Part 5 of “The Long Way to RPPL: What Positive Culture Actually Looks Like” — the final post in a series on two decades in the creative industry, and what they taught me about building a company on purpose.
If you’ve read the rest of this series, you already know the throughline: two decades of studios and agencies, some that got culture right and some that didn’t, each one teaching me something I couldn’t have learned any other way. RPPL Studio is where all of it landed. Not as a mission statement we workshopped in a conference room—it was workshopped remotely—, but as an actual operating principle we test against every client, every project, and every person we bring on.
It comes down to three things, the same three things I’ve been circling since Post 1: treat everyone as an equal team member, listen to their ideas regardless of where they sit, and never take advantage of the trust someone places in you when they choose to work with you.
That sounds simple. In practice, it shows up in small, specific ways almost every week. It shows up when a designer two weeks into a project pushes back on a creative direction I’m attached to, and the answer is to actually consider it rather than pull rank. It shows up in how we scope and price work — clearly, honestly, without padding or games, because the people we work with deserve to know exactly what they’re paying for and why. It shows up in how we built the team itself: not by hiring the cheapest available talent, but by bringing in people we already trusted, people who’d proven they do excellent work and deserved to do it somewhere that valued them properly.
It also shows up in how we work with clients. Every one of us at RPPL came up through agencies where the client relationship could tip into something transactional — where the goal quietly becomes managing the client rather than serving them well. We do the opposite on purpose. We tell clients the truth about their brand, their product, their idea, even when it’s not what they came in expecting to hear, because that’s the same principle I learned interfacing with CEOs at The Seventh Art all those years ago: real trust isn’t built by agreement, it’s built by honesty.
None of this makes us unique in some grand sense. Plenty of studios say similar things. What I’d point to instead is the fact that we didn’t arrive at these principles as branding. We arrived at them the long way — through the specific rooms I’ve walked through in this series, the good ones and the difficult ones, the mentors who modeled something better and the moments where nobody did. Every one of those experiences got folded into how we actually run this business day to day.
That’s ultimately why we’re so excited about the work in front of us. Not because the client roster is interesting, or the brands are ambitious, or the design challenges are fun — though all of that’s true too. We’re excited because we get to do this work the way we always believed it should be done, with people we respect, for clients who deserve honesty, inside a culture we built specifically because we know exactly what the alternative costs.
If there’s one thing I’d want a reader to take from this whole series, it’s this: positive culture isn’t a perk, and it isn’t a values page. It’s a series of decisions, made over and over, about how you treat the people in front of you — the junior designer with a better idea, the CEO who needs to hear something they don’t want to, the teammate who’s been treated as expendable somewhere else. Get enough of those decisions right, consistently, over enough years, and eventually you get something worth building on purpose.
That’s RPPL. That’s the long way we took to get here. And it’s the reason every project we take on gets the same thing from us: people who are paying attention, who mean what they say, and who are genuinely glad to be doing this work — with you.
