Why do people go to personal trainers? It’s free to jog in the park. One session with a trainer costs as much as a month at the gym. More even. And yet people see trainers all the time and the reason is obvious.

Trainers know the secret to working their muscles. They work out daily. Their bodies are at peak performance. (We’re talking awesome, fit and muscular trainers here – shout out to the trainers @ tribe). Someone who doesn’t work out daily could never match this level of performance. Their muscles are simply not conditioned that way.

Just as the body has limitations, so does the mind. Lucky for us, we can train our bodies and minds to perform better, faster, and more efficiently. Just as muscles grow stronger through the process of constant tearing and repairing, creativity, or the creative muscle also develops through focused and sustained exercise.

Where does brand strategy fit into all this? If you want to get fit, you see a trainer. The trainer provides you with the high performance strategy that will take you from here to there. The same goes for your brand strategist. Like that trainer, he’s been flexing those creative muscles daily, pulling and tearing, repairing and pulling them again. He knows about peak performance. He knows what a well-branded business can be capable of.

Where some businesses may see limitations (“No way can I lift eighty kilos!”), a brand strategist sees opportunities (“We can leverage some weight over here to make it seem lighter.”). He looks at your strengths and uncovers possibilities where you might not have seen them before. Just as you look to your trainer’s sleek physique for inspiration, your brand strategist gives you a fat injection of creativity.

That’s what we’ve been doing at here The Sponge: funneling our energy into creative strategizing. Every day. After we’ve strategized, we rip it all apart and put it back together again, make it stronger. It’s entrepreneurial weightlifting and hot damn, it feels good. For myself, I feel incredibly grateful for the opportunity to do this kind of creative muscle-flexing.

It’s that energy and sizzle that we long to pass on in a strategy meeting. At the Sponge, we’re selective with our clients because we know it’s essential for achieving maximum effect. A strategy is something we have to develop together. It’s an exchange of ideas and it requires open-minded clients to get excited about new innovation, clients that want to explore and have fun.

Fun, you say? Yes, fun. That’s when the best work gets done. When people get excited – that’s when the creative juices really get flowing. That’s a large part of why seeing a brand strategist is important. Once the creativity comes, you start to examine facets of your business you didn’t even know existed. Revenue streams appear like magic. You start clipping away all those tedious bits that create stress.

Strategy meetings are a place for things to grow, a place where ideas get molded into products you can take to the bank. What exactly goes on in these meetings? I’ll save that for next time.