For four years I co-led a branding and design studio in the Toronto area called Renga. The idea behind this studio was to, as much as possible, help support businesses doing good work reach the right people. Our tagline, the future needs good brands, captured this intention.

The role evolved as our team grew; but my primary responsibilities were growing and leading the team, supporting with brand strategy on some client work, and overseeing many of the operational aspects of the business. My title here was sort of a tricky thing to land on, we went with Director of People and Operations because my responsibilities held a lot within those areas. Managing Director might also be closer to what it was in practice.

Brand Strategy

Early in my role, I worked with the founder/CEO to develop our brand strategy model that was focused on the intention behind your brand. We coined our approach brand therapy, and the idea was to help our clients get to the healthiest version of their brands via intention (what you want your brand to be) and then perception (how others experience it). We found it helpful to externalize the brand as a separate person in order to explore how our clients want their brand to be experienced by their ideal customers/users. It also helped our clients separate their own ideals and preferences from what was best for the brand. This brand person would form the basis for the brand guide.

It's important to note that this was just one tool we used to work with clients. Another that I developed was building brands around purpose. This usually came out of discovery calls with clients where we focused on why they created the company, what problem were they trying to solve, and how would their solution make their target audience's lives better. This helped us lock into something less abstract than a brand persona and instead give their brand that singular heroic purpose that stayed true to the reason the company existed.

Growing and Leading the Team

When I started, the team was made up of 3.5 roles—3 of those were the founding team, of which I was a part of. During my time there we grew the team up to a maximum of 14 roles, including designers, copywriters, strategists, account managers, and even interns. As we grew, my role really shifted to ensuring that our team was healthy, happy, and committed to doing good work on time.

This included a full employee life cycle: interviews, hiring, onboarding, reviews, and regular 1:1s with every member of the team where I would check in on their work and troubleshoot with them. These 1:1s were also a space to coach our team, where I could help them think about their career goals and find ways in their current work to take steps towards them.

I also took on hosting our full team meetings each week, trying to create a healthy environment where we could think and laugh together even when we were on separate clients and projects throughout the rest of the week.

Organizational Infrastructure

Managing people well requires more than just good relationships, you need good systems in place. My role involved ensuring our systems and processes for managing a remote team worked well. Some of the systems I managed were:

• Humi (HR software);

• Asana (project management & 1:1s);

• Employee Handbook.

One of the fun projects I worked on in this space was creating an Employee Handbook that captured everything in one place. It had everything from our policies to defining what software we used and how to use it.

Special Projects & Client Support

One other part of my role was providing high level org strategy, specifically on things to keep us in line with our desire to be a socially good company, and supporting with strategy and copywriting for several clients. Projects here include:

• Overseeing our B-Corp Application process;

• Strategy lead for our company rebrand (2022);

• Writing and pitch strategy on fundraising decks for Henry Rose, Home (now Dwelling), Bright, and Simplii Bank;

• Brand strategy support for Manifest Climate, Three Ships, Threads, Wellfield Technologies, & MoneyClip.