Meet Robert Bean, Lila Morency | Story-driven film production company

We had the good fortune of connecting with Robert Bean, Lila Morency and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Robert, Lila, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
I, Lila, was a fashion designer for nearly a decade, initially attracted to the beauty and creativity of the sector, but when entering the ‘real world’ after fashion school, I realized there was a mismatch with my values at a moral and sustainable level, as well as with my strong desire to put something out into the world that was making it a better place instead of feeding this consumeristic machine.

I felt like my creativity was being forced instead of nourished and I really struggled to find peace of mind. After a period working in a toxic design office, I decided to leave design all together. Eventually I found myself working in sales, helping a denim brand expand into the Italian market. That gave me a lot of freedom and allowed me to travel all over Italy and connect with people, but the creativity and feeling of contributing something meaningful to the world was still missing.

Robert, on the other hand, was a commercial pilot for easyJet. Even after dedicating so much time to studying and spending so much money to make his childhood dream of becoming a pilot come true, he realized that the lack of creativity and connection to people was missing. When given the opportunity to go part time, he took it and was able to start exploring more creative avenues that he loved as a child, starting to play around with a camera again and making films.

After a couple of collaborations together, we had the opportunity to tell a story for a sustainable cycling brand in Europe. It featured our friend, Davide, who recently separated from his wife and cycled north to south of Italy as a way to prove to himself that he was strong and capable enough to tackle this next chapter of life alone. This was our first ever story, prior to that we’d worked on a handful of ads but nothing of substance.

Davide’s story moved us to tears during the interview. The energy in the room was beautiful, raw, emotional, vulnerable. Robert and I turned to each other at the end and said, “this is it”. We could feel the power of storytelling, it’s realness. We didn’t know how we were going to bring it into the world, but we just knew the world needed more of it.

Less than a year later we’d quit our jobs and moved from Italy to Colorado, started IMPACT and dove into the deep end.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Straight talk – the first 2 years of business felt like we were at business school. We made some SILLY mistakes, we invested in (many) things that gave us no ROI, we got distracted doing other things when clients asked, “do you do x?”. What else? Well, we had some incredible results that we decided to stop doing (and then realize that we should have scaled those things), we worked with many companies we didn’t want to work with but couldn’t say no.

We learned the hard way.

Well, it was expected, wasn’t it? Partnering a fashion designer with a pilot? You get a whole heap of vision, and big dreams, but a lot of naivety and business inexperience.

But we’re still here, and now thriving, working in a niche that we truly love. We look back at the last couple of years and wouldn’t have changed it for anything else. There’s a somewhat masochistic element to entrepreneurship that exists in the moments where everything hurts, yet you still need to take another step forward, you need to keep going.

And in moving forward daily, this journey has been less of a professional one, but more of an inward one. The business wasn’t going the direction we wanted it to back then because we were in the way. When sales weren’t happening, we were the issue. When the pipeline was empty, we were the issue. When a project wasn’t completed on time or to the level it was intended, we were the issue.

Subconscious beliefs that had been internalized for a long time. I’m not good enough. I’m not worthy. Playing out worst-case scenarios, and not best-case scenarios. Self-sabotage. It’s all there. We humans all seem to suffer from a concoction of these aspects within our psyche. And we’re starting to see that many businesses fail when their owners fail to overcome those aspects.

This is a hard reality to swallow at times, but it sent us on a deep journey inward, to hold space for ourselves, to heal, to move on, to rid ourselves of the baggage that was getting in the way of success. This space-holding for ourselves has allowed us to bring a more holistic, whole, loving, compassionate, empathetic offering for our clients, because we now have more emotional capacity within our own lives.

Anyone can show up with a camera, record and interview, and try and piece everything together in the edit. We’ve learned it takes depth to tell a story, and if you don’t cultivate that depth in your own life, you can’t possibly hold space for another to bring that depth in the way that is true to them.

So that’s what we’re most proud of, and we believe this is what sets us apart. When our clients respond, “you just got us”, “you saw me”, when we move people to tears, it’s testament to the work we’ve put in, for constantly moving forward day-to-day. Understanding that the ups and downs in entrepreneurship are representative of the ups and downs of our own lives, so when presented with a challenge in business, we have an opportunity to turn within and solve something much deeper within ourselves.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Given that we’re entrepreneurs and we don’t take that many vacations, we’d 100% take the opportunity to max-out this trip with them…

Day 1: We’re ones to always plan a trip around food, so we could start in Boulder and go to Dry Storage for brunch, get a few snacks and go hang out by the Boulder Creek where we can do a little cold plunge in the river and hit Pearl Street for a midafternoon ice cream at Gelato Boy. For dinner we could go to Denver and hit up Gusto, an amazing Italian restaurant near Sloan’s Lake, where we could also enjoy a nice after dinner stroll.

Day 2: One of the coolest ways we’ve seen the state was from a top-down view was while sky diving, so we’d head over to Longmont to do that in the morning. Hopefully our guests would be down. Then to keep the excitement going, we’d hop in the car and drive up to Mt. Blue Sky; a beautiful to drive up to for people to experience being on a 14er without needing to do all the hard work.

Day 3: We’d keep heading west, destination Ouray, stopping by Palisade for some of the world’s juiciest peaches. In the afternoon, once in Ouray, we would rent some ATVs and get lost somewhere on off road trails.

Day 4: Telluride. Need I say more? Grab a pack lunch from Baked in Telluride and head up one of the trails by foot. In the afternoon we’d take the gondola to rest our legs and go have dinner somewhere up there.

Day 5: Now it’s time for some real culture. We’d recommend Mesa Verde’s cool built communities on the cliffs and a bit of history, although Robert has been keen to ride on the narrow-gauge railway between Durango and Silverton. So maybe we’ll just let him do that while we go to the cliff dwellings!

Day 6: Honestly, Mesa Verde is like 8 hours away, so we’d be headed back after a solid week out. Can’t go wrong by stopping by Leadville on the way back for lunch. Talk some big dreams about doing Leadville 100 someday, only to forget about it once lower where there’s more oxygen…

Day 7: Sleep all day. That was a loooong week.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
We definitely couldn’t have gotten to where we are without a good few mentors and guides. One of our hero’s is Chris Do from The Futur (correct with no ‘e’ at the end). It was something we heard in one of his podcasts talking about living a fulfilled life that led us to quit our jobs and venture into the world of entrepreneurship.

From Blair Enns, we learned how to price our creativity and speak about money with clients. A hugely important skill to have in business.

But the organization that we’d like to dedicate this shoutout to is Muse Storytelling for teaching us their proven, science-based process for crafting impactful, human-centered stories. The level of intentionality and remarkability that we’ve been able to bring into our business is truly as a result of their process, and we’re delighted to now mentor as story experts within their inner-circle.

Website: https://www.impact.eco/

Instagram: @impactfulstorytelling

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/42717866/

Image Credits
IMPACT LLC