CGC Guides

Passion Projects vs Paying the Bills

By Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov | Updated September 28, 2026

Every creative business lives with the same pull: the work you love rarely pays, and the work that pays is rarely the work you brag about. The owners who navigate it best do not treat passion projects as a guilty indulgence or a someday dream. They treat them as funded investments with a job to do: building the portfolio, opening new markets, sharpening the craft, and keeping the founder in love with the company.

This guide draws on seven episodes of Creatives Grab Coffee, from the milestone episode where Dario and Kyrill named the tension out loud, to a studio whose corporate work funded a half-million-dollar feature film, to an owner who built a separate banner just to protect the filmmaker inside the business. The pattern across all of them: stability first, then passion, on purpose.

The Milestone Confession

Fifty episodes into the show, Dario and Kyrill set the guest chair aside and recorded the conversation that frames this whole guide. It took three takes, because the first two turned into venting sessions. The honest version that survived, Passion vs Business and the Future of CGC, names the thing most owners feel but rarely say: the large majority of an owner’s time goes to business development, growth, and outreach, and only a small slice goes to the craft that pulled them in.

The episode’s sharpest reframe is about how people end up here in the first place. Almost nobody in corporate video chose it on passion alone. They drifted toward the work that paid, got good at it, and the passion formed around the skill.

That is not cynicism. It is permission. You do not have to have dreamed of making ads to build a real, fulfilling business doing it, and admitting the tension out loud is the first step to managing it deliberately.

Stability First: A Sequence, Not a Tradeoff

The throughline of that milestone episode is that passion and stability are not opposites competing for your soul. They are a sequence. Running a corporate video business is a business first and a creative pursuit second, and the creative pursuits only survive if the business underneath them is solvent.

Two practical moves follow. First, split roles by preference: Kyrill leads creative and Dario leads business, so each protects the part of the work he actually enjoys. Second, price properly, because margin is what funds the bets. If your client work barely breaks even, there is no passion budget to allocate, which is why this guide pairs with how to price video production work.

The Rule: Passion Pays When a Brand Is Attached

Sean Collins of Jukebooth gave the show its cleanest articulation of the economics, in the episode that inspired this guide’s title, Passion Projects vs Keeping the Lights On. Sean loves storytelling work, and he is clear-eyed about what it earns on its own.

His answer is not to abandon the fun work but to engineer the overlap: chase the passion, keep real attention on the corporate, product, and promotional work that funds it, and where possible, attach a paying brand to the story you wanted to tell anyway. His bet on outdoor adventure filmmaking, mountain biking, hiking, and hunting stories built into a genuine pillar of the business, is exactly that: passion converted into a positioning play.

Passion Projects as Portfolio and Marketing

Chris Kitchen built KGB Productions on the purest version of this play. The company started in 2003 as a ski-film outfit in Jackson Hole, and the outdoor passion work never stopped, it just changed jobs. As he explains in Mastering Your Niche, KGB’s personal films and award-winning documentaries function as both portfolio and marketing: they showcase what the team can really do, attract new kinds of clients, and open doors into new markets that a commercial reel alone would not.

Strategic spec work does the same job, demonstrating capability before a client has to take a risk. And the passion is not just a marketing artifact: two decades in, Chris credits staying creatively challenged as the thing that sustains the career at all. The niche his passion built is also the moat the business still runs on, the dynamic covered in full in should you niche your video production company.

The Separate Banner: Protecting the Filmmaker

Craig Bass of Motion Source takes the most structural approach on the show. A couple of years before his episode, he created Year of the Phoenix, a separate banner for his own films: a feature documentary years in the making, a fictional feature in progress, and a stream of shorts. He keeps it apart from Motion Source because the corporate market has nothing to do with that creative audience, and because growing the studio the wrong way would crowd the films out, the case he makes in The Case for Not Growing Your Studio.

Two details make his version convincing. First, the passion work measurably improves the client work: the crew’s documentary experience directly upgraded the interview lighting on Motion Source’s corporate shoots. Second, nearly half his slate is lower-budget nonprofit work he finds more fulfilling than another product spot, proof that fulfillment can be engineered into the paying work too, not just quarantined into side projects. His warning to owners is blunt: do not let the business convince you that client work is as close to filmmaking as you will ever get.

Let the Corporate Work Fund the Feature

Damian Fitzsimmons of Braveman Media is the show’s best proof that the sequence pays off. Years of reinvested corporate and commercial work, and steadily larger budgets, are what made a feature film thinkable at all. Then, in 2016, a corporate client trusted him with a personal story, a bar he and his friends opened in 1972, and Damian’s screenwriting background turned the anecdotes into Across the Rails, a period feature with a roughly half-million-dollar budget, the arc he traces in From Corporate to Feature Films.

Note what greenlit it: not a passion budget line, but a client relationship built through the paying work. The film also ran on relationship capital behind the camera. Damian’s best friend since age twelve, the Emmy-winning cinematographer Colin Watkinson, shot it for a fraction of his rate, on the same vintage lenses he would later use on The Handmaid’s Tale.

The film went on to win Best Film at the Liverpool International Film Festival. The corporate base did not compete with the dream. It was the funding mechanism, the same pattern that shows up across founding stories in how to start a video production company.

Fund Your Team's Passion, Not Just Your Own

Rise Media in South London widens the lens. The company itself was born from passion, three friends filming each other’s parkour in the Jackass era, and the founders have institutionalized that origin: alongside gym memberships and private healthcare, Rise runs a passion-project initiative where the company funds a team member’s pitched idea, part of the culture they describe in 3 Founders, 1 Vision.

The framing matters. For Rise, funded passion projects are not charity, they are retention strategy, because the hardest part of running a nine-person studio is finding and keeping good people. Giving your best editor a company-backed creative outlet is often cheaper than replacing them, the same logic behind growing and investing in your team.

The Documentary Midlife Crisis

By the show’s hundredth episode, Dario and Kyrill had noticed a pattern across a hundred guests: after enough years in the industry, almost everyone wants to make a documentary. They named it the documentary midlife crisis in Looking Back and Moving Forward, and their prescription is the most practical passion advice in the archive: start with a three-minute passion piece and prove the concept before betting a year on ninety minutes.

The episode is also a case study in a different kind of passion project: the podcast itself. Five years in, the hosts are clear that the show earns almost nothing directly, and that the value is indirect, relationships, learning, and visibility for the company behind it. Some passion projects pay in currencies other than revenue, and knowing which currency you are chasing is part of scoping the project honestly.

The Scaling Trap: Growth Does Not Buy Creative Freedom

One reason owners defer passion work is the belief that scale will eventually buy the freedom to do it. Episode 50 dismantles that math. In a service business, an extra fifty thousand in revenue usually means more talent, more overhead, and more management, not more profit and certainly not more free time. A production company that doubles its headcount mostly doubles its management burden.

Craig Bass is the living counterexample: Motion Source peaked at eight or nine employees, and he deliberately shrank it to three plus freelancers, in part to protect the filmmaking. If growth is on your roadmap, do it with open eyes and real systems, the ground covered in how to scale a video production company, and do not expect the passion budget to appear on the other side of the org chart by itself.

What the Passion Work Gives Back

Read across the seven episodes and the returns on well-run passion work are concrete. Portfolio and market access: KGB’s documentaries opened client categories the commercial reel could not. Craft: Motion Source’s documentary work upgraded its corporate interview lighting. Identity: Rise’s parkour origin is still the most memorable thing about their positioning. Retention: a funded passion initiative keeps a team that is otherwise hard to keep. Fulfillment: Craig’s nonprofit slate and Damian’s feature are why those owners still love their companies. The common thread is intent. In every case the passion work was scoped, funded, and pointed at a job, not squeezed out of leftover evenings and resentment.

The Playbook: Funding Passion Work Without Starving the Business

Distilled from the seven episodes, here is the sequence that keeps both sides alive.

1. Stabilize first. Confirm the client work reliably covers costs and pays the founders before you allocate anything to passion projects.
2. Price for margin, because margin is the passion budget. Know what your work costs and your real day rates, and charge accordingly.
3. Set an explicit passion budget: a percentage of profit or a fixed annual figure, decided in advance, so the projects are funded on purpose instead of bleeding the company quietly.
4. Give every passion project a job: portfolio, new market, craft development, team retention, or pure fulfillment. Name it before you shoot.
5. Attach a brand where you can. The overlap between a story you love and a client who will pay for it is the highest-leverage passion work there is.
6. Start small and prove it. A three-minute piece tests the concept, the workflow, and your appetite before you bet a year on a feature.
7. Use relationship capital deliberately: the client who trusts you with a personal story, the world-class friend who works for a favor. Big swings run on goodwill as much as budget.
8. Decide where the work lives. Under the company banner it feeds the portfolio directly; under a separate banner it protects both audiences. Both models work, so choose on purpose.
9. Extend the budget to your team. A funded team passion project is retention, morale, and R&D in one line item.
10. Review the returns yearly. Keep the projects that earned their job, portfolio wins, new markets, sharper craft, and rescope the ones that did not.

Frequently Asked Questions

Source Episodes

Every perspective in this guide comes from an on-the-record conversation. Go deeper with the full episodes:

The Hosts

About

Creatives Grab Coffee is a podcast about the business behind video production: sales, strategy, pricing, team building, and everything that happens off camera. New episodes every week on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Lapse Productions is a Toronto-based video production company serving tech, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing clients with corporate, promotional, event, and testimonial video. New to commissioning video? Start with our guide to the types of corporate video.