Catalytic Leadership

Not Creative? AI for Agency Owners Unlocks a Bigger Advantage

• Dr. William Attaway • Season 3 • Episode 118

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Feeling overworked, under-inspired, or stuck rewriting the same proposals on repeat? You’re not lacking time — you may be underleveraging your creative edge.

In this episode, I’m joined by Brad Ball, co-founder of Ardent Creative, Verity Software, and Committed Mastermind, to reframe creativity as a business advantage — especially when combined with AI for agency owners.

Brad shares how his team used AI to shrink 60 hours of proposal work down to 1 hour, while improving personalization, speed, and accuracy. But the real insight? Creativity isn’t just for designers — it’s a mindset. A muscle. And every entrepreneur scaling past 7 figures needs it firing on all cylinders.

We’ll explore the four-part framework from his book Art of Entrepreneurs, how automation enhances—not replaces—creativity, and why agency owners must shift from overworking to orchestrating.

If you’ve ever thought, “I’m just not creative,” this one’s for you.


📚 Books Mentioned

  • Art of Entrepreneurs by Brad Ball

  • Atomic Habits by James Clear


You can grab Brad’s book, Art of Entrepreneurs, wherever books are sold — I highly recommend it. To explore more of his creative and entrepreneurial work, visit https://www.ardentcreative.com or search for his art online.


Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

Connect with Dr. William Attaway:

Dr. William Attaway:

I'm so excited to again have Brad Ball on the podcast. Brad is the co-founder of Ardent Creative, a full-service creative agency specializing in design, development, marketing and AI solutions. He's also the co-founder of Verity Software and a partner in the Committed Mastermind. Although Brad's a successful entrepreneur, he's also an award-winning artist. For Brad, the two cannot be separated. Many of the connections he's made in his business career can be traced back to his performance art painting, where he expresses his artistry live and on stage. A firm believer in nothing is by chance, Brad knows that the brushing canvas have forever shaped his life, and his clients are fortunate recipients of his creativity. He's the author of the new book Art of Entrepreneurs Discover your Creative Genius. Brad, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show again.

Brad Ball:

I'm glad to be here. It's going to be fun. It is.

Intro:

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know, last time we talked a bit about your journey and how you came to be where and who you are today. Today, I really want to dive deep on your new book. I read this and was absolutely blown away, not just by the creativity that you bring to it, because that's a huge part of who you are Creativity that you bring to it, because that's a huge part of who you are but by the way you captured entrepreneurship through a very different lens. So that's where I want to go today. You good.

Brad Ball:

Let's go, let's do it.

Dr. William Attaway:

Let's do it All right.

Brad Ball:

So tell us, let's start with, why did you write this book? So I guess overall the idea had been stirring. You know, you have a lot of people in business and you have meetings and whatnot. They talk about, oh I'm not creative or oh I can't do this. But really the foundation to any business, you know, starts with sales and marketing. But even just having the idea to do a business or the visionary aspect of a business, that all starts with creativity. And the idea is that the more you tap into that creativity, the more it's going to impact your business. And as I kind of started this journey, a lot of creative books are more for creatives and so I wanted to portray this more for the person that doesn't necessarily think they're creative, or if they are, how can they tap into that more? And so that's really the journey just started with me brain dumping and just kind of answering some of my own questions, and then it just kind of evolved into what it is now.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know you hit the bullseye with me. Anyway, I'll say, because I have been guilty in the past of saying I'm just not the creative type, not a super creative person, and you really popped that balloon pretty early in the book, this idea that I'm not creative, that entrepreneurs are not creative. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that and why you see the very act of entrepreneurship as being creativity in practice.

Brad Ball:

So one of the first things I address, I mean when it comes to people thinking they're not creative, is I ask them if they have kids or if they remember their own childhood. And what were they doing? You know, were they analytical or were they using their imagination? And I would say 99 out of 100, if not 100 out of 100, they're all going to say man, I was imagining I was playing with toys, and I use the story of Andy I think it was in Toy Story 3, where he's playing with all these toys and it's this robust railroad sequence, and I just remember as a kid doing that same type of thing. Well, that's the creative mind.

Brad Ball:

But then what happens? We get stuck in an industrial education system that really suppresses art and creativity out of people because you're stuck in a chair day after day, and that evolves into our business life that we got to sit in an office chair all the time, unless you're in a creative field, and so when you look at it from that lens, all kids are creative. And then what you see now also, as people get older, big names like George W Bush, arnold Schwarzenegger, jim Carrey and others are now painting later in life, and so it's just kind of interesting. Once you get out of that, you know hustle people gravitate more to that creative side, so it's always there. But what if you actually tap into that while you're in business? How would that impact your team, you, your ideas? And the more I tap into that creativity, the more the ideas flow.

Dr. William Attaway:

So what are some ways that you've done that with your team?

Brad Ball:

I mean a lot of times it can be just actually doing some creative things, whether it's music, I mean. A lot of times people listen to music if they have that ability. Even simple things like in the middle of the day, going for a walk to reset, recharge, let your brain have the moment to think. And so I remember team members in our office would just randomly just take a walk around lunchtime or just when they needed it, just to reset.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yeah, yeah, I've done that many times. I get stuck, I get in my head about a problem or something I'm trying to write and it just won't flow and I'm just like, okay, you know what? Change of place, change of pace, change of perspective. I heard Mark Batterson say that years ago and I've loved it and I'll just leave and I'll go walk around the block a couple times. You know, just take a walk in the neighborhood. I come back 20 minutes later and it's like whatever the block was, it's gone. And all of a sudden there's the answer oh yeah, this and it just flows.

Brad Ball:

It's remarkable, Like where was it before?

Dr. William Attaway:

Right, same guy Right yeah.

Brad Ball:

Yeah, so that's a premise that I even talk about perspective. Sometimes you have to get a different view of something before you really can see with clarity. And I go through some different stories of things that I went through on my journey, and one of my favorites is I was in college I have an art degree, so painting and drawing and I was a freshman and I walk into this art gallery where this artist had painted these beautiful chrome bowls and I looked at it and I was like wow, that looks just like chrome. And I go up to him I said, where did you get that chrome color paint? And he looked at me with this puzzled look on his face like you're an idiot, and he didn't really say anything. He just looked at me puzzled and then walked away. And then I went up and looked at the painting and I was like, oh my gosh, I see it now.

Brad Ball:

It wasn't that it was a paint, but if you look at a chrome bowl or something that's chrome, what does it actually do? It reflects. It reflects. So it was the reflections of all the colors and the things around it that made the color. So it was blacks and reds and greens and blues, and until I actually looked at it with clear eyes did I actually get it. And so that happens with a lot of things in business or in life that we see in a tunnel, but once we can actually really get clarity it brings all things into focus.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that. That clarity is so, so important, but it's often hard won because the distractions, both external and internal, never seem to stop. How do you foster that type of clarity?

Brad Ball:

Well, I would be lying if I said I have clarity all the time. I think, as people we always have different things we deal with and we're all on a different journey, and so I think it's just sometimes just pushing through and going through the process. I, honestly, I've been in a little funk for lack of better terms of just actually getting in the studio and painting. I started one and I got stuck and I stepped away and it's just like, okay, I got to get back to it and so, knowing that frustration I had before kind of may hold me back, I just had to push through. And so I think we all deal with that. But it's just trying to stay as much into that zone as possible, regardless of who you think you are. I mean, I've got people who think they're introverts but yet they show extrovert tendencies, and so does that make them an introvert or an extrovert? And so for me, I think I adapt based upon my surroundings.

Dr. William Attaway:

Same, thing with creativity. So what does that look like then? What kind of surroundings do you put around you in order to foster that kind of creativity? Are there things that you do for yourself or with your team, things that are in your environment, that help foster that?

Brad Ball:

I mean, the thing that came to my mind right off the bat was being around somewhat like-minded people, but people that challenge me, like, you know, the mastermind and even when I talk about perspective, sometimes you have to have another person that sees it from a different angle that you can't like a coach, like a William Attaway, and then they bring that clarity. It's like man, I didn't see that because sometimes we're just blind to it, and hopefully that's what the book also kind of allows is lets people open their mind to new things and allow those things to really resonate within their life.

Dr. William Attaway:

And I think that's really what it did for me. It gave me a view of myself that was a little bit different. It's like looking through a prism and seeing a color or a color scheme that I had not seen before. You break it up into four pieces in the book you know the blank canvas sketching the blueprint, brushstrokes of mastery and crafting a masterpiece. Can you walk through just an overview of those four sections and why you float it that way?

Brad Ball:

Well, yeah, let me grab it just so I have a reference myself. So the blank canvas itself, I mean that's kind of self-explanatory, that everything starts from a beginning and sometimes you've been in business long enough a lot of times those goals get crushed pretty quickly. Or it's not just a straight line, it's a bunch of just angles and ups and downs and it's a journey. But you have to start somewhere and you have to just take a step, whether that's starting out on your own or just even doing something creative. That if you go into a gym, do you expect to lift the heaviest weight right off the bat?

Dr. William Attaway:

Not so much.

Brad Ball:

No, you start with the bar and then you work up weight until your body gets used to it. Same thing with art or anything creative wise you start at the beginning and then you walk it out. So that's kind of the first piece. The second one, sketching the blueprint, which I have, just some of the plans and the process, but in that I think one of the big pieces is vision, beyond what you can see now, that seeing the future is hard. But casting a vision, especially for business, is important, letting your team know where you're headed, and if you don't have clarity on that, then you're not going to go anywhere. And I've seen that in business. I've seen that in ministry and churches, where a leader didn't have a vision for where they were going and they were content basically where they were. So it just stayed the same and it stagnated. And so, even if you're if, even if you don't know where you're headed, as long as you're pushing towards something that people can grab a hold of, I think is vitally important.

Brad Ball:

So then the next one, um, brushstrokes of mastery. I mean that's just all navigating. I have the artist ability, the artist strategy, and one in particular is the art of AI, and so how that navigates is, if you think about AI, which is the big craze right now, that, oh, it's going to eliminate all our jobs, I believe there are certain things that it can't, and one of those things is creativity that it's still going to take a human to be able to communicate and navigate from point A to point B, or what that vision actually is. So if you're doing production type work, where it's repetitive and can be automated, that's going to get taken away. But the high level creative things being able to see things from different perspectives and things like that are going to stay around. And so I think that's important as human beings, that creativity, that imagination, really goes beyond what AI can do, at least at this point, unless it starts thinking for itself.

Brad Ball:

And so the last one creating your masterpiece. I think the big thing with that is you know, we're all on the journey. We're going to have ups and downs, we're going to have pitfalls. I've had a fair share of my own in 20 years and with this business, but 25 on my own. It's not a, like I said earlier, just a straight shot. There's ups and downs, twists and turns, pitfalls along the way. Actually, you use that If you ever played the video game Pitfall? I'll actually talk about that, because you're jumping crevices and you're swinging across vines and it's just a fun story. I'm a kid at heart, right, but I end it with the final masterpiece because at the end of it all, at the end of this journey, there's a crown, and so I talk about. I'm a faith guy and so I really talk about that journey with God and Christ and how, ultimately, this is all molded into what he would want it to be, and so he's the ultimate masterpiece in our lives, or that ultimate masterpiece. So all these things really flow into that final piece.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know, I love the flow of that. I love how you built upon each piece, just like you would create a work of art, and I particularly like the last part. I mean being a person of faith myself. I think about that verse that we are created to be God's masterpiece. You know this idea that there is an intentional creative aspect to each one of us. You were not an accident. You were created on purpose, for a purpose, and discovering that purpose is one of the ways that you allow that masterpiece to flow through. That's one of the things I picked up from your book. I had never seen entrepreneurship really as an expression of that, but it really. It jumped out, just jumped off the page at me.

Brad Ball:

Yeah, I mean I think if you look at your life as a masterpiece and that God's the ultimate guide of that, it can be refreshing and invigorating to some extent that all these issues and journeys that we have ultimately make us into that final piece. And some of the worst of times that I've been through have been the best of times and it sometimes comes in waves, right, but at the end of the day, I'm not in control of those things. All I can do is just be present and willing to walk out the journey. And on the creative side, I mean, I think it would be short-sighted to basically think as human beings and you know great creation that we're all limited to just being one thing and we all have the same brain. We all have the same things.

Brad Ball:

Now we have different things we like and leanings, but those can evolve and sometimes our habits or things can change. It's like a book Atomic Habits. You build repetitive habits. It's going to impact your business. Same thing If you build repetitive creative things in your life that cause you to be more present with your team members and more creative and more open-minded, it's going to have a huge impact on the bottom line. That's a good word.

Dr. William Attaway:

You brought up AI a minute ago and I think that there is a very real sense. I hear this more than a few times in the creative community, in particular from videographers and photographers and whatnot, who are bemoaning AI almost as though it's the enemy of creativity. Yeah, as a creative and an entrepreneur, how do you view the rise of AI and kind of where that's going when it comes to creativity?

Brad Ball:

I mean there is a disruption event, but if we look at it as a tool, it can really enhance our creativity in many ways. And I've actually been playing with video tools, whether it's Midge Journey because they added it recently Runway ML or even Veo 3. And the ability to go in and create almost a commercial from scratch is actually quite fun, and the outputs aren't always perfect. You can have the best prompt, but you still have to work through it. That's where the creative piece comes in. You still have to navigate that. And if you really watch a movie, let's say, are they little short clips or are they like five-minute segments? No, they're all like five to 10-second clips. Every now and then you get one a little longer, but it changes cameras. And if you think about AI video, it's very similar longer, but it changes cameras. And if you think about AI video, it's very similar. And so the ideation process, where in the past we'd have to draw out storyboards and sketch things out, I can actually go through and create a storyboard visually for a client via AI. That we couldn't do before and it would give them a really good representation of higher quality. So if we have to go actually shoot this and get actors and really create that video. It's going to be a lot stronger than it would be because we've already done a lot of the prep work and so it'll streamline that process a lot more. So, as it comes to this AI things, it's leaning into that creative mind to be able to see how can these tools impact my business in a greater way and how does it save time.

Brad Ball:

And one of the things that we've done internally is everybody sends proposals outright and it can take hours and hours to write the proposal and do all that.

Brad Ball:

So we have some GPTs that we've stacked together to where you record the phone call. Immediately that transcript goes into a GPT, it spits out the initial email summary and then that automatically goes into a proposal that has all of our documents, whether it's a website, a brand, anything that we've ever quoted. It's got that information and then, a matter of minutes, it's going to spit out the quote with accurate timelines and estimates. But what we also do is then we have the follow-up email created at the same time, and generally when we talk to clients, we'll throw in something personal, something that connects us with them, because that's what we all gravitate to.

Brad Ball:

I think creativity and connection are important, and then the GBT is trained to go find that personal piece and throw it into that follow-up email. Oh wow, and so then something that might have taken us 60 hours in a month to do now takes us maybe an hour and so, and it's. And what's funny is we have developers that will get quotes from and they may say, oh, it's going to take 40 hours and we know to double, it's going to take 80, because they just can't estimate properly. Ai usually gets it pretty close right off the bat.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's remarkable. My dad started a traditional ad agency back in the 70s and he ran it for 45 years.

Brad Ball:

Wow, I didn't know that.

Dr. William Attaway:

Years and I remember growing up in that world and watching him setting up video shoots, you know like photography, shoots for different businesses and storyboarding. All this stuff the tools that are now available that you're describing he could not even have possibly dreamed of, but enable you to give a concept and save so much time and dramatically increase your effectiveness and efficiency 100%.

Dr. William Attaway:

But it does not take away from the creativity, I think, because you're still driving it, you still have to prompt it and you still have to have a picture of what could be before you start.

Brad Ball:

And I actually think creativity is even more important in this coming age. That a lot of. If you think of the industrial education system, why we are trained a certain way, that goes away to where the creative thinking and that mindset becomes much more important than anything in the past, because we're not going on a sibling line that's all taken over by robots and automations, but the creative mind and creative thinking is much more important, which is why I think agencies, uh, have a really good place in the new marketplace because that's what we do. We're in the ai more than anybody else, because I was talking to a friend of mine today. They do, let's just say, construction and they're like I have no clue about this stuff and I just went through that whole proposal process. That sounds amazing.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yeah, it's remarkable. You know, we live in the agency world and we are so familiar and are so accustomed to talking about this for the last year and a half two years, but most people are not there. Most people have not gotten to that point yet. Charlotte and I went to the movies a few weeks back and there were people standing behind us and you try not to overhear people's conversations but sometimes you just do and I heard this one guy say to his buddy hey, have you seen that new AI chat GPT thing? You use that at all. And the other guy was like, nah, I'm not messing with that. Yeah, me either. And I was like, oh, my goodness.

Brad Ball:

Well, you know, what's going to be interesting is that the students like my twins that just graduated high school. They use it and so they're on the forefront of technology. Now they may not use it the right way yet, but they're going to be used to these tools, so we have to. For my age and up, we have to be able to adapt and creatively think about what's coming.

Dr. William Attaway:

It's so true. Our oldest daughter just graduated college as an English major right and she's about to start a graduate program in library and information sciences. And I started talking to her while she was home this summer about AI and all this stuff. I said you know, did y'all talk about that at all in classes? And she said, no, they just told us how terrible it was. And you know, stay far away from it and all this stuff. And I was like and that is what she believed that this was bad, this was terrible and all that.

Dr. William Attaway:

And I said, well, let me give you a different way to think about this. And I started showing her some of the potential and some of the capacities of it for what she does, and she began to open her mind and kind of dip her toe in it a little bit. But it takes that. It takes somebody who's willing to say, hey, let me show you a different way of looking at this. And, circling back to your book, that's exactly what you did for me with creativity. I'm not going to talk about it the same way anymore. And I think we can see this disruption and I love that word with regard to AI and what's going on. We can see the disruption as an opportunity right, not as a threat.

Brad Ball:

Very much so.

Dr. William Attaway:

Brad, this is so good I'll give you the last word. Anything else you want to share about the book with the people who are listening?

Brad Ball:

Well, I guess the last thing that came to mind is for those that don't think they're creative. Maybe you're an accountant and you're very analytical. You look at those that don't think they're creative. Maybe you're an accountant and you're very analytical. You look at data and numbers, and I had a conversation with a friend of ours who's an accountant and he's like I'm not creative at all and later on he told me he's like man, I can go into somebody's books and pinpoint the exact things that that business needs to adjust to really impact their bottom line. That right, there is a creative thought process that somebody else can't do unless they're trained to do it. Number one, because you've been there and done that but you know the numbers, and so a lot of times there's a lot of overlap on some of these things. But that's really important to impacting your business in general is being able to understand that those thought processes are creative in nature.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's a very good point and a great way to tie a bow on today's discussion. Brad, I'm so grateful for your time and the creativity that you displayed in sharing this book with us the creativity that you displayed in sharing this book with us. I highly recommend this. If you are listening to this and you are interested in creativity and entrepreneurship and where the two intersect, you will not find a better read. Check this out Art of Entrepreneurs by Brad Ball. We'll have the link to that in the show notes, Brad. Thanks so much for your time and your insight today.

Brad Ball:

Thanks for having me.

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