We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brandon Smithwrick. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brandon below.
Brandon, appreciate you joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?
I have been able to make a full-time living off of my creative work. Just to give you a bit of background on my journey, I studied fashion merchandising, quickly fell in love with marketing, and during that time social media was still relatively new for brands and businesses. I began working on social teams in NYC for companies like Greats, Ralph Lauren, then Squarespace, then Kickstarter. Over my career, I became a bit more senior and started to even lead social teams, manage them, everything.
Over the past four years, I started to share that knowledge for my own channel and even post my own content. Year over year, I kept seeing my side hustle income double and soon overtake my 9-to-5. That’s when I knew it was time to leave, so I actually quit my job in August 2025 to be a full-time creative entrepreneur.
Definitely not a day one, overnight success thing, but just the power of consistency and dedicating time for your side project because you see a light at the end of the tunnel or you’re just seeing returns in smaller ways.
Some of the major steps for me were:
– truly just consistency
– making sure content wasn’t just what I wanted but what would really help people
– having the lens of these are things that I haven’t heard anyone else talk about, so there must be room in this conversation for this perspective
Major milestones included everything from interviews to trips with brands to keynote speeches, all the things. When I look back and figure what could have sped up my process, it was probably me just going all in from day one. The longer you wait, the longer it will take to compound, and your first couple of creative projects may not even be your best work. You want to make sure that you are giving yourself that natural time to make those mistakes while you can, so that when it comes time for the big leagues, you are ready and you’ve already put all the reps in.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
So I like to say I’m a creative marketer turned creator. I used to help brands and businesses with their content, and now I help other small business owners, entrepreneurs, and creators with their content. I post all about strategy and tactics on how to grow.
I’ve been able to be recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for my work in marketing and advertising. I’ve been on podcasts, I’ve been on stages, I’ve done keynotes, and now I work as a content creator. I write a newsletter called Content, where each week I give people valuable information on how to increase and improve their content in a way that doesn’t just perform but really makes you money and grows your business. I also do consulting to help creators, entrepreneurs, one-on-one, building AI workflows, content systems, and automations within their business so they can begin churning out this content every single week.
Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?
When you are an LLC, you are a small business, and one of my friends told me how not enough creators apply for small business grants, especially when you have creative works, and that was a big one. I think I’m fortunate enough to where I want to leave that money for people who need it more, but that was definitely a resource I did not know about, and I wish other people knew about it too.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
This is going to sound like an odd one, but my life got significantly better from a business standpoint, from a financial standpoint, from a quality of life standpoint. When I took, I would say, a season, three to six months, it’s now just become my daily. Instead of watching Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max, I paid for YouTube Premium, and I watched nothing but educational content while I worked.
I increased my financial literacy. I increased my business aptitude. I increased my resilience, because instead of watching shows, I would just be watching things that open my mind to so many possibilities. It’s allowed me to retire my wife. It’s allowed me to travel, work remotely, think differently about my business and even opportunities. I would say watching YouTube channels like Ali Abdaal, Matt Gray, Jay Klaus, and a ton of others slowly started to allow me to see a pathway to $1,000,000 and even start to see what I made annually as a quarterly goal. Even the level of conversations you begin to have are different because your mind is just not scared of those things anymore.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://contenttocommas.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brandonsmithwrick/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonsmithwrick/
Image Credits
Not applicable.