How to Turn Unfulfillment Into Income
What kind of business is the most impossible to scale?
If you said farming, you’re probably right. I’m not a farmer so I don’t know for sure but it’s gotta be tough. The real answer is the business you’re most likely in RIGHT NOW.
A creative business is the hardest to scale.
Creative businesses are brutally hard to scale. In some ways, they’re almost impossible to scale. I’ve built several multi-six-figure creative businesses, and today I own a multi-seven-figure creative company. And honestly? I wouldn’t wish owning a creative business on my worst enemy.
We do this because we love it. We love the beauty and the pain of convincing people who need our services that they should also value our services. Owning a creative business is a little like Stockholm syndrome. The industry constantly devalues us, underpays us, and tries to replace us. You’d think we would use our creativity to escape our captor’s clutches. But we just freaking love the gig too much. Our relationship with creative work is toxic at best.
That might not be true for everyone. But this part is:
THERE ARE ONLY TWO WAYS TO SCALE CREATIVE SERVICES.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling design, photography, writing, video, illustration, strategy, or underwater basket weaving. There are only two options:
Hire people to do the work for less than the client pays you.
Charge significantly more, then figure out how to deliver the work in less time.
That’s basically it. You can build systems. You can create templates. You can use AI agents to handle the admin and workflowy stuff. But the creative work itself? Still mostly unscalable.
A fish cannot climb a tree simply because a LinkedIn bro wrote a seven-part carousel about it. It is by it’s nature, NOT able to.
Creative work is by nature NOT scaleable.
Creative work requires human energy, judgment, taste, focus, and care. That’s also what gives it the power to make people feel things, buy things, and make decisions. If creative work were infinitely scalable, it probably wouldn’t have the same impact it has had for thousands of years.
But its unscalable nature is also what makes this vocation so personally painful. Because eventually, every creative person has to confront the Unfulfillment Monster.
You know what I’m talking about. The work you hate doing but have to do to pay the bills. The projects you loathe. The clients you’d like to chuck off a cliff. The jobs you accept even though you’d rather eat a yogurt parfait filled with glass shards than say yes.
Every creative person faces this dilemma. Some face it every single day.
What the Instagram gurus won’t tell you is that you can turn unfulfillment into income. And not just more income. The closest thing a creative service business has to passive income: money that is no longer completely dependent on you personally doing every inch of the work.
My First Encounter With the Unfulfillment Monster
In 2011, I was a starving designer. I was making around $300 a month designing T-shirts and website homepages. Then I met a guy at a pool party who told me he built websites.
I asked what he charged. When he said, “Sometimes $3,500 or more,” I nearly spit out my overcooked hot dog. People were willing to pay far more for a functioning website than they were for a pretty homepage design.
So I did what any starving creative would do. I went to Fiverr. This was early Fiverr. You could find talented developers for pennies on the dollar.
I met a developer named Shishir, sent him a message, and we hit it off. Within a day or two, I had hired my first web developer. I had already learned that I was not a developer—and had absolutely no desire to become one. Trying to learn enough HTML to bring a homepage to life was my first real encounter with unfulfilling work.
Almost overnight, I went from charging $500 for a website design to charging $3,500 for a fully built website. On one early project, I charged the client $1,200, paid Shishir $300, and kept the difference.
That was my first real taste of creative entrepreneurship. Not just freelancing. Not just trading hours for dollars.
REAL MONEY.
Of course, AI has changed the game. Today, every designer has Thanos-like finger-snapping powers and can generate code with their eyes closed. Had you handed me a Claude subscription in 2012, I might be writing this newsletter from my private island. Probably true for all of us.
But the deeper lesson hasn’t changed: Hiring someone to handle work I didn’t enjoy completely changed the way I saw creative business.
The Boring Work Is the Valuable Work
Fast-forward to 2015. I was making good money as a designer, but I started noticing something. The most consistent money in graphic design came from production work.
Ads. Ebooks. Presentations. Ongoing, repetitive, mundane stuff. The kind of work that rarely ends up on the front page of your portfolio.
Much of the money in creative services has always been—and will probably always be—in work that is not especially fulfilling. Think about it. The services clients need every month are rarely the sexiest ones.
My company now makes more than half a million dollars a year just designing slide decks for technology companies. Slide decks. Not groundbreaking identity systems. Not intricate illustrations that belong in a museum. Slides.
So be thankful for the mundane work. Be grateful for the tedious tasks that put food on your table and money in your bank. The goal is not to ignore the unfulfilling work, scoff at it, or wish it away.
Replace Yourself in Chunks
The goal is to turn it into income without being the person who has to do every bit of it.
At that point in my career, the big, fun, sexy projects—logos, branding, illustration—were what I wanted to do. But to attract more of that work, I needed time. Time to market myself. Time to build relationships. Time to create.
And because creative work doesn’t magically scale, the only way to create that time was to hire someone else to handle some of the production work. So that’s what I did.
I hired someone. I trained them. I paid them well. I told my clients I was bringing on help so nobody felt surprised or deceived.
And I was terrified. What if the clients didn’t like this person’s work? What if they weren’t as good as me? What if I lost the account because my new designer was a dummy?
Guess what? None of that happened.
Instead, I discovered that I was a great coach. A great teacher. A pretty awesome motivator. My clients loved working with the new designer.
I was able to accept more projects without personally doing all the work. The designer made good money. The clients received great work. And I had more time to pursue the projects that actually energized me. Everybody won.
Fast Forward
It’s now 2026, and Forrest is a multimillion-dollar boutique creative business. Some years are great. Some years are hard. But the freedom I’ve created by building a team has been a treasure to my family—and to my sanity.
I still go through seasons when the work feels unfulfilling. But now I see that feeling differently. It’s often a signal.
Maybe this is work I should train someone else to do. Maybe it needs a better system. Maybe it should become a repeatable service. Maybe I can find a way to get paid for the result without personally pushing every pixel.
The point of this email is not to convince you to start an agency. Honestly, an agency is probably the last business I would rush to start right now.
The point is that the work you find most unfulfilling may also contain your best opportunity to create leverage. If clients consistently pay for it, the answer may not be to stop offering it. The answer may be to stop doing all of it yourself.
Find someone who enjoys it—or is at least good at it. Train them. Communicate clearly. Create standards. Give feedback. Replace yourself in chunks.
Do not disappear overnight and dump everything on someone who started last Tuesday. Slowly remove yourself from the parts of the process that drain you, while protecting the quality your clients expect.
Then use the time you buy back to pursue work that is more fulfilling, more valuable, or both. You may wake up one day with nine full-time employees and four kids like me. Or maybe you’ll build a small, profitable team that gives you Fridays off.
Either way, remember this: Creative services are not naturally scalable. But when you learn to communicate well, teach other people, build trust, and sell your expertise, you can achieve the rare kind of scale available to creatives who are bold enough to turn their unfulfillment into income.
Do not waste the boring work.
Turn it into freedom! Maybe this is your sign to go and hire someone to do the stuff that doesn’t fulfill you so that you can finally get paid to focus on what lights you up?
For the love of humanity,
BT
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