Living the dream

Season of Growth

In the last year, my company, CremaLab has gone  through an amazing season of growth. We've gone from being a small UX/UI focussed design crew to a full service digital product development company.  This has offered great rewards and great challenges.  A recent Smashing Magazine artle talked about going from a designer to a creative director.  The article could not have pinned me any more accuratlely.  In the nexte few weeks, I'm hoping to share a bit of my experiences through our beginings, our growth, some challenges, and a few goals/ dreams for the future. 

Some ground rules.  

Ignore my horrible grammer and most likely my horrible spelling. As I've mentioned before, I'm a creative, not a copywriter.  I'll do my best to use spell check, but if these posts are actually going to happen, they have to come from the hip, and we all know that firing from the hip produces some interesting results. 

Living the dream

This is what living the dream looks like.

So I just got off of an interview with a new applicant for a position at our company.  Often times, we open up the question of "Now do you have any questions?"  to which there's usually the akward.............  "No, I don't think so..."  But this person asked a question that I probably haven't asked myself in a long time.  "What do you like about working at your company? "  As the founder and owner, most often I'm focussed so much on selling our overall culture, services, and general "So what DO you DO?" answer, that I don't think about directly why I, George Brooks, like working at my own company.  So lets make a simple list, shall we?

Reason's I like working at CremaLab 

1. This is my dream job.  I've wanted to work in a creative enviroment, with creative people, creating creative things, since I can remember.  Several attempts to make this happen in different shapes and forms has landed to me working with some of the greatest young vibrant minds on the planet. 
2. Which leads me to my second item.  Our crew.  Off the top, my long time best friend Daniel Linhart is my business partner.  
   
   I know I know.  Dangerous!!!  But it's been amazing.  Two totally opposite sides of the brain that when communicating well, really creating something amazing.  Not to mention a crew that is truely a mix of old and new friends, who are wildly talented guys. Of whom I trust each of them to do great work and represent CremaLab in an amazing way!
3. We are creating something amazing! Not only the products that we are working on, but the time spent on how we build those products. Our processes, or focus, our strengths, our goals, our differentiators, etc. 
4. Culture.  This is somethign that we talk a lot about.  Something that we glean from places like Zappos, google, and many others. We are all about creating a place with our crew can flourish, creative through is encouraged, and everyone really has a say.  This doesn't always happen every day, but its something we are always thinking about.  The video above shows just a piece of this in action.  But there's also the Xbox in the office, the creative office itself,  the beer in the fridge, the art on the walls, the collaberation or random dancing in the office.  All of this creates an amazing place to work.  

More to come...

I'm excited about sharing more of the full story.  But you can tell that a lot has happened in the last year.  

Please share your story as well.  Have you been through a change from freelancer to company owner, or creative to creative director?  Let me know what you think.