Dear reader, welcome to our yearly agency review. As is our tradition, we take a beat to look back at how BRAINS navigated being an independent agency in the world. It’s our yearly open reflection of how we tried, failed, or succeeded at living up to our highest ideals and values as a group of creatives.

Burying the lead… 2025 was a solid year for BRAINS. From just about every data point, we met or surpassed our goals for the year. High fives. Nice work.

In the 2024 review, I wrote about how we were starting to really put some pieces together and we felt ready to cook. Well, we cooked. We maybe even cheffed.

It was a year of stepping onto a larger stage as an agency. BRAINS has had an untraditional path, with untraditional leaders, who mostly have untraditional paths themselves. Speaking frankly, that’s always given us a bit of a chip on our shoulders. We don’t always know how the game is “supposed” to be played. At times, that has put us at a disadvantage — undoubtedly. But what we really started to embrace this year is that our untraditional worldview and our curiosity are a big part of our superpower as an agency. As we watch the agency landscape shift under our feet, we find ourselves… doing well. Positioned well for the moment. And much of that is because of our chip. Sometimes we just don’t play the same game or ‘know better’ — because of our untraditional paths. And because of our belief that we do belong on the biggest of stages, creating the biggest impact for our clients.

To quote the great Ratatouille, “You must be imaginative, strong-hearted. You must try things that may not work, and you must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from”.

Now, let’s look under the hood of 2025.

As always, I love talking shop and hearing others’ experiences — you can reach me at ben@BRAINS.co.

…

How we Cooked: Culture AND Creative

Let’s start with what we mean when we say “we cooked”. Every year I set a theme for us as an agency — a north star for the year. In 2025, the theme was “Let’s be AS KNOWN for our creative as we are for our culture”. BRAINS has been known internally and validated externally as a great place to work. We objectively have a pretty strong culture. We try to lead with our values, truly take care of each other, and drive impact for our clients. We frame BRAINS as an experiment: Can you have a high-impact agency full of happy and healthy creatives? Our culture is something we are proud of and something we have worked incredibly hard to nurture over the last decade. But that chip on our shoulder was driving us towards more. As a leadership team, we wanted to start being AS KNOWN for our creative output as we were for our internal culture. AS KNOWN for our impact on external culture. AS KNOWN for driving our clients’ business forward.

If 2024 was a year of putting some big pieces together, 2025 was a year to prove the experiment on a bigger stage. Can we be successful BECAUSE of our values and not despite them? Leadership was in place. Key positions were in place. Important processes were in place. Opportunity was in front of us. Let’s cook and see if our worldview holds water.

Here’s a snapshot on how we did.

On the business side:

We grew our revenue by 35% year over year. That’s a leap. It’s the kind of growth that comes from betting on ourselves, saying yes to the hard stuff, and proving we can deliver at scale without losing what makes us… us.

We grew our staff by 30%, bringing on nine new people across design, strategy, project management, and production. We hired people who make us better. People who challenge us. People who fit the culture we’ve spent years building and then push it forward in ways we didn’t see coming.

We elevated three long-time BRAINS to Partner: Moe Rice (Director of People and Culture), Gustavo Delgado (Managing Director), and Drue Flynn (Director of Design). We talk all the time about growing our own people, about building leaders from within, about creating pathways that don’t exist elsewhere in this industry. Well, we did it. And now our leadership team looks different. More diverse, more complete, more ready for what’s next.

We landed clients that validate our positioning. Challenger brands. Brands that need someone who gets that being part of the zeitgeist drives buying decisions. Dr. Squatch. Smash Kitchen. Nex Playground. Neuro. BallerTV. Prisma Health. Orgain. Adoro Pet. Hormbles Chormbles. Caraway. And at the end of the year, Palms Resort and Casino.

We continued to help our partners grow. Helping tonies reach incredible new heights and launch the Toniebox 2 globally. Helping MAGNA-TILES reclaim top market share on Amazon in one of the most competitive toy categories in the market. Helping the National Breast Cancer Foundation continue to reach record impact.

We lived our impact ethos. We did work that worked.

And we won some nice awards to validate it all, including being shortlisted for Adweek Small Agency of the Year, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with shops we’ve admired for years. We did not win that award, but the validation for being a top 5 small agency was a real “just honored to be nominated” moment for our team. And now we’re gunning for it next year.

On the culture side:

Internally, we run an annual survey that goes deep. We ask hard questions. What’s working? What’s breaking? Where are we living our values? Where are we falling short? We ask for intense honesty. We can only live our values if we’re honest with our progress and / or failings towards those highest ideals.

Our overall satisfaction score hit a record 8.15 out of 10, up from 7.60 in 2024. That’s a 7.6% increase. For context, we’ve been tracking this since 2023 when we were at 6.56 (a particularly challenging year and reason for implementing). The trajectory is clear. We still have work to do, but we are getting better at this.

Externally, the validation came too. Our Great Place to Work score hit a record 96%, compared to 57% at a typical U.S. company. We were named a 2025 Fortune Best Place to Work in Advertising & Marketing. And our retention rate hit 94% — another stat we are proud of in an industry full of churn.

And we were able to take all that business success and turn it into more for our people. Better benefits, higher pay comps, and more profit shared than any year before.

So all in all, as we sit back and take stock, 2025 was a great year for BRAINS (and an equally great year for our sister media agency Mass Culture). The eco-system worked, the worldview landed true, and our people grew.

…But it’s never quite that simple, is it?

Growth is fun!?

Here’s what matters more than the numbers: the why behind the math. In that same survey we asked the team what drove the year, and they told us. Growth. Intensity. Learning. Excitement. Leadership. In that order. The year was experienced as fast paced and intense, but deeply rewarding. That tension is real. Growth comes with a price.

The survey highlighted where we did well but also where we struggled. Burnout and overwork topped the list. Siloing second. Resourcing gaps third. Our values that took the biggest hit? “We Look for Magic” and “We Spark Joy.” The culprits: pace, burnout, limited time for exploration and celebration.

So we were winning AND we were really stretched. Both things were true.

But here’s the thing we also collectively believe to be true: The agencies positioned to win right now are the ones built for high-growth clients. Clients who are moving fast. Clients navigating a universe of variables. Clients who need partners who can pivot with them, not partners who slow them down with rigid processes and unworkable timelines to the realities of their business. Not partners looking for awards and the next client.

That’s our positioning. And our fierce commitment to our clients. And if we’re honest, that’s also what makes this all hard at times.

The infrastructure we built in 2024 worked. The organization worked. The processes worked. The hiring worked. The leadership expansion worked. But growth outpaced systems at times, creating strain despite the improvements. We can build for agility, but agility at scale is a different game. And we’re still learning how to play it well.

The question this year isn’t whether we can scale without losing our soul. We did that. The question has become: can we sustain it while staying responsive to the clients who need us most?

But… we all agree, growth is mostly fun.

Impact Ingredients

If there’s one thing we learned this year, it’s that creativity is a decision. Not a hope. Not something that happens through crystals and astrology charts. A decision.

When we look at what actually drove impact for our clients and our work, a few ingredients rise to the top:

Structure enables creativity, not constrains it. This year we moved our team structure into ‘Pods’. Simple business units created and designed to service the complexity of our various client needs. The pods were mentioned by 85% of our team as the year’s most impactful initiative. Why? Because the right structure creates clarity. And clarity creates confidence. And confidence creates space for risk. Our pod-based teams knew who owned what, who they were building with, and what success looked like. That freed them up to actually create.

Hiring isn’t just about filling seats. It’s about raising the floor. Also mentioned by the team at 85%: hiring and recruitment. Every new person changes the agency. They either raise the standard or they don’t. This year, we hired people who made us better. People who challenged us to be sharper, bolder, more thoughtful. That compounds. When you’re surrounded by people pushing you forward, the work gets better.

You can’t skip the setup for bold work. Our reflection report was clear on this. Bold work needs a setup. Clients need education on how we work, what we need, and why it matters. Teams need boundaries so they can protect the work (and themselves). And leadership needs to guide, value, and incentivize creative risk-taking. When those things aren’t in place, boldness gets dampened by mixed signals and internal uncertainty. We learned this the hard way on a few projects. We won’t make that mistake again.

Agility beats perfection. Multiple teams reported evolving their workflow mid-project and applying the learnings forward. That’s the move. You don’t wait until next year to fix what’s broken. You iterate in real time. You document what you learn. You share it with the broader team. You systematize it, and you get a little bit better every single time.

Common language makes collaboration possible. Whether it’s our creative spectrum for evaluating work, our shared values, or just the way we brief projects, language matters. When everyone speaks the same language, you can have better conversations. You can challenge each other more effectively. You can move faster because you’re not constantly clarifying what words mean.

These ingredients aren’t revolutionary. They’re just really, really hard to do consistently. Especially when you’re growing fast.. Especially when the pace feels relentless. Especially when you’re tired.

But they work. And we know they work because we saw it this year.

The Changing Agency Landscape

While we were busy cooking, the industry around us was on fire. And not in a good way.

Omnicom cut 4,000 jobs after acquiring IPG and shuttered legacy brands like DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe… agencies with roots dating back to the 1800s. Ogilvy eliminated 700 employees. GroupM announced layoffs.The American ad industry lost 4,600 roles between August and December 2024.

Dentsu, a company that’s survived 124 years including world wars and global downturns, is projecting just 16–17% operating margins by 2027 after massive layoffs — far below their previous 20–25% margins. Agencies are working harder, with leaner teams, for less reward.

Everyone has a theory. Forrester predicts AI will result in a 15% reduction in the U.S. advertising workforce by 2026. The industry is claiming clients are wanting more for less. Brands are moving more work in-house. And every penny has to show immediate ROI.

Those are real things happening in the industry. But we believe that the real issue is that many of the larger agencies are built for a version of marketing that no longer exists.

The shift happening isn’t just about AI replacing jobs. It’s about how creative work gets made. For years, agencies operated by learning tools and hiring specialists. That model was well suited for a long time. But as the business landscape has shifted we’re find a need for aganices to evolve alongside it. A those who haven’t are finding fragmented workflows. Lots of output, not much coherence. Not much context. And no orientation around business impact.

What’s replacing it is systems thinking. Connected processes that carry context and structure decisions. Where architecture matters as much as execution, and judgment matters more than volume. The future isn’t humans versus AI. It’s humans orchestrating intelligence.

This is the landscape shift. The holding companies are consolidating because their model was built for a very different era. Big teams. Big overhead. Big retainers. Clients don’t need that anymore. They need partners who can move fast, think systemically, and deliver impact without the bloat towards the big goals.

That’s where agencies like BRAINS sit. We’re not big enough to play the consolidation game. We’re not trying to be. We’re building for agility. For impact. For clients who are navigating constant change and need a partner who can move with them.

The traditional model is breaking, and we’re watching it happen in real time. But that doesn’t mean agencies are over. It means the ones who survive will be the ones who adapted to what clients actually need: speed, systems thinking, and the judgment to know what matters.

We think we’re positioned for that. But the landscape is shifting fast. And we’re paying attention.

So hold onto your butts.

But First, the Human Stuff

Before we talk about where we’re headed, we need to talk about the year we actually lived.

2025 started with the LA fires. Most of our team was displaced.One lost their home. Some evacuated with nothing but what they could fit in a car. We spent the first weeks of January checking in on each other, finding places for people to stay, making sure everyone was safe. Work stopped mattering for a minute. People mattered.

And then we kept going. Because that’s what you do.

We had babies this year. Weddings. We celebrated new life and new commitments. We also had sickness. We had loss. We had the full spectrum of the human experience compressed into twelve months while also trying to grow an agency by 35%.

Here’s what we learned: you can’t separate the work from the people doing it. You can build all the infrastructure you want. You can have the best processes, the clearest values, the most thoughtful leadership structure. But at the end of the day, agencies are made of humans. And humans are messy and great and going through stuff.

The thing we’re most proud of this year isn’t a revenue number or an award. It’s that we took care of each other. When the fires hit, the team showed up for each other without being asked. When people needed time, we gave it. When someone was struggling, we didn’t pretend not to notice.

That’s the culture. Not the ping pong table or the benefits package. The actual willingness to see each other as whole people and act accordingly.

So yeah. We cooked. We grew. We proved some things. But we also lived. And we did it together. Onto the next one.

What’s Next: Impact Is a Creative Act

For 2026, the theme is: Impact Is a Creative Act.

Here’s why.

The industry loves data and attribution. Dashboards and optimization. Performance funnels and conversion rates. All of that matters. We’re not saying it doesn’t. But here’s what we keep coming back to: the biggest impact any brand has ever made came from a creative idea. Not an algorithm. Not a perfectly optimized funnel. A creative leap that changed how people felt, thought, or acted.

Creativity is not the soft part of business. Creativity is how businesses create disproportionate impact.

We live in the most optimized era in business history. And paradoxically, one of the least impactful. We can track everything, attribute everything, test everything. We’ve turned experiences into math problems and attention into spreadsheets. And yet, despite all that intelligence, trust is eroding, loyalty is fragile, and culture feels more fragmented than ever.

Data can explain the world as it is. Creativity is what allows us to imagine what it could be. And impact only happens when people feel something strong enough to change how they think or act.

At BRAINS, we don’t see creativity as decoration. We see it as a problem-solving discipline that operates where data stops being useful. Data tells you what is. Creativity is how you decide what should be different.

Creativity is how brands earn attention instead of buying it. It’s how they build trust when institutions are questioned. It’s how identity is formed in a world overloaded with choice. It’s how people decide what matters.

In a hyper-automated world, creativity becomes the last truly human advantage. AI can optimize, predict, forecast, and scale. But AI cannot originate taste. It can’t understand social nuance. It can’t create a new cultural truth. It can’t spark irrational love or build belonging.

The last great business advantage isn’t speed or efficiency. It’s bold imagination.

So that’s our bet for 2026. We’re doubling down on creativity as the engine of impact. Not creativity for its own sake. Creativity designed to change how people feel, think, and act in ways that matter to culture and business.

We’re going to keep building systems. Keep refining processes. Keep taking care of our people. But we’re going to do all of that in service of one thing: making creative work that actually moves the needle.

Because if it doesn’t move someone, it’s not creative enough.

Here’s to 2026.

BRAINS Agency in Review 2025 was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear reader, welcome to our yearly agency review. As is tradition, this is our moment to look back at how our collection of brains navigated being an agency and doing creative work together in the world. It’s our yearly reckoning of how we tried, failed, or succeeded at living up to our highest ideals and values.

This marks my sixth year writing these reviews as co-president of Brains. What started as an internal exercise to document our learnings has grown into something more — a gesture of transparency and accountability that we share openly.

This year’s reflection hits different. Less dramatic pivots, less existential crises keeping us up at night, fewer “unprecedented times” demanding yet another unprecedented response. Instead, a simpler story about what happens when the dust settles a bit — and we figure some shit out.

As always, I love talking shop and hearing others’ experiences — you can reach me at ben@brains.co.

Now, let me tell you about 2024…

New Brands, Same Brains

We started out 2024 launching our new look. And it fit us much better. It was us, by us. And that felt good.

We had also ended 2023 by reworking our values. It was us, by us. And that felt good too.

Those things mattered. We started the year with a fresh haircut and bright eyes — after a pretty challenging year (please see Global Financial Crisis for more information).

I won’t lie, some of this year’s post may even read as boring (I’m going to talk a lot about processes). But we just experienced a year where boring was cool. Real cool. No existential crises. No global pandemics. No economic meltdowns. Last year I wrote that “change is the only constant,” and that holds true. We changed a lot. But this year we changed more on our own terms. Change by us, for us. And that felt good.

Annnnd it worked. We had record years across both Brains and Mass Culture. And the two agencies worked together just like we dreamt it up.

We were the same Brains as ever, a quirky can-do agency with big hearts and creative minds… but we had a new bite to us this year. We hit a stride, and we were very very good at our jobs.

The amount of objectively good and business impacting work we did this year was truly incredible for me to witness. I’m so proud of our team, and so proud of how we helped our partners this year.

A lot of things hit right for us this last year, but I would credit a lot of our success to the fierce focus on processes that we embarked on at the beginning of 2024.

“Ben, are you really about to write 2000 words about processes?” you ask. Well… yes, yes I am, thank you for asking. And buckle up, because this process post has bangers.

See, here’s the thing about creativity that nobody likes to talk about: its best friend just might be boring ol’ process. I am an undying romantic about the chaos of creation — the inexplicable late-night breakthrough, the shower epiphany, the stroke of genius pulled from a hat. But 2024 was our year of embracing a less sexy truth; that good processes and structures yield incredible creative outputs, at scale — but only with a bought-in group of individuals.

Simple insights. Clear strategy. Impactful creative. And bought-in individuals living out values that are us, by us. Maybe it’s all as simple as that?

The Impact Agency

We started last year with a clear focus; I wanted to be an ‘Impact Agency’. Yes, yes I am aware that sounds cringy… like saying we’re the ‘Anti-Agency Agency’. It smells of ‘Le Bullshit’.

The truth is I think the agency world is in flux. Many of the big agencies are struggling. The landscape is changing and we are finding more and more clients looking for an agency relationship that is more aligned and incentivized towards a full business view.

Less about awards. More about impact.

That’s us. We’ve pivoted our agency over the last six years to meet the changing landscape and build a team that gets the business side as much as the creative side.

“What are we trying to do?”

It’s amazing how important that simple question is, but how often overlooked it is in the agency world.

This year we were an Impact Agency. And it turns out, it has a lot to do with that unsexy foundation-building and process setting.

Here’s what we learned: real impact — the kind that transforms businesses and moves needles — doesn’t come from random strokes of creative genius. It comes from having a precise understanding of what moves those needles, and a values-aligned team ready to move them. It’s about having systems that can turn insight into action, and processes that can scale success without sacrificing soul.

It comes from a fierce look at processes and setting your team up to be able to cook.

Simple insights. Clear strategy. Impactful creative.

And we have proof! This year we launched new brands into the world that are thriving (and helped build new ones that are about to launch). We saw our D2C partners have record-breaking results. And our non-profit partners have the same. We helped partners like Nex and Magna-Tiles expand and build their brand into new retail channels and crush Q4. We helped 100 year old family companies like Just Born impact their culture. And we partnered with tonies for our fourth year together to incredible new heights (I believe tonies will be one of the most important brands of the next decade).

Each partner had common threads in our shared success. We had GREAT partner relationships this year. We positioned ourselves towards impact. And that led to aligned and shared goals. And that led to great relationships. Yes, I believe we had truly inspiring creative this year, but we also did the unglamorous work of building measurement frameworks that could precisely target and scale what was working and why. Launching Mass Culture wasn’t just about adding media buying to our toolkit — it was about creating a seamless system where creative and media could work together like a well-choreographed (Renaissance Tour Beyoncé) dance.

That’s what being an impact agency really means. It’s about having the systems in place to not just create great work, but to know exactly how that work is affecting our partners’ businesses. It’s about being able to trace a direct line from our creative choices to real business outcomes.

That’s kind of sexy?

Stuff We Did

If you’ve read any of our previous year-in-reviews, you know we talk a lot about our grand experiment: Can we build one of the best agencies on the planet while keeping our people happy and healthy? Six years into this “experiment” and we’re still experimenting (with slightly fewer lab accidents).

This year our leadership team started with some questions: How do we maintain a people-first culture while building the processes needed to scale? How do we add structure and deliver impact without becoming a soulless burnout machine? Can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we be the most creative AND the most impactful?

These questions led us to that fierce look at processes.

We started by defining what excellence actually looks like. Not in vague terms, but in specific, actionable qualities we could observe and nurture. We identified five key traits our highest performers embody: pivoting with purpose, pursuing brave ideas with bold action, speaking fluent client, and perhaps most importantly, working out loud and enjoying the ride. These aren’t just nice words on a wall — they’re the standards we now coach toward and celebrate.

But excellence isn’t just about individual performance — it’s about creating systems that let everyone thrive. We completely reworked our resourcing processes to give us a full, real-time look at everyone’s workloads. We built systems and standards for how to create the most space for the best creative work. And we stopped calling it resourcing. Seeing each other as resources is dangerous. It’s now a weekly workflow exercise that includes the entire leadership team. It’s the best way to know what, who and how we are doing as an agency. It’s the dedicated practice of taking care of one another and of our partners.

We implemented Pulse Checks to monitor team burn out, stress, and satisfaction. We launched No Meeting Fridays to protect deep work time. When new business opportunities started flooding in, we built the ability to scale our capacity without sacrificing quality. It’s not the kind of thing that wins awards, but it’s exactly the kind of foundation that lets us consistently deliver award-winning work.

We got a lot of data and we used that data.

Here’s a detail from our data that perfectly captures why I love our team: When we analyzed our Pulse Check results, we discovered something fascinating. Our Project Managers and Account Leads were consistently reporting high stress levels — but not for the reasons we expected. These leaders weren’t stressed about their own workloads or challenges. Instead, they were carrying worry for their team members, even in cases where those very team members were reporting that they were doing just fine. Think about that for a second: we had team members losing sleep because they thought their teams were overwhelmed, while those teams were actually reporting as thriving. Our Accounts team has an empathy meter dialed to 11. What a wonderful problem to have.

But that data collecting was the only way we were able to identify that and then help fix it with new language and new systems.

We also tried some things that didn’t quite work. Our first attempt at goal-setting was ambitious — maybe too ambitious. We created a cascade of goals that flowed from company-wide objectives down to department goals and finally to individual goals. We had so many teams and goals that our goals had goals. It was goal Inception.

So by the end of the year we pulled back. We simplified. We focused on fewer, more meaningful metrics. And something interesting happened — the more we simplified our goals, the more our teams actually achieved them.

But the real magic happened when we started treating our process development like a creative project. Instead of just implementing systems, we asked our teams to help design them. The result? Processes that actually work for the humans using them, not just the spreadsheets tracking them.

Processes by us, for us. And that not only felt good… that worked.

A New Chapter in Leadership (And a Heartfelt Goodbye)

So much of our success this year can be tied to our incredible leadership team.

And none more than the three that are joining me as new partners in Brains as of Jan 1st, 2025.

But before I talk about our new partners, I need to take a moment to acknowledge a pivotal transition. After years of being the steady hand that helped guide our financial ship, my co-president and partner Brandy Amidon is stepping away from Brains and deeper into her role at Mass Culture and as mayor of her thriving town, Travelers Rest. Brandy will share more about her transition elsewhere, but if you’ve read our previous reviews, you know how instrumental Brandy has been in building the foundation we stand on today. Her leadership helped us navigate through COVID, through economic uncertainty, and through our own evolution as an agency.

I remember when Brandy and I first stepped into our co-president roles. We were young leaders with big dreams and probably just enough naïveté to think we could actually achieve them. Looking back now, I realize that naïveté might have been our superpower. Because here we are, having built something good, something real, something that’s ready for its next chapter.

And what a chapter it’s going to be.

I’m thrilled to announce that Gustavo Delgado, Moe Rice, and Drue Flynn are stepping into partnership roles at Brains. Each brings something unique and essential to our leadership team. If you’re wondering what makes them the right fit for this next chapter, well… let me tell you about them.

Gustavo has this uncanny ability to see patterns where others see chaos. He can look at a complex business challenge and not just solve it, but turn it into an opportunity for growth. I’ve watched him transform how we approach client partnerships, bringing a level of strategic thinking that has fundamentally changed how we deliver our standards of impact. He has been instrumental in shaping our definition of excellence and pushing us towards where we are as an agency today. He is also one of the only people on planet earth that can hurt my feelings. A true gift held for the select few and the select talented.

Moe is our cultural compass. She is our heart and the keeper of the magic of Brains. She has this extraordinary talent for understanding both the art and science of what we do. She’s helped us maintain our soul while building our systems, reminding us that process without purpose is bankrupt. Moe can name a new company in her sleep and arrives at brilliant creative solutions faster than anyone I know because of her equally and delightfully weird // empathic brain. She is best known for making grown men cry during creative pitches and for going to renaissance fairs.

And Drue? Drue is our design GOAT. Jordan in her prime, she makes the impossible look effortless and has never met a design challenge she couldn’t crack. Her work isn’t just beautiful — it’s transformative. I’ve watched her turn complex brand challenges into elegant solutions that seem obvious in hindsight, which is perhaps the highest praise you can give a designer. She embodies that rare combination of creative prowess and strategic thinking that defines where we’re heading as an agency. Drue will be tasked with building one of the world’s best branding studios within our walls. Drue and I share a deep love for Martin Short and old movies with questionable themes.

These new partners, along with the rest of the leadership team kicked a lotta ass this year. And did much of the work to set us up to have the year we had.

Us by us. That feels good.

A Final Note

Every year when I write these reviews, I try to find the thread that ties it all together. The story beneath the story. And this year, I kept coming back to one question.

I turned 40 this year, and did plenty of reflection — as is my right and duty as a married with two kids multi-agency owner (next up I get to get into historical biographies!).

I even went on a retreat this year with a friend and one of our partners (as is my right and duty). And this was the question I brought to the retreat:

Can you scale something and not lose the soul of something?

Honestly, I don’t know. Look around. It’s not super encouraging. The ideas often feel mutually exclusive. … And that sucks.

At the end of the year, I brought this question back to the leadership team..And to the new partners. And honestly, f*ck it. We want to give it a swing.

We keep finding year after year that often just asking the question bends the arc in the right direction.

Is it possible? Yeah, we think so.

Will it be perfect. Absolutely not, no. Not even close.

But we’ll keep trying to ask the right // hard questions.

And the experiment continues.

This year revealed that maybe the real test of any experiment isn’t in the dramatic moments. It’s not in the crisis responses or the breakthrough innovations. It’s not even in defining those qualities of excellence we’re so proud of. No, the real test comes in the quiet moments, in the daily practice, in the steady building of something sustainable. It’s in the moments when no one’s watching and you still choose to hold each other accountable to our highest ideals.

Looking ahead to 2025, I’m filled with this profound sense of possibility. Not just because we’ve built strong foundations or because we have an incredible team of partners and creatives. But because for the first time, I can see how all the pieces fit together. How the processes we’ve built and the culture we’ve nurtured aren’t just supporting our work — they’re amplifying it. We’re no longer just an anti-agency agency, or an impact agency, or whatever we decide to call ourselves next week. We’re simply Brains, and we’re building something that matters. Something that works. To put it simply, 2025 will be a year where Brains f*cking cooks.

…

Each day at Brains I see incredible things. I see our team rallying around each other during tough weeks, at our designers collaborating on ambitious projects, at our strategists diving deep into thorny problems. I see how our new systems — from Pulse Checks to Workflows — aren’t just making us more efficient; they’re somehow also making us more human. That’s rad.

Can you scale something and not lose the soul of something?

We’ll see.

Brains Agency in Review 2024 was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a new Brain in town. Yes. You’re reading correctly. Brains on Fire is now BRAINS. New name, new look, new website. We’ve been working real hard, and we’re real excited. Some of you may be wondering — where’d the Fire go? Well, let’s back up a bit.

Brains has been around for about 30 years.

In that time we pioneered the word of mouth marketing movement, became a beacon for community building with two books to our name, and blazed the way for other creative companies through our commitment to building a people-first culture of highly collaborative, independent thinkers and designers.

We’ve always been united around the purpose-driven creative work we do. Our mission has been fueled, largely, by our people. We are marked by the sparks of countless creatives who have worked with us throughout the years. Community has, and will always be, our through-line, and one of our strongest differentiators.

So why ‘rebrand’? Why mess with a good thing? Why lose “on fire”?

In the past five years or so, the world around us has shifted in ways we couldn’t have ever imagined. As a result, our business has evolved and our team has transformed. We’ve moved from a community marketing agency working primarily with not-for-profits into a full-service creative agency with a growing list of purpose-driven partners across vertices.

We’re finding that our work centers less around starting movements, and more around driving real business or organizational impact. We focus on understanding our client’s unique problems in order to help them thrive and grow, building better brands, companies, and products for a brighter future.

We’re believers that in this industry (and quite possibly, in life) change is the only constant. Clients come to us to drive meaningful change all the time. We felt it was time to adjust our own brand to reflect this new direction.

We looked at where we came from and where we’re headed. Internally and externally, friends and clients alike already referred to us as simply “Brains”. That felt relevant, and, well, we felt ready to embrace it.

So, while “On Fire” is gone, we’re still the same people you know and love. We’re still enamored with the creative process. We’re still the brightest-eyed, hardest-working, quirkiest group of marketing experts you’ll ever meet. We’re still mission-driven, we’re still a certified B Corporation. We still look for the sparks — in fact, they’re at the center of our refreshed look. We still love the way it feels when an idea ignites something bigger than ourselves.

This change reflects our growth, our evolution, and our future. It’s about embracing our people — the Brains behind the magic — and stepping confidently into our next chapter, together.

Plus, we gotta be honest: it looks pretty cool on a hat.

Check out our new digs at http://www.brains.co.

Here’s to Brains, 2024 and beyond. Like the rebrand? Like how we think? Want a hat? Reach out. We’d love to talk with you. Like we say, our Brains are your Brains.

New Brand. Same Brains. was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A year of complexity. A year of impact.

…

Ben Hart is the co-president of Brains on Fire, a creative agency and B Corporation that helps community-driven brands launch, grow and meaningfully impact the human experience.

…

Welcome to our yearly agency review where we take a look back at how our team navigated the world of agency life and creative work together. It’s our chance to reflect on the ways we’ve tried, failed, or succeeded at living up to our highest ideals and values.

We do this annual review as a way to document and share our learnings. We’ve made the decision to publish these openly as a tangible expression of living our values of transparency and accountability.

Truthfully, we find that the building of this thing called Brains on Fire is as interesting, creative, and challenging as doing the work that we do. Because of that, we love to talk shop with others in this space. If you have any questions or comments, we want to hear from you. You can chat with me here: benjamin@brainsonfire.com.

Alright, let’s look at 2023.

…

If you haven’t read these before, at Brains on Fire we frame up what we are trying to build together as a grand experiment. That experiment is simple on paper: Can we build one of the best agencies on the planet — full of happy and healthy people?

Of course what is simple on paper is complex in practice. And what we are learning is that scale has an exponential effect on that complexity. Human scale = human complexity.

What I love about our team is that we are bold enough to believe we have the talent, the drive, and the opportunity to figure out the first part of that equation. Although Brains has been around a long time, we are entering just our 6th full year in this current chapter of leadership. In this latest chapter, we have outperformed our perception and size as an agency and delivered truly incredible results so many times now that we are starting to believe that we can be the world-class agency we want to be.

It’s truly the second part of the equation — ensuring everyone is ‘happy and healthy’ — that amplifies the complexity of building this agency together. This pursuit doesn’t just add a few variables; it pours gas on the complexity, pushing us to redefine what the very definition of success looks like in the agency world.

Humans are not a monolith. What drives you is not what drives me. Where you find purpose may not be where I find purpose. How you create may look radically very different from how I create. How you cope with stress, how you learn, how you navigate change, how you recharge your batteries, how you view success, etc. etc.

This is where our experiment finds its greatest challenges — how do we reach ‘happy and healthy’ for all of us? Is that even possible in a fast-paced, high-pressure, service-based industry like ours? These are the questions we wrestled with last year.

What we’ve learned over and over is that by simply asking the questions we tend to be miles ahead of the rest of the industry — and many other workplaces. While there’s power in the asking, there’s still human error in the answering. Answers don’t come overnight, and when they do come, they don’t always nail it… and they aren’t always pain free. There were many times in 2023 when we lived out the absolute best of our values, and there were times when we dramatically failed.

Perhaps what we’ve learned most is that the scale of time and a distanced perspective — choosing the widest lens — gives us a better and more true sense for our progress as leaders and as a company.

In many ways, we’ve learned that we’ll never ‘solve’ this experiment. But by continuing to ask the hard questions and striving for answers, we’re steering our agency towards a happier, healthier, and more fulfilling work environment. A place that’s full of opportunity, impact, creativity, and community.

And goddamn, that’s not a bad way to spend your days.

Being known for our work as much as for our culture.

Our leadership team started 2023 with a simple challenge — become as known for our work as we are known for our culture.

2022 was a great year for us. We were a 100% Great Place to Work. We were named an Ad Agency top 10 small agency to work for. We made and shared more money than we ever had and we grew more than we ever had.

We felt a great sense of achievement and loved that we were becoming known for our culture, but we wanted to do a better job at telling the story of how that unique culture fosters incredibly joyful, thoughtful, change-driving, and award winning creative work.

We wanted conversations about our culture to always be in the same breath as “Did you see the work they did?” Or better yet, “Their work fundamentally changed our business.”

We talk a lot at Brains about being the anti-agency agency and in many ways, we think the agency model is broken. Incentives are often misaligned. Traditional processes, or ways of working with clients, are outdated. And a lot of the time, this game is full of so much bullshit. The bullshit is exhausting. We honestly hate it.

We no longer just believe there is a better way. We’ve proven it, we’ve modeled it, and we want to keep chasing it across the board.

Through the latter part of 2022 and much of this year we’ve somewhat tirelessly reevaluated and challenged our notions of what makes a good agency, what quality work really means, and the processes (and magic) required to create it with consistency and scale.

For us, it’s been articulated down to one word — impact. We constantly question, “How is our work making a real difference for our partners?” That sounds pretty straightforward, but it’s surprising how rare this seems to be a driving force for many, especially larger, agencies we encounter. The old model seems mostly unconcerned with the impact of the work towards the client’s goals — as long as that work is buzzy and gets noticed within the industry. Our industry is very very self-congratulatory and somewhat insular.

Look, we’re as guilty of self-congratulation as anyone, and we certainly still have to play the game often enough, but we are hoping to shift the focus from within to emphasize real, measurable impact in all we do.

We think the whole industry is changing. Anecdotally, this year has been telling: we’ve punched above our weight, winning a lot of work against much bigger agencies by emphasizing impact. We also lost a few times, and when we did lose, it was to smaller shops. Clients are hungry for impact. They want partners, not service providers. They want a model of mutual or shared success. They still want the award winning creative work, but they want it tied to the bigger picture. And they want you to see, and give a damn, about the bigger picture.

With that in mind, I’m going to view this year through the lens of impact. Impact and partnership. How did we practice this new model of agency?

I’ll start with some obvious things to those of us in the industry — this was a challenging, if not outright shitty economic year — for both agencies and most industries. The economy swung hard from the COVID boom. Consumer sentiment and cash tightened, VC money dried up, and many brands that had shifted their models, growth, and projections based on COVID realties were presented with a new reality that was challenging for some and devastating for others. Many of us — our clients, agency friends, and tech friends — experienced layoffs. We had clients with the banks that failed this year. We had clients have to go through debt restructuring. We had multiple clients struggle to pay their bills this year.

As with any year, not all of our clients, and probably not all agencies were hurting, but this year was tougher on that front than any we have experienced in a very long time.

What that meant for us was that this model of impact and partnership was more relevant than ever. This shift in focus for us was timely.

We also learned that momentum is so important when you are building something. Momentum covers up so many sins. And when the whole economic world feels like it’s stagnant, things can feel… sticky. Burnout is more prevalent on both agency and client side. People start grasping for answers and solutions. Things like winning creative awards seem trivial in the face of survival and livelihoods. All of this has contributed to why I am more proud of our work this year than any previous year.

A key ingredient of our ‘impact’ success was the launch of our sister agency, Mass Culture, in January of 2023. Having a brand-first, shared-values, performance and media buying agency to work alongside our strategic and creative work has shown incredible results in our first full year together.

Here are a few things we are proud of this year that we think highlight our focus towards impact:

• We helped one of our non-profit partners reach 100% growth during their prime fundraising campaign for a third consecutive year.
• We helped a 100 year old, family-owned legacy company begin a transition to the younger generation by reimagining their brand, company culture and company values.
• We helped one of our partners make the jump from primarily direct to consumer to an omni-channel retail marketing approach, launching their first national broad awareness campaign. With Brains on creative and Mass Culture leading all media spend, we doubled the YoY revenue to $150m while reducing cost of acquisition by ⅓.
• We acted as interim CMO to steady the ship for one of our largest partners as they managed a company restructure that led to a full debt restructuring to the global VC landscape.
• We helped multiple companies grow by 100% YoY — in this consumer economy, overseeing much of the marketing and advertising and media for those partners.
• We helped give birth to three bouncing baby brands this year. We helped set them free into the world and start to see early returns on their brand promises.
• We helped clients manage the hard stuff this year too. We’re talking product recalls, debt restructuring, and layoffs. We helped reset values to meet the new realities, and reset business models to meet those same realities. We worked with partners in good-faith on cash flow issues and we participated in hiring processes and large-scale business decisions as everyone navigated this wonky year.

We did all of this while doing creative work that we felt was world-class and award-worthy. And we did it the Brains way: driven by curiosity and a genuine dedication to impact lives in a meaningful way. We helped people tell their stories and achieve their dreams. We helped give back to the veteran community, and we helped self-described nerds find more community. We helped cut the screen time epidemic for kids, and we helped bring more joy into the marketplace.

In many ways, the goal we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year was achieved.

We are proud of that.

Things We’re Thinking About

Here are some other things that were on our mind in 2023 as we move into 2024.

Areas of impact. As we look to double down on being an impact agency, we are challenging ourselves on what a modern agency must be competent in to be a true partner and deliver impact to where business and the marketplace is heading. We’ve identified three areas of impact that we will grow into as an agency. How to scale each of these well is the challenge ahead of us, but we are off to a great start.

• Culture and Business modeling
  We call this upstream work, but are finding it more important to modern brands and the changing marketplace. How you work, and what you stand for is becoming as important as the product output.
• Branding, Rebranding, and Go-to-market
  Distilling Brand is probably what we love doing the most. Any success we’ve had boils down to Brand. It’s the heart of what we do. This work is always deeply human, and needs a healthy dose of curiosity, strategy, storytelling and magic.
• Campaigns, Marketing, and Growth
  Managing growth can be difficult, but incredibly rewarding. This work takes equal parts strategy, executional excellence, and big-swing creative. Impact here happens when everything is working like an orchestra.

Our values. In a sticky year, values become even more important. We view values as shared beliefs that guide our actions. Simple things we all agree to, as part of this community, and commit to holding each other accountable to top to bottom. The last time we set our values was five years ago when we made the leadership transition. In many ways, that set of values were course corrections from the previous years. With our growth and evolution, it was time for an update. We spent a few months at the end of 2023 resetting our values first and then setting collective goals next for 2024. The order of that was important. Here’s how we did it.

• We had a multi-disciplinary, multi-tenured, small group do a listening tour and evaluate our current values with a list of ways to simplify, clarify, and evolve them.
• Towards the end of the year we conducted a team wide survey on the ways we lived out our values, the ways we fell short, and what each team member felt was important moving forward. Interestingly, our values where we shined the most were also the ones we fell short on the most. Remember when I mentioned people are not monoliths? Each value is open to the unique interpretation of the reviewer. Just enough transparency for one person is way too much for another. Culture is living and breathing in that way.
• Leadership took the recommendations and the survey results and wrestled them to four key values with three key ‘behaviors’ for each of the values. We worked hard to make the four key values simple, sticky, easy to remember, and easy to use.
• Leadership collectively revealed the values to the whole team along with topline goals for 2024.
• Each team then went away and came back with three Q1 goals to support the topline goals.
• Each individual employee is now setting personal Q1 goals that ladder up to our organizational ones.
• And we’ll have team-wide accountability tools (the values and their associated behaviors) to keep us on track and honest for those goals.

Burnout. After 2023, this is on everyone’s mind, across many industries. Paper after paper and study after study are trying to figure out what is going on with burnout in the workforce. The combination of COVID, remote work, and global economic stagnation are tough ingredients to mitigate burnout in any industry, let alone service industries already oriented towards burnout potential. We honestly don’t have answers here, just things we want to try.

• Values and goals are the first step. We think a shared sense of purpose and meaning goes a long way here. As well as momentum. Values, goals, and moving out of a stagnant feeling year are steps in the right direction.
• Momentum. This is often counterintuitive to burnout, but when you are growing, learning and winning, work is just better. It just is. It starts to scratch that purpose itch a bit more and it starts to feel less like work. We want to be the best agency on the planet, and we plan on making some momentum that way after this sticky year.
• We’re working on getting smarter with resourcing and with meetings. Being in a people business is half art and half science. We are trying to nail the science part by getting smarter with how we resource our partners and projects and how we structure meetings. Which leads us to…
• No-meeting Fridays. Hybrid meeting culture is a large cause of burnout across all industries. We’ve explored all sorts of things, from four day work weeks to embedded teams. To start, we’re going to implement no meeting Fridays to carve out dedicated flow time for our teams. But we know this will have to be paired with in person time to keep community culture on par with heads down work culture.
• More fun. We are unapologetic believers that creative work should be fun. We trade our brain stuff for dollars. That’s wild. And that’s awesome! We are looking for ways to build more creative ritual, more spark and more fun into our workflow. Connection and community are antidotes to burnout — plus, the work always is better when we do it that way.

Cool Shit. That’s our technical term for… doing more cool shit. We think a lot about what we can do for our clients that’s interesting and weird and cool. And we think about what can do for ourselves. Life is too short to not play a bit. And experiment a bit. Even in the business world. The AI revolution is here. Our team is here for it, and learning as much as our brains will give space for. The tools now available to us are truly things of science fiction. We think about that a lot. And we think about launching brands a lot. In the coming years I wouldn’t be surprised to see some fully Brains-owned brands out in the world. Cuz that would be cool.

…

I’ll end this review with a personal note. I love this job. I always have. I love building things and creating with people I enjoy. I’m an unbearable and eternal optimist (something I have learned to curb when necessary as a leader, but it is who I am). I’m very comfortable viewing success through the scale of time. I like betting on this group of people and this way of working to lead towards things like money and growth and awards and acknowledgement and all the words we like to assign to success.

But this year was complex. With scale, the problems get bigger and more frequent. That seems to be the nature of leading an agency of this size — the nature of doing anything worth doing in the world. In many ways, complexity is the price of growth. The price of ambition — even if that ambition is rooted in a common good.

New horizons come with the unknown. And the unknown comes with moments of doubt. That is to be human. To pretend otherwise is the wrong form of arrogance.

Many times I looked around this year and wondered, “Am I doing this right?” And I know I’m not alone in asking that question.

Earlier this year I watched the movie, Asteroid City. In an ending scene, one of the main characters is performing in a play. Mid-scene he stops the play and asks the director, “Am I doing this right? I still don’t understand the play”. To which the director responds, “It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.”

This year has taught me that the search for meaning… or happiness… or fulfillment in work is also something that should be viewed through the long scale of time. It’s not always clear. Often we ask ourselves, “Am I doing this right?”. Sometimes, I’m not sure I even understand the play.

This year I’ve gotten into the practice of telling myself to “just keep telling the story”. That’s what I’m confident in. That’s what I believe in. I believe in the story we are telling at Brains.

And most days that’s enough for me.

Brains, Agency in Review 2023 was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Building a Great Place to Work (that does Great Work)

Benjamin Hart is co-president of Brains on Fire, a creative agency and B Corporation that helps community-driven brands launch, grow and meaningfully impact the human experience.

Welcome to our yearly agency review where we take a look back at how our team of creatives navigated the world of agency life and creative work together. It’s our chance to reflect on the ways we’ve tried, failed, or succeeded at living up to our highest ideals and values.

This year marks the fourth full year that my partner Brandy Amidon and I have served as co-presidents of BOF. We do this annual review as a way to document our learnings, and we also know that others may find some useful takeaways from our reflections. That’s why we publish it openly, as an expression of living our values of transparency and accountability.

We also love to talk shop with others. So if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to me at benjamin@brainsonfire.com.

Ok, 2022.

…

I’m going to tackle this one a bit differently than I have in years past. This year I’m going to start with some data. FUN! DATA!

This year at Brains on Fire:

• We spent / invested more money than we ever have. This primarily comes in the form of people for an agency (we added a lot of new folks this year). This added a significant dollar amount to our bottom line. About a 15% increase from the year before. For a mid-size agency, that’s a lot.
• We raised our existing team’s salaries more than we ever have. We believe in paying our team above the fair and equitable measuring stick and we made big strides this year in pushing that ideal forward. Every person who had worked here for at least a year got an increase in their pay.
• We invested more hours than we ever have into personal and professional development. Both in our newly implemented 1:1 structure and our dept / team learning structure, we tallied over 2,500 hours in on-the-clock development as a team. That’s over half a million dollars invested in non-billable hours.
• We arguably (objectively?) did our best work ever this year. For us, that meant both the amount of output and the quality of the output to our standards. This year, we felt proud a lot.
• ANNNNNDDD we made (and shared) more money than we ever have. A 77% increase in profits from the year before. Eclipsing the goal that we set out at the end of 2021 — a goal that felt impossible at the time.
• Oh, and we were named as a Great Place to Work with 100% of the team saying that Brains was a great place to work (with some additional exciting news on this front dropping in January of this year).

To put a finer point on it, we invested more than we thought possible and we profited more than we thought was probable. And we did it all while becoming a better place to work that did better work than ever before.

^ I am immensely proud of that paragraph.

In years past, I’ve laid out a lot of our ups and downs to get to this point. How we rebuilt the culture, developed processes and standards, built the team, developed leaders, etc.

Well, at risk of sounding overly bombastic — this was, in many ways, our year of arrival.

Arrival to the belief that the experiment is possible.

At Brains, the experiment is a question we talk about often. A question on if we can create a great agency together — a great agency that’s filled with happy and healthy people.

We’ve been around for a while. We know many agencies. Some of us come from other agencies. We know how hard being a creative ‘service provider’ can be. Especially with high-growth, high-performing trajectories. There is lots of burnout. Lots of inequality. And lot’s of chipping away at culture and values to chase success.

We talk about a better way. We talk about being successful because of our values and not despite them. We talk about building something worth choosing, together. That’s our experiment. Building the best agency on the planet, filled with healthy and happy people.

But we do question if it’s possible. If it’s sustainable.

This year we proved to ourselves that those things were possible. That they were not just things we talked about — they were true things. We proved that the experiment could work. And we proved it many times over to ourselves. We arrived at possible.

Did we arrive at the end of the experiment? Did we solve it? No, of course not. And we never will. It will always be an evolving experiment. Something to strive for.

But we saw glimpses of it. We saw our collective ability to create, when all
things are considered, a pretty great place to work.

Scaling Excellence

In my previous posts, I’ve covered at length how we think about growing leaders, adding talent, developing processes, etc.

All of that played a monumental role in our measurement of success this year, but one thing probably stands above the rest for me. Scaling standards of excellence.

A couple of years back I had an interaction with a client that has kept me up a night or two as I think about the growth trajectory of Brains. This client had worked with a competitor of ours, a well-known agency that we have admired as a peer. Folks with celebrated work in the industry and a disruptor in the space. But our client was not a fan of their past experience with them. In his generous praise of the way we go about our work he said, “[The other agency] has some talent, but it all depends on the team you get. If you get stuck with a B team the work is just fine. And the experience of getting to a final product with them isn’t awesome.”

Fair or not to this other agency, that stuck with me. And our leadership team talks about this idea a lot. How do we both define and scale excellence? How do those ‘B team’ words never have relevance to our work? Can you have a larger agency with consistent quality and experience that matches how we pitch ourselves on our website and in a new business call? Can we live up to our own expectations?

That’s a big part of the experiment for us. Here are some ways we worked on that this year:

1:1s
Each member of our team has a person who is directly responsible for their personal and professional development at BOF. And we take it seriously. We set goals and ensure role alignment for each person. Leadership included. We hold each other accountable to what’s been laid out. Your 1:1 is your advocate. They care about you as a person, but they also care about your professional trajectory. And that means they are going to push you. These individual alignments ladder up to our goals as a company and to our highest ideals as an agency. And they set pathways for growth individually and collectively. When I step back, it’s beautiful. And simple. People caring about people. It’s not rocket science. It’s consistency and intention. And good faith on all sides.

This system led to many growth moments for our folks and our company — things like new mastery of skills, deep dives into topics like ADA compliance or AI applications for our work, clearer job titles and growth trajectories, and a ton more. All coming from individuals.

Department Learning & Sharing
Above the 1:1 structure we have small team structures. As is typical, our teams are departmental — Design, Social, Strategy, Projects, Leadership. Those teams meet weekly to share, learn, tackle hot topics, and more. Each team has quarterly / yearly goals that they develop as a group. Those goals can be process-oriented, task-driven, learning-focused. It’s up to the team. The teams then share back the goals with the whole company for accountability. And learnings and processes are also shared back regularly and systematically implemented when needed.

The sharing back and systematizing are the important parts here. The teams aren’t operating in silos. They are getting inspired, learning, and then bringing it back to the whole to make our work better. We saw countless examples of that this last year.

The Magic Shop
One of our values at Brains is simply, ‘We Believe in Magic’. This is our value that acknowledges and pays homage to those deeply mysterious and deeply human parts of our work. The inexplicable flows of social movements and human connections that can be found in and through creative work. We believe in magic. And we are committed to pushing our work to the boundaries of the known and into the spaces that feel uncomfortable and squishy and transcendent.
The Magic Shop is a part of our weekly team meeting time to carve out space to dialogue, share, learn, dream, laugh — all the good stuff. A time to believe in magic together. We spend one meeting a month going over updates. What’s going on with each client, what’s in the new business hopper, any new programs or policies, etc. The other three weeks are dedicated to magic-making. Personally, if I look back at this last year, some of my fondest memories as a team are during our Magic Shops.

These things individually are not groundbreaking. It’s together that I think we saw their impact. They are structures that allow us to practically play out the stuff that is most important to us as leaders and as a team.

Creating a Great Place to Work

I’m going to keep this one short. We’ve done a lot of policy and culture work over the last four years to bring us closer and closer to creating a place worth choosing every day. This year we implemented better parental leave, implemented 30-day sabbaticals for anyone who’s worked for us for seven years or more, took more holidays, shut down the offices at the end of the year, implemented more transparent growth and salary opportunities, built on our B-Corp scores, and more. We are firm believers that a culture is and should be constantly evolving and looking to better itself. When new people come, we are a new company. Our culture is not a Kool-Aid to be drunk. Again, not a destination to arrive at. It’s additive in nature, it’s amorphous.

Yes, all that contributed to us continuing to be a Great Place to Work. But I think the biggest thing is one of the simplest things. I tell every new person that starts with us that as soon as they feel powerless to change something here, they should leave. Because we are no longer the company that deserves their time.

We’ve all worked at places that felt like that. Powerless to change. It’s awful. Truly awful. My philosophy is simple. Everyone should be empowered to create change. To better us. To make the place more worth choosing. In a community, that change takes dialogue of course. It has to work for the whole and for what our vision is. But, I really believe it’s that simple. Start with a leadership posture of empowerment for change, and then build the mechanisms (1:1s, Teams, Magic Shops) to foster, facilitate, and enact that change. Boil it all down and that’s what I think is at the center of creating and sustaining a great place to work.

It’s Hard. And That’s Ok.

This year’s story is maybe a little too nice. As with all good stories, we need some drama, some conflict. So I will end with some personal thoughts on leading. This was probably my most fulfilling and validating year as a leader — but it was also maybe my hardest year as a leader.

Some stuff got a lot easier. Some stuff got a lot harder. With human scale comes complexity. And so much messiness. At times, ‘the problems’ can feel relentless. And it takes a lot of focus and energy to maintain perspective.

I certainly didn’t nail everything. Far from it. I spread myself too thin at times. I struggled having my brain bounce from thing to thing to thing. Time management was a challenge. Feelings of guilt would crop up if I wasn’t working constantly.

Four years of building is hard. We also work with many startups, oftentimes as business partners and not just agency partners, which stacks building companies on building companies. And we launched two new sister agencies this year (Dunshire and Mass Culture).

I felt it.

And at times the team did too. There was still something in the air this last year in the entire world of work. We all still don’t know what normal should look like after the last few years. We’re still figuring it out. And that leads to some weeks just feeling — off. It leads to having big wins and things to celebrate — and not feeling those accomplishments properly. There was plenty of funk.

But it was ok. It is ok.

Because building great things is hard.

And building great things WITH great people is a really wonderful way to spend your days (it can be both personally and professionally fulfilling).

Those two things can be true together.

And it’s ok to say that.

Our Agency in Review 2022 was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Growth & the Faces of the New Not-So-Normal

Benjamin Hart is co-president of Brains on Fire, a creative agency and B Corporation that helps community-driven brands launch, grow and meaningfully impact the human experience.

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Dear reader, welcome to our yearly agency review. Our moment of reflection; a look back at how our collection of creatives navigated being an agency and doing creative work together in the world.

It’s our yearly reckoning for how we tried, failed, or succeeded at living our most idealistic values.

2021 was my — and my partner Brandy Amidon’s — third full year as agency co-presidents. We set out a goal to do this every year. It’s inherently an internal exercise designed to document our learnings, but we’ve heard that others find some useful and applicable sentiments in these annual reflections, so we publish it openly as a gesture of transparency, vulnerability and one more small effort at living our values. We hope you find something here of use. Some encouragement maybe, or simply some validation in a shared experience.

If you have any questions or comments, we always love to talk shop; benjamin@brainsonfire.com

The Growth Year

If Brandy and I were forced to assign broad summations to our first three years as co-presidents, it would probably go something like this:

Year one was about untangling and redefining our values and rules as a community. It included a lot of listening, over-inclusion, and building trust.

Year two (start of the pandemic) was an immediate test of those refreshed values and rules. It was a real-time proving ground for the work we had done the previous year. It was really hard, but also really helpful in sifting and refining what actually worked or what was just bluster.

Year three, this past year, was clearly defined by growth, and all that word encompasses.

This last year was exciting. Our business was healthy and growing. Our culture felt healthy; growing and evolving for the better. The whole team bought into where we wanted to go as a company. The mindset shift across the board was so fun to be a part of.

We had built the trust and the culture to start having different conversations as a team. Conversations about growth and efficiencies and scalability. Conversations about our collective futures… and ‘the possible’.

With those conversations came a new focus on ‘the how’. How do we keep growing? How do we scale? How do we teach? How do we coach?

We came to some important realizations this year. First, in order for us to maintain and further our company growth, we would have to have a major emphasis on personal and professional growth for each of our people. Second, the state of the world and the changing state of the ‘workplace’ after two years of pandemic demanded the exact same thing. Taking care and growing our people was the only way forward.

It was an incredibly exciting year, but what has felt most exciting is that it feels like just the start of something big. Something special. And the whole team could feel it. And believed it.

But none of that would have happened without those first two years of foundation building and trust earning that brought us to this point.

The Pendulum Swings

I think a lot about the balance and counterbalances of a healthy team culture. A good team culture is not a final destination. We will never “arrive.” Creating a healthy team culture is a constant pursuit that will change course, flow in new ways, and evolve as often as human culture does the same — which is, of course, all the time.

Our first two years of leadership were punctuated by a lot of inclusion. We were very cognizant that our team not only needed exposure to many different parts of the business to learn and grow in new ways not available to them before, but also they needed to see with their own eyes how we were making positive changes. They needed to experience it. Feel it. Not just hear it.

What that meant was a lot of people on projects. A lot of people attending our internal new business meetings. A lot of people included in decision-making and co-creation. A lot of people included in everything.

That approach was so needed those first two years. And the team growth and learning was substantial. But it also had an interesting side effect.

At Brains on Fire we work very hard to have a healthy work-life balance. We preach it, we expect it, and we put processes in place to protect it. We are in one of the toughest industries to live out that value, and so we work so hard to make sure it’s actually a fundamental truth for our agency. But what we started to find with our posture of over inclusion was that it had a fairly adverse impact on this work-life value.

Too many people had too many things for our brains to handle it all well. We still did fairly good with the other parts of the work-life value, but mentally and emotionally it always felt like we had a million things going on. And for our brains, we kind of did.

And so we started to swing our pendulum back a bit towards less over-inclusion. Still healthy inclusion and co-creation, but the work we did over the first two years had built the trust we needed to swing the pendulum back towards trusting each other enough to not have to see or experience ALL the things. It was just too much. Having a right-sized amount for our brains to handle is good. And needed for great work to happen.

And so the pursuit continues. We’ll see where the pendulum swings next.

Growing Leaders

The realization that growing our people was paramount to our next chapter of company growth came with another realization — we also need to grow our leaders.

Brandy and I are still young leaders. Admitting that is healthy. It is also ok and healthy to admit that the rest of our leadership team are also young leaders.

Despite being young leaders, it’s also healthy to admit that leadership is much like our culture — a constant pursuit. We’ll never arrive at some place with all the answers, skills, and tools needed to be a “complete” leader — but we should always be moving forward towards that goal.

And the healthiest thing to admit: we needed some external help on this front.

This year we began a process of leadership coaching with our friends at Refound. Having a third party was beyond helpful. 10 out of 10 recommend.

I won’t spend a ton of time here, but these are a few key takeaways from the process:

• The process was incredibly helpful in examining and identifying the pendulum swing needs for our culture. We were doing a lot of things that were great for our first two years but unsustainable over the long-term with a larger, growing company. We saw that we needed to add more hierarchy and structure when before that would have likely been perceived as a negative cultural move.
• A major emphasis of the process is on right-sized accountability and understanding that personal and professional growth are intertwined. We are creating a culture that fosters those things for each person in a sustainable way.
• That led to us implementing a new and more sustainable 1:1 structure for each person on the team. Each person has one human who is responsible for their personal and professional development, with accountability structures set up for each person and leader. Also, our leaders have a sustainable amount of folks they are responsible for. Those 1:1s are built to be full of curiosity, exploration, and co-creation for each other’s futures. It’s early days for the new structure, but it’s already beautiful.
• Along with the 1:1s, we also set up communal learning for our different teams (accounts, strategy, design, social, etc.). We’ve realized that 1:1’s are important to growth, but equally as important are communal learning opportunities. These group settings allow us to critique and challenge each other, skill share, and collectively start to provide language and process around our definition of what excellence means and looks like.

We are in the early days of these new structures, so I’ll have more to say on them in the future, but our posture to start has been one of grace. We made a full team acknowledgement that the first few months will be uncomfortable, that we’re all learning new skills, and we’ll need to constantly work to share back learnings and failings — and grow together.

Add Great People

Growth and scale comes with the inevitable need to add humans to your existing group of humans. That can be scary with a young team culture heading in the right direction. Disrupting our culture or our team’s individual growth for the cost of scale is something we have always been wary of.

So we took adding the right people to our team incredibly seriously.

This is in no way a revolutionary statement, but it just proved so true for us this last year — taking the time to invest in the right folks from both a skills standpoint and an additive cultural impact standpoint has enormous benefits to both your business objectives and your cultural objectives.

We have found that our new folks have added dimension and learning to our culture in ways that are profound and sometimes unexpected. We are inextricably better with them on board, and it has given us the confidence we needed to scale without losing the spirit and soul of what we believe makes Brains on Fire a place worth working at.

Big Work

This last year we did much of our biggest work yet. And arguably our best work.

All the cultural pursuits mentioned in the above sections are nice. It all sounds nice and feels nice. But at the end of the day if it’s not making an impact on our work or on the clients that we serve, then it’s just… nice stuff. That’s the reality of being an agency, at the end of the day we are judged and given more work through the quality of work.

Well the cultural pursuits worked. This last year it undoubtedly made our work better and our work bigger.

One of my constant adages to the team is this: We are successful because of our values and not despite them.

This continues to prove itself. When we live our values, our work is always on an arc of improvement… no matter the scale.

The New Not-So-Normal

I would be remiss to end this annual reflection without talking about the “new normal.”

And here is what I have to say — none of this shit is normal.

Nothing feels normal and nothing feels stable still. That’s the reality you know if you work with other humans in any capacity.

Sure, we’ve settled in a bit and learned some new coping skills. Maybe some things are returning to something that feels like normal, but two years of feeling the ground move underneath us has taken a toll… even on the “normal.”

I look around at my team and see an incredible resilience … and an incredible exhaustion. But we see it everywhere. Not only in-house, but also with clients and friends.

These are the faces of the new not-so-normal. Resilient and tired.

I think maybe I’m just tired of folks in the business world trying to arrive at some kind of new normal.

We. Just. Don’t. Know.

And I think that’s ok. We just have to ride the tiger. The more we keep trying to tell our teams and ourselves that we are in the new normal the more unsettling it is when the ground moves again.

Take care of each other. Communicate the present. Position as best we can for the future. And grow. That’s what we’re going to try and do.

Another thing I tell my team often is that acknowledging a really difficult and hard present and being very optimistic and excited about the future are not mutually exclusive postures. Both can coexist.

These are the faces of the new not-so-normal. Resilient, tired, and incredibly optimistic.

Our Agency in Review 2021 was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Benjamin Hart is co-president of Brains on Fire, a creative agency and B Corporation that helps community-driven brands launch, grow and meaningfully impact the human experience.

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Dear reader, you have stumbled upon our yearly agency compendium. A small moment to look back at how our quirky collection of creatives navigated being an agency and doing creative work together in the world. A reflection on how we were able to spark more creativity, find new processes, focus more on contributing to the human experience, and maintain being a profitable business.

It’s our yearly reckoning for how we tried, failed, or succeeded at living our most idealistic values.

I also add a personal ingredient of leadership to the recipe. It will have a lens for how I personally navigated the task of leadership with my co-president, Brandy Amidon and our partners.

It’s inherently an internal exercise for ourselves, but we’ve been told that others have found some useful and applicable sentiments in these, so we publish it openly and air our dirty laundry (read as 2020 sweatpants) to the masses. A gesture of transparency and openness that is yet one more small effort at living our values. We hope you find something here of use. Some encouragement maybe, or simply some validation in a shared experience.

If you have any questions or comments we always love to talk shop; benjamin@brainsonfire.com

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Let’s start with the obvious… this is a hell of a timeline to be living on planet earth. I’m going to try my best to avoid the obvious tropes of a 2020 lookback. I will attempt to not use a “this is fine” meme. I’m not going to use the words “dumpster fire.”However, if you are reading this 100 years into the future, please know this last year sucked. Really bad.

That reality will obviously set the backdrop for this reflection, and color much of the situational details, but it will not be its full sum. The lessons gleaned are surely different than I would have bet on last January, but they are still full of use and possibility for our post-COVID future. And at the risk of being an insufferable glass-half-fuller, I would argue they are deeper and more profound lessons than we could have ever learned without this awful year.

Despite the year of suck, hope abounds.

Getting Lucky & Scrappy

In truth, 2020 was a great financial year for us. We grew our bottom line, took care of our people, and were still able to hit the financial goals we set at the beginning of the year, including all profit-sharing and bonus goals.

Given the circumstances of this year, many would call that a miracle. But the reality is somewhere in between being scrappy and getting lucky.

When March hit and stay at-home orders were issued, we went into full scrappy mode. With the high degree of uncertainty hanging over everything, we didn’t want to make assumptions that the same opportunities would be available to us three months later — or even one month later. We pushed ourselves and took on a very heavy workload. For about three to four months, we pushed really hard, with a strong, collective commitment to push without sacrificing the quality of our work.

We also got super scrappy with what we did for our clients. We weren’t the only ones spinning and trying to orient ourselves to this new shutdown world. Our team identified quick areas of need for our clients, areas we felt we could deliver high impact on a short timeframe and then we pitched those ideas. When we got the green light, we spun up new systems and processes quickly, sometimes within days.

Our social teams flooded social channels with additional customer service help for many of our social contracts, offering a high level of human touch and interaction to an audience of people who were panicking, scared and isolated. Our mantra was to solve problems for folks, but to above all else, be human… and simply care. And that approach mattered to people. Beyond contributing an abundance of problem-solving humanity, we were also able to turn our learnings and processes into new, high-humanity customer service strategies and programs that our clients have continued to carry on with their internal teams.

We spun up new campaigns and community programs that were just right for this time in history. Many that built lasting brand affinity for our clients long after they ended. We looked at ways to bring our experiential work online. And yes, we even designed some zoom backgrounds.

The team really shined. They worked so hard and innovated on impossibly short periods of time, all while collectively and personally dealing with the world crumbling around them. I’ve never been more proud of how we showed up for our clients and showed up for each other. We truly lived our highest stated purpose this year and we contributed to the human experience in meaningful ways… even when the human experience was in crisis.

But we also got lucky. We have worked hard to strategically diversify the types of clients we serve. To set ourselves up for an inevitable industry wide downturn (in say tourism or healthcare, etc.), but no amount of foresight could have set us up for a global pandemic. When it hit, we were simply lucky with the diversification of the clients we had. We were servicing clients in education, baby essentials, mental health, children’s at home entertainment, and a slew of other direct to consumer companies and organizations that seemed tailor built to do well during a pandemic.

And we all stayed healthy.

We got lucky. And it would be foolish and arrogant to think otherwise.

But beyond the mix of scrappy luck, there are two clear takeaways for me in how we pulled off a good year:

First, we couldn’t have done it without our clearly-defined values and rules. The last two years we collectively did a ton of work to clearly define our values and rules for working together. Those gave us constant guides to check our very real-time decision making against.

Values like, ‘We do together’ and ‘ We take care of each other’ and ‘We lead with empathy’ took on new and deeper meanings and accountability.

Rules like, ‘Stay Flexible. Embrace Process’ and “Deescalate. Don’t Escalate” were invaluable language tools for the intensity of the time.

Brandy and my commitment to make leadership decisions based on a hierarchy of Our People first, Our Clients second, and Money third was invariably tested. The ruse of its simplicity stripped bare, revealing a much more complex formula. But one that we leaned on daily to guide us in our quest to be leaders worth a damn.

Second, we were 100% transparent 100% of the time. Our financial books are totally open for the team and everyone is up to speed with our new business goals and financial objectives. That was the ONLY way we could have asked the team to push as hard as we did. There were no back room conversations going on. We reviewed the situation together and collectively asked, “Do we want to push hard now and mitigate risk? Or hope for the best?” We were asking a lot, but it was always with all the cards laid out on the table.

We were bought in. Both to the values that would guide us and also to the full realities and details of the business decisions that we had before us. Those two things made all the difference.

Remote Work

By now, we’ve all read a million remote work articles born from 2020, but it’s hard to do a lookback and ignore it completely.

We were already well set up for remote work. Pre-COVID we already embraced remote Tuesdays and Thursdays for our folks — and we already have several full-time remote team members. Because of this, the transition to a fully remote workforce was fairly painless for us.

Overall, I think the data is a wash on whether our productivity and creativity increased or decreased. It’s impossible to apples to apples the pre- and post-COVID eras of our work. We aren’t just working from home now. We’re working from home AND homeschooling our kids. We’re working from home AND emotionally dealing with a global pandemic. Too many variables are now in play to determine what “works better.”

Personally, I miss people. My creativity is usually fueled by some spark of human interaction beyond a screen. But that’s not true for everyone on our team. I think the obvious takes on remote work seem to revolve around the fairly obtuse realization that, “Wow! Some people DO like working from home.” Overall I think our pre-COVID mix of time in and out of office, a hybrid solution, is probably a healthy balance for our productivity, creativity, and emotional health.

But we did learn a few new things.

First, fully remote work comes with an exponential increase in meetings. Getting everyone on the same page takes a full slot on the calendar now, even a small brainstorming checkin. And that’s death. No one likes more meetings. If you are reading this and you like more meetings, you are a straight up freak. A masochist. And I’m sorry I have to be the one breaking that to you, but it’s true. We all found ourselves working crazy hours to try and get the actual work done (the work that we were having all the meetings about). I’m still not sure we’ve cracked this nut. It still feels unbalanced, but we’re definitely better than when we first started. We had to double down on our no-meeting days. And after some time getting our feet under us, we started setting better boundaries with each other and our clients. In a lot of cases, we would tag in and out. We had each other’s backs. If someone was behind, we let them skip and took good notes to fill them in later. I think this may still be one of the greatest challenges of fully remote work; making sure the knowledge gaps are filled while keeping meetings from becoming overbearing. We have all the tools. We use Slack and Asana and Mural and Hangouts, etc. but we still find this problem to be… a problem.

Second, we have always worked hard to operate as one unified team despite our multiple offices. We are firm believers that cross-collaborative and cross-pollinated teams are incredibly important to the health of our culture and the quality and depth of our work. Pre-COVID, we were proud of our success eliminating team disparity between the offices. Remote work took us to the next level. We now operate, without the smallest amount of hyperbole, as one team. It’s beautiful. But there will certainly be the risk of reversion when this time comes to an end. The takeaway for us is that we will have to be super intentional about gaining back the good things, those small face-to-face moments and chats, and not letting those build back the small and often imperceptible walls of tribal division that happen simply by occupying the same space. Are both goods possible? I think only if we’re intentional about it as we move back into a hybrid solution.

Pride & Purpose

You know what’s really hard to do in the face of an existential crisis? … make branding and marketing matter. At all. That was the not-so-well-kept secret of 2020. Maybe none of this matters? I think everyone wrestled with that. Whatever profession. In the face of our loved ones getting sick or dying, nothing else matters. Nothing. As a whole, our team never went full nihilist, but at times, we all dabbled. And that was why the type of work we were doing mattered last year more than all others. Was what we were doing contributing in meaningful ways to the human experience? Were we adding to peoples lives? Or were we just peddling crap? Because if we were peddling crap in 2020, then I’m out.

At Brains we talk a lot about building a place that’s worth choosing to go to work at every day.

At the end of the day work is… work. It takes us away from our families and loved ones and puts stress in our lives. It’s a necessity. And when we try and say it’s something more, we aren’t being completely honest with ourselves. BUT if we are honest with that reality, and then we say, “Well if I have to work, I want to do it with good people who also want to put good and creative things into the world” then that’s not such a bad way to spend so much time.

I have never been more proud of the work that we did than in the year 2020. And never more convinced that we are creating a place worth choosing.

This year we showed up for people and communities in incredibly tangible ways. For our client Hello Bello we created Camp Hello Bello where parents from the community created content for the community that suddenly found themselves stuck at home. We had parents baking, singing, crafting and doing storytime all for each other’s kids. And with every piece of content we would venmo the creator within a day. Putting much needed money into parents pockets as quickly as possible. For our client tonies we helped families connect with separated loved ones through the power of story. Little ones falling asleep to stories from their grandparents they could no longer visit. We helped communities of education and communities of health and communities of mental wellness. We helped people launch good things into the world and we contributed to people’s lives in ways that mattered to them. Not to us. To them.

And that gave us pride. And that gave us some purpose in our work. And that purpose gave us some calm while wrestling with the bigger questions of 2020. A year that put the finest point on the question, “What really matters?”.

The Loneliest and Most Intimate Year

The thing I have reflected on most about 2020 is how lonely, and yet beautifully intimate it has been. When this is all done I will not miss the loneliness, but I will miss the intimacy tremendously.

The isolation caused by being physically apart from others is very, very real. The human toll on not just our team, but on society as a whole, is high. Many of us ended this year with some measure of sadness and isolation. We were all flat out exhausted. Burnt out. That is the hard truth of 2020.

But there is another truth. The truth that we have never had a more intimate year with each other or with our clients. We have had a year of being in each other’s bedrooms and living rooms. A year of little hands and faces popping into view on screens. A year of spouses sitting next to us during meetings. A year of shirtless boyfriends working out in the background. A year of being in the kitchen with each other while we fix lunch. A year of seeing each other at our most unpolished, vulnerable and real states. This year we’ve cried with each other and we’ve cried with clients, but we’ve also laughed, celebrated, and shared some incredibly human moments together. The pretense of being “professionals” was unceremoniously ripped away and we were left with a beautiful thing; our very messy but very shared humanity. And we all just had to be ok with that reality. Man, what a thing. I will miss it when it’s gone.

So here is to a brighter, less lonely, but equally intimate 2021.

Our Agency in Review 2020 was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our Agency Year in Review 2019

And how to not sink a 30-year company your first year on the job

First, a little backstory to this post…

In January 2019, I took over as co-president of Brains on Fire with my partner Brandy Amidon. We joined two existing (and amazing) partners, but also succeeded the long and historic tenure of Robbin Phillips. Robbin spent the last 20 years as president building BOF into its current form and gaining some well deserved notoriety along the way.

It was a big change.

We also have two growing offices: one in Los Angeles and one in Greenville, SC. I believe this unique geographical setup is one of our greatest strengths, but it also added to the complexity of our 2019 Year of Change (read as YEAAAR OOOOFF CHAANNNGGE).

Yes, bad news, you’ve stumbled upon a year-end / year-beginning reflections post. I’m about to hit you with some of the lessons I learned from the past year. The spoiler to this post is that we ended up having a really great year in many ways. We grew the company, invested in our people and reset and realigned conversations on what we do, how we do it and what our values are. I’m really proud of how a lot of the past year played out, but I also screwed up plenty.

If I’m being honest, writing these down is simply an exercise in catharsis after one of the longest and most extraordinary years of my life (with an exciting new one ahead). I do hope others might find some helpful nuggets in here.

I’ve broken my reflections into two sections. The first are my lessons for us as an agency. The second are personal lessons stepping into the role of co-president. Let’s jump in.

Agency Lesson #1: Change is Hard for Humans. Embracing it is the Difference

This is something we fundamentally know as an agency. One of our services is the difficult and often precarious job of rebranding. We find rebranding to be the hardest human thing we do, well beyond new branding and building community. That is because of change. Half, if not more, of our job during a rebrand is to walk the humans of the brand or organization through the journey of change. We work hard to design that change journey in a way that makes it slightly easier for humans to embrace, but what we’ve learned over the years is that everything about our humanness wants to resist change. Change is so scary. It brings uncertainty and it brings us out of our sense of safety. And fear is such an unfortunately powerful force. Especially if it’s in any way tied to one’s sense of identity.

But at the end of those rebrands we have found, without outliers, that the most successful rebrand projects happened when the humans involved really leaned into change. Even though it was scary, even though there was so much uncertainty at points, they bought in and jumped in to co-create the change. They believed and it led to success.

Because here’s the thing: in every single case of our rebrands, change was necessary. Stagnation is death. No one is reaching out to us to rebrand because they just want to “spice things up” a bit. They are reaching out because there is a problem.

Funny how you can know something so fundamentally true as an agency, but still struggle when internally applicable.

To be fair to ourselves, change never rolls in kindly. It whirls and weathers you in the moment, and requires a lot of difficult patience and willingness to sitting in the discomfort to see how things will shake out.

The lesson I took away for our agency this year is the same lesson we try and teach our clients; embrace change. Lean in and co-create it to a beautiful and shared outcome. It’s the difference between success and mediocrity. Was change absolutely necessary for us? Who knows. But it was upon us. We had two routes: embracing or resisting. When we embraced it as an agency, we created beautiful things together, and found new and exciting paths to success. When we resisted, whether because of fear or stubbornness or complacency, we were mediocre at best. People got left behind by those who chose to embrace, and when people are left behind, it takes a lot of time, effort and hard choices to get everyone caught up and moving collectively towards the future again. And that’s time spent looking backward instead of working forward.

For Brains on Fire, change will always be upon us. Always. We have chosen an industry that is ever-changing. And it’s easy to get left behind.

We are at our best when we lean into the change, embrace it and co-create a better future.

What’s the best way to collectively embrace change, you wonder? … well, that’s next.

Agency Lesson #2: Start with Defined Language and Shared Values

When it came time for the leadership transition, Brandy and I had developed a deep trust over the past few years, and we were also aligned in our vision for the future of Brains on Fire. From the beginning of our ownership journey, we didn’t want to dictate a process or plan that didn’t include our team. Brandy and I are obsessed with culture, and I’m a big believer in designing our own culture and change processes with as much intention and attention to detail as we would design a brand, a website or a community. Brandy and I were two of many and we needed “the many” for conversations about where we are and where we want to go…together. We told the team up front that we had two options:

1) We give everyone a fully-flushed plan for our future on January 1st, 2019…day one.

2) We gather insight. We define language. We align in values. We share, talk and trust. Then we make a plan together.

We collectively chose 2. That process took six months.

We started with a listening tour with our team using various conversation starters on fear, dreams and hopes. Listening first. Sharing our thoughts second.

From there, we moved into defining language. Humans simply can’t change without language to contextualize that change. We need to clearly understand what’s being asked of us. Change is doomed when it gets lost in a cloud of ambiguity. We did a lot of work on building language to contextualize the changes we were asking ourselves.

After that, we worked on redefining our shared values and our rules for working together. The values and rules were born from our conversations and our shared experiences, and built using newly-defined language. We debated and wrestled with the values and rules. We combined and cut, ultimately arriving at them together.

The values and rules led to redefining our processes and how we communicate externally. All of this led to doing better work. And more importantly, enjoying and being more fulfilled in our work. But the process was not the easy route. It was hard. It took time, and it is hard for everyone to be patient during a time of change.

Now our future plan feels very real, transparent and open to everyone here. We shared a fully fleshed out presentation with the team at the midyear point. It included who we are, what we sell and why we exist. We focused on culture, values, rules and a 3-year, detailed goals list.

Overall, we are essentially doing the same things that Brains on Fire has been doing for the past 30+ years, solving big creative challenges and opportunities for our clients. We help good people tell their stories better. We try to spark change and inspire communities to action. We do it all through a fairly unique and quirky human-focused lens and insightful approach. We try to do those things in a way that contributes to people’s lives in meaningful ways, connecting them to others through shared passions. But again, change was upon us. We needed to reset some things and align on others. We took the time to work out the language, values and rules that felt most comfortable and accurate for the next chapter in the long story of Brains on Fire.

Agency Lesson #3: Communicate Your Decision Making Hierarchy

As we were beginning the process above, Brandy and I also immediately set and communicated our hierarchy for decision making.

The hierarchy was:

1. Our People
2. Our Clients
3. Money

Simple as that.

If a client is bad for our people they aren’t the right fit.

If it comes down to sacrificing a little money for the success of our clients, we figure out how to overdeliver.

And so on.

This was a simple, powerful way to set the tone for how we will make decisions as a company. It was a way to start building trust from day one. More importantly, it gave the team a mechanism for accountability with leadership as we moved through the first year. If Brandy and I made a decision that felt outside that hierarchy, the team let us know. Then we worked to adjust.

It also gave Brandy and I a guide for hard decisions. It wasn’t always cut and dry, but it helped tremendously for many tough calls we had to make.

Agency Lesson #4: Trust is Built through the Work

Soon after the transition, we launched a very large brand that our team had touched pretty much everything on — from naming to identity to packaging to web to the campaign launch. Besides the brand and launch performing extremely well in the real world, it was the first time the team felt really in the trenches together since the leadership transition. The energy, flow, support and sense of team was palpable and infectious. We all had each other’s backs, and we were all committed to excellence at the same level.

That’s what we learned all year. We can talk until our faces are blue, but the real, deep trust is built through hard, gritty, intense, fulfilling work. It’s earned when times are tough and we have to actually live out our language, rules and values. It’s the moments when we get the opportunity to show that we actually care for each other…and don’t fall short. When we make it through, we take the time to celebrate those moments when the team is all really playing, creatively excelling and buying into a shared approach to success simply because they care enough to do so. That’s the good stuff.

Personal Lesson #1: Listen. Listen. Listen.

I consider myself a pretty great talker. This has afforded me some success in this business.

I’m also a big believer in the power of listening, but having the patience for it, especially when things are busy, is not one of my strengths.

If this year has taught me anything, it’s to triple down on listening. It requires taking the time, presenting the right body language and making sure the listener knows they were heard and understood. These simple acts go a long way, and are always worth the time when building a culture worth being a part of.

But maybe the biggest thing I learned this year is not not assume one group needs more listening over another, regardless of whether those folks have been with the company for 30 years or six months, they all seem to need the same amount of time to be heard. It was a clear reminder that we are all human. We all have hopes, dreams and fears. Things like age or experience don’t change that. It may change the things being heard, but the time needed to be heard is equal.

Personal Lesson #2: Learn to Live with Letting People Down

This has been the hardest lesson for me. With this job comes simply too many things. I literally can’t do them all. It’s a constant juggling act.

By nature, I’m a people pleaser and an achiever. With too many things, I always feel like I’m letting someone down. Be it my colleagues, a client, my family or even myself, someone is always getting just a little less than I feel they should be getting. It’s hard to live with that feeling every day and not let it eat at you a bit or feel like you’re falling short.

Throughout the year, I got better at the stereotypical things like delegating and time management, but my biggest jump was communicating. Real-time over-communication through the juggling helped everyone manage expectations better. It also helped me feel a little better about not getting all the things done or giving everyone the time and attention they deserved. But mostly, I just needed to learn to let go of the feeling that I was falling short and be ok with getting done what I could.

Personal Lesson #3: Find the Middle of the Pendulum

I find there is a delicate balance when it comes to being an effective leader. Between being a good listener and setting vision and direction. Between feeling the responsibility for the wellbeing of our humans and not letting my mind run through the next 30 things we need to do to get everything done. Having the patience to sit in the middle of those things and recognizing the right timing for each is important.

It’s easy to let the pendulum swing, to feel the panic of an impending deadline one day and the high of new business signing the next. Steadiness and confidence are so important, as is not projecting the pendulum swing onto the group. At any given time, I can now be equally concerned about their stress or money or life challenges or workloads. I believe strongly in not passing through anxiety to the team. Leadership has the ability to affect the tone of the whole office.

Finding the middle of the pendulum is key.

Personal Lesson #4: Mistakes are Fine. It’s What’s Next that Matters Most.

I remember a few months after the transition, we gave a presentation as a team. Following the presentation I felt some funk from the group. After some hard conversations, I learned that the women in the group felt that I had talked over them and done some good ole fashioned mansplaining during the presentation.

And they were right. Absolutely right. I had done the mansplaining.

I was devastated that I had so ignorantly bumbled into the male presidential trope that I hate, but I was glad the women on the team trusted me enough to ding me for it.

I was lucky enough to have another chance at a more equitable presentation shortly after my misstep, but it was clear I had to get that one right to keep any trust that I had built over the previous months.

Overall, I’m not really built for regrets. I like to consider myself an idealistic realist. I generally think things will turn out ok with some hard work and vision. I’m arrogant enough to think we can usually fix what needs fixing. I don’t love looking back and I’m anxious to move forward.

But when it comes to culture, owning your mistakes and course correcting are the only ways to build and maintain real trust. Repeating and repeating erodes trust…in a hurry.

That has been my lesson this year. Mistakes and missteps are fine. They will happen. It’s what you do next that makes you a leader worth following.

Personal Lesson #5: Work is Just Work

Work is just work. This is my most important lesson from 2019 and one that I’m constantly trying to relearn everyday. My brain has this very annoying habit of over inflating how important this job is in the context of the rest of my life.

A new title of “co-president”, added responsibility, and big brand launches didn’t help much.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very proud of the work we did this year. Incredibly proud. We launched big and exciting things into the world that mattered to real people and actually impacted the human experience in meaningful ways. That’s an awesome get to say about my job.

But here is the reality, I missed too much this year. I missed countless moments with the little faces who simply know me by, ‘Papa’. I missed countless moments with the person who has chosen and committed to spend her life with me.

I missed those moments even when I was with them. Because my idiot brain was somewhere doing work.

This year I’ve tried more, and probably failed more than ever to remind myself that when you strip it all away, it’s just noise. It’s not real and true substance.

It’s. Just. Work.

We do work so we can do life. Life is the substance.

My kids could care less what it is I do for work. My wife, god bless her, would love me if I sold ladies shoes (trust me here, I know this for a fact).

This year, 2020, is the year that I keep reminding myself, “It’s what you do next that makes you a man worthy of being a father. Worthy of someone choosing to spend their days with you. Work can wait. After all, it’s just work.”

Our Agency Year in Review was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Brains on Fire Finds More Success Through Finding a Deeper Purpose

For humans, stories are really, really important. They connect us, inspire us, heal us and help us find our place in a really big world. We believe people want to be a part of a story that is bigger than themselves, and that they want to find themselves in the stories of others. That foundational element of storytelling is why we became a B Corp. It helps us tell our story better so that we can do more good and find other good people. And, ultimately, the decision starts with a personal one, and the ability to find purpose and meaning in your work.

Over the years, I have probably tried to explain to my children a thousand times what it is I do for work. I have an 8-year-old daughter, Stella, and a 5-year-old son, Truman. They are smart and inquisitive kids, very curious about the world and how things work. But even with their insatiable curiosity, it’s difficult for them to understand what it is I do at Brains on Fire. If I tell my kids “we are a creative company that believes in the power of human connection,” I don’t exactly see light bulbs turn on. Concepts like advertising, marketing, and communications are just tough for young kids to get — especially the community-focused way we do it at Brains.

For a long time, if you were to ask my kids what I did for work, their answers would vary. For a few years they would answer that, “He pushes buttons,” a clear nod to my nerd-rooted propensities (I wear glasses) and hours spent on a computer for work. Other times, they would tell people that I worked directly for some of our clients. When other well-meaning school parents asked, I would have to clear up that no, I am not a baker or a horse rescuer or kid helper. Most recently I had to clear up that I was most definitely not a laser scientist. That one didn’t have as much to do with my work at Brains as it did with my son’s “overactive imagination” (Read: “being a little liar.”)

Over the last year or so, as they have gotten older, I’ve finally made some inroads with them on understanding what it is I do. It came when I tried to distill our work to its most foundational element and told them, “I help people tell their stories.” That’s finally when I got light bulbs.

If we get deeper together, I say, “We help good people tell their stories better…so that they can do more good and find other good people.”

They get that.

And they like that.

At Brains, this cuts straight to the heart of what we believe … that for humans, stories are really, really important. They connect us, inspire us, heal us and help us find our place in a really big world. We believe people want to be a part of a story that is bigger than themselves, and that they want to find themselves in the stories of others. Whether you’re talking about branding, marketing, advertising or community, we believe a lot of it can be distilled to story.

That foundational element of storytelling is why we became a B Corp. Because we drink our own Kool-Aid. Simply put, being a B Corp helps us tell our story.

It helps us tell our story better so that we can do more good and find other good people.

For those unsure, B Corp is a certification. It is to business what Fair Trade certification is to coffee or USDA Organic certification is to milk. B Corps are for-profit companies certified for meeting rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. It means that in addition to profit as one of our legally defined goals, we also define goals that include making a positive impact on society, workers, the community and the environment.

It’s a verifiable commitment to viewing business as a force for good in the world.

We learned a great deal about ourselves during the long, rigorous, often tedious (but very rewarding) certification process. It’s a process that I will outline for curious folks in a follow-up post to this one. But for this post, I want to talk about the why. Why did our company want to become a B Corporation? Why does it help us tell our story better?

Vision

Like any meaningful cultural change, it starts with vision. The vision for B corporations set forth by B Lab is a compelling one that I’ve personally been interested in and drawn to for years. It’s a vision that embraces the “and” not the “either/or”. You can be both a profitable business and do good in the world. It’s not an either/or equation.

Being a B Corp isn’t straight up altruism, but it’s not cut-throat capitalism either. It’s a healthy, responsible, sustainable median. It’s a better way to do business.

It paints a vision of a community of like-minded businesses that take care of their people, their community, and the environment. Businesses that collectively make an impact on society.

We found ourselves in that story. We recognized our own company vision, the vision set forth by Robbin Phillips (our Courageous President), in the vision of the B Corp ideals. And it’s a story we want to be a part of. A next chapter we want to write.

So it has helped us tell the story of who we felt we already are — as well as who we aspire to become.

Your People

Becoming a B Corp should be a collective decision. It’s passed down from the vision makers at the top, but you need collective buy in for it to be successful. You need a culture that embraces it 100 percent, and a team that is eager to continue down the path of improvement together.

For us, the reasoning for our certification was most clearly found in our people.

Every day I am privileged to work with kind, generous, equitable colleagues that inspire and challenge me to be a better human.

At Brains on Fire, it was our people who championed our internal program that allows each employee four paid hours of community service/nonprofit donation time every month.

It was our people who started the Good Four campaign. A nationwide call to agencies and creative companies to collectively give four hours of good time together on April 4 (4/4).

Our people are always encouraging us to be more diverse, more environmentally conscious, more transparent.

It’s our people who are always pushing us to do more work that makes a real difference in the world.

It’s our people who find their professional purpose in meaningful work.

For us, it was simple. The B Corporation certification was the logical and best reflection of our people. It helps us tell the story of our people.

The Community

For us, the B Corp community is two-fold…

First, 0t means being a part of a community of “same-tribe” brands, companies, and organizations that all share values and best practices designed to meet our social and environmental goals.

We are excited to join like-minded companies, including Honest Company, Patagonia, Method, Good Worldwide, and more in shaping the future of business.

Second, the community is our clients.

At Brains, clients are more than just clients. They become our partners and, more often than not, they become like family. The B Corp certification is a reminder to them that we will always be honest and fair, and we will always push them to be famous for their people and the ways in which they love them.

It’s also a call to our present and future clients that we believe in doing work that makes a difference in the world and contributes in a meaningful way to the human experience.

Being a B Corp helps tell the story of our community.

Your Most Important Story

The B Corp model is a series of expanding circles that starts from the smallest point and expands outward. It begins with your company or team, then expands to your community, and so on all the way out to big, wide world. You take care of your people and expand out from there. It’s what I like best about the model.

But my biggest takeaway during the whole process is that the decision to become a B Corp is a very personal one.

I believe that the smallest circle is you. It’s your family. It’s your smallest hoop of humans. It’s your most important story. The why starts there — and it ripples out. And when it starts there, it’s infectious…because it’s real.

That’s where it started for me. As a dad, shaping a world that’s better for my kids is my why.

But that also means that ultimately this post really isn’t for you. This post is for my kids. Because the why is them.

…

Children, this decision was made for you. It’s a symbol of your kindness and your curiosity. Of your infinite potential. It’s a promise to you that you can both make a life for yourself and be a conscious participant in the world. It’s a reminder that there is such a thing as enough and plenty. And that people are worth it … always. It’s an encouragement that when the dark feels overwhelming, look for the good … because there is always more of it. And when you find the good, roll up your sleeves and join it. It is a road map. For a brighter tomorrow. But a map with new horizons to be discovered and built.

Stella, it’s a hammer for your glass ceilings. The strong, smart, creative and talented women that I work with (and also your momma) are your testament that with hard work you can do anything you want in this world.

Truman, it’s an encouragement that the privileges you carry come with the responsibility of empathy and action.

It’s an evergreen reminder to both of you that stories are important. A reminder to hear as many stories as you can and to look for the “human-ness” in whatever you choose to do when you’re grown.

Children, you are my most important story. And I’m beyond proud to be your papa and to take a brave step in this direction with the good people that I work with.

One day, I hope this helps you better understand what it is I do. But more importantly … why I do it.

B the Change

This story was originally posted @ Brains on Fire

B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.

Why We Certified Our Values — Our Company’s Most Important Story Starts With My Kids was originally published in brains on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not about the man. About the way of thinking about the world.

(I have two children. A 7 yr old daughter named Stella and a 4 yr old son named Truman.)

Dear children,

I’m writing this letter to you about something that you can not yet fully understand. In fact, it is hard for many grownups to even understand what I am writing about. But in time, I know you will understand this letter and it will become clear to you why I have written it.

This letter is about Donald Trump.

I know you have heard me talk about Donald Trump. And you may have even seen Donald Trump, the man, on television. But you see the Donald Trump that I’m writing you about is not really a man at all. Donald Trump is something entirely different indeed. Donald Trump is a way of thinking about the world.

Being Donald Trump means that you are afraid. That you are afraid of people who are not like you. You are afraid that those people will take what you have. Or what you feel should be yours. And that fear makes you hate those people. All of those people. You are not sure why, but you hate them. And you take away those people’s names and you take away their stories. And you hate them. And you keep them away.

Donald Trump means believing that you are stronger if you are bigger or angrier or you have more violence than the other people. If you try to listen to or hear the other people, you are weak. And you will lose. You will lose at the game. You are not sure what the game is, but you know that if you are weak or ugly or fat you will lose at the game and you will be a loser. But if you are strong or you have more money or you can punch those people in the face, you will win at the game.

Donald Trump means believing that if you are a boy it is better than being a girl. And being a boy will surely help you win at the game. But being a pretty girl is much, much better than being an ugly or a fat girl. If you are a fat girl or you look different from the pretty girls, you are ugly… and that is not good. But it is always best to be a strong boy who has lots of money. Because money is the most important part of the game. And you want to win at the game.

Donald Trump also means that you don’t need to be right about something to say it or even to believe it. You just need to say it. You need to say it loudly and many times and you need to believe that it is right and then it will be right. Even if it is not right.

You see my children, there are many people who like Donald Trump. And these people want Donald Trump to be America, the place where you live and are growing. And if Donald Trump is America, and that is the place where you live and grow, then you may also one day become Donald Trump. And that is why I am writing this letter. Because I am worried about Donald Trump and I am worried about you becoming Donald Trump.

Stella, I can recall with rare clarity the very first sound you made in this world. I sobbed. I could not contain it. It was a sound like no other I had experienced or have since. With that first sound of protest, you had made me a papa.

The next day, your mother and I brought you home to our Connecticut apartment above the coffee shop. It was the 4th of July and you were being kept awake by the popping of fireworks in the summer street and by the man singing Frank Sinatra at the fair outside of our window. But it was all as it should have been and we were very happy.

Now you are seven. You are smart, full of wit and skeptical of most everything. But most of all you are kind. Bravely, tremendously kind. You care about people’s names. And you care about people’s stories. And I have been witness to this.

My daughter, you are not Donald Trump.

Truman, when your mother and I first saw you we knew our family was complete. You made us whole. We brought you home to our house, the same one that we live in now, and the children from the street came to you and they held you and have loved you since.

Now you are four. My sweet California boy with golden hair and a tender heart. You feel everything. Deeply. But I have seen strength in the sensitivity of your youth. You will care about people’s names. And you will care about people’s stories. And I have been witness to this.

My son, you are not Donald Trump.

You see my children, Donald Trump is not a new way of thinking about the world. Donald Trump has come before by different names and he will come again, by new names, when you are grown.

But the good news is that I believe with all my heart that becoming Donald Trump or not becoming Donald Trump, is a choice. Your choice.

But it is not an easy choice.

One day, my little ones, you will come to realize that you are privileged children. You live in a house with a green yard. You do not feel fear when you play in the street or walk to the park. You have never witnessed true violence. You do not want for food or clothes or any basic thing. You have a mother and father who love you. Who love each other because of you and in spite of you. And even the color of your skin, still and unfortunately, affords you an unspoken privilege that is not afforded to others in this place where you are living and growing. Your entire world is safe, full of love and full of privilege. Your stories are happy stories.

But as you grow, this will be a difficult thing for you to come to terms with. At first, you will fight against the idea that you are privileged. You may feel that it makes your stories less real or less interesting. But after a time, you will come to understand it and maybe even to accept it.

And this, my dear ones, is why your choice will be difficult.

Because privilege can make the lines of your choice blurry. It can make it difficult for you to recognize Donald Trump. Privilege can make you stop hearing people’s names and caring about their stories. Privilege can make you afraid. Afraid that people will take what is yours or what you feel should be yours. And children, you can let your privilege make you afraid. Or you can let your privilege make your world bigger. You can use it to make this place that you are living and growing better. By hearing as many different stories as you can. And remembering as many names as you can.

And then when your Donald Trump comes, you will recognize him. And you will remember that your papa knows you. And he has been witness to your kindness. And he knows that you care about names and stories and that you are not afraid. And you will remember this and you will not become Donald Trump.

And that is when it will become clear why I have written this letter.

One final thing to remember my children is that we must never hate the people who are becoming Donald Trump. We must remember that they have names and that they have stories of their own. And that perhaps the reason that they are becoming Donald Trump is because of their stories. Perhaps they are afraid that people will come and take what is theirs, or what they believe is theirs. And we must remember that no matter if it is true or not, that is a very scary thought indeed. And perhaps if we can listen and we can hear the people who are becoming Donald Trump we can learn something for ourselves and we can learn something about the place where you live and are growing. Something that will make our world bigger. And this place better. And perhaps, if these people have not yet fully become Donald Trump, they may be able to hear us and read this letter and they might know, like you now know, why I do not want you to become Donald Trump.