A Cabin in the Woods

I first visited Bernd Heinrich in his cabin in Maine over a decade ago.? I was a young filmmaker / producer without a lot of clarity of what I truly stood for - unsettled and unsure I knew I wanted to tell stories in some shape or form for the rest of my life. That visit was part of a now previous life.? Now in 2024, this visit has served to close out a 3 week trip I have been on in the USA - growing Fell and Company out here and navigating the shifting tides of life.?

Wild and peaceful places, shared and alone,? are so vital to me, to my well being, and to this understanding of why for so long I have kept our agency as some form of mystical cabin in the woods.? An escape from an otherwise oversaturated, loud and often hollow modern world.

Growing a company is a weird experience, starting with an idea and then catapulting it into the universe and seeing what lands out of it.? As it grows it turns into its own ecosystem and its own culture forms.??

Through that growth and cultural formation, I have chosen to stay as quiet as I can outwardly and be as present as I can with my core team. I think in the world we live in today there is just too much noise and attention grabbing throw-aways never made for any real purpose.?

The stoics say ‘be quiet, suffer in silence, the outside world does not matter, the loudest are often the most lost’. The stoics don’t ask for permission or try to please the crowd. The stoics just do.

It’s not lost on me that there is an irony to write about stoicism in an industry that is built on attention seeking behavior.? It’s ironic to write about stoicism at all and how the older I get the more I align with it.? It requires silent action but for the sake of a milestone, I think this stoic lean might help people understand who we are as F+C, and why we are.

After initially growing well from 2017 to 2019, getting through COVID, facing a wildly challenging 2023 and now sitting here 7 years in, it feels good to be proud of where we are, who we are, and to invite more people to come visit our little cabin in the woods.?

I sit here at Bernd’s cabin learning so much of what a dedicated life can look like. I am still a restless soul like so many of the people on my team, and to an extent a lot of the clients and partners we have too.? Everyone seems to be searching for something and somehow we create an environment where that search can manifest into a "something" and come to life.? Embracing that restlessness means now I am a lot surer of the man I am and the man I want to continue to be.? And I know fully that at my core I will always be a storyteller.

Like me, Fell and Company is grown up somewhat now and we are doing something special here. We have built an agency model that is very uncommon as far as I can see.

We remain quiet. Our actions are our words and we have a lot more storytelling to do. And here in the USA our next big restless pursuit begins.

“Go all the way with it. Do not back off. For once, go all the goddamn way with what matters.” - Ernest Hemingway