When Mike and I set up Fleming Steele nearly a year ago we had a very clear vision of why we were doing it. Belfast is a great place to work. In fact it's like a big village. If you produce great work you get noticed. You get a network. Not only that but the pool of talent available in Northern Ireland's creative sector is quite exceptional so we set out to put Belfast on the map in the creative industry and make it a new creative centre of excellence.

If you look at our client base you will notice that we work all over the UK and further afield, and why not? We have clients as far away as Australia, USA and the South of France but we don't need to be in those locations all the time. We have a small office in Belfast and one in London but we tend to spend most of our time, not meeting clients face to face but actually doing great work for them. We do realise that key milestones on projects require meeting in person which is why we also spend quite a bit of time planting trees to off-set our airmiles carbon footprint.

As business people you will appreciate that keeping your cost base low is one of the key factors to success but that's not to say that you can't reach out a little further.  We are building our young business on technology: Twitter, Facebook, Website, applications such as Basecamp for project management and we use Skype every day to conference call with our clients all around the world for free!

So this was our 'why' as Simon Sinek (and our good friend Nick Sunderland) so brilliantly puts it in his TED presentation 'How leaders inspire action' featured below.

Dim lights

In The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier poses the question: 'Do you know who you are, what you do and why it matters?' You'll probably know the first two and if you have got the last one sussed then you are on track. Ask yourself these questions. You'll be surprised.

We took inspiration from Fallon - below is their story

Thirty years ago, five Minneapolis entrepreneurs met at a downtown diner and pooled their life savings to buy a single print advertisement that ran in two metro newspapers. On that day Fallon opened its doors, without a single client, under the headline, “A new advertising agency for companies that would rather outsmart the competition than outspend them.

Where others viewed our geography as a disadvantage, we found opportunity. Bob Dylan had already proven that if you’re determined to surprise the world, Minnesota is as good a place as any to raise your voice. Unlike the big ad shops on Madison Avenue and the left coast, we have the advantage of actually living in America where the people are–where brands, not trends, are built.

Fallon’s ambitious use of creativity to outsmart has been unwavering. Today outsmarting requires a more generous approach to marketing. Generous brands create something of value in the world: entertainment value, social value, and belief value. Generous brands are additive to peoples’ lives and to culture. They help build ideas in the world; they leave something behind. Modern branding is learning to give as much as you take.

Putting Belfast on the global Creative map is our 'why' - what's yours?

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