For a long time, I thought the goal was simple.
Work for the biggest studios. The biggest brands. The names everyone recognizes.
Places like Buck. Digital Kitchen. Dress Code. The kind of logos you’d proudly stack on a portfolio slide.
I did that. And it completely changed how I think about finding creative work.
Because the truth is… who you work with matters just as much as the work itself.
When I was at SCAD, the goal was clear.
Work for the best studios in the world.
We all knew the names. We studied their work. Tried to reverse engineer how they did it.
And to be fair… the work is incredible.
But what you don’t see as an outsider is how that work actually gets made.
Creative director. Design lead. Internal team. Agency partner. Client. Stakeholders you’ll never meet.
The bigger the team, the further you are from the final decision.
Ideas get filtered. Adjusted. Reframed.
Sometimes improved. Sometimes diluted.
I started my freelance career embedded at Yahoo and Viacom.
These weren’t slow, precious projects. This was constant output.
Daily content. Tight timelines. Real deadlines.
I was working directly with producers, editors, and marketers.
No buffer. No time to overthink.
That environment forced a different skillset.
You learn how to:
You don’t get precious when you’re producing every day.
And honestly, that foundation carried me through the rest of my career.
After that, I spent years working with agencies and studios.
Big ones. Small ones. Everything in between.
This is where the portfolio work came from.
The highly polish projects. The pieces you’re proud to show.
There’s a lot to love about that environment:
But there’s another side to it. Long hours. Unpredictable bookings.
Projects you can’t share because of NDAs.
And a surprising amount of time spent waiting for approvals.
Great work doesn’t just come from talent.
It comes from how many highly skilled people need to approve it.
The best working relationships I’ve built weren’t with the biggest names.
They were with small studios.
Working with people like Erica Gorochow at PepRally completely shifted how I saw my role.
It wasn’t transactional. It was collaborative. Ongoing. Built on trust.
And that one relationship opened more doors than any cold outreach ever could.
Including opportunities with studios and brands I had admired for years.
One strong relationship can outperform dozens of loose connections.
In small teams, things feel different.
You’re closer to the work, the decisions, and the leads.
I could finally see my impact on the final piece.
Last year, I spent six months at Google.
On paper, it was everything I had worked towards.
Top-tier brand. Best day rates I’ve ever had.
And non-animator normies were impressed with the big name. 😏
But the day to day looked different than I expected.
50+ hour weeks and A LOT of meetings.
I was doing great work but I wasn’t close to it.
The bigger the company, the more your role gets narrowed.
You become a specialist inside a much larger machine.
Here’s the part that surprised me most.
My best work didn’t come from the biggest teams.
It came from the environments where I had the most proximity to the work.
The pattern for me has been pretty clear.
The closer you are to the work and the decision making, the better the experience.
Permalancing sits in a really interesting middle ground.
It’s not staff or one off freelance.
It’s embedded, ongoing collaboration.
And over time, that compounds.
You stop re-explaining things, build context, and make decisions faster.
People start to trust you and your creative input more.
The best work I’ve done didn’t come from starting fresh.
It came from sticking around.
Right now, I work directly with clients on a motion subscription.
No layers. No middle management. Everything runs through a client portal.
Requests come in. I work through them. Turnarounds happen fast.
There have been tradeoffs.
But what I’ve gained is something I didn’t have before.
Control over my time.
Space to build my own business.
And finally… the ability to invest in my own work, not just everyone else’s.
For most of my career, I was giving 50+ hours a week to client projects.
There was no room left to build anything of my own.
The industry teaches you to chase bigger.
Bigger studios. Bigger clients. Bigger names.
Because that’s what looks good on a portfolio site.
But once you’ve “made it”, you realize something quickly.
Clout comes with layers.
And layers create distance.
Distance from the work, decisions, & impact.
Big names don’t make the work better.
Being a trusted, embedded creative partner does.
Permalancing is a long-term freelance setup where you embed with a team for ongoing work. You’re not staff, but you’re not a one-off hire either. You build context, trust, and speed over time.
It depends on what you value. Big brands offer scale and structure, but small studios often give you more creative ownership, visibility, and direct impact on the work.
Large teams introduce layers. More stakeholders means more approvals, more feedback loops, and slower decision-making, even if execution itself is fast.
You stop re-explaining context, build trust with collaborators, and move faster. Over time, this leads to better creative decisions and stronger work.
Yes. Big-name clients can add visibility, but they don’t guarantee better work or better experiences. Many creatives do their best work in smaller, more collaborative environments.
Motion Partner
