We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jessica Morales a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jessica, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
I am an adoptive mom. My husband and I adopted our daughter, Brighten, at birth from Texas in 2016. At the time, I was working as a marketing and fundraising director for a statewide nonprofit in Alabama. I loved the work I was doing and had significantly increased the organization’s revenue during my time there.
But adoption being what it is, we only knew about our daughter for three weeks before she was born. As any parent knows, that’s not nearly enough time to secure daycare or reliable childcare. Thankfully, I worked from home (I’m an OG remote worker—before it was cool), but I still had a full-time job with real responsibilities.
As Brighten got older, I started to realize that what I was doing wasn’t sustainable. I was trying to work and parent at the same time during the day, and I wasn’t really doing either job the way I wanted to. I felt constantly pulled in two directions. Around that same time, I also began to see something I hadn’t fully recognized before: the skills I had developed in the nonprofit sector—strategy, storytelling, fundraising, marketing—could be incredibly valuable to many nonprofits and small businesses that couldn’t afford a full-time or even part-time staff member to do that work.
When Brighten was eight months old, I took a leap of faith. I left my stable job and started my own business, coming alongside organizations in a fractional capacity to help them show and tell their stories. A few years ago, my husband and I took another leap and combined my business with his video production business to create Bright & Gray Creative (named after our kids, Brighten and Grady).
Today, that risk has grown into a thriving company with eight team members and incredible clients. What started as a decision rooted in motherhood and necessity became the foundation for work that allows me to feel deeply rooted in my skillset and values.
Jessica, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I graduated from Samford University with a degree in Journalism & Mass Communication, concentrating in PR and advertising. I have loved photography since I was a kid, and my answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” evolved often, from writer, to photojournalist, to campaign manager, to English teacher, to nonprofit creative. Each season centered around storytelling and people.
Right out of college, I worked at a family-owned advertising agency in Birmingham, and that experience deeply shaped me. It taught me how to be a good employee and showed me how meaningful a family-owned business can be. I will never forget the founder’s wife walking around the office, handing out paychecks and calling each of us by name. As a young twenty-something, that stayed with me and influenced the kind of culture I wanted to build one day.
I eventually felt a pull toward work I was deeply passionate about, especially orphan care, and found my way into the nonprofit world. There, I learned how powerful strategy, fundraising, and creative storytelling can be when resources are limited but the mission is big.
Out of all of that, Bright & Gray Creative was born. We are a full-service creative agency offering fractional marketing support including social media management, web design, branding, video production, and photography. Many of our clients come to us with a dream and the startup money they have saved, trusting us to create the visual and strategic representation of that vision. We take that responsibility seriously and tell their story in a way that reflects who they are and the life experiences that led them there.
When I look at Bright & Gray Creative today, I can clearly see how each of my professional and personal experiences have blended together. I have now founded a family-owned creative agency employing incredibly talented twenty-somethings and helping shape the beginning of their careers. At the same time, we partner with businesses and nonprofits we genuinely care about. One of the biggest surprises has been how passionate I have become about industries I never expected, not because of the services they provide, but because we get the privilege of holding people’s dreams and bringing them to life.
As Creative Director and Lead Photographer, I get to combine my childhood dreams every day. One moment I am working as a strategist, and the next I have a camera in my hands capturing real people and their stories.
What I am most proud of is that we do this work with an extremely high level of quality while keeping it accessible for businesses and organizations of all sizes. At Bright & Gray Creative, our aim to be known for doing things with excellence and with the utmost integrity. As long as we can maintain this, I will always consider my career path a success.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
My business partner is my husband, which might sound a little boring at first, but it really is not.
We met when I was a junior at Samford, but I had known who Jason was long before that. He was always on campus with a camera, even after he had graduated, doing contract work for different departments. which he still does even today. I was immediately fascinated by him.
We actually have the same degree, but very different strengths. Jason comes from a video, technology, and live events background, while mine leans more toward digital media, strategy, and the artistic side of storytelling. We started dating my senior year of college and got married two years later.
Jason had been filming weddings since before we met, and after we got married, he really ramped up video production as a side hustle, working with corporations and events. When I left my full-time job to start my own business, we began to notice something interesting. We were constantly pitching each other’s services without even realizing it. Jason would sit with a client and pitch video, but they had no social presence or website to host it. I would hear people’s stories and immediately start dreaming up video ideas to help bring them to life.
During 2020, while we were quarantined with a three-year-old and a one-year-old, I wrote a blog post addressed to myself ten years in the future. It covered a lot of things, but one realization stood out. I genuinely believed our businesses should be run together. We talked about it off and on after that, but it stayed more of an idea than a plan.
A year or so later, that shifted during a conversation with my family about the Enneagram. I was explaining to my mom that my type and Jason’s type are often known as strong business partners. I am an 8w7 and he is a 3w4. Without missing a beat, she said, “Well, you do kind of run your family like a business.” It was funny, but it also stuck.
That moment pushed us to start talking more seriously about the fact that we are better together in every aspect of our lives. If that was true personally, why wouldn’t it be true professionally too? In 2023, we began preparing to combine our work, and in January 2024, Bright & Gray Creative officially launched.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
I never imagined that our team would be more than just me and Jason. Actually, that’s not entirely true. The blog post I wrote to myself ten years in the future includes that hope. I think I’m more surprised that it actually happened.
I have had some really strong role models in my life, and I am incredibly grateful for them. Both of my parents work in education, and I watched them lead students, parents, and colleagues with grace, even through really hard seasons. Early in my career, I also had a supervisor who deeply mentored me professionally. She taught me the importance of opening yourself up to people in a way that creates vulnerability and invites others in. That kind of leadership builds trust and loyalty.
In the nonprofit space, we practiced this with donors, and I learned that it was never about being fake or oversharing. It was about being real. Many leaders are hesitant to let people in, whether they are clients, donors, or staff, because we do not want people to see the mess. But trust is built when people feel included, not kept at arm’s length.
As storytellers, we ask people to allow us into their lives and their work, and that requires some give on our part too. That philosophy shapes how I lead our team. As we grow and evolve alongside our clients, I am intentional about teaching our team that high morale comes from feeling trusted, valued, and genuinely known.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://brightandgray.com
- Instagram: https://Instagram.com/brightandgraycreative
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/brightandgraycreative
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicasmorales/
- Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/@brightandgraycreative
Image Credits
ARei Creative