Planning to acquire? Got a new product or service to launch? Thinking of entering a new market?

You’ve tested your assumptions. You know your plan is sound. You know that with the turmoil in the marketplace, you must evolve to grow. That survival is not a sure thing.

You turn your plan over to your leadership team to launch.

Six months later, it’s going nowhere.

The sales team isn’t selling it. Creatives are loath to work on it. Marketing isn’t promoting it. Account isn’t talking about it with clients.

When confronted, they insist it’s a priority. Each is telling their teams to focus on it. Yet somehow, everyone consistently avoids action.

When you intervene, you can easily get people to understand and agree your plan is sound. Nothing seems to help. Training, performance bonuses, directives — all go nowhere. Worse, you can’t identify any one person or group actively blocking the plan.

And then you remember: when you founded the company, everyone thought you were crazy. Family, friends, colleagues, even early employees. They all thought you were nuts.

Now that you’re successful, and you suggest you need to pivot, many of the same people — including your leadership team — resist. Because, you intuit, “we can’t risk what we’ve built.”

They’re protecting something that exists only because you took the “crazy” risk they all thought was impossible. Now they think you’re reckless. They can’t seem to appreciate how many times they’ve benefited from you pushing through the impossible to get to new success.

You feel the stress your demands are putting on leadership. It’s as if they were being torn between two authorities. But who, exactly, was this other authority? Like so many founders, you’d assumed that being in charge meant the organization would respond to your insights. How could it be that you have all the control on paper but so little in daily practice?

If the Person at the Top Isn’t in Charge, Who Is?

The culture.

You’re wrestling with a different kind of living being: one that developed its own character, its own preferences, and its own will. Your personal ethos of innovation is at war with your organization’s character, which craves safety, certainty, and predictability. The fact that you created it matters very little.

Organizations maintain legal and cultural boundaries that define who’s inside and who’s out. They mix capital, talent, and material into products and services. They grow through hiring, adapt to market pressures, start subsidiaries, and acquire others. A company’s culture emerges from thousands of daily interactions, but can’t be found in any employee handbook or org chart. And when threatened, organizations exhibit a tenacity that can override the preferences of any individual within them.

Even the leader.

What to Do

Get curious before you get strategic.

The resistance isn’t defiance. It’s information. The culture is telling you something about itself: what it fears, what it values, what it believes it cannot survive without. Your job, before anything else, is to understand that.

Not from a distance. Not through a survey or a town hall or a reorganized org chart.

One conversation at a time.

I’ve been doing this work for forty years, and I’ve never seen a culture shift from a directive.

I have seen it shift from a single honest conversation someone didn’t expect to have. A creative director who finally said what she’d been holding in for two years. An account lead who admitted he didn’t believe in the new direction because no one had asked him what he thought. A COO who was protecting her team from what she assumed you’d do with the information.

These people aren’t your problem. They’re your path.

The question isn’t why they’re resisting. It’s what do they know that you don’t?

Sit with that long enough to mean it. Then go ask.

What you’ll find, almost always, is that the resistance has a specific shape. It lives in particular people, in particular fears, around particular losses, real or imagined. Once you can see its shape, you can work with it. You can’t work with what you’re busy overriding.

Now Show Them What’s Possible.

Not as an argument. As a story.

Find the firms that made the move you’re asking your people to make, and lived to say it was worth it. Tell those stories in rooms where your people can hear them. Not as proof that you’re right. As evidence that the fear is survivable.

Then go further. Help them see the future you’re building, specifically, concretely, with them in it.

Not the strategy deck version. The human version.

What does a Monday morning look like two years from now if this works? Who’s doing what? What did we build that we couldn’t have built any other way? What did we stop being afraid of?

People don’t move because the logic is sound. They move because they can feel the future… and because they can see themselves inside it.

That feeling can’t be installed. It must arrive on its own terms. Your job is to create the conditions for it.

Stories do that. Honest conversations do that. Being seen does that.

What you’re building toward isn’t compliance.

It’s a room full of people who have each, privately and in their own time, come to the same conclusion: yes. This is the right way forward. And it includes all of us.

That’s a different kind of momentum than anything a directive produces. It’s slower to start.

It doesn’t stall.

You already know how to do this. You did it when you founded the company: you persuaded people, one at a time, that the impossible was worth trying.

That’s still the work. It’s just aimed inward now.

I’ve been working on something longer.

For forty years I’ve been watching what happens underneath the visible problems in creative firms. The stalled initiative. The leadership team that agrees in the room and disappears in the field. The founder who has all the authority on paper and almost none of it in practice.

The book is called The Work Beneath The Work.

The subtitle is: For people who built their strength from struggle — and haven’t named it yet.

I’m 80. I couldn’t have written this earlier.

One more thing.

I have six cover directions and I’m genuinely undecided. I’ll share a few here soon and ask what you think. Your instinct matters to me.

The post The Culture Resists Change appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

The result was clear. Big Yellow it is.

A note on what comes next. This first printing is only 25 copies. I’m using them to seek endorsements from people I respect in the creative, trauma, adoption, and mental health worlds — and to hand two literary agents at the Chuckanut Writers Conference in late June.

After releasing the interior file I realized the book needs at least three more essays: two I’ve already written, one I’ve only thought about. So the next printing will be different.

The current version is 8×8 inches — square. My conversations with the agents may change that. The illustrations run horizontal, which could point toward a horizontal format, or perhaps a more traditional vertical one. We’ll see what those meetings surface.

And with the four submitted design concepts, my own proclivity for change, and whatever the agents suggest — there may well be a whole new batch of covers for you to weigh in on.

Stay tuned.

The post The Votes Are In appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

I’ve been posting drafts of chapters here for years, and many of you have already read those earlier versions.

Now, I have to choose a cover. And I keep changing my mind.

So, I need your help.

Here are six options, each pulling in a different direction. I’d love to know which one made you want to know what’s inside.

Please tell me what you think — and soon. I’m printing an initial run of advance copies this month, and I’d rather go to press with your eyes on this than without.

One question is enough: which cover made you want to open the book?

The post Help Me Choose a Cover for The Work Beneath the Work appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

But you have something special: a room where it’s safe to be wrong. Before we get to that, consider…

AI is already doing what you charge for. Briefs. Headlines. Visual directions. Brand narratives. HTML Sites. Films. From functional to fabulous, and all of it fast. Clients are using it. Some are using it instead of you.

And the disruption won’t be slow. The deaths I’m about to describe came fast. Some came in an afternoon. One in a single meeting.

You’ve heard these stories before. But you need to take another look. Why? Because you’re in them.

Cautionary Tales are Predictive

In 1979, engineers at Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto invented the graphical user interface — windows, icons, a mouse. The technology that would make personal computing accessible to everyone on earth. They locked it in the lab. Management didn’t understand what they had.

Steve Jobs visited. He walked out knowing exactly what he’d seen. Six years later, the Macintosh changed the world. Xerox watched.

In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the world’s first digital camera. In-house. He brought it to management.

Their response: “That’s cute — but don’t tell anyone about it.”

Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

In 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. Days later a reporter asked Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer what he thought.

Ballmer laughed. Said the iPhone was too expensive, had no keyboard, wasn’t a good email machine. Smirked: “Apple is selling zero phones a year.”

He was the CEO of the most powerful software company in the world. Surrounded by smart people. Performing his certainty in public.

Microsoft’s mobile business never recovered.

In 2000, Netflix’s founders flew to Dallas and offered to sell their company to Blockbuster for fifty million dollars. Blockbuster CEO John Antioco called it a niche business. Called the whole idea dot-com hysteria.

The Netflix co-founder later recalled that Blockbuster executives laughed them out of the room.

Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Netflix is worth over two hundred billion dollars. One Blockbuster store remains.

In 2013, Nokia announced it was selling its mobile division to Microsoft. At the press conference, CEO Stephen Elop ended his remarks with this: “We didn’t do anything wrong. But somehow, we lost.”

He reportedly had tears in his eyes.

The Person Missing from the Room Where it Happened

Five stories. The same failure every time.

Xerox didn’t know what they had. Kodak knew and buried it. Ballmer laughed in public. Antioco laughed in private. Elop wept at the end.

Notice what’s missing from every one of those rooms: someone who felt safe enough to say the hard thing out loud.

The firms I watch struggle aren’t struggling because they lack talent. They’re making Ballmer’s argument — quietly, to themselves. They’re Antioco, in their certainty. They’re doing nothing wrong by yesterday’s standards while tomorrow arrives without them.

That is where you are. Right now.

Who Pushes Back?

Here is the one question that matters. Not the strategy question — the human one.

Do you have anyone around you who would tell you if you were wrong? Would they feel safe enough to say it?

The best creative firms have something no corporation can manufacture and no AI can replicate: a room where it’s safe to be wrong.

Where someone can put an unpopular idea on the table and not be dismissed. Where a junior person can say what she actually sees. Where failing at something new is the cost of figuring it out — not evidence that you don’t belong. Where working for the common good is the actual norm, not the poster on the wall.

The corporate world has been trying to build this room for decades. They put it on the all-hands agenda. And then the meeting ends and the same people dominate and the same ideas die and the same unspoken rules take back the floor.

Ballmer had a building full of smart people. What was missing was the room where someone could say, “Steve, I think you’re laughing at the wrong thing.” Antioco had a conference table full of executives. Not one said, “Maybe we should hear these people out.” Elop inherited a company where no one had been telling leadership what was actually happening for years.

They thought they were making the right decisions. Because no one was safe enough to say otherwise.

You have something none of them had. A human-scale organization where the culture is still yours to shape. Where people are close enough to each other that trust is still possible. Where someone can walk into a room, say the uncomfortable thing, and be heard.

The firms that survive will have used that — built a place where people felt safe enough to figure out the new tools together, try things that might fail, say what they actually see.

That room is yours to build. Build it now. The next Ballmer moment is already happening somewhere. Make sure it isn’t yours.

The post Advisory Notes: Wake Up, Creative Firm Leaders. appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

My client, Nadia, took a breath. “I could feel the pain in her voice when she said it.”

(Nadia is a pseudonym)

“It turns out she wasn’t the only one.”

In a sweeping layoff, scores marketing professionals lost their jobs — many of them had been clients of Nadia’s small creative firm.

“Will you lose the business?” Always my first thought.

“No, with the layoffs they’ll be sending more work out. We’ve seen this before.”

“But not at this scale, right?”

What happened next was even more revealing. One by one over the next few months, five of those let go landed positions at five new companies — and every one of them re-engaged with Nadia’s firm.

They had to fight to do it. Every major corporation runs a purchasing department. Those departments maintain lists of approved vendors and resist adding new suppliers. You’ve just been fired. You’re still feeling the pain and the vulnerability of being let go, and the last thing you want to do is ruffle the feathers of your new employer. There was real risk involved in hiring Nadia’s group.

They fought anyway.

Was it because Nadia’s work was better than every other creative service provider out there?

No. There are plenty of small creative firms doing excellent work.

What these clients were reaching for was something harder to name and harder to find — emotional safety. In their new and vulnerable positions, the last thing they needed was to work with a supplier they didn’t know or trust. An approved vendor on a list was a stranger. Nadia wasn’t.

They had to fight to hire Nadia.

There’s one more detail worth sitting with. All the players in this story — the clients who’d been laid off, the contacts inside Nadia’s firm they reached out to — were women. Whether that reflects something specific about how women navigate corporate vulnerability and the search for trust is a question worth asking.

Authentic Culture is a Business Asset

So, what had Nadia actually built?

It’s tempting to call it a particularly warm working relationship. It’s something more deliberate than that.

Inside Nadia’s firm, culture is not a poster on the wall. Self-improvement is a standing expectation. Staff read and take courses. Each year, Tommy holds the mic at the winter gathering and revels in awarding prizes for most books read, most courses completed, and top insights shared. It’s serious, but also full of laughter — one recent winner turned out to be a devoted reader of vintage Superman comics, which brought the house down.

Achievement here is something to celebrate, and the celebration is genuine.

The kindness is genuine too. Senior people model what generosity looks like in practice, every day. Client and staff birthdays are noted with cards, flowers, and often a meal or a coffee. A death in the family? Don’t be surprised to find a gift — a cheese board, something thoughtful — arriving at your door.

This isn’t policy. It’s culture, lived out in small acts. Consistently.

Young talent is invested in. Training, learning modules, ongoing mentoring — the assumption is that growth is continuous, not a one-time event. When the city began looking for groups to adopt local parks, Nadia’s firm took one on. They now arrange events for the neighboring businesses, condos, and apartment buildings. Progress on community projects gets reported in weekly meetings, alongside client work.

And then there’s the orientation toward clients themselves. Significant time goes into understanding not just what clients ask for, but what they actually need. Patience, listening, cooperation. An appreciation for the natural way projects evolve as they unfold, rather than forcing them to follow rigid scopes. Iteration is the norm. Co-creation is the practice. A make-it-happen culture has built skills in project management and live events that extend well beyond the writing, design, branding, and filmmaking at the firm’s core.

Here is what all of this adds up to: clients routinely park their funds with the firm in advance, completely eliminating cash flow anxiety.

Trust, backed up with money.

B2B is P2P

These days, inside giant corporations, individuals feel vulnerable. Often afraid they’ll lose their jobs. Not knowing what’s next it’s almost like being a stranger inside their own organizations — longing for a place where their creativity, intuition, and humanity is recognized and valued.

When they find that in a small creative firm, they don’t just hire it. They tether themselves to it for safety.

When those clients move on — to a new company, a new role, a new situation — they bring their lifeboat with them. The bond survives the corporation because it was never really about the corporation in the first place. It was person to person, all along.

What Nadia’s firm offers its clients isn’t design, or marketing, or even particularly excellent executional service, though it does do all of those things. What it offers is a psychological home — a place to stop being a title and start being a collaborator. A place outside the machine where someone remembers your birthday, celebrates your progress, shows up when something goes wrong, and never makes you feel like a line item.

Call it a Professional Sanctuary. Call it Institutional Immunity. Call it a Relational Lifeboat.

Whatever you call it, it is not an accident. It is the result of a deliberate culture, built over time, by people who understood that the most valuable thing a small firm can offer a corporate client isn’t a deliverable.

It’s a reason to stay.

The post Advisory Notes: Relational Lifeboat appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

I turned 80 this year.

That means I’ve watched enough transitions to know the pattern. Something new arrives. It promises everything. People divide into the frightened and the evangelists. And somewhere in the middle, quietly, the real question gets lost.

The real question right now isn’t about the tools.

It’s about us.

There are eight billion of us on this planet. For three hundred thousand years, we evolved in groups small enough to know every face at the fire. Anthropologists call it Dunbar’s number — roughly 150 people. Within that circle, we could track loyalty, reputation, threat, and care. We knew who was reliable and who wasn’t. We knew when someone had gone quiet and why it mattered.

Beyond that scale, our nervous systems strain.

We default to tribe. We hoard. We other. We form camps.

Our technology has become planetary. Our emotional wiring has not.

This gap — between Paleolithic emotion and god-like tools — may be the real test of this era. Not whether AI is safe. Not whether it takes our jobs.

Whether we are capable of the cooperation this moment actually requires.

I don’t know the answer to that at civilizational scale. No one does.

But I work at a different scale. I work with creative firms of twenty to eighty people. And what I’ve come to believe — after decades of this work — is that the small group is not a consolation prize. It is, in fact, the unit of human organization that evolution actually built us for.

Inside a firm that size, led well, the Dunbar conditions still hold. People know each other. Reputation means something. When someone goes quiet, someone else notices. Trust isn’t a value statement on a website. It’s a daily practice, visible and fragile and real.

These firms can adapt to AI faster than the giants. Not because they have better tools or more brains. Because they have something the giants have almost entirely lost — the ability to feel what’s happening inside the room and respond to it.

Entire professions will dissolve and recombine. Knowledge will be cheap. Capability will expand in ways I can’t see. Maybe you can’t either.

And the cooperation required to navigate this moment may be greater than any we’ve ever asked of ourselves.

I think it will be won or lost in rooms small enough that people can still read each other’s faces. In firms where a leader pays close enough attention to notice when someone has gone quiet. In groups that hold together not because they have to, but because they’ve built something worth protecting.

That advantage, measured against the scale of what’s coming.

Is everything.

The post Advisory Notes: The Gap appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

Just enough to require a light jacket and hat for the dash to the café.

The café where, with coffee, muffin and laptop, I’ll snuggle in to write, people watch and consider.

I sit down to type.

A guy sitting across is deep into his phone when he’s interrupted with: “Hey Dan, it’s been ages…”

Dan, annoyed for the briefest moment, extends his hand with, “How’s it going Tommy?”

Tommy pulls out a chair — I note he hasn’t asked — and responds with, “We hit the paper today. Great coverage, better than I’d hoped.”

“Oh yeah, is it the battery project? What’s the latest?”

Just then a woman balancing two coffees and a large bag enters with, “Tommy, Dan, I didn’t know you were working together…”

“We’re not.” This from Dan, as she puts the coffees down and says, “We’re going to need a bigger table. Karis is joining me.”

Now Dan has the I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening face, but he stands, scans the room, pulls his jacket off his chair back and moves to the long, empty communal table.

The group follows.

I type a bit, wanting to catch all of this. Not wanting to seem like I’m eavesdropping. Try to be small.

A second woman enters with pastries. Must be Karis.

“Oh, I didn’t know you’d invited a group, Sarah.”

“I didn’t.”

Dan is smiling as he stands and gives Karis a hug. Things must be looking up for Dan.

Karis, glancing around: “I’ll get some more pastries.”

Tommy: “Not for me. Did you see the piece on our deal this morning?”

Tommy looks like the youngest in the group, maybe late twenties. Clearly on fire with what’s happened and the publicity.

“Well,” Sarah says, leaning back into a long pause that gets them all to turn to her. “Well.”

I note that the space is filling, the clatter from the kitchen is louder, and hope with the noise I’ll still be able to follow.

Sarah’s “well” is followed by a description of a couple of short films created to promote natural products — one a fashion brand, the other a perfume. In both, the story and footage feel natural, soft like spring growth, and very human. She emphasizes the humanness repeatedly. Her hands gesturing, occasionally touching Tommy’s shoulder.

“It’s the human touch that brings it alive. That makes us feel the sensation of being.”

Pulling out her laptop: “Take a look.”

I’m desperate to see, but can’t. Don’t want to break the spell.

Sound must be low. They all lean into Sarah’s screen, watching silently.

“Tommy, when I saw your piece this morning, I called Karis to see if she was up for pitching you. And here you are. So — no rehearsal, we’re into it now. Karis? You up for this?”

“Let’s see what Tommy thinks.” Karis, the sensible one.

Tommy looks thoughtful.

Dan asks, “How did they get the actors to seem so natural?”

“They aren’t actors. They’re just teens — talented teens, but just kids in their element.”

Tommy asks, “What do pieces like this cost?”

They all look at Karis.

I checked the time. Gotta go.

I stood, put on my jacket, slipped my laptop into its bag, slung it over my shoulder and bussed my cup and plate, remembering all the business breaks I got from collaborations.

The post Advisory Notes: Collaboration appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

Happy to be off the street. It’s become a rough neighborhood again. Panhandled three times between parking and finding the entry.

Buzzed in, I noticed the fresh paint and new sisal runner as I climbed. Reaching the second floor, I entered to find high ceilings and what had to be a fabrication in progress — a tower of some kind, half-built, dominating the center of the room.

My client Jenn, a pseudonym, smiled when she saw me from across the floor and gestured toward it. “Ted, don’t you love it! We’re boxing it for a B2B event in Omaha. It’s gotta get off tomorrow. I’m glad you got to see it.”

There it is, I thought. B2B. And it looks like a hell of a good time.

The End of an Era

I sold my firm years ago. To a holding company, as it happens — the same kind of company that has since acquired Turner Duckworth, JKR, and hundreds of others. I understood the impulse completely. You build something, you pour decades into it, and one day someone offers to turn that into money you can actually hold. You take it. I took it.

What I didn’t fully get at the time was what gets lost in that transaction. Not immediately — the work continues, the people stay for a while, the name remains on the door. But holding companies are not built to sustain creative culture. They’re built to extract value from it. Those are different projects, and eventually the difference shows.

Turner Duckworth and JKR were trophy acquisitions — not distress sales. The founders were rewarded. The work had been extraordinary. But the era those firms represented, the era of the large prestigious B2C creative firm as the pinnacle of the industry, is closing. Not because the work got bad. Because the model got old.

The Seeds of  What’s Next

WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and the large independents like IDEO have shed hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past several years. That talent didn’t vanish. It dispersed.

Some of it started something new. Some of it landed in smaller firms. In the Seattle metro area, where I worked, the Seattle Creative Directory lists over 200 small creative firms. As far as I know it’s unique — I’m not aware of another major market that catalogs its creative community this specifically. But I think of it less as a local curiosity and more as a window into what is probably true in every significant city. The fallout from the holding company era is out there, building things, finding footing.

A few of those 200 firms will grow into the next generation of significant creative companies. Not most of them. But some.

Understand the Moment

The question is which ones — and why.

It won’t be the firms with the best work, necessarily. It will be the firms whose leaders understand what moment they’re in.

B2B creative spending is growing fast. Budgets are increasing. The work is becoming more sophisticated — experiential, brand-driven, content-heavy, increasingly complex. And the premium on genuine human creative judgment has never been higher, precisely because AI has commoditized the cheap end of the market. Clients who want real creative thinking know they can’t get it from a prompt.

But here’s the problem most creative firm leaders haven’t solved yet: their best people didn’t get into this industry dreaming about B2B. They came up worshipping the work Turner Duckworth did for Coca-Cola, and the best from IDEO. The visual systems JKR built for global consumer brands. That’s what drew them to the craft. Telling them the future is B2B can feel, if it’s not framed right, like a consolation prize.

The leaders who figure out how to reframe that story — who can make B2B feel like a creative frontier rather than a fallback — will keep their best people. And keeping your best people, in this AI era, is the only durable competitive advantage a creative firm has.

Creativity in Bloom

Back in Jenn’s studio, watching her team work around the tower, I noticed something. Nobody in that room looked like they were settling. They looked like people doing work that mattered, solving a problem with their hands and their eyes and their judgment, enjoying the comradery, the pleasure of doing something cool, together.

That’s the story worth telling your people.

The large firms consolidated. The holding companies extracted. Talent scattered, landed and started building again. And the work — the real work, the work that requires a human in the room with taste and nerve and the ability to read what a client actually needs — that work is growing.

The neighborhood outside may be rough. But upstairs, something is alive.

The post Advisory Notes: New Creative Frontier appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

I can’t do anything. I’ve done everything I can. To do anything else would weaken my hand.

Strategic calm required.

The Presentation

The presentation went well. Nods. Encouraging smiles. Our deck shared beyond the immediate group. We were the last to present — they allowed us that.

All good signs. And yet.

Experience suggests caution.

The waiting is the worst kind of not knowing. The dark place I go when uncertainty feels like vertigo. Freefall. Nerves on full alert. Action isn’t possible. There’s nothing to be done. Caught in the in-between time, nothing to fill an unfillable void.

A void that, if I let it, can completely own me.

Not Dead Yet

I’ve learned not to let it.

I find a diversion. I start a project that promises some completely unrelated future success. The project puts me in the flow — that private place of joy where thinking about what we do, how it helps others, how it advances the cause, makes time move again.

A couple of days pass. The anxiety still hangs at the edges. But mostly managed. There are stretches now where I’ve forgotten the waiting entirely.

Then the email arrives. Subject line oblique. I click.

We’re a finalist. Not dead yet.

Moving Targets

I book a flight and fire back a note asking who else is in contention. They’re not comfortable revealing that. But happy to talk.

So we talk. About fees. About goals that have shifted over the course of the process. (Iteration is always in play.)

About the decision makers — who, it turns out, aren’t aligned. Some are pushing hard for an almost fictional storytelling approach. Others want something grounded in technology.

The winner, my contact tells me, will offer a balanced approach that includes both.

I’ve heard this before. It’s a losing proposition. A brief written by a committee with conflicting views, asking for something that pleases everyone and therefore pleases no one.

You’ve heard this before. So have I.

Back to What Works

So I go back to my roots.

We design a survey. We go out and interview actual users — outside the biggest grocery stores in town. We listen. We write and illustrate a presentation around a single organizing concept: We Asked.

The result?

We won.

Always Somewhere to Go

I still get the vertigo. The freefall feeling when there’s nothing to be done but wait. I still feel that flutter — what a client once described perfectly as a bad butterfly in the chest — and I just turned eighty.

You don’t outgrow it. You just get better at knowing what to do with it.

The answer, every time, is the same: go make something. Not to distract yourself. Because making things is what you know how to do. Because the flow is real, and the waiting can’t follow you there. And because the work you do while you’re waiting for one thing is often what prepares you to win it.

Creative people have an advantage in the in-between time that most people don’t recognize: we always have somewhere to go.

The post Advisory Notes: On Waiting appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.

When you start a creative firm, the dream is usually simple.

You want to make great work.

Work with talented people.

Build something meaningful.

You imagine spending your days thinking about ideas, design, strategy.

What no one tells you is how much of your life will eventually be spent worrying.

About payroll.

About losing a client.

About whether the next project will come in time.

Somewhere along the way you realize something surprising:

You are no longer just the creative person you once were.

You are the person responsible for everyone else.

For their jobs.

Their families.

Their futures.

That responsibility can feel heavy.

And sometimes, incredibly lonely.

Many founders quietly carry the feeling that they have drifted away from the very work that once excited them.

The creative director becomes the manager.

The designer becomes the negotiator.

The strategist becomes the person solving everyone’s problems.

And occasionally they wonder:

Is this what I wanted?

Running a creative company can be one of the most rewarding experiences imaginable.

But it can also change you in ways you never expected.

If you’ve run a creative firm, you probably remember the moment you realized that.

What was it for you?

The post Turning Point: Every Founder Eventually Asks the Same Question appeared first on Ted Leonhardt.