The Terrible Twos: Bonfire's 2nd Birthday
Plans, meet Reality. Reality, meet Expectations. And everybody meet Kevan and Shannon.
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight brand, marketing, and creative learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).
Bonfire just turned two. Which means that we’re officially no longer a “baby business”—more like a toddler now!
Last year, our one-year anniversary post felt like a celebration of everything we’d managed to accomplish in that relatively short period of time. We’d made significant cash, we’d worked with some cool clients, we’d guested on a dozen podcasts or webinars, and we generally felt really good about scaling our brand agency, bringing on freelance partners to expand our capacity, and moving into new lines of business like community and retreats.
We went into Year 2 with clear plans and high hopes…and then wow, did nothing go like we thought!
Let us tell you all about it.
Year 2 by the numbers
We went into Year 2 with a big bet: We’d be able to sustain our agency growth enough to onboard some “permanent” freelancers who could then, at the right moment, become our first full-time employees and take over much of the day-to-day agency operations. Plus, while the agency got big, we’d stand up a digital community and in-person retreats, capturing all the latent demand just sitting there waiting for us.
Spoiler alert: This didn’t happen.
With the agency work, we did onboard two freelancers—versatile brand and content strategists we knew and loved from past in-house roles—and then… 🦗🦗🦗🦗🦗
Our inbox continued to buzz with interest, but the crickets came when we’d follow up. Seemingly the minute the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2025, clients stopped signing with us.
It helped that we heard we weren’t alone. Other agency owners and solopreneurs told us similar things. The fiscal and regulatory Trumpian Chaos means lots of businesses are more skittish about spending money. AI “advancements” mean a lot of marketing leaders suddenly view brand as something a robot might do for them on the cheap. And the general disruption of AI in business, especially in content, social media, and SEO, means everyone is scrambling with resources and budgeting. Whether it was bad timing, no budgets, fuzzy ROI, or good old-fashioned ghosting, clients stopped saying yes at the same rate they did in Year 1 of Bonfire.
Obviously, mathematically, fewer clients plus more Bonfire staff isn’t a great formula. So, to get us back on the profit bus, we needed to do something we had yet to do at Bonfire: hustle for new business. The four of us spent a lot of time drumming up outbound experiments to get more people into the pipeline. We pitched ourselves on social media, we LinkedIn-networked til our eyes crossed, we sent dozens of emails to companies and contacts that had just raised money, had had a recent M&A event, or were explicitly looking to hire brand resources. This yielded maybe half a dozen discovery calls, only one of which became a client—and they were someone one of us had already worked with.
The most valuable lesson: We learned we all hated doing outbound. If this was the only way to feed a consistent pipeline, count us out. (And apparently it didn’t even do that!)
In the end, our revenue numbers in Year 2 don’t look so dramatically different than Year 1, but what was majorly different is the amount we spent on labor, expecting a scale that never arrived. We started the calendar year with ~6 months of expenses in our operating account (not our savings)…and by June we had indeed spent it all, even after freezing pay for ourselves.
While running in place with agency growth, we also took on two completely new lines of business. By choice, if you can believe it! These were intentional steps we wanted to take in order to find sustainable income and to do work that brings us joy … emphasis, at least in Year 2, on “work.” We’ve talked in other newsletters about our big pivot with the community we launched, and at the same time as this community flop-and-pivot, we planned and executed a totally new retreat offering because why not do something else expensive and risky. In keeping with Year 2’s theme, none of it has come easy.
Taking stock of the full year, the very rough breakdown by numbers and dollars, not including taxes, looks like this:
Now, deduct taxes (👋 ~30%), plus our tech stack, travel expenses, professional services like lawyers and accountants in two countries, and you can see how different Year 2 ended up being compared to Year 1.
“But wait!” you might be saying. “You have $200k in savings from Year 1, you ding-dongs. What’re you gonna do with that?”
We’ll discuss that below!
Join us for our next event…
⚠️ Spoiler alert: You can sneak a sabbatical into your existing life. What if you could design a mini-reset that you can actually do before this year ends? Learn how in this working session on Wednesday, October 15 @ 12pm EST.
Year 2 by the feelings
As we mentioned, the agency side of things did not take off in 2025 like we wanted it to.
A chaotic world breeds fiscal conservatism and shuns creativity.
And here we are, artsy people peddling pricey stories. Whoopsie!
If it were the Middle Ages, we would be run out of town by a torch-wielding mob or accused of witchcraft. Either way, we retreated to the woods.
And as we sat back, took care of the lovely clients we did have, and nursed our wounds from the stress and reality of running too many businesses at once, we realized something important:
We liked it in the woods.
First of all, it’s quieter here. We weren’t constantly being asked to justify our expertise and sell ourselves to skeptical clients. (You called us, remember?) We weren’t rushing to hit deadlines and thinking about how to make other companies more successful. And we weren’t toiling away at the teeth-pulling exercise of trying to extract a message, a meaning, a point of view from companies that simply had nothing of substance to say—companies that hire branding professionals to give them a point of view pleaseandthankyou, rather than hire branding professionals to excavate and elevate the authentic beliefs they already hold.
(Please note: This is rarely if ever the “fault” of the marketers trying to hire us. Brand appreciation is either in the DNA of the company, or it’s not!)
A lot of it started to feel really hollow. And kind of icky. Plus, we were distracted—in a good way!—by things like the events we were holding every month in our community, the live retreat we’re hosting in France this freakin‘ week (!!!), and all the other daydreamy cool stuff we were dying to kick off and get started or invest more serious time into.
Being a business owner comes with so many inescapable feelings like responsibility, pressure, uncertainty, fear, and hope. Having time and space—giving ourselves time and space—allowed us to understand what we really feel about our business and what we’re told to feel, by our pasts, by our beliefs, by our LinkedIns.
Year 2 brought about a Great Unlearning.
Unlearning definitions of success.
Unlearning what it means to work hard.
Unlearning urgency.
Unlearning how we value what we produce, which is unlearning what makes ourselves valuable.
Letting ourselves imagine what Bonfire is beyond an agency.
Basically, by slowing way, way down we were able to take notice of what work was actually exciting and stimulating, and what work wasn’t. And why. The slowdown allowed us the space to ask the radical question of what we really wanted to be doing instead of just continuing to do what was working. If we’d been making money with consulting clients hand-over-fist, up to our eyeballs in demand, and actively scaling the brand agency as planned, we wouldn’t have had the perspective to think “Wait a minute…do we really want this?” We’d be too caught up in the trees to imagine new paths through the forest.
Year 3 by the possibilities
You might think that a takeaway from our Year 2 roller coaster would be to not make any bold predictions or plans for Year 3.
You’d be wrong!
Perhaps we have become a bit more pragmatic after two years of business ebbs and flows, but we are no less ambitious with our dreamcasting. The past year has taught us patience and balance and an openness to let the business become all sorts of different things and not just the one single thing we believe it must. It has also reminded us of how fun and fulfilling it is to build something uniquely our own.
And therein lies the ambition for Year 3: How can we make Bonfire even more of a place where we do what we love?
The question first requires us to know what it is we love! Easier said than done, when outside voices and Western capitalism and productivity culture are trying to answer the question for you. Fortunately, we’re getting pretty good at feeling into the energy of ideas and following our own curiosities to figure out where we want to go next.
Here is what we really love doing that we don’t want to go away:
Working with people who are wrestling with the same things we are
Being creative at work and in life
Writing
Giving back / giving things away
Knowing this, Bonfire could end up being a TON of different things. Once we’ve discovered what it is we love doing, we then get the fun job of figuring out what this looks like in practice and how to make enough money from it (key word: enough).
Here are just some of our plans and pipe dreams that we’re kicking around for Year 3:
1 - Property purchase. (This is what the $200k is for.) We have plans to buy a property in France where we can host all sorts of cool events and parties and retreats and workshops. It’s one of our more realistic dreams, actually: We have French real estate agent friends and everything. If you’ve ever dreamed of being part of a French countryside experience (buying into a property, attending a getaway, hobnobbing with brokers), send us a reply. We’d love to connect!
2 - Bonfire Collective. We believe the next evolution of our agency will be toward an inclusive, collective model where Bonfire provides the infrastructure and network effects for a host of freelance consultants to thrive: PR, content, social media, design, you name it. If you’ve ever dreamed of going solo but were scared what “solo” would look like, we’d like to talk. Send us a reply!
3 - More retreats! Team retreats! In the coming weeks we’ll be putting together our retreat calendar for 2026, and we expect it to include multiple options across the year and multiple retreat types: the weeklong sabbatical like we’re running this year, but also maybe team retreats, shorter retreats, retreats in the US, retreats in space, who knows? If you have ideas, please do drop us a line.
4 - More writing. As you can tell from the length of this newsletter, we like to write! It is one of our favorite things we get to do each week, so we’re actively wondering how we can bring more of this editorial perspective and creative practice into our Bonfire work. Maybe 2026 will be the year of the quarterly Bonfire magazine. Maybe we’ll buy a fledgling local US newspaper. Maybe we’ll write a book. Or two. Stay tuned!
5 - Pipe dreams. It probably does not surprise you that we have a laundry list of other ideas that we think could be interesting to try. These ideas include: a software product, a publishing company, a funny T-shirt business, a French chateau HGTV show, applying for The Amazing Race, a book club, mushroom chocolates...
And we should be clear: the Bonfire agency will continue into Year 3. Send us any referrals you’d like, and we’ll gladly answer. The Campout community will continue into Year 3, and we promise not to pivot too many more times. (👀)
We have a lot we want to do, but as Year 2 taught us, we don’t need to be in a rush to do it all. In fact, rushing and striving and sweating toward the goalposts is decidedly NOT how we want to be doing Bonfire.
And that might be the biggest lesson from Year 2 of our now-toddler business: We know ourselves better about what we do and do not want to be doing.
Which should make for a great Year 3, regardless of what comes next.
Over to you…
If any part of our journey resonates with you, get in touch! As you can see, we’re very much figuring it out as we go, and we love building our community as we do.
Want more like this? Join us in Campout.
In Campout, our digital community, we talk about stuff like this on the daily in our channels and a couple times a month in our live events. All supported by exercises and templates to help you craft a career with purpose and intention.
This month, join us for:
DIY Sabbatical: Design your own recharge. A working session that answers the question: What if you could design a mini-reset that fits your actual life, not the version where you have unlimited PTO and zero responsibilities?
Career AMA (Save the Date). Our very first Career AMA is in the works—where someone gets real about their career journey, the pivots, the wins, the "wait, how did I end up here?" moments, and everything in between.
But wait! There’s more…
Wanna hang out?
We’re SOLD OUT for our first retreat this fall, but you can join the waitlist for our next one, coming spring of 2026.
Wanna be friends?
If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.
Wanna work with us?
If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.
As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.
