The Myth That Sinks Companies
Written By: Jules Flesner
In downturns, when companies look to trim costs, creative and tech roles are often the first to go. Why?
Not because they aren’t valuable. In fact, they’re usually critical to a company’s sustainability and market share. They’re cut because their contributions are misunderstood, and don’t translate neatly into the black-and-white numbers that finance and the C-suite rely on to make staffing decisions.
Leadership, accountants, and creatives all speak different “languages.” In practice their roles or departments are foreign worlds.
It’s easy to connect sales roles to revenue streams. It’s nearly impossible to quantify design, brand, and culture shaped by creative/tech roles. And when misunderstood, these functions and employees become invisible.
The Absorption Myth
When creative or tech roles are dissolved, leadership often assumes whatever workload remains can simply be absorbed by residual staff. But this logic would never fly in other departments. If an accountant role dissolved, would you hand off payroll or cash flow to a graphic designer? If an analyst walked, would you expect a web developer to build financial forecasts?
Creative and technical roles, requiring the same depth of skill and advanced education, often gets treated as optional, or worse, interchangeable. The truth: eliminating these roles doesn’t just shift the workload. It destabilizes company culture (internal) and erodes the brand (external).
Company Culture: What Your Employees Feel on Sunday Night
Culture is never going to show up on a P&L sheet. That’s because it comes a step before. It’s the heartbeat of your workforce. It lives in the minds of employees, and can look like:
That gnawing pit in their stomach on Sunday night, or the unfazed calm when the Monday morning alarm goes off.
Inside jokes that foster belonging (although never at someone’s expense!).
Leaders who laugh at themselves first, setting the tone for humility and safety.
Clear, current RACI charts that prevent gray-zone stress and hours of wasted productivity over who should be cc’d on an email.
Meetings that spark enthusiasm because they respect people’s time with proactive agendas and disciplined hosts who stick to them.
Space in the week (3–5 hours) reserved for training, research, and innovation, carved out evenly across roles and departments to avoid inequality resentment.
Culture is influenced through a thousand non-direct actions, most of which creatives (with strong comms/tech support) tend to initiate. Lose them, and you lose the glue that holds everything together.
Brand: What Customers Think When They Hear Your Name
If culture lives in employees’ heads, brand lives in customers’. You can’t control it. You can only influence it. Brand is shaped in ways like:
The sharp designer who turns complex products into sales-closing collateral.
The PR team that positions the company as a credible, interesting/original thought leader.
The tech whisperer who keeps the customer-facing platform seamless.
The SEO, SEM, and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) experts ensuring that AI search engines talk about your business accurately and favorably.
A strong brand means customers are eager to pay for your product or service and recommend you without hesitation. A weak brand results in missed sales targets, staff churn, customer frustration, and reputation damage that could take years, or a full repositioning, to restore.
Over time, creative/tech investments compound. Sell a product or service line, and you might realize tens of millions more because of the positive perception that’s been deliberately nurtured over years.
Translating the Intangible Into Numbers
Yes, culture and brand are elusive terms. They don’t translate into Excel columns as easily as revenue and expenses. But we can evaluate their ROI:
Smaller companies: For less than $1M annually in staff/agency hires and tools, you can enable hundreds of millions in sales while slashing staff turnover (typically ranging from 50% to 200% of an employee’s annual salary).
Larger companies: With millions invested in internal creative departments and/or agency partnerships, you can support billions in revenue with under 10% turnover (which fuels stability and preserves institutional knowledge).
When creative and tech roles are cut, immediate savings are overshadowed by long-term losses in competitiveness, recruitment, and profitability.
So Who’s in Charge of Defining the Elusive + Dispelling the Absorption Myth?
The companies that are hurting right now have had C-suite, founders, and executives sitting in ivory towers, speaking only in numbers, ignoring guidance and ideas from the creative and business development experts they hired. Ultimately, these are the roles that must create space for collaboration between math-minded leaders and perception/concept-driven creatives.
That said, creatives and tech leaders proposing bold (even disruptive) ideas to C-suite, must accept the risk that comes if those business development ideas impacting culture and brand aren’t adopted. You can have flawless logic and rock-solid/numbers-driven data, but if it’s not your company, the final decision isn’t yours.
Leaders can overlook, dismiss, or misunderstand them, but the concepts of culture and brand still pay the bills. They are critical assets, not optional luxuries. The companies that truly understand and invest in this are the ones we see surviving and thriving.
