Click anything to jump. Or press → and take the yellow brick road.
In 2001 I founded the design and film department at Visual Art: direct-to-client creative built on top of a post house’s craft. That department went on to become Goodbye Kansas Studios. The move you described at lunch, a post-heavy house building its creative layer, is one I’ve already made inside this company’s own ancestry.
I’d made the same move before at Rising Sun Pictures, and I spent the last decade running the finished version of it: Brokendoll, a strategy and creative studio built on a small senior core, working with Microsoft, Paradox and Mojang.
What follows is the model I promised you: how the division works, why the economics hold, and how I’d build it inside Kansas.
The last one of these I built became Goodbye Kansas Studios.
Your first interim report said it plainly: growth alone is not enough, the focus is the quality of revenue, not only the level. And Q1 backed it up with the first EBITDA-positive quarter in the recent record. The turnaround is real and visible.
Here’s the thing about quality of revenue: it’s decided long before the invoice. It’s decided by who owns the strategy, who writes the brief, and whether the work is commissioned from trust or won in a bid. A fixed-cost studio bidding at the execution layer can improve its quality of revenue at the margins. It can’t change which side of the margin it lives on.
That’s not a criticism of the work. Kansas’s craft opens doors at the Netflix, Amazon and Sony tier that most studios never see. It’s an observation about where the work sits in the value chain, and the value chain has an upstream.
You can’t bid your way to pricing power.
The division you described is the one I’m proposing: a small, strategy-first entity under the Kansas umbrella, on the right side of the 80/20 rule. It owns the brief upstream, sells the full campaign, and prices from strategy instead of from hours.
Execution runs through a parallel pipe built for campaign economics: Kansas’s bench as the first-call execution pool at internal rates, freelancers as the overflow valve, AI throughout, and Kansas’s own AAA assets as the raw material. The studio keeps selling the tentpole. The division sells everything around it.
It opens two doors at once: the rest of the campaign on clients Kansas already has, and the AA tier the studio’s cost structure can’t currently price for.
Before the script is written, we write the brief.
Goodbye Kansas is a Wizard of Oz reference. Dorothy is the one who actually leaves Kansas: small, determined, and the reason the story goes anywhere. dot is the working name for the division, and it completes your own metaphor from inside your own brand world.
It’s built on Ferrari logic: a distinct personality with a clear position, never “Goodbye Kansas but smaller.” The parent lends the reputation; the sub-brand does the leaving.
And the name is the first live demonstration of the methodology. Naming, positioning and identity from a blank page is precisely the discipline the division sells.
The naming is the demo.
Stage one is a paid design engagement. We define the offer, the pricing, the name, the pipeline and the anchor clients: the division on paper, with revenue attached, before a single fixed cost exists. It also lets both sides test the working relationship while it’s still cheap to be wrong.
Stage two, at launch, I step in as founder-operator: running the creative and the vision, with operational support building underneath as revenue scales. The senior core stays small. That’s not a constraint; it’s the model.
Revenue before fixed costs. The rule applies to me too.
A modern game launch buys strategy, brand identity, key art, cinematic trailers, live-action, gameplay capture, dev diaries, social content and a hundred versioned deliverables behind them. The list is long, and it’s bought as a campaign, increasingly from whoever owns the strategy.
Kansas sells the most prestigious line on that list: the tentpole trailer. One line. The rest is commissioned elsewhere, at margins the trailer never sees, by people the trailer vendor never meets.
The client buys the list. Kansas sells one line of it.
For every trailer, Kansas builds AAA-grade characters, environments, rigs and performances: some of the most expensive assets in the business, paid for once and usually retired after ninety seconds of screen time.
A campaign pipe that starts from those assets instead of from zero produces key art, social content, dev diaries and versioned deliverables at marginal cost. No outside agency can match that price, because no outside agency has the assets.
That’s the industrial logic under the division: the studio makes the hero asset; dot amortises it across the entire campaign.
Everyone else starts from a blank file.
The division’s own headcount stays small and senior, permanently. Execution capacity is rented per project through a valve that points home first: Kansas’s bench at internal transfer prices, external freelancers as overflow to keep the pricing honest.
The division’s P&L stays variable-cost. The bench gets utilisation it wasn’t getting. And the work arrives pre-sold at strategy-anchored prices instead of won in competitive bids.
At Brokendoll the freelance line swung five-fold month to month on identical headcount: 258K one month, 1.3M SEK the next. That’s the point. The cost only exists when the revenue does.
The bench stops being overhead the day the work arrives pre-sold.
Your AA-to-AAA framing maps exactly onto the model’s two documented capacity bands:
Scaling adds senior leads and valve width. Never fixed capacity.
The unit economics were never the problem.
Three times I’ve built a 360 offering for post-heavy companies: taking craft houses upstream into strategy, direct to the people who commission the work.
One direction the whole way: closer to the client, further up the value chain.
This goes beyond writing and creating concepts. It’s brand-based: positions, platforms and identities that campaigns get built on. Before the script is written, we write the brief.
And it’s 0-to-1 thinking: naming, positioning and building from a blank page. It’s the hardest brief, and the one dot itself will be born from.
The relationships already exist: since Crusader Kings III, Paradox has asked me personally to define every grand-strategy brand they own. A Sharkmob tone-of-voice workshop grew into naming and brand copy. Minecraft kept me embedded for eight years, Eurovision reached 200 million viewers, Microsoft made us a Preferred Supplier.
I was coming home anyway.
Thank you for reading. Let’s talk.