The next best step

I’ve spent most of my life figuring things out as I go. Not aimlessly. I’ve always had a pretty good idea of what I wanted my life to look like. The kind of work I wanted to do. The people I wanted to spend my time with. The freedom to chase something interesting when it came along.

I just never felt particularly compelled to map out every turn along the way.

Derek, on the other hand, has had a master plan for his life for as long as he can remember.

Which makes the fact that we’ve spent nearly a decade building a company together pretty entertaining.

Since becoming partners in 2017, we’ve approached just about every major decision from opposite ends of the same conversation.

Derek sees the destination. I tend to see the next turn.

And somewhere in the middle, we’ve managed to build Spry.

Not exactly the company either of us imagined when we started. But increasingly, the company we both hoped it could become.

I’ve always thought of Spry as a bit of an experiment.

What if we could build a business around the things we genuinely love doing?

What if work could be something we looked forward to instead of something we endured? What if we could make a living telling stories, traveling to interesting places, meeting remarkable people, and creating things we’re proud to put our names on?

And what if we could do all of that without sacrificing the lives we wanted to live outside of work?

It’s a romantic idea.

It’s also a small business.

There are bills to pay, families to support, and people who depend on us making good decisions. Every new opportunity comes with some degree of risk. Every investment in the future has to be weighed against the responsibilities of the present.

Derek and I are each responsible, in a very real way, for the livelihood of the other’s family.

That’s not something either of us takes lightly.

And it’s what makes this whole experiment so interesting.

Because every few years, usually when some combination of restlessness and opportunity starts creeping in, we find ourselves having another version of the same conversation.

What do we want Spry to become?

Not necessarily what makes the most money next quarter. Not what the industry says a company like ours should be doing.

What do we actually want to spend our lives building?

We talk. We dream. We challenge each other. We get excited about possibilities that probably sound a little ridiculous at first.

Eventually, we find ourselves aligned on a vision.

Then comes my favorite part.

Figuring out the next best step.

When I joined Spry in 2017, Derek had already built something interesting.

There was a talented team of designers, creatives, and genuinely good people who knew how to come up with ideas. What they didn’t necessarily know was how to turn those ideas into films.

That was the opportunity I saw.

I came from a production background. I understood the mechanics of filmmaking, how to organize a crew, build a production, and get something from an idea on paper to a finished piece on screen.

So that’s what we started building.

Not a new company. Not some grand reinvention. Just a proper production operation inside an existing digital agency.

It was the first meaningful step in what would eventually become a much bigger evolution.

And looking back, it’s funny how much that moment says about our partnership.

Derek, the lifelong planner, had built a creative business full of possibility. I, the guy who generally follows his instincts, showed up and started putting systems in place.

Neither of us knew exactly where that combination would take us.

But we both recognized that there was something worth pursuing.

And so we did.

For a while, we did what you’re supposed to do when you’re building a successful creative business.

We grew.

We hired people, expanded our capabilities, took on bigger projects, and built an agency around the work we were doing.

There was momentum. There was opportunity. And there was a growing team of people who depended on us to keep the whole thing moving.

Then COVID happened.

In the span of two weeks, we watched an entire year’s worth of business disappear.

Just like that.

Whatever plans we’d made suddenly seemed pretty irrelevant.

We scaled down. We went into survival mode. And for the first time in a while, Derek and I found ourselves much closer to the actual work again.

There was no grand revelation in the middle of it. We were trying to keep a business alive.

But as we worked our way through that period, something began to change.

We started asking different questions.

Were we building the company we wanted to run? Were we doing the work we actually loved? And if we were going to pour everything we had into rebuilding Spry, what did we want that company to look like?

The years that followed brought us back to something that had always been there.

We love making things.

We love being on location. Working with talented people. Finding the story in unexpected places. Taking an idea that exists only in someone’s imagination and turning it into something people can actually experience.

As Spry evolved from a digital agency into a creative production company, we found ourselves increasingly drawn to the stories themselves.

Not just the ones clients hired us to tell.

The ones we wanted to tell.

We began exploring original content, developing our own television projects, and learning what it takes to bring independent productions to audiences.

That meant stepping into unfamiliar territory. Understanding distribution. Building new relationships. Learning an entirely different side of an industry we thought we already knew pretty well.

And, occasionally, wondering what the hell we’d gotten ourselves into.

But every new experience revealed another possibility.

Another door.

Another next best step.

Eventually, we realized that what we’d been building was bigger than a company that made commercials, branded content, or films for other people.

We wanted to create original stories. We wanted to own the things we made. And we wanted to help other storytellers find a path to getting their work made, seen, and distributed.

We wanted to build a studio.

Today, Spry is evolving into a production company and studio focused on original storytelling, commercial production, and helping great ideas find their way to the screen.

It’s a pretty significant evolution from the digital agency Derek started all those years ago.

But to us, it feels surprisingly natural.

Every version of Spry has taught us something about the next.

The digital agency gave us a creative foundation. Building a production company taught us how to bring ambitious ideas to life. Developing original entertainment has opened our eyes to an entirely new world of possibilities.

None of those chapters was wasted.

And none of them required us to know exactly what the next one would look like.

As we’ve gotten older, our definition of success has changed, too.

Our families have grown. Our priorities have shifted. Time has become a little more precious.

The question isn’t simply how big we can make this company.

It’s what kind of company we want to spend our lives building.

One that challenges us creatively. One that gives us the freedom to pursue things we believe in. One that provides for our families and creates opportunities for the people we work with.

One that still makes us excited to get out of bed in the morning.

And every few years, when that familiar restlessness starts creeping in, we have to decide whether we’re willing to invest in that dream all over again.

So far, the answer has always been yes.

I think there’s a temptation when you look back on a business to connect all the dots and pretend there was a master plan.

To tell the story as though every decision was calculated. Every opportunity was strategic. Every step was leading toward some inevitable destination.

That’s not our story.

We’ve made plenty of wrong turns. Chased ideas that went nowhere. Spent time and money learning lessons we probably could have learned the easy way.

But we’ve also built something we’re incredibly proud of.

And perhaps more importantly, we’ve built something that still has room to become something else.

I have no idea what Spry will look like five years from now.

Derek probably has a spreadsheet somewhere.

But I have a pretty good idea of what I’d love it to become.

And tomorrow, we’ll get up and do what we’ve always done.

Take the next best step.