A few weeks ago, we wrote about the 1-year anniversary of Bonfire, which, in case you’ve come into our little community from some unrelated corridor of the internet, is the creative brand consultancy behind this very newsletter. (And if so, hi! Here’s what we do.)

In that post, we touched on the fact that a major motivator to strike out on our own for both Kevan and me was that we get to do things our own way. We get to be creative—or at least, be intentional—about how we structure Bonfire, what kind of work we do, and how we work together.

It’s super easy to get caught up in the idea that there are playbooks for how to do things the “right” way, and the business world—with its competitive nature, its inherent complexity, and its devotees to econ, stats, and finance—is especially susceptible to that line of thinking. Our culture reveres people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Gary Vaynerchuk because they 1) are successful in a very visible, quantifiable way and 2) either dispense formulaic wisdom on how to replicate that success or are the subjects of others’ rapturizing theories and analyses on how they “made it.” We examine their routines, we ape their schedules and personal habits, and we build our companies and workflows and strategies based on what worked for them. 

But…none of us…are…them? 

Our companies aren’t their companies. Our audiences aren’t their audiences. Our market conditions aren’t their market conditions. Sure, we may have some overlap with these “gurus.” (Maybe both Warren and I prefer iced coffee year-round? Twinsies!) Those overlaps certainly increase when you’re studying and emulating business builders in the same industry or with the same model as you. And I can also buy that there are some universal, common-sense practices to run neither yourself nor your company into the ground. 

But our strengths, skills, weaknesses, interests, politics, hopes, fears, and resources are entirely individual and entirely, for better and for worse, our own. Kevan talks about this with our clients from a competitive benchmarking standpoint when it comes to marketing strategies and big brand initiatives; everybody wants to benchmark against what [Leading Cool Company] did, but unless you are also benchmarking their values and their org structure and their budgets and whether or not they launched pre- or post-pandemic, pre- or post-AI bubble, in an election year or not…you’re setting yourself up to be the Wish version of the original.

It’s just simply untrue that if Kevan and I want to learn how to make Bonfire the most successful it can possibly be, we should go devour Warren Buffet’s 7 Habits for Success or go watch GaryVee’s talks at various Success Unleashed conferences. (But your mileage may vary, I suppose!)

This is not some anti-intellectualist rant about how nobody is actually an expert in anything so just do things your own way all the time, take that horse medication someone is hawking on TikTok, lean into those 9/11 conspiracy theories (#themeltingtemperatureofsteel)—NO! Experts are real, and you should hire and/or consult them and/or become them in order to do specific things you don’t know how to do. All I’m saying is that it helps to have your own personal definition of success and then to keep vigilant about what exactly it is you’re trying to learn from them—just HoW tO bE sUcCeSsFuL???—and whether or not you and that person actually share similar characteristics, resources, and definitions of success and reality.

Because we over here at Bonfire seem to have a rather quirky definition of success, we’ve chucked the idea that there’s any kind of playbook out there for us. Instead, here are three ways we’ve been creative about how we’re building this-here airplane as we fly it, with the hopes it might encourage you to put down the playbook—or just release the anxiety that a playbook exists and everyone has it but you. (It does not; they do not.)

1. Dessert first: We start with pie in the sky 

In almost all aspects of how we’ve built and run Bonfire, we start from a place of imagination and then back into the logistics. We give ourselves permission to approach every decision with a sense of play and the freedom to ask “What if…?” We literally talk about “dream casting” our company like it’s a blockbuster movie or a fantasy sports league. We begin discussions by saying things like, “Can I tell you what my infinite budget, ideal version of this is?” And then we listen to each other. 

We don’t usually get to do the 100% no-holds-barred dream version of something because there are still constraints on time and money and energy and, like, physics. But when we start from a place of “dream first, ask questions later,” we find we end up a lot closer to our dreams. Makes sense, right? Figuring out the ideal state first gives us something clear to work towards and then lets us get scrappy and creative with the how. 

Being super pragmatic at absolutely every turn might seem like the smart or safe way to go about building your roadmap, but we’re here to tell you that there’s room to daydream. 

2.  We don’t care what Bonfire becomes

Ok, this is definitely a flippant way to put this. Of course we care if Bonfire is one day synonymous with blood diamonds or strip mining or sweatshops. A better way to say this: We are not indifferent to what Bonfire does, but we hold very loosely any ideas about what it must be in order to be successful, because we’ve divorced our definition of success from our business activities.    

Today, we are a profitable brand consultancy. Up next, we’ll be launching an online community for creative marketers with digital courses and events (more on that soon!). In the future, we plan to have in-person experiences like workshops and creative retreats in the French countryside, which will support an artist residency program. Kevan has a clever software dream that maybe he’ll tell you about someday. We could see ourselves writing books or really leaning into content creation around the in-person experiences in France. Maybe we’ll sell the consultancy piece or wind it down after a few more years. Maybe the online community won’t work out, but the courses end up really popular so we’ll double down on that aspect. In other words: WHO KNOWS! 

We don’t have a 300-person-agency-or-bust mentality. We don’t need to spin up software and then sell it off for 8 figures at the first chance we get. The only thing we really, seriously, for sure care about doing—our definition of success—is building spaces that nurture a creative community. And we can do that in about a bazillion different ways. That means we get to experiment, invest in what works, and jettison the rest without feeling like we’ve failed. 

I said in a LinkedIn post a little while ago that in order to maintain your creative motivation, you have to be outcome agnostic but process proud. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get beaten down by delays and hurdles, and your creative life will wither. In our processes as Bonfire—how we build and conduct our business, foster relationships, and take care of ourselves, our families, and our friends—we can always be nurturing creativity. We have almost total control of the processes, and if we’re proud of those, then the outcomes can take a hike. 

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that having one crystal clear product or service is the best way to focus and succeed. But I dunno, sounds kinda boring…

3. We strive to give away our toys

In our pie-in-the-sky version of Bonfire, Kevan and I as cofounders would be establishing new lines of business—like consultancy, online community, in-person experiences, etc.—and then, when they’re doing well…we’d give them away. 

We imagine either literally giving or selling parts of the business to others to run, grow, and evolve over time, or just thinking up unconventional compensation strategies to get our future employees incentivized to “own” these lines of business for themselves. Maybe that’s a profit sharing model, maybe that’s a commission structure for roles you wouldn’t expect to earn commission, maybe it’s letting people “buy into” partial ownership with their labor. We’ll see! But it all boils down to: Why should we have all the fun—or all the responsibilities? Fun gets amplified when shared, and responsibilities get easier. 

We sometimes talk about the idea of not wanting to work for Bonfire, but rather on Bonfire. Like viewing the business as a whole as our ultimate product vs. executing what the business actually produces for our clients. This isn’t something we can do today or tomorrow or even next year, but keeping this possible future in mind is motivating and freeing. If I don’t have to imagine myself literally doing client work for the entirety of my career, what else might we build?

It seems like the more common model, the celebrated model, is for founders to sit on top of the pyramid and hang on to as much managerial control (and money) as possible. But that sounds super exhausting! And what’s the point of making all the money you possibly can when you don’t actually have the time or mental space to enjoy it? 

Over to you

We’ve given you a little peek into our business brains with this post, and we’d like to hear what resonates with you…or doesn’t! If you’re also an entrepreneur or thinking about becoming one, what are the wildest, most idealistic fantasies you have about how you’d do things differently than expected? Let us know in the comments or by replying to this newsletter.