Part 4 of “The Long Way to RPPL: What Positive Culture Actually Looks Like” — a series on two decades in the creative industry, and what they taught me about building a company on purpose.
By the end of my time at Big Drop, I’d learned everything I needed to know about the kind of studio I wanted to build. Not from a lecture or a case study, but from years of paying close attention — to what worked, to what didn’t, to how people showed up when they were trusted and respected, and how they showed up when they weren’t. That kind of education doesn’t come cheap, and it doesn’t come easy. But it’s the most valuable thing I took from that chapter of my career.
Eventually, the direction I wanted to take and the direction the company was taking stopped lining up. That happens. Companies change, people change, and sometimes the version of a place you fell in love with isn’t the version you’re standing in anymore. I’ve made my peace with that. What I took from it wasn’t resentment — it was clarity. I knew, with more certainty than I’d ever had before, exactly what I wanted to build next.
Here’s the part I haven’t said yet in this series: by the time I made the decision to leave, RPPL already existed. I’d formed it months earlier with two people I’d worked alongside for years, each of us running a different piece of the business — one leading operations and sales, one leading production, me leading creative. We weren’t waiting around for a plan to fall into place. We already had one, quietly, in motion, built around exactly the principles this whole series has been circling: listen to people regardless of title, tell the truth regardless of power, treat people as equal contributors instead of disposable resources.
So when the moment came to actually leave, we already knew what we wanted to build instead. And we knew, immediately, who we wanted to build it with.
The designers and developers we brought on early were people I’d worked with before — genuinely excellent at what they did, and people I knew deserved to be part of something built with more intention than what they’d experienced elsewhere. So we made a decision early on that wasn’t complicated at all, even though it would have been easy to overthink: we went and hired them.
We hired them because they were excellent at what they did, and because we knew exactly what it would mean to the people on the other end of that offer to be valued and respected in more ways than one. If the last chapter of this series was about watching a culture erode from the outside, this chapter is about what happens when you decide to build the culture yourself, on purpose, from day one.
That’s the thing about starting something new after fifteen years of collecting lessons the hard way: you don’t get to pretend you don’t know better. I’d learned, across every studio and agency I’d worked at, exactly what good culture looks like and exactly what it costs when it’s missing. RPPL Studio wasn’t an abstract idea about “positive company culture.” It was a direct response to everything I’d watched happen, and hadn’t been able to fully fix, everywhere else.
We built it around the same three things this whole series keeps coming back to: treat everyone as an equal team member, listen to their ideas regardless of where they sit, and never — under any circumstance — take advantage of the trust people put in you when they choose to work with you. That’s not a mission statement we wrote for a website. It’s the actual operating principle, tested against every job I’d had before it, and against the very people we chose to bring with us.
Next: what “positive culture” looks like in practice at RPPL today, and why it’s the thing we’re most excited to bring to every project we take on.
