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For those of you who have been a part of our Fearless Foundry newsletter and journey for a while, you know that just about a year ago, I made a massive decision to reorganize our operating model.
Rather than continuing to employ a group of people regardless of how many projects or clients we had on any given month, we restructured ourselves into a Creative Collective, wherein we tailor our team to the unique needs of each client and offer a core set of creatives the ability to make a substantial part of their income from Fearless Foundry, while also being able to have the benefits of being the owner of their own LLC.
While some of you might just consider this a contracting model, what I have come to find (and have seen unfold over the last year) is that the collective model we are building is not only uniquely powerful and profitable, but it is also growing in popularity.
Since we launched this idea to the market on our own behalf, it's been interesting to watch how many different founders have approached me in conversation to say: “I'm shifting to a collective” or “I'm considering starting a collective.”
It has also been amazing to talk to these folks and compare notes about the pros and cons and what this model has brought forth for their teams.
For me, the first thing that it has brought forth is a greater level of stakeholder accountability from everyone on our team in terms of the clients and projects we serve. In our old operating model, team members still made money and benefited from being a part of Fearless Foundry, regardless of how much they actually contributed to an individual client, or regardless of whether or not that client stayed on with the business.
For example, under the traditional employee model, if a team member failed to complete a key element of their scope in a way that the client was happy with, and then the client chose to leave us as a result, that team member typically still had the same salary and got to stay on our staff, even if we were losing revenue as the result of their misstep. Of course, we would have a corrective conversation with the employee. Still, fundamentally, if an error isn’t big enough to cause a termination, there isn’t much that can be done to help that person truly understand the impact of their lack of follow-through.
This situation is no longer the case because under our new model, team members are compensated based on a percentage of the revenue generated from the clients they serve, and, in turn, our team is then more accountable than ever for the quality of the work they do, and, quite frankly, our client service has grown in terms of value and overall quality.
As the founder who is responsible for tracking our revenue and expenses, I have a lot more peace of mind with the collective model, because our team now operates in a world where there's a logical consequence to the outcome of one's work product, and the way that people behave has naturally evolved based on this clear connection between client happiness and their paycheck. In good times, the model means that the happier our clients are, and the more success we have with them, the more clients keep coming back and spending more money with our business! And as a result, we have more money to pay our team. And if the inverse is true and the client is unhappy, the team feels the consequences, as opposed to just me as the business owner shouldering that negative outcome.
The second thing that came to light in our collective model is the fact that it brings higher caliber creatives to the table. In our old operating model, we had a lot of junior staff because seasoned professionals simply didn’t want to give up their passion projects and autonomy to work full-time for someone else. While I loved mentoring younger creatives, we were often simply a stepping stone for them, and we experienced a lot of turnover as people either chose to strike out on their own or sought out a different opportunity to continue growing outside of our organization. Even the junior staff tended to also be multi-passionate, and often had side projects. And yet, in our old operating model, I was paying people full-time wages plus benefits, while typically not actually getting their full-time abilities and attention.
Employees were frequently burning out because they were not fully capable of managing a full-time role plus side work. They struggled to navigate these capacity limitations, which impacted their work performance and required others to step in and handle their tasks when they weren’t able to, yet I was still expected to pay them as if they were showing up at full capacity.
With the shift to our operating model, we now only employ senior strategist-level people, with the exception of a few amazing interns we have on staff. The result has meant not only a higher caliber of creative work but also better communication and collaboration. It has increased our ability to work asynchronously, which inevitably has led to a lot more freedom and flexibility for our staff because we have more people on the team who are experienced and responsible for managing projects with multiple stakeholders, regardless of time zone or whether or not they're “clocked in” at any given time. We also have been able as a team to do more with fewer people, because we are all operating at a higher caliber of collaboration.
As many of you know, one of the core endeavors that unfolded from the change in our operating model was a rollout of a rebrand, and what that really led to inside of our business was this magical moment where it felt like the outsides now finally match who we have become on the inside of our business, and the further solidification of key things like our mission, vision, values, and ideal clients.
What has been so beautiful about that process is to see the way that our collective team has not only contributed to the development of that rebrand, but now really sees it as central to who they are and why they work here at Fearless. It is clear that the collective model has created more stakeholdership and leadership within our team, because we developed a brand that they all chose to be a part of. Even though each of these collective team members owns their own businesses, the majority of them make 80 to 90% of their net revenue from our model. As a result, they also see themselves as essential to aligning the right strategies from a marketing and business development perspective, to ensure that we continue to grow our client base here at Fearless.
Previously, although we had team members who were responsible for creating and contributing to our marketing content, there was a lack of true ownership and buy-in on the bigger picture of who we were as a brand or a business, and I would struggle to even get employees to share about the work we were doing on social media. Now our collective is eager to be part of our marketing efforts, because they know that the more they help grow Fearless, the more they attract amazing projects to work on and grow the earnings they take home as a result. The downstream effect of that is a desire to be active and participatory in the strategies and content we're creating in order to promote ourselves as a brand.
Now, these are all very tactical things that have come out of the development of a collective. But the thing that I am most proud of is something that is a lot more intangible, and that is the evolution of our culture.
Inevitably, when you bring together a group of people around shared values and a mission and vision for a company, you start to have the foundations necessary to build a really powerful culture. While I think that we're early on in the next iteration of what our team looks like and how we operate, we have found an incredible stride in recent weeks, as we titrate some of our new operating procedures and the ways that we speak and share about ourselves as a brand that. To me these are small changes that are indicative of the formation of something much bigger that is beginning — the unfolding of a much stronger culture of accountability and quality that was hard to cultivate before this collective model.
Maybe it's something about having more senior talent in the room. Maybe it's something about having a shared mindset about the ways in which we want to work. Or maybe it has to do with us all buying into the brand we're becoming. Either way, core to the new collective is the fact that we are all committed to building a culture that puts collaboration, flexibility, and equity at the forefront, and that, more than anything, is what I am proud of.
I know that I'm not alone in exploring alternative operating models, and I'm very curious to hear from our community.
What are the ways in which you are working that are working well for you?
I left the corporate environment almost six years ago, and I did so because I didn't feel like there was a place where I could fully be myself and do the work that I wanted to do in a traditional working environment.
I also strongly believe that for most women and marginalized people, the traditional ways of working were not built by or for us, and it's up to us to forge new pathways and ways of working that actually make sense for the lives we live and the ways we want to show up in the working world. If you have a new or non-traditional way of working that you're exploring, I would love for you to share back with me so I can highlight the things our community is doing to reinvent work in a way that's more equitable to all.
I can't wait to hear more from our community.
- Madeline
