The Benefits of Encouraging Passion-Led Practice In Your Business

...not as a side hustle. Because they're creatively hungry and they just bloody love it. It matters more than agency and business leaders realise.

When someone's out there directing shorts, shooting docs, figuring out how to make something compelling with no budget and no client breathing down their neck, they come back to brand work sharper. Their instincts haven't gone soft. They've been pouring love and resourcefulness into a different set of boundaries and a different set of problems.

There's a real difference between someone who can execute a brief and someone who has an actual point of view. You feel it immediately. One delivers. The other elevates. That difference comes from passion-led practice and it filters through any creative services you offer as an agency or output as an organisation.

Brand and marketing teams can smell a production-line agency a mile off. But when they meet people who stretch and challenge themselves outside of work, fuelled purely by love for the craft, they want in.

Makers who've been through the full, bloody experience of developing their own projects, failing, iterating, going again, are infinitely better at handling the mess of commercial production. They get it. They solve problems. They're resilient. They're great communicators, because they've had to be.

And there is a direct marketing benefit to your company as well! If you have talented, passionate creative team members making films and promoting them, you also get to shout about their achievements. Rachel, Eldge, Gianni, Jordan and Myles have all had multiple films officially selected and nominated for BIFA qualifying festivals across the UK, and many more festivals globally. 

Supporting and encouraging your team means you can to enjoy and benefit from their passion and success too.

So here's the question worth asking: do your people care about the craft when nobody's paying them to? If they do, that energy is in everything they touch.

That's the Be The Fox. People make things because they can't not. Take a look at some stills from our teams recent indie film work below and continue reading for 6 ways you can make passion-led practice a core part of your agency or organisations success...

So how do you build that into your own team?

6 things that actually move the needle:

1. Hire for the side project, not just the showreel. Ask what people make when nobody's briefed them. That answer tells you more than a portfolio review ever will.

2. Give people room, not just time off. A "no meetings Friday" policy means nothing if the workload doesn't shrink to match. Protect the space properly.

3. Put budget behind it. A small personal projects fund, even a modest one, signals you mean it. Cash speaks louder than a re-post.

4. Let the work back in the building. Screen people's passion projects internally. Talk about them in reviews. Don't treat them as separate from "real" work, they're the R&D. We often go down to a pub with huge screens and enjoy some team time together watching each others work. Like a grown-up show-and-tell!

5. Promote the makers, not just the managers. Shout about the creative work your team is involved in outside of client projects. Be proud of them, show them off. Make them part of your brand. Faces people recognise and connect to that draw clients to your brand.

6. Model it from the top. If leadership's own creative instincts are visibly alive, that gives everyone else permission to keep theirs alive too. Be brave. Crave out precious time to make and you'll find it reminds you of the love of creating too.

The Film School For Brand Leaders

Candid conversations between the people who make ads, brand content and film.

In Brand Film School we demystify the tasks, processes, and challenges to make sure marketers, comms leads and brand managers go into creative projects fully briefed.

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