I love the team we've pulled (and are pulling) together at Stokefire. Seriously.  I've found some of the very best talent around. A struggle we've had, however, is that what we do behind closed doors just doesn't fit with what other firms in branding and advertising do. As such, when someone experienced comes in our door they must first spend weeks unlearning a whole lot of stuff that makes them valuable to firms other than ours.

Perhaps the hardest thing for new talent to digest is that experience is never the answer to any problem. Experience might give you perspective on how we might solve an issue, but "I've always done it this way" or "that's how everyone does it" are non-starters here. It's borderline comical to see the response when anyone - including me - tries to play the experience card. You get a room full of crossed arms and shaking heads surrounding the one attempting to rest on a pile of laurels. 

And that's how it should be.

I truly hope that Stokefire never becomes a place where someone from another agency or consultancy can drop what they're doing and just plug in at Stokefire and get to work. If that happens then we've failed. We'd be just another agency in a long line of agencies that are indistinguishable. Here? I want to see the very best talent struggling to change their perspective and contribute. I want them feeling like they just might not be able to breathe the air. I could pay any of a few thousand designers that can do "beautiful" in their sleep to come on and build stunning logos. But I don't care about beautiful. I don't even immediately care if the client is going to like it - because that's not why clients hire us. We get hired because the stuff we deliver works. It's the times where we pursue beauty (or humor, or shock, or sparkle) over effectiveness that the $(*% hits the fan.

Sound arrogant? Maybe naive? That's part of the reason I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track. When people hear what we're up to they tell us that it will never work. That we just can't change the rules like that. That there's no reason to do anything other than straight-up agency work. Or even that there's no reason to get into the business at all and that we could find a company doing what we do elsewhere...

I know I should be knocking on wood when I say this, but we've never had a single creative team-member ask to leave our firm. In five-plus years. Every year our work gets better, client expectations get higher, our staff more talented...

And every year we move farther away from a plug-and-play agency where talent can come and go with ease.

I'm pretty sure every employee at Stokefire wouldn't have it any other way.  Here's to hoping I don't find out via a mass exodus of talent.