Introducing The Mullet Career Strategy™ — Creativity & Business

6 min readSep 8, 2022

Career announcement! After some reflection, I’d like to announce that I’m starting a new position as a Human Mullet™.

Allow me to explain…

This past spring, I left Pacific Content, the company I co-founded eight years ago. I loved the team, I loved our partners, and I loved the amazing collaborative, creative work. However, our weird little company had grown a lot — we were about 60 people when I left — and I was not doing the work I enjoyed or that played to my strengths anymore. There are many talented people who would be better at enabling a distributed team to work effectively inside a huge telecom company, and I needed a change.

However, I didn’t know what kind of change I wanted to make. I needed a break to recharge and reflect on eight years of entrepreneurship in the rapidly evolving podcasting industry and the continually fascinating branded content/brand storytelling industry.

So my first step was to take a “Summer Sabbatical.” I took the summer off. I haven’t had this kind of time off in 28 years (!), so it was a real treat to decompress and have some empty space to do nothing.

The most common question I have had from friends and ex-colleagues over the summer has been, “what are you going to do next?” For quite a while, the answer was “I don’t know.” Today, however, after careful consideration, I can bravely and proudly announce that I embracing an exciting new concept — The Mullet Career Strategy™.

Business Up Front

During my time off, I have had two distinct impulses. The first big impulse has been to more deeply explore the relationship and balance between creativity and business. It is an age-old struggle, most often framed as art vs commerce, or in the media, as the separation of church and state (programming/editorial vs sales/revenue).

I’ve had a significant number of calls and meetings since I left Pacific Content where the recurring theme has been the need to solve problems on the business side of creativity, or alternately, the creative side of business.

I realized that I have two different perspectives on “the creativity business.” The first is from starting, building, and selling a creative services company. We had to figure out a business model to be able to utilize our creative talents. We had to figure out how to grow a creative business and keep it profitable. We had to figure out how to build a culture where top talent would flourish and creatives could do their best work. We had to know what to track and what not to track. We had to explore what values to use for decision-making. In short, we developed a lot of expertise in running a successful business with creativity at the core of the offering.

The other side of “the creativity business” came from working with partners — usually the marketing teams at large brands like Slack, Shopify, Dell Techologies, Ford Motor Company, Charles Schwab, Atlassian, and many others. Our work was about the value that creativity brings to large businesses. We helped a lot of teams learn to think and act more like media companies — to create value for intended audiences, to generously offer a gift in service of others, and to learn to tell stories with emotional impact. We collaborated deeply as single creative teams built with people across multiple companies. And it worked really, really well.

I loved all these experiences, whether it was running a creativity business or helping brands instil more creativity into their business, there is a delicate balance between creativity and business. When they are in balance, great results can be achieved. And when they are out of balance, problems arise more and more often.

In a creative business, if the focus is all on creativity and not enough on the business (a common problem), the business obviously suffers. And in a marketing business, if the sole focus is on your own products and services instead of using creativity and empathy to earn the attention of your potential customers, you get ignored.

Balancing creativity and business is essential. My fascination with finding this balance has led to the formation of my next business.

The Creativity Business is a strategy firm designed to help creatives build better businesses and also to help all types of businesses infuse creativity into their marketing, communications and internal cultures. I’ve just launched an email newsletter for those who are also interested in exploring this space — I hope you sign up and find it valuable! I’m really excited about this new venture, and I’m looking forward to working with a real variety of partners to solve challenges at the intersection of Creativity and Business.

But this is only HALF of my new Mullet Career Strategy™!

Party In The Back

I also realized that I have another unfilled bucket in need of attention — my own creativity. With time off to think and reflect about what brings me joy, where I enter a flow state, and where my most enjoyable collaborations take place, it has been making fun stuff with other people. It has been creating for the sake of creating. I have had so many great conversations about this type of creative project with my friend and ex-colleague at Pacific Content, Geoff Siskind, that we mutually decided to start a public creativity project together. It’s not a business, but instead a way to explore creativity for its own sake. And so, we are launching The Creativity Guild and invite you to join us on the journey.

Behold The Mullet Career Strategy™!

As I step back and look at what I’ve decided to do, it seems to me that I have figured out a path to keep Creativity and Business in balance for myself, as well. The Creativity Guild project with Geoff is about celebrating and exploring creativity, and The Creativity Business is about the business of creativity in all its forms. I feel like I have two great projects for left and right brain thinking and I’m equally excited about each of them.

I know the most elegant way of thinking about these two projects is a balance of Creativity and Business — perhaps as a Venn diagram, a 2x2 graph, a balanced scale, or something like that.