As any new parent knows, it is one thing to read about parenting. It is another when you bring that bundle of joy home, and it is all yours to nourish and grow.

Team Xhilarate has been advising and helping clients grow brands for years. Based on client feedback and our reputation, we believe that we are pretty good at it.

When Covid hit the photo/video production side of Xhilarate suddenly everything became very quiet. Coincidentally, this silence occurred when one of our partners, Photographer Zave Smith, had an idea for a new recruitment platform called xBound.

Zave noticed how hard it was for people over 50 to get back in the workforce after a job loss. He also noticed many professionals were retiring, yet still wanted to remain engaged in their professional lives. His idea was to create a platform that would make it easy for businesses and non-profits to connect with the experience, wisdom, and technical knowledge of late career and semi-retired talent. The Covid photography break gave Zave the time he needed to explore and possibly launch this new recruitment platform.

As designers, photographers, and content creators, we have spent our careers urging our clients to use our talents to help them build their brands. Now as start-up owners with very limited capital, the question of how to spend our resources to achieve the best growth went from the theoretical to very real. Questions like, should we invest on a shoot, stock footage, google ad words, lead generation services, a conference, or to hire talent? With xBound added to our product mix, we now must constantly be asking ourselves “where should our limited time and resources go today?”

The effect has made team Xhilarate more humble and more empathetic to our clients’ needs. We understand why many clients are nervous when they reach out to us to build their brands. They are also grappling with limited resources that need to be allocated across a broad range of business building efforts and it is difficult to understand which investments will result in the strongest ROI. When you make that commitment to allocate precious resources to creating the strategic and visual aspects of your brand, we take that commitment to heart.

Now that xBound has grown from a seed of an idea and is in full-up launch mode, we are spinning it off to allow it to grow to its fullest potential and to allow the Xhilarate team to focus on what it does best–strategic branding, design and client service. Xhilarate and xBound have witnessed, first-hand, the power of design, branding and clear market messaging. This is how we broke through the clutter and market noise created by the much larger competitors in the branding & design and recruitment industries. It is the same power we can offer to you—the power of strategic thinking, clear messaging, and visual assets that truly will help grow your brand.

About Xhilarate