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Real artists aren't starving. The creatives who care most about the work are the ones who figure out how to get paid for it.
I've spent 20 years in creative fields and done about 250 consulting calls in the last six months, almost all with people stuck between 5k and 15k a month, working full time hours and quietly losing their love for the craft.
So here's exactly what I'd do if I wiped it all and started over. I call it the five ones. One target market, one product, one conversion tool, one traffic source, for one year.
I get into why most of us are running the Walmart version of our business when we should be running the Coach version, the Snickers bar wrapped in a paper towel, and how Hosanna hit 12.5k in her first month of coaching after she picked one channel and stayed there.
I also tell on myself about TallBear, the band my friends called the best band that never was. I wrote ten songs and released three.
Connect with Jonathan:
- Instagram: @jonathandavidray
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathandavidray/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jonathandavidray
If you're a creative service provider who's tired of being talented and stuck, check out Wealthy Creatives Coaching → [link]
Chapters:
Creators and Guests
What is Wealthy Creatives Podcast?
Most creatives didn't start their business to burn out.
Wealthy Creatives is a conversation with videographers, photographers, designers, musicians, and creative service providers who are building businesses that actually give them their lives back.
Hosted by Jonathan David Ray — a musician, creative director, and business coach who's spent 21 years in the trenches — each episode explores what it really means to be wealthy as a creative: not just financially, but in inspiration, margin, freedom, and the kind of work that makes you come alive. Expect honest conversations about finding inspiration to create your best work, pricing your work, building a client base that values your craft, and living a creative life as an entrepreneur you don't need a vacation from. If you're a creative who's tired of being talented and broke, this is your show.
00:00:00 @jonathandavidray
Most advice on making real money as a creative was written for a world that just doesn't exist anymore. Build a personal brand, post every day, pick a niche you don't actually love just to make money, raise your prices, and the right clients will just magically appear. But none of it tells you how to actually go from being booked out and broke to running a calm business that actually pays you well. Now, I've spent 20 years in the creative fields myself as a musician and a creative director, and over the past six months, I've done about two. 250 consulting calls with creatives just like you for photographers, videographers, designers, coaches, and musicians, and they were all stuck in that exact same spot, somewhere between five and fifteen thousand dollars a month, working full-time hours, but quietly losing their love for the craft, the very thing that they got into business to do. So in this video, I'm going to tell you exactly what I would do if I had to wipe everything and.
00:00:53 @jonathandavidray
Start over as a creative in 2026. I'll show you what type of work to sell and the one type of person to sell it to. How to package what you do so that the right people happily pay a premium for it. The single change that turns someone who is interested into someone who pays you for your work. And the one discipline that's underneath it all that compounds all of this into 30, 50, even $60,000 a month. By the end, you're gonna have a full system and you'll know exactly where to start. Before any of this, though, we have to talk about something. Almost every creative person I know believes that being a great artist and making money just don't go together. That real artists are supposed to be broke, right? They're supposed to struggle, and if that you're making good money, you've somehow sold out, or you just got.
00:01:39 @jonathandavidray
Got lucky, but it's completely backwards. Real artists aren't starving, and the creatives who actually care about their work are the ones who figure out how to get paid for it, so that they can have long and fruitful careers. And so this is where it starts. Most creatives think about money like a wholesaler. They Sell a lot of small things, and they stay busy, and they keep the prices so low that the work keeps coming in. But the people who get paid well, they think completely differently. Here's the simplest way that I can explain it. Let's say I have a handbag from Walmart, and I have a handbag from Coach. Okay, technically they're both the same thing. They're both purses, and they serve the same purpose, right? But one is cheap, and it's sold to everyone, while the other one is sold at a.
00:02:21 @jonathandavidray
Premium price only to people who actually want it, and here's where the problem is: most creatives are running the Walmart version of their business, which causes them to get exhausted, burn out, and stay broke. So practically, what that means is so simple: stop pricing your work to win everyone, and start pricing it for the people who actually want what only you can do. You want to be coach, not Walmart, even if that means fewer clients. But the way you price your work is only. The other half has nothing to do with pricing, and it's the reason I personally struggled in my creative career for years. You see, most creatives never actually put their work out into the world. The best example I can give of this is when I was in a band called Tall Bear. Our bandmates called our band the best band that never was.
00:03:09 @jonathandavidray
I had written 10 songs for a record, but I only released three because I kept editing and I kept polishing and tweaking, and it never was perfect. I kept waiting for it to be perfect, and as a result, that music career just never happened. Not because the music wasn't good, but because I never put it out. Everything changed when I started shipping out work that was good enough. Instead of trying to make it perfect, that's the thing that nobody tells us to do. And the struggling creative is not struggling because their work is bad. They're struggling for one of those two reasons: they price like a wholesaler instead of a premium provider, and they keep perfecting their work instead of shipping it. So they never get the reps that actually lead to getting paid, that actually lead to a long career. Real artists learn how to leverage what they do, and that starts with fixing both of those things. So now the only question is left.
00:03:59 @jonathandavidray
How do we actually do it? And here's the whole map I want you to follow. I call it the five ones: one target market, one product, one conversion tool, one traffic source for one year. And the idea running through all of those five is the same: stop trying to do everything all at once, and double down on the things that matter. Almost every creative I talk to is losing momentum because they're chasing too many audiences with too many offers, selling on too many platforms, and then giving up before. Any of it has time to work, and the five ones is going to force you to go deep on what actually matters instead of going a mile wide. And then it forces you to stay there long enough for to actually compound. You see, the first four are focused on actually building the income, and the fifth one, the one year, is the discipline that allows all of the others to actually add up. Now, the reason I start with the one target market is because every other decision that you make, what you sell, how you sell it, where you show up, all of that falls apart if you get this one wrong.
00:04:57 @jonathandavidray
When we need clients, our instinct is to be available to everybody. We want to take any job we can get from anyone. But the second you try doing that, you end up getting noticed by nobody. So here's what you should be doing instead. You shouldn't be thinking about who would like your work. You should be thinking about who needs your work. That single change in thinking is going to take you from being just one of many options to being the answer to somebody's specific problem. I want you to think of it like this. I want you to picture a carpenter. Someone who only ever thinks about how good he is at making beautiful tables and beautiful chairs, he can't see his target market because he's only thinking about what he makes, how he makes it. But the person on the other side isn't buying a table or a chair. They need something to feed their family on and look good in their house. That's what they're buying. So when you start seeing the problem.
00:05:47 @jonathandavidray
You focus on becoming the solution instead of focusing on the thing that you're making. Then I want you to add one more filter. I want you to pick the market you actually enjoy working with, and make sure they can genuinely pay you. Because a market you can't stand is going to drain your energy and your love for your craft, and the one that can't pay you, well, they're going to drain your bank account. Both of them matter. So now that you know exactly who you're for and what problem they need solved, the next question is, what's the one thing you sell them? I want you to imagine you're a little kid dressed up as your favorite Ninja Turtle on Halloween, and you're going trick or treating at somebody's house. You show up at the door, and you're excited because this house always has your favorite candy. And they open the door, and they hand you a Snickers.
00:06:28 @jonathandavidray
Bar your favorite candy bar wrapped in a paper towel. Are you going to take that candy bar? Probably not. Now reimagine the scenario, but you open the door and the candy bar is offered to you in the wrapper, in the actual packaging. Nothing about the product has actually changed. It's identical in both cases. The candy bar is the same, but the packaging is the entire reason that makes you decide whether or not you're going to reach for it. You see, having no clear packaging and just piling on add-ons is the paper towel version of your business. Let me show you a practical.
00:06:58 @jonathandavidray
Example of this. I have a client who runs her own video agency. She's super talented, and she sells brand films. And she sells them at a set price. In her proposals, lists out all the clients going to get right, all the deliverables, how long the shoot was, how long the film is going to be, how long the delivery cycle is, and then she gives them the options of. Adding more photos and videos for some extra fees, but that's a hard sell. And almost all her incoming clients were wanting the cheapest option. That's the option they were choosing. Packaging of more stuff wasn't making them want to buy. So we reframed the whole thing into one product.
00:07:34 @jonathandavidray
Described by what the client actually gets out of it. So instead of selling a one-minute pran film, she sold it as a way to get more leads and clients. And any other products they could buy wasn't just more stuff, but a quicker path to the outcome that they already wanted. And that single change helped her attract the right clients, got them to pay more, and filter out the ones who couldn't afford her offer in the first place. In reality, nothing really changed about what she was doing. She was still selling the same thing.
00:08:04 @jonathandavidray
Same craft in a completely different way. In our first session together, she told me she's like, I've never sold that way before, and that just goes to show that giving more options and more add-ons, it actually feels generous and helpful, but it actually pushes people away instead of getting them to buy from you. So now you've got one market, you have one product that actually speaks to what your clients need, but none of that matters if you can't get someone to actually say yes. To buying from you, and this is honestly where the whole thing breaks down for many of us creatives. I want you to think about how you sell right now. You probably send a quote, a proposal, and you hope the client says yes to your offer. I mean, you cross your fingers when you hit send on that email, or maybe you drop the price and then things just get quiet, or you just quietly hope that the work, your portfolio, speaks for itself. But because there's no repeatable process underneath any of that, every sale.
00:08:56 @jonathandavidray
Just feels random, and your income stays unpredictable no matter how good the work actually is. But the simpler fix for this, that requires a lot more discipline, is picking one way to close a deal and get genuinely good at it. This could be a verbal conversation, a strategy session, a discovery call, a webinar, whatever fits your style the most. Something that takes your person with their problem and gets them to say yes. And here's the thing: you're gonna get good at anything that you do over and over again. And you can't do that if you're inventing a new pitch, a new way of selling every single time somebody shows interest in your product. One of the biggest issues I see with my creative clients is that the way that they close the deals just lives in their head. They close one deal and they lose the next one, and they don't understand why. We don't know how to improve on something that never became an intentional process. When I was a wedding singer a long, long, long time ago.
00:09:49 @jonathandavidray
I had one conversation I ran every single time I got an inquiry. I'd get that person the phone and I'd run this play right here. I'd ask for information their big day, to describe what they wanted their wedding ceremony to feel like, what they were worried about, and what would make them feel like their day was a success. Then I would take their own words and loop them back right back as a promise I was making. If they hired me, for example, I would tell them that they wouldn't need to worry about when the music would start during the ceremony. That was my job. I was going to take care of that, right? The whole thing is just going to be this beautiful moment that they're going to always remember. That conversation was my conversion tool, and it worked because it was the same questions every single time, and I got good at that play. I worked on this with a DJ client of mine named Derek. Now, the big change we made to grow his income wasn't rewriting his offers. We just stopped giving the buyers three choices at the end of his calls.
00:10:41 @jonathandavidray
So instead, after every discovery call, Derek would just make one single recommendation based on what came up in the conversation, and he made $5,000 in his first week just by making that one change. So that just goes to show what one good conversion tool can do. Look, closing isn't just some personality trait you're either born with or you're not. It's a process you have to run the same way every single time, and the creative who masters one conversation will always do better than the more talented creative who just improvises every time.
00:11:11 @jonathandavidray
So let's move on because a product and a way to close are worthless if nobody ever sees you. And this is the most exhausting part because most creatives are just trying to be everywhere all at one time. The creative who's posting on Facebook and Instagram and printing business cards—why are we doing business cards? Running to network events ends up being good at none of it. Nobody actually knows that. They exist. I worked with an animator who could list 150 different things that he was able to do, but he wasn't actually focusing in any one area, and as a result, he wasn't making enough to quit his day job. Doing a little bit of everything feels productive, but it's the best way to make sure that you don't actually go anywhere. Here's what works: find out where your ideal client congregates, where they're already spending time. Instagram, LinkedIn.
00:11:58 @jonathandavidray
Facebook, YouTube. Then own one channel in that space, so you can build a clear path for clients to get to your offer. Somebody sees you there, they know exactly what happens next. They DM you, they book a call, and they go straight into your one conversion tool. Build out a path for them to follow. Every call to action, every step, laid out intentionally, so they can easily move from not knowing who you are to becoming a client. The easier you make it for them, the easier they'll become clients. Networking and referrals—they can totally feel productive. But if they don't become a system and build on each other over time, they're just keeping you stuck. They're just a fancy way of making friends. One real channel does, though, because every time you show up there, it gets a little bit easier and reaches a few more people than the last time.
00:12:45 @jonathandavidray
My client Hosanna is a doula who delivers babies and sells workshops and creative courses to first-time moms. She used to sell everywhere and to whoever came along. She had a target audience in mind, okay, but no real thought about how she was reaching them and where. She was living in this like field of dreams mentality. That's what I call it. That most of us live in. If we build it, they will come. But it wasn't working. And what she did to change was that she zeroed in on Instagram as her one channel. She got a clean and simple, easy strategy in place with a consistent rhythm to reach her ideal clients. And you know what happened? She hit her first $10,000 month in her very first month of coaching, just by making that change. Actually, I take that back. I'm looking at my text with her now. Her goal was 10k, but she actually hit 12.5k.
00:13:31 @jonathandavidray
That's what happens when you hone in on mastering one place. Okay, so now that everything else is in order, let's talk about the one thing that decides if all of this going to work out or not. One whole year, and I need to be honest without tempting the alternative is okay, because this the part where most of us creatives fall away, okay, especially us ADHD people. We all know the creative who picks a market in January. They launch something new in March. They have a new plan for a new platform in May. Then they get discouraged and talk about doing something completely different in the fall. They're always chasing the next thing and always starting at the bottom of a brand new learning curve. They never stick with anything long enough for it to work, even though it feels like progress. It's the exact thing keeping them broke. Does that sound familiar for some of you? The discipline is simple, but it's hard.
00:14:25 @jonathandavidray
Which is why you need to commit to your one market, your one product, your one conversion tool, and your one channel for a whole year. A year is actually long enough to master every single one of those things. It gives you enough time to genuinely become known in your channel and refine your product based on real reps, real data, real feedback. And this is where the title pays off. Okay, I'm not telling you that everyone watching this will make a million dollars. What I am telling you is that. Focusing on each of the five ones and holding it for a full year is what actually builds towards thirty, fifty, sixty, eighty thousand dollars a month. That's creating real, lasting wealth as a creative. Because when you stop starting over every few months and you let one focus year do its work, the business not only gets calmer, but the cash comes in and your revenue grows at the same time. Look, I hope this was helpful for you and an encouragement for you to stay consistent.
00:15:22 @jonathandavidray
As you build your business, if this hits the exact wall that you've been bumping into, the next thing is to watch this video where I break down why so many genuinely talented creatives stay stuck at the same revenue point for years. Make sure to watch this video next, and I'll see you there.