We recently connected with Kevin Bourne and have shared our conversation below.

Kevin, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses

Family business is something a lot of people try to stay away from, and often times with great reason. Doing business with family can be messy and can actually destroy relationships.

My wife, Koliah, and I are the co-founders of a company called SHIFTER. It started as a Black media outlet covering music, film, television, fashion, business and sports. A few years ago we spun it of into a content marketing and creative agency called SHIFTER Agency. Then in 2022, we launched SHIFTER Entertainment to take our brand into film, television, digital content, and live experiences.

What makes my wife and I different is that we’ve known each other all our lives—literally. I was at my wife’s first birthday party. Eventually, we became best friends and then co-workers. Prior to our relationship becoming romantic we had worked together about 10 times between work, church, and business. There’s no one I enjoy working with more than my wife. She’s a boss with amazing skills and experience.

We’ve worked together so often we don’t really think about juggling our work and personal relationship—we just do.

The key to doing business with family, especially your spouse or partner, is mutual respect. My wife and I think very highly of each other and we know where each other’s gifts lie. My wife is great at organization and numbers. She can manage anything. She’s also great with people and isn’t afraid of being around other executives and “important people”. Meanwhile, she knows I’m great at developing and casting vision, quality control, branding/brand management, and all things creative.

Understanding the strengths of your spouse, or any family member who is a part of the business, and creating clear roles around those strengths are key.

As an extension of this, every person who is at the table in the family business has to have a clear reason for being there, especially if they’re going to be a partner or decision maker. No stragglers allowed. If they want to be an employee that’s cool, but they need to be able to respect boundaries at work and adhere to whatever culture you’re trying to create.

One of my mentors always says, “It’s not personal. It’s business”. That’s especially true when you’re dealing with family.

Doing business with family requires some serious maturity and even more in-depth conversations than a normal business partnership. You need to answer some questions. Who is going to be the boss? What is our process for making decisions? Then the answers to those questions need to be included in a partnership agreement. My wife and I are about to create a partnership agreement. We didn’t feel like we needed one at first. We didn’t really have any expectations of each other. But now that the business is getting very serious, some expectations have come up that need to be documented.

So family business isn’t for everyone. It requires a lot of maturity and conversation, and you have to genuinely enjoy being around those people. If that’s not you, cheer each other on from a distance and go your separate ways.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started out as a Black culture journalist, which I still am today. I report on music, film, television and fashion.

I was always good at writing and storytelling since I was in elementary school. I always loved words. When it came to spelling bees, I was a problem. In high school, I also loved essay questions on exams.

This love for words carried over to adulthood and my professional career. I studied political science in university and eventually became a political communications staffer. It was during this time that I noticed there was a lack of media platforms telling the stories of talent in my city so I started a media platform called SHIFTER. Eventually, I got fired from my job because my political dream had faded and I became more passionate about media.

The problem is I had to no creative bone in my body. Prior to politics, I was a suit and tie wearing Organizational Development consultant. The new dream motivated me to buy a camera and learn how to take pictures and shoot/edit video. I also discovered I had a knack for journalism. Outside of a one day photography class, I’m self-taught as a creative.

After a few years of becoming a sought after arts and culture journalist touching written, TV and radio content, I launched SHIFTER Agency to leverage my years of communications experience and the fact I became good at all things creative, especially content marketing and branding, and getting myself and my team members on TV and radio. My wife and I have both acquired TV and film experience in recent years so now we’ve started our new company SHIFTER Entertainment specializing in Black content.

The tagline for our agency is “We notice you and get you noticed”. That’s the problem we solve. I like getting people, companies and brands noticed.

Since the murder of George Floyd, we’ve especially become the “diversity content” experts. A lot of companies and brands want to communicate with and market to Black audiences but they don’t know how without saying the wrong things. We also help our clients to reach younger demographics, especially the 18-35 demographic that drives trends and makes things “cool”. Companies and brands struggle to figure out this demographic, whereas that’s one of our strong suits alongside people of colour.

We’ve worked with everyone from clothing brands to banks and universities on content and marketing pieces geared towards Black people and other people of colour. We don’t necessarily want to be typecasted as just being able to work on Black projects although we enjoy it. But we can compete with any big firm out there when it comes to content creation as a service on non-Black projects as well.

Aside from our understanding of people of colour and the 18-35 demographic, what sets us apart from other content creation agencies is that we believe in creating pieces that give people feeling, whether it’s a video series or graphic design. I call it the “dope factor”. We’ve collaborated with other agencies on projects and found they’re overly preoccupied with rationale, making creation a cerebral exercise. We believe that there should be strong rationale for the look and feel of what you’re creating, but at the end of the day whatever you’re creating has to give people a feeling.

We once collaborated on a branding project with another agency. They didn’t like the mockup we came up with because they felt the rationale wasn’t strong enough. When my son (who would be a part of the target audience for the design) walked past my computer and saw the design, he started freaking out. He thought it was dope. He probably couldn’t tell me why it was dope, but it gave him a feeling. That experience changed my whole approach to content creation and design.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Well, 2023 marks 10 years for our company so that in itself is an illustration of resilience.

It took us 6-7 years to make any money, partly by design. Our initial strategy was to focus the first few years on building the brand and then monetize the brand. Being able to go 6-7 years making no money was hard. We ended up on social assistance and eating from the food bank with kids. In hindsight, I don’t necessarily recommend this approach, but it’s what we did.

At the same time, my father lost his four year battle with Cancer. I didn’t lose a beat. The day of my father’s funeral I was writing and editing articles for our media platform right up until we left to go to the church. Once I got through my father’s passing, the second of my two business partners left, as well as all the writers from our media platform. A team of 12 people was reduced to just me. I got to the place I call “The Valley of Decision”—that place where every entrepreneur has to decide whether to keep going or to pack it up.

I put a plan in place for how I was going to start making money and gave myself two months to execute. Two weeks in I started making money. It wasn’t a lot, but it gave me the hope that what I was doing wasn’t just an expensive hobby but a business. Eventually, we rebounded. My wife joined me as a business partner, my team grew again, and I got big opportunities like being on press junkets with actors like Kevin Hart and Tyrese Gibson.

Then last year, when Google changed their algorithm, the website traffic on our media platform complete tanked. It was bad. In our business web traffic affects revenue. It totally discouraged me, but we rebuilt. A year later our web traffic is at an all time high; about eight times what it was this time last year.

More recently (literally two weeks ago), a number of my company and personal social media accounts that I’d been building for eight years were hacked and shut down by a social media juggernaut who shall remain nameless. Once again, this put a number of projects on hold affecting our revenues. On top of that, 30 minutes after finding out we were hacked, the location for the TV show we were shooting fell through and we were shooting in two days.

Although we don’t have our accounts back, everything worked out. We found a location to shoot and we worked around the social media problem with our clients.

While I definitely had a few down moments recently, I’ve been through enough of these ups and downs in business to know that things always work out; these tests come to show us what we’re made of.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish I knew more about grants. In our 10 years of being in operation, this was the first year I felt I could slow down enough to fill out grant applications. Before that I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

In 2022, I got three out of the four grants I applied for, totaling $30,000. I plan on writing even more grant applications in 2023. It’s free money and helps you to scale.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur or creative, there are a lot of grants out there for businesses, especially if you’re a youth, woman, disabled person or person of colour.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.shifteragency.com, https://www.shiftermagazine.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shiftermagazine/ @kbtheboss_
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iamkbtheboss
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinrbourne/
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/kbtheboss_
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@shiftermagazine

Image Credits
Jean jacket and hoodie photo (credit: Quest/Dreamland Studios)
Red carpet interview with Andre De Grasse (credit: Ben Telford Visuals)
Quest/Dreamland Studios