Our WHY
What’s changed?
We’ve been thinking about this question quite a bit recently while telling the world about Freestyle.
No one has actually asked us directly. But it sits quietly behind almost every conversation we have about Freestyle. Sometimes we say it out loud. More often, it's just there in the background influencing the choices we make.
Why are we so interested in purpose? Why do we keep talking about the importance of relationships? Why have we become more selective about the kind of work we'd like to do?
The funny thing is...we’re not sure anything has actually changed. Yet everything has.
We have spent years in events. Between us we've worked with businesses of every shape and size. We've delivered events all over the globe, for all sorts of reasons. And looking back, we wouldn't swap any of it because every project, every client and every conversation has shaped who we are now.
Maybe that's entirely the point. Perhaps you get to a stage in life where you're not chasing the next job just because you think you should. You stop measuring success by how busy the diary is, and start paying a bit more attention to how the work actually makes you feel.
We've realised that the projects we remember aren't necessarily the biggest ones. They're the ones where we came home talking about the people. The stories. The client who genuinely cared. The team that wanted to leave something better than they found it. The conversation that had nothing to do with the event itself and everything to do with why the event mattered in the first place.
Maybe that's why purpose has become so important to us. Because when you spend a huge part of your life working, when it starts consuming your headspace and takes you away from home and your own tribe for weeks at a time, you start wanting that time to mean something.
We're probably more ambitious than we used to be, we're just ambitious about different things now. We're a little braver than we were. A little steadier. A little less willing to compromise because we're worried about where the next piece of work comes from.
Instead, we're trying to trust that if we continue to build the kind of business that genuinely reflects who we are, the right people will find us. Or maybe... we'll find them.
There's a sentence we wrote down recently that keeps coming back to us:
The work we choose becomes part of the mark we leave behind.
We don't know if that rings true for everyone but we know it feels true for us.
We want business to feel personal. We want our work to matter. We want the time we spend with our clients to count. Not because every project has to change the world, but because if we're going to spend our lives building something, we'd quite like to look back one day and feel proud of the people we built it with.
Maybe that's all this really is;
A desire to make business feel a little more personal.
To spend our time with people we'd happily have around our own kitchen table.
To build work we're proud of, with people we're proud to know.
This is our WHY.