Our Origin Story

How a hallway conversation, a hard truth at a bar, and a small peer group became Fast Forward Collective.

This is our first post on this new site, and there's really only one way to start: from the beginning.

Overheard in a hallway

At TAAFI, a top international animation conference and expo, three industry veterans — rain-makers, funders, and producers — stood talking in the hall outside the program rooms. This is what they said:

The kids who get internships and go right into creative jobs after graduating are the lucky few.

Those who don't graduate with a job already will likely end up on the scrap heap.

So many great and talented artists are being discarded with no chance.

We set out to turn that around. This is why Fast Forward Collective began.

It started with my son

I'm a longtime business leader, coach, and nonprofit founder. Most of all in this story, I'm the proud father of Zandy, a 2025 SCAD graduate with a BFA in Illustration. He may not be the "virtuoso type", of artist, but he has always wanted, deeply, to become a capable creative and to contribute to film, animation, and games. He grew up a devotee of graphic novels, and quickly of anime and manga, and worked steadily on his art all along, starting with drawing his grade-school classmates as "chibis."

Frankly, I was worried when he chose SCAD. I likened it, to my wife, to someone showing up at Juilliard and only then needing to learn an instrument. His first year was fully remote, in the depths of Covid in 2020; then he became a "freshmore" (a sophmore who'd not yet lived on campus) in the fall of 2021. He was assigned to Surf, and off he went into the wild and wonderful Savannah creative community orbiting planet SCAD. The outcome was impressive: SCAD developed his skills to a professional level, although he worked to the very edge of burnout to get there.

A hard truth at the bar

During a senior-year break, one night he was closing a restaurant we owned, where he was managing. I sat with him while he did the closing runs and counted cashboxes. As we sat at the bar, him working, me just listening, he said one of the most challenging things I've ever heard as a parent:

Dad, it turns out that I'm really good at something I don't want to do — managing the restaurant — and I'm not sure I'm good enough at the thing I want to do with all my soul: professional art.

The drift after graduation

He landed at home and began his job search in earnest. It was a grind of daily resume and cover-letter writing, met with rejections or, most often, just crickets. As an Eagle Scout, he has grit and is not adverse to sticking to it. But without the creative community of Savannah and the structure of school, we could tell he was frustrated and a little lonely. I could see that without some intervention, he might give up on his dreams and settle for a job well outside the creative lanes. It was heartbreaking for us as parents and, I would soon learn, it was happening to talented creative school graduates everywhere.

A trip to LightBox

Last year, Zandy asked to attend LightBox Expo to work on his job search. His mom, Jana, had one condition: he had to take me along. So I dug in with full immersion, as if my son was one of my CEO clients, and we prepared for weeks. Then at the event, I realized something. As wonderful as LightBox is, its really built around artists selling their work in artists alley and all the things one might expect from a trade-show. It isn't a job fair.

That said, the organizers work hard to ensure that there’s lots of career related break out and presentations. I attended them all and I observed the portfolio review process that goes on at the Expo. Every career and job-seeking breakout I attended was oversubscribed. Every portfolio review line snaked for around the exhibits. All were packed with young creatives trying to figure out the very same thing we were – how do I get my career started?

The need was obvious, and it appeared largely unmet.

We definitely weren't the only ones

Back home, interacting in SCAD parent groups on social media, I met others who shared the same worries — kids sitting in bedrooms, sending out resumes, trying to figure it all out alone, most under the weight of student loans coming due. For those who didn't leave school with everything lined up, there were few obvious places to go for guidance, help, or the fellowship of other creatives. Parents want to be supportive but don't always know much about the industries and sectors their young creatives are trying to break into. Parents and grads alike were becoming angry and jaded. One grad I met along the way, during the early days of testing this idea, put it simply:

My SCAD diploma is sitting on the floor and I should hang it up. But, as my student loans come due, it does seem like a metaphor for the outcome from my time, tuition, and degree from SCAD. I mean I'm serving at Cracker Barrel to make my loan payments...

An idea from another world

I coach CEOs and senior peer groups for a living. I began to wonder whether a similar approach could work for creative graduates: a small, peer and accountability group, plus some supporting tools and learning, that might build the missing bridge from graduation to an established creative career. I began to think of college art programs as a form of trade school. They just didn't have the bandwidth to also prepare young creative grads for the career development that would come and from industries in immense flux with AI and many other structural business model changes.

A pilot that's working

Late last year, a pilot peer group of recent SCAD alumni came together and started meeting on Zoom on Wednesday evenings, with me volunteering as coach. In between Zoom sessions, they work together in a private Discord. In just a few months, it became a real workshop with real output: members reworked how they introduce themselves and their work, built job posting 'radars', learned how to speak about themselves more confidently, rebuilt their portfolios around proof rather than polish, overhauled their online presence, and started professional email lists most young or any artist never build.

And it began showing up in the real world. Since we started meeting, Sarah has begun a new creative job. Elyse joined a local animation studio that grew out of a nearby college program. Jill landed her first hands-on role in her field, animating characters for an indie game studio. Logan showed his work at an esteemed Philadelphia art festival. And Zandy has advanced an original comic and built out commission pricing, resulting in several direct commissions.

Best of all, they're no longer doing it alone.

Fast Forward Collective

This group inspired me to found Fast Forward Collective, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit building infrastructure for the transition from school to a working creative life. We even have a name for the gap it serves: the Invisible Middle — the fragile stretch after commencement when the studios, deadlines, critiques, community, and identity that carried a young artist during college all disappear at once.

It usually isn't a talent problem. It's a momentum problem, and it's where too many gifted graduates quietly set their dreams aside. Even a small, well-held peer group can restore the momentum of an extraordinary education at the most fragile moment of a creative career.

Those three industry veterans in that TAAFI hallway were describing a scrap heap of wasted, well-educated creative talent.

Fast Forward exists to turn that around, one graduate, one peer group, one journey at a time.

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Fast Forward Collective — infrastructure for the transition from school to a working creative life.

If you're a recent grad in the Invisible Middle, a parent watching your kid navigate it, or a studio or school that wants to help close the gap — welcome. This is where we'll be sharing what we're building and what we're learning along the way, and we'd love to have you along for it.

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