In-house creative teams often have no idea how their work is performing. No data, feedback loop or connection between the assets they're producing and the business outcomes those assets are supposed to drive. Jess Abdulnour kept running into this problem, and eventually built a system to fix it.

In this episode, Jess shares the Creative ID system she developed to connect creative output to performance data without custom software or expensive integrations. But the deeper problem goes beyond data access: it's about how creatives see themselves and their role in the business, and why getting them to claim ownership of performance is harder than solving any technical problem.

Jess Abdulnour is the founder of The BrandNuè Agency and has spent 15 years working in brand strategy and creative operations for companies in regulated industries including finance, mortgage, healthcare, and legal. She has held senior brand and creative ops roles at companies including New American Funding and Camino Financial. Her work focuses on helping regulated businesses build brands that drive growth when paid acquisition channels plateau.

• The Creative ID system: how a simple field added across existing tools connected creative output to performance data
• What changed for the creative team once they could see results: from subjective approval to data-backed decision-making
• Why the mindset problem is harder to solve than the technical one, and what it takes to get creatives to see performance as their responsibility

• Download the free Creative ID Guide here: www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-id

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-ops-assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net

When your output is no longer the work: that's the shift that defines creative leadership. But most creatives who move into leadership roles struggle to make it. They still measure their value by what they produce, not what they enable others to produce, and that quietly undermines their teams, their influence, and their own satisfaction.

In this episode, Tyler Mitchell shares what that transition actually looked like from the inside: the late-night doubt, the identity crisis, and the moment he realized that the distance between leader and doer isn't a failure of connection, but a necessary condition for good leadership. We also discuss the leaders who got it wrong, what he took from those experiences, and what he's doing differently right now to develop the next generation of creative leaders on his own team.

About the Guest

Tyler Mitchell is the Director of Video Strategy at Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., one of the largest insurance brokerage and risk management firms in the world. He has spent his entire career in-house, moving from product photography and print layout to video production to leading a globally distributed video team. As a creative leader, Tyler has developed a people-first philosophy rooted in empathy, intentional development, and the discipline of staying connected to the creative without being involved in every step of the work.

Key Topics Discussed

• The identity shift that catches most new creative leaders off-guard: moving from measuring your value by what you produce to what you enable
• Why seeing the person behind the work, not just the output, is both the right thing to do for them and for the business
• The functional lead track that Tyler created to develop future leaders without loading them down with administrative overhead

Connect with Jesse

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-ops-assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net

Most companies' hiring systems weren't designed for creative work. Internal recruiters don't usually have the creative industry expertise to evaluate tone, craft, or cultural fit. And creative directors end up stuck in approval processes that take weeks when they need someone tomorrow.

Steve Potestio has spent 20 years in creative staffing. He's watched companies build systems that make it harder to hire the right creative talent. In this episode, we break down why creative staffing breaks down, what gets lost in translation, and what creative leaders can actually do to get the flexibility they need.

Steve Potestio is the Managing Director of Harvester Talent, a creative staffing firm focused on direct-to-client relationships and deep creative industry expertise. Over 20 years in the industry, he's built and scaled multiple staffing companies and watched the staffing landscape evolve from direct hiring manager access to complex vendor management systems. He's seen firsthand how procurement-driven processes strip away the subjective evaluation that creative hiring requires, and he built Harvester Talent specifically to solve that problem by working directly with hiring managers who understand what creative talent actually needs.

• How to make the business case for staffing flexibility
• Why the best recruiters push back on job descriptions instead of just executing them
• Understanding potential over immediate fit: evaluating the gray area beyond resumes and job descriptions
• How to build relationships for future roles, not just immediate openings

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-ops-assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net