We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Stewart Rosburg a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Stewart thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I have been able to. The journey was a little something like this:
1. Childhood. I was a homeschooled kid that was encouraged to be creative and be outside a lot. I think the extra time involved with being homeschooled left time for boredom and that led to be more creative–in general. Lot’s of imagining and lots of time to try things. Through gradeschool I used to want to be an architect, obsessing over my own floor plans on grid paper as a 10yr old.
2. In highschool I made new friends who had access to photoshop. Getting in on the early days of tutorials online and learning how software worked was pretty magical to me. By the end of highschool I had moved on from highschool and was appointed the graphic designer for the school. My highschool had a lower amount of hours in class but required some kind of job on campus. It didn’t pay much but it was the first connection (and earlier than most) that I realized you could make money doing something you like to do–and in general, that design is powerful and valuable to people. I designed posters, event mailers, and T-shirts. A lot–a ton of t-shirts.
3. Towards the end of highschool I had friends who loved making videos and I started to help them by learning after effects. I knew then that I’d want to try and learn motion graphics and how to do it for a living
4. The college I chose had a strong film and animation program but no motion graphics major so I talked to the professors to build a custom program for me. It was a lot of extra work and hours, but 4.5 years later I graduated with a degree in “character animation”. The reality was closer to a minor in graphic design, film, and mostly animation classes. By my junior year, I was confident enough to try to freelance in the motion graphics industry. I got on Motionographer’s job board and landed a couple of my first legit jobs. I soon quit my job in the libraries media dept. and even considered quitting college early because I saw a path to already making the kind of salary I had hoped to out of college.
5. I got married and my wife had a job that encouraged her to move jobs and locations ever 6m-1yr. It was exciting but also a challenge to get integrated into any professional community as a motion designer.

— So, finally getting to the question “Was it like that from day one?” yes and no. I think the talent and work ethic made it possible for me to start making motion design a career from day one, but that didn’t mean it was super successful from then. I think I came up with an arbitrary goal of hitting $45k my first year out of school as a new freelancer. The first few years were a lot of ups and downs. I passed that first year goal but the next couple years I would set new goals and sometimes far surpass them, sometimes fail hard.

Major milestones over the first few years (now 10+ in) would be:
1. Learning that your network is the most valuable tool to grow
2. Being self motivated and getting used to long periods of not much or any work–motivated enough to keep working on skills or keep reaching out to grow the network
3. Taking time to think ahead on how I wanted to grow from a freelancer into a business model someday. This allowed me early on to start thinking about what was worth my time to continue to get better at and what may allow for more growth if I let others help me out.

What could have sped up the process?
1. A lot of opportunity cost for me went into dreaming a little too far out in advance. I would update a 5 and 10 year plan almost quarterly at some points in my career, eager to get to the next step and pursue the growth I dreamed of. I think in reality, the best growth is sustainable growth. For me, that’s looked like incremental/slower strides forward. The downside is now explosive growth, but the upside is that we haven’t seen many steps going backwards or big falls for me as a freelancer all the way (joking, we’re still really small) to a 5 person team now.
2. I think finding my strengths/what makes me unique in this business sooner, and owning that, could have sped things up a bit. Some people find that they’re really really good at a specific software, skill, or type of look or video–if that’s you, own it and run with it. For me, it’s taking me a long time to own my skill–and it’s likely because it’s kind of hidden and not one thing about my skill is pronounced as much as others. It’s to be good at a lot of things but not great at any one thing–sounds like a con, but I’m finding a way now to make it my ‘thing’. For instance, I’m good enough at networking, running a business, finding the write people to grow our team and hone in on their skills/develop them as individuals and their collaboration with our team etc. all of those things combined is what makes me unique, I’m good enough to know what it’s like to be the designer/animator/editor AND what it’s like to work with a client that I can really help connect the dots. So take your time to understand yourself and what you’re good at, then tell your network (and the industry at large) about it and own it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

A lot of this is in the last question.

A little more about how I got into it:
Early on I was open to anything my skills could concur, or anything that was close to my skill set that I was willing to work extra for to get the right output for the client. My first few jobs as a freelancer were helping with a brand film that made commercial siding panels (a company based in Denmark) that needed VFX of their panels flying onto buildings. Right after that, I got jobs doing concert graphics for Mariah Carey, The Jonas Brothers, and Rascal Flatts.

More about what we do/offer now:
We’re a production studio that specializes in motion graphics, 2D/3D animation, and VFX. Our favorite work are jobs that combine all of those things. For instance, doing a promo for Love Island USA this year, we had our illustrator make tons of custom 2D characters and set pieces, our 3D animator create fun stylized set pieces, and our VFX team composite them all together with the actor for the final piece.
We do tech explainer videos, social media post, live event videos and backgrounds, concert and sports live event backgrounds, live action videos, VFX for commercials and movies and more.

What we’re most proud of:
Right now, we’re most proud of the strides forward that our team is making to the level/quality of work we can provide. We’re small but we solve client’s problems head on. The promo mentioned above, for instance, we were competing to produce that work against a VFX team out of LA. They do bigger work and have a team 20x the size of ours, but we eventually won the job because we delivered what the client was looking for. Small but mighty–we stay nimble and it helps us deliver big for our clients. We’re also really proud of our client retention. In our world, most of the work we do is one-off work (very few retainers) and that means the only way you get repeat work is to work on-time, on budget, and being a fun team to collaborate and work with. The consistency that we can do this is why we’re still around and still growing now.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Me being homeschooled was mentioned. I grew up in a bit of a bubble (okay a lot of a bubble). Like anything, pros and cons came along for the ride into my career, even from that.
I grew up generally being an optimist. I still consider myself one, but I had to unlearn the innate trust I had in people to be generally/almost always ‘good’. A couple examples:
1. The first internship I had was in high school. It was an incredible opportunity to see what motion graphics studios were like, however, just because the opportunity was appreciated doesn’t mean that I could look up to everything about the people around me there. I had to start learning then that you can take and leave some things from mentors and people that have gone before, they’re not perfect just because they’re ahead of you.
2. As I started to get my own clients–early on especially–I had to learn who to trust and who not to trust. Unfortunately there are plenty of people out there that are ready, willing, and even proficient at exploiting people in the creative field. Promises of ‘exposure’ with little to no pay is the classic trope that I had to learn, but even those waving decent budgets around could be awful to work with if their expectations for a project well exceeded their budget. I had a client that gave a clear example of what they wanted, they continually moved the target up and up as the project went on–refusing to pay and threatening to ‘ruin’ my reputation.

The good news is that over time, I learned more self respect and set rules and guidelines up for myself and clients (as well as a better trust for my gut feeling on people) that’s helped me avoid these issues now.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

I think Chris Do of the Futur is pretty great. Reading and being interested in your field is great and I encourage it. Equally important for me is just keeping a balance of life, exercise, breaks and work all together.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tellstrategicdesign.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tellstrategicdesign/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/18147455/
• Other: https://vimeo.com/tellstrategicdesign