, cool. What are those things? What's the first thing you do with a client? Right. Or maybe we have a call and then we map out their goals. Okay, cool. What do you do next? And I get them to explain how they would step by step get a client from where they are now to where they want to be. But they have to tell me as if I am a ten year old child and I have no knowledge of that industry whatsoever. And if they can't explain it like that, then we have to dig. Okay, what do we do? And they're like, I don't know. Okay, well, next time you're on the shoot with the client and this problem comes up or you do this thing, I want you to observe. How do you actually do it? What are the steps? We just keep going through this process. Now with AI, it's amazing, right? Because you just take that transcript of that conversation, you give it to AI and you say, map out. Usually I say a maximum of nine steps because otherwise it's too many steps to keep in people's minds. So a maximum of nine steps of what I just described, how I get a client from feeling overwhelmed to clarity or whatever your promise is from A to B. And then we have a process. Let's quickly recap. What are the four things? Give us a high level and then we'll wrap. mindset is number one 80 mindset 20 strategy so if you don't get the mindset piece right then everything else basically doesn't work and the core principle around mindset is this idea of phantom loops so we all have these subconscious patterns that run our lives and the first part is becoming aware of the pattern and then the second part is making these micro decisions every day to change your behavior so that pattern is no longer running you and influencing your behavior And a very useful tool is just imagine if you're on this path in 10 years and take it to its extremity and see where you're at. If you're happy with that result, you don't need to do anything different. But most likely, if you're here, it's because you want to change some of that. Exactly. Number two. Number two is differentiate. So your ability to differentiate yourself amongst your competition. And the key to that is your story. So the key lives inside your story. And I believe that we're all in a unique position to solve a problem for someone. And when you can identify who that person is and what the problem is, life and business becomes a lot easier. So that's almost like matchmaking. If I understand who I am, there are ideal matches for me and non-ideal matches. And the problem is most of us don't figure out who we are, so we think we're a match for everyone and we know that that's not true in life. So let's figure that out. And AKA personal brand. Number three is communicate. So your ability to communicate your unique value to your ideal clients, that person that you're uniquely positioned to help. And so the big idea around this is where we engage with those clients rather than stage four being, hey, I'm ready to buy a rebrand right now. We actually want to come back down the decision making process to stage one or two where we're aware of the problem, but we haven't yet decided that we're going to fix it. And the way that we do that is we swap services, i.e. branding, illustration, design, the symptoms. What is our ideal client experiencing right now? And the more we talk about symptoms and the better we get at articulating our ideal client's symptoms, the easier it will be to attract them. You're trying to create in your copy, your language, your marketing, a moment where you use their language and not your language, whereas by reading it, they raise their hand and say, that's me. If you can do that, you're going to get work. Number four, last but not least, deliver. So your ability to grow and scale a business that doesn't rely on you. The core principle here is that you don't want to sell people or your team, really, because you might have an amazing lead designer. And if they leave and that's who you've been selling to your clients, then the business is in trouble. You want to sell process. They want to come to you because you are able to get them from where they are now, which is struggling, confused, all of those symptoms you identify to where they want to be. which is the ultimate state or the desire and your process should clearly articulate how you do that and so when clients come to you you're selling them that process you're not selling them how great you are or how great your design is or your work is you're selling them hey this is how we get people from a to b and so it doesn't really matter who implements that process i don't think this is controversial for me to say but mcdonald's does not make the world's best burger not even close very rarely are they on any list that you can think of in terms of burgers you can eat but they're probably one of the most successful burger franchises in the world, brand value alone, market cap. And it's because Ray Kroc had figured out the exact way he wants to make a burger every single time. So although it may not be the best, it's going to be very consistent down to the pickles, how much ketchup and mustard is on each burger. You're trying to figure out your formula and not make it a secret. That's the key difference here. You need to communicate that process because this is where Blair Enns would say something like this, low variability in process equals low variability in outcome. When I want an outcome, I don't want to guess whether or not I'm going to get it. So you describe your process very clearly. It gives me greater confidence that you and your team are the right fits for us. You'll notice that the people who can articulate this have a competitive advantage over the ones who can't. Matt, appreciate you being here. Appreciate you dealing with my shenanigans and nonsense. I enjoyed our conversation very much. I think it was clear and practical. I love the visual metaphors. And if this was the taste of what's in the book, wholeheartedly recommend y'all pick up the book. Matt, anything else? Where do people follow up with you or anything else? Just on LinkedIn? Follow him? I'm on LinkedIn. Just search on Amazon for the Creative Studio Roadmap and you should find the book.

Download transcript

Enjoyed this? There’s more where it came from.

Get insights on running and growing a creative business.

You can unsubscribe anytime. By submitting, you agree to receive communications and to our Privacy Policy.

“You're trying to figure out your formula and not make it a secret.”

— Chris Do

Key Takeaways

Subscribe

YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify

Details

Topic: BUSINESS

Share