Ryan Honey: How to Build a Sustainable Creative Culture
Ryan Honey and team have built a culture designed to nurture creativity. Images c/o BUCK.
On average, every year, a company will experience 18% turnover in its workforce. With people being the engine of any good creative studio, those organizations who meet the averages experience tremendous brain drain every 365 days and lose a significant amount of what makes them great. Add in the ongoing impact of the pandemic on work and it’s no wonder that the ability to retain talent is one of the most pressing conversations of the moment. So how do you build and maintain a sustainable creative culture that attracts and retains talent?
To answer that question, we checked in with the global creative company BUCK who has, uh, bucked the “great resignation” trend. Over the past year, BUCK has experienced 4% employee turnover, well under the industry average. Sure, their partnerships with brands like Nike, Ray-Ban, and Cash App make it a coveted place to work. But it’s more than that: co-founder and co-Chief Creative Officer Ryan Honey–along with co-founder and CEO Jeff Ellermeyer and co-founder and co-Chief Creative Officer Orion Tait–have baked culture into their DNA ever since they opened shop in 2004. From then to now, BUCK has grown from the three founders to 600 people. An amazing 33% of team members started as interns and another 20 people have been there for over 10 years.
Here, Honey shares why retention is so important to creative work, what has contributed to BUCK’s high retention rate (hint: friendship), and how they have “scaled” their culture from the founding team to hundreds of employees working in New York City, Los Angeles, Sydney, Amsterdam, and elsewhere around the world.
Heeey! BUCK team members on the set of a project for Tinder.
Why is team member retention so important to creative collaboration?
The work gets better the longer you stay together. You develop a shorthand and you don't have to explain yourself as much. You have implicit trust. If you can retain people that propagates throughout the whole business. It’s not just a creative opportunity; it’s also a career opportunity.
When we're able to step away from the work and let our people have career growth and take ownership over the business, that’s where you see that career opportunity. That’s where the retention comes in.
What contributed to that high retention rate of great talent?
We’ve always been about giving people a voice. Orion and I started as artists, the people on the box working for clients. We’ve seen a lot of different ways people do things, and we want to create a place where everyone has a voice no matter where you are in the chain. If you want to bring an idea to the table it's appreciated no matter what. We try to create a safe space for people to be as creative as they want. That’s how you see the best work being made.
Having fun on an Ad Council shoot.
An organization’s culture can be defined by the founders and expanded by the founding team. But then when you start to get bigger, and maybe all the way up to 600 people, it can be a challenge to keep that through-line from the early days to present day. How do you “scale” culture?
It goes back to retention. It’s all about those people who have been here since the beginning and who helped build the business. We have some people at BUCK who have never worked anywhere else. It’s about friendship. There are a lot of people at work who I consider my best friends, including my business partners. There are people in the world of business who say don’t be friends with your employees. I have always disagreed with that. Some of my closest friends work at BUCK. That’s what makes us strong and able to scale.
In addition to a clear ethos about your culture at BUCK, what tactics do you use to make BUCK a place for career growth and skills development? Ongoing training? Long-term incentives? Ability to work from any BUCK location? Or something else?
This is ever-evolving but everything you have mentioned above is part of the plan. Our Talent team, led by Jan Jensen and our Operations team led by Madison Wharton, have taken our vision for the type of creative culture we want to foster and added structure and transparency so that BUCK can be a home where people want to stay and do the best work of their lives. We want BUCK to be a place that celebrates everyone’s differences, and everyone feels they can bring their authentic selves to work. We have a strong focus on providing a well-mapped out career path for each person, while making sure we continue to invest in our people through purpose-driven work, and creative opportunities with a lens of innovation. Although the past couple of years have made certain aspects of our jobs more challenging, we are constantly finding new ways to collaborate even while many BUCKers are now working remotely. Our focus is to adapt as needed, but to make sure that our people are supported and given the mentorship and training for them to grow within BUCK for the long term.
Of course BUCK has a stunning office in Brooklyn’s Industry City.
In this new era of work, what keeps you up at night and what are you working through?
The biggest hurdle is getting people together. We have offices in Sydney and Amsterdam, and both have pretty much gone back to the office. The offices are smaller and there is less friction in getting to the office. But in Los Angeles and New York, many people are still working remotely.
We can work remotely and through this there are things that are gained and things that are lost. There's probably more that's gained, except for the younger generation, which is the part that is the most difficult. Solving that is going to be a major challenge in the next 10 years where you've got these people coming out of school or people coming from all over the world–there are 27 countries represented at BUCK. If you're not able to be in the office, you don’t make those connections and have interactions with the more senior staff.
BUCK is a beacon for talent and that contributes to a strong pipeline of people who want to work there. That’s invaluable, but it’s also hard to quantify. How do you quantify that impact on the business?
The easiest way is how many people have bought houses.
That's a pretty good metric of success.
Our goal is to have a business that supports creatives and gives them the opportunity to buy houses, raise kids, and have families. Our clients, mostly, tech companies, have all of these financial instruments and enormous amounts of money that they can use to attract people that we don't have.
Our biggest challenge is that our clients are our biggest competitors for talent. We just introduced one of our favorite junior employees to a brand recently, and a week later, they made her a job offer that paid her twice as much as she made at BUCK. It was a lot more than market rate. That happens. But those brands, generally, are not about creatives, right? They’re about manufacturing, engineering and product. What we're trying to do is create a culture that supports creativity and enhances that. And eventually we would like to have those tools that they have to attract and retain people in the long term. That comes with more scale.
It's one thing to attract great talent, but when you lose them, how do you still keep your soul intact?
We are lucky to not have a lot of talent leave BUCK, but when they do we wish them the very best and genuinely feel there will always be a place for them at BUCK. This is the key to BUCK’s soul: shared values that center around being good people and creating a culture that supports and nurtures creativity.
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