Ep 149 | How to get creative without going crazy with Justin Bajan

Your agency doesn’t have to be insane to produce great work.

We’ve romanticized chaos in this business for years.

🙀 The weekly (daily?) fire drill🙀 The wall-to-wall meetings🙀 The indecisiveness masquerading as niceness

Justin Bajan and his partner Dustin Artz wanted something different. After years riding the big-agency roller coaster, they created Familiar Creatures with an explicit goal to prioritize stability.

Okay, maybe they were a little insane to think they could pull that off.

But here they are 8 years later inventing stuff like Protein Vapes for Crunch Fitness—a completely fictional product delivering 35 grams of protein per puff. All while keeping the culture 93.7% chaos-free.

Steadiness hasn’t made the agency less creative. It’s helped create the conditions for creativity:😺 People feel safe enough to experiment😺 Curious enough to follow strange ideas😺 Grounded enough not to chase every new trend

In this episode, Justin and I talk about how to create enough stability for people to do brave work, how to protect your agency’s culture from bad hires, bad clients and bad decisions—and how to remain curious enough to keep stability from turning into complacency.

As Justin says, mystery is where the juice is. (Vape juice?)

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Welcome to the DesuckifyWork® podcast. The show where we cut through the BS and find ways to make work less chaotic, more human and less ridiculous. All of which makes your business more profitable, by the way.

(If you enjoy this one, please like, share, rate, review or subscribe to the podcast.)

Let the desuckifying begin.

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Follow Justin on LinkedIn and visit familiarcreatures.com to see what he and the team are creating.

If your agency would like to try this whole stability and creativity thing, let’s talk. Schedule a free half-hour Chaos to Clarity session and we’ll identify one thing that could make your agency 2% less crazy—without making the work any percent more blah.

Type “meow” in the calendar invite and I’ll also send you a free DesuckifyWork® t-shirt.

Bye, everyone!

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Bonus question from Justin:Why did you choose this business? And what’s keeping you in it?