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At Moxie Sozo, we spend a lot of time asking our clients the big questions: What do you stand for? What are you becoming? What isn’t working anymore? What do consumers need from you now? What will they need in three years? What would you do differently if you weren’t constrained by “how you’ve always done it?”
They’re good questions. And, it turns out, they’re a lot harder when you’re the one answering them about your own agency.
Like most leaders, our days are packed with the work of running a business: leading clients and teams, pushing strategy and creative forward, developing our people, and solving whatever new puzzle each day presents. It’s important work.
They’re good questions. And, it turns out, they’re a lot harder when you’re the one answering them about your own agency.
Like most leaders, our days are packed with the work of running a business: leading clients and teams, pushing strategy and creative forward, developing our people, and solving whatever new puzzle each day presents. It’s important work.
But when you spend all your time building the thing, it can be surprisingly difficult to step outside of it and ask what else the thing can become.
It felt especially important for us this year. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to help brands thrive in constant change. We’ve challenged our clients to get clearer about what should remain constant and more intentional about what needs to evolve. And somewhere along the way, we realized we needed to turn that same thinking inward.Thoughtful reflection and conversation require something that is sometimes our most precious resource: actual time and space. So last month, our leadership team spent three days at a beachside offsite doing exactly that.
It’s hard to have a bad day in Malibu. The sun was out, the beach was spectacular, and we found ourselves tucked in a canyon estate surrounded by beauty. We weren’t there for a vacation, but working with the right people to think about a future you’re genuinely excited about can feel a little like a spa day for the intellect.
We started by looking backward.
That’s not something that comes naturally in a business built around what’s next. In the crush of the everyday, it’s easy to finish one climb and immediately start looking for the next mountain. But before we could talk seriously about where Moxie was going, we needed to understand what had changed. And the answer was…a lot!
Over the past year, our leadership team itself has evolved: two new VP roles, a shifted VP role, and a new CEO role. This was our first year working together specifically as a team of four, but we could see that the change went beyond the shiny titles. This group had already begun changing the business: how we work together, how we lead our teams, how we partner with clients, and how we think about the value that Moxie creates.
Most importantly, we’ve started pushing ourselves beyond the idea of Moxie Sozo as simply a best-in-class creative studio. So, we asked the hard questions. How should our teams evolve? How can we become better partners to our clients? What should we protect as Moxie changes…and what are we ready to rethink? We came away with a game plan that stretches well beyond the next year, but the more immediate lesson was about what it takes to have those conversations in the first place.
If space made the reflection possible, the people made it meaningful. It’s hard to overstate the value of surrounding yourself with people who care enough about each other and what you’re building together to tell the truth. People who can challenge an idea without making it personal, who have opinions and are willing to change them. Who can ponder what could be, follow a conversation down the wrong path, and occasionally discover that the wrong path was exactly what you needed to get somewhere useful. It helps (apparently) if those people are also willing to get in a hot tub, put on a face mask, share a bottle of wine (or five), and literally walk down the road marked “road closed” before ending up at the right one.
That’s not something that comes naturally in a business built around what’s next. In the crush of the everyday, it’s easy to finish one climb and immediately start looking for the next mountain. But before we could talk seriously about where Moxie was going, we needed to understand what had changed. And the answer was…a lot!
Over the past year, our leadership team itself has evolved: two new VP roles, a shifted VP role, and a new CEO role. This was our first year working together specifically as a team of four, but we could see that the change went beyond the shiny titles. This group had already begun changing the business: how we work together, how we lead our teams, how we partner with clients, and how we think about the value that Moxie creates.Most importantly, we’ve started pushing ourselves beyond the idea of Moxie Sozo as simply a best-in-class creative studio. So, we asked the hard questions. How should our teams evolve? How can we become better partners to our clients? What should we protect as Moxie changes…and what are we ready to rethink? We came away with a game plan that stretches well beyond the next year, but the more immediate lesson was about what it takes to have those conversations in the first place. If space made the reflection possible, the people made it meaningful. It’s hard to overstate the value of surrounding yourself with people who care enough about each other and what you’re building together to tell the truth. People who can challenge an idea without making it personal, who have opinions and are willing to change them. Who can ponder what could be, follow a conversation down the wrong path, and occasionally discover that the wrong path was exactly what you needed to get somewhere useful. It helps (apparently) if those people are also willing to get in a hot tub, put on a face mask, share a bottle of wine (or five), and literally walk down the road marked “road closed” before ending up at the right one.
As we talked about the Moxie we want to build, we kept coming back to the qualities of the people we want to build it with: Curiosity. Drive. Opinions. The confidence to speak up and the openness to be changed by someone else’s thinking. They’re the qualities we’re looking for next, and they’re the qualities we want to keep nurturing in the team we have today.In summary, we came, we saw, we strategized. We drank a lot of wine. And now here comes the fun part: making it happen.
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