Editor’s Note: In the years I’ve known Tim, he has become a dear friend, an advisor to Motionographer, and someone I feel lucky to have in my corner. We talk every week, and I rarely hang up without something new to think about: an insight that helps an idea take shape, a question I hadn’t thought to ask, or a reminder that I don’t need to add one more thing to an already long list.
There is laughter, too. I love his sense of humor, and the kindness behind his support warms my heart. He makes me feel that the person carrying all those ideas matters as much as the ideas themselves.
I am mesmerized by the way his mind works. Tim has a gift for making complicated things feel clear while leaving you curious enough to keep exploring. At last week’s preview of Revolve, his new six-week accelerator for creative entrepreneurs, he held my attention for the entire hour.
When he finished, he asked the room whether he was onto something. That stayed with me. After giving us so much to think about, he still wanted to listen.
That combination of intelligence, humor, humility, and care is what I admire most about him. This piece is a love letter, and I’m happy to call it that. I adore Tim, I believe in the work he does, and I want more of our community to experience the generosity I get to feel in our conversations. I’ll be taking Revolve myself, because it is an experience not to be missed. You’ll find the details at the end.
Tim Thompson wanted to be a movie star.
Growing up in suburban Denver in the 1970s and ’80s, one of four brothers, he was the kid taking things apart and talking out of turn in class. On Saturday mornings, he watched That’s Hollywood. He wrote letters to television shows asking how things were made. Few wrote back.
His mother encouraged him. “I would share my plans with my mom, who supported me 1000%,” he says. With her help, he remembers screen-testing at seven for the role of Danny in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, without knowing what the story was about. He didn’t get the part, and it did little to shake his confidence: “I never doubted that I could build a successful career in entertainment.”
The part of that story he carries with him is his mother’s belief. “My mom believed in what I wanted to do and helped me pursue it,” he says. “These days, I get to offer that same support to others who believe in their talent and are willing to do the work.” There is a whole life connecting those two sentences.
At twenty-five, Tim married Katie, whom he calls the love of his life. Her support made anything feel possible, and she has been his partner through every change since. Around the same time, he joined RGA/LA, which became Imaginary Forces. He spent six years working in main titles, visual effects, and commercial post production, solving the kinds of production challenges he had dreamed about as a boy watching television.
He had found his way into Hollywood. By thirty, though, he was looking further ahead. He noticed how few people over fifty he encountered in the industry unless they were executives or union members. He started thinking about how to build a career that could last.
At thirty-two, the question became more personal. “I needed a new center in my life,” he says. “I found Jesus and went to seminary.” While studying, he continued working with studios and found a home at Trailer Park, where he spent five years building and managing operations before and during the company’s acquisition.
When he completed his master’s degree, he left Trailer Park and started RevThink. He put the experience he had gained at RGA/LA, Imaginary Forces, yU+co, and Trailer Park to work helping friends and colleagues build their own companies. That change had a cost. “It meant letting go of the career I had imagined as a kid,” he says.
When we talked about it, he went further.
“I would have never done this if it wasn’t for quitting who I thought I was becoming and becoming the person I needed to be.”
It is a significant thing to say after reaching the world you dreamed of entering. It also helps explain why he understands the difficulty of asking someone else to reconsider their future. What RevThink gave him was the opportunity to stay close to the work while helping owners through difficult decisions. Their relationships and accomplishments became the most meaningful part of his career.
Katie and Tim now travel together, visiting studios and agencies, speaking at conferences, and working with teams in person. They have built a life around their work, their relationships, and seeing the world together. They also have five sons and three grandsons. There is plenty of life beyond the next project.
That matters when you understand what Tim wants a business to make possible. When RevThink began, he saw a growing need for support that understood creative businesses from the inside. The tools of Motion Design and post production had become more accessible. Studios were appearing everywhere, and he was concerned about who would get to lead them.
He was seeing more companies started by people from sales and production, and fewer by creatives. “I thought we would gut our industry if we made it all about money,” he says. “Above everything else, I had learned one thing: ‘Creative Must Win.’” He wanted creative entrepreneurs to have the business support to build viable companies, lead their industry, and make the work they believed in.
He acknowledges the people who were already advising owners. Keir McLaren was working with Chris Do at Blind. Mike Simonoff was advising The Ebeling Group, Tim’s first client. Tim credits Simonoff with teaching him a great deal and giving him room to disagree.
What Tim brought was his experience inside creative production, and a desire to make that kind of support available more broadly. The name he chose describes the work. A revolution is a time of change; thinking is about strategy. Helping people through change became Revolution Thinking, and its shortened form, RevThink, also carries a nod to his seminary training and ordination.
Sometimes an owner comes to him when the situation is already severe. Tim describes employees walking out because payroll hasn’t been paid, or a project so far over budget that the owner doubts the company will survive. Often, though, it begins with loneliness.
A business grows. Decisions arrive faster. The owner reaches the limit of what they can carry, and the company stalls or begins to suffer from rushed choices. Tim starts by trying to understand the owner, the business, its clients, and the reason behind the work.
“You bring the compass,” he says. “I’ll build the roadmap.” Through his Seven Ingredients framework, that work becomes strategy, systems, routines, and people who can carry those practices forward. The company develops the ability to operate beyond its owner’s individual capacity.
But when I ask what makes him proudest, he describes the moment something clicks. An owner sees possibilities they had stopped considering. They recognize that they have the freedom to shape their career, and that some of the limits they have accepted can change.
One owner described it to him as “cataract surgery for a business.” Tim has his own name for it: “I call it ‘permission granted.’ It’s the best part of the job.”
His mother gave him encouragement to pursue a life he could imagine. Later, he had to give himself permission to change that life. Now he helps other people recognize that they have choices, too.
“I think people hear ‘business consultant’ and assume I’m mostly interested in the numbers,” he says. “I’ve spent my life around creative people, and I care deeply about what they make and what it takes out of them. I want the business to support that talent. When I push an owner on pricing, operations, or a difficult decision, it’s because I want them to keep doing meaningful work without sacrificing their health, their family, or their future.”
That concern now runs through his thinking about AI. Tim uses it himself to develop ideas, research, and write formulas that would otherwise take considerable trial and error. He also wishes it were better at editing without flattening different voices toward the same center. He has a name for a problem creative people are facing: the mastery paradox.
“A polished result can arrive before the understanding needed to judge it,” he writes. “That’s the paradox. You can produce something impressive without knowing why it works, where it fails, or how to improve it.”
An experienced artist’s value becomes visible when a decision has to be made. Does the work serve the story? Is the timing right? What happens when the client asks for a change?
“Being able to explain and deliberately improve the work matters more as generating options becomes easier,” he writes. For young artists, he emphasizes making choices, getting feedback, and revising. Developing judgment still requires experience, and he believes the people running studios have a responsibility to help create it.
“If we automate the work people used to learn from, we have to be intentional about creating new ways for them to develop judgment.”
During the Revolve preview, Tim asked us to examine the habits we repeat because they worked before. The portfolio, the reel, the website, the ways we find and maintain relationships with clients. Which assumptions are we still testing? Which have simply become routine?
He describes technological change as moving through revelation, revolution, and evolution. In his view, we are in the middle stage, still discovering what these tools make possible and what they mean for our businesses. Revolve is built around working through that uncertainty.
One exercise asks us to consider three questions: What did we think clients were buying? What might they actually value? How could we test the difference?
A client asks for a website. We understand the deliverable and begin thinking about how to make it. But what does the client need that website to accomplish? How will they judge whether it has worked?
Asking can change the conversation around the project. Tim brought it back to a question I think every creative entrepreneur should spend time with.
“What are clients paying us to understand, decide, and make possible?”
In his written answers, he suggests starting with a recent project. Ask the team what they understood that the client could not yet see, and which decisions the client trusted them to make. Those moments offer evidence of value that might never appear in a list of deliverables.
Over six weeks, Revolve gives participants time to examine those questions with other creative entrepreneurs. The process moves through assumptions about the future, expertise, client hesitation, and the possibility of developing new offerings, before connecting what the group has learned. Tim wants people to stay with difficult questions long enough to discover something. He expects some discomfort, and he expects participants to learn from one another, using the group to challenge the thinking they might otherwise keep repeating alone.
When I asked what success would look like for someone finishing the program, he returned to the same two words.
Permission granted.
He hopes someone will see a possibility they could not see before, feel less burdened by preserving a business exactly as it has always been, and become curious about what they could build next. The invitation extends to creative entrepreneurs, including freelancers thinking seriously about their businesses and their futures. As Tim and I discussed, the responsibilities of a freelancer and a studio owner can differ, while both have something to contribute to the conversation.
And because a life contains more than the questions that occupy our working days, I asked Tim a few quick ones.
The first thing you do in the morning?
Read the New York Times.
The music playing when you think best?
’80s pop. It gives me energy.
A piece of Motion Design you never tire of?
I’m a main title junkie. If you go to the movies with me, be ready for me to watch the entire end crawl.
A place that resets you?
The beach.
What makes you feel like a beginner again?
Technology always makes me restart. As I say, “Technology Follows Technique.”
The question you wish more studio owners asked you?
Am I trying to solve the wrong problem?
I love that he still stays for the end crawl. After all the changes in his life and career, the curiosity that sent those letters to Hollywood is still there. I also love that, when he talks about what he has accomplished, he keeps coming back to other people finding their way.
That is why I wanted to write this piece, and why I will be taking the full six weeks of Revolve myself. I attended the preview and found myself considering how these questions apply to Motionographer, to the people who trust us, and to the value we bring to our community. Tim made the conversation relevant to my own responsibilities, and I encourage you to experience it for yourself.
If you are a creative entrepreneur working through what this moment means for your business, bring a real question and join him. Revolve’s free kickoff sessions are on Tuesday, October 13, and Thursday, October 15, at 9 AM Pacific / noon Eastern. Just register on the program page, and the calendar invitation will follow.
The full six-week accelerator meets live online on Tuesdays and costs $1,500, with scholarships available upon request. Space is limited. Sessions are recorded, and participants have a shared online space to continue the conversation. If the cost is an obstacle, ask RevThink about available payment arrangements. An in-person gathering is also planned, with details to be confirmed.
Thank you, Tim, for being in our corner.
I asked him what one sentence he wanted readers to remember.
“You don’t have to predict the future to take responsibility for your place in it.”
Revolve: revthink.com/revolve
Portrait: Jonathan Kim