My first months at GRF.
I don’t remember when I first heard words like brief, pitch or campaign.
Probably long before I knew what they meant.
My father has spent practically his entire professional life in advertising and marketing, so that world always felt like a natural environment to me.
Growing up, I saw what agency life looked like.
Phone calls that continued long after working hours. Presentations changing until the very last minute. Travel. Clients. Pitches. People spending a lot of time talking about ideas - and even more time trying to turn them into something real.
I’m not sure I understood exactly what my father did back then.
But I understood the energy around it.
And without really noticing, that world became familiar to me.
Maybe that’s why it wasn’t entirely accidental that, years later, I found myself in Amsterdam studying Communication Science.
And then at FCB Amsterdam.
That was the first time I stopped experiencing advertising through my father’s work and started experiencing it for myself.
University taught me one way of thinking about communication. FCB showed me what happens when that thinking enters a real brief - with a real client, deadline and budget.
Then came GRF.
Somewhere between my life in Amsterdam and my father’s new professional chapter in Skopje, an opportunity appeared for us to do something we had never done before.
Not just talk about work.
Actually work together.
And I have to admit, I was curious to see what that would be like.
First, I had to understand GRF from the inside
I expected my first assignment to be something familiar.
Brand. Content. Communication. Maybe a brief.
It wasn’t.
My first project was connected to something GRF also builds for its clients: systems and process automation.
The team had already defined how we wanted to work, how information should move and which repetitive processes were worth automating.
My job started with research.
I had to understand which solutions existed and which one could best support the operating model GRF had already designed.
At first, I thought we were looking for a tool.
Very quickly, I realised we weren’t.
Technology can do many things.
That doesn’t mean we should do all of them.
So the research wasn’t simply a comparison of features.
I had to understand why GRF wanted to work in a certain way.
What are we trying to simplify?
What should actually be automated?
Where does technology genuinely save time?
Where does it simply add another unnecessary step?
And will the system we build today be able to grow with the company tomorrow?
After the research phase, we selected the solution together and started turning the model into a system that actually worked.
It was an unexpected first project.
But looking back, it was probably the best possible introduction to GRF.
Instead of someone presenting me with slides explaining how the company worked, I had to understand it well enough to help turn part of that thinking into a working system.
And I learned something important very early:
Technology is not a solution until you know what problem you are actually solving.
The potter had no pot
There’s a Macedonian saying:
The potter has no pot.
Our situation was fairly close.
GRF was already working on strategies, brands, websites, systems and growth for its clients.
GRF just didn’t have a website of its own.
We had clients. We had projects. We had a way of working. We also had fairly strong opinions about what other companies’ websites should look like.
We simply didn’t have one ourselves.
Part of that was intentional.
My father didn’t want to start by building a website, creating a LinkedIn page and telling a big story about GRF - only to then figure out what the company was supposed to be.
He wanted to do it the other way around.
Work first.
With real clients.
On real problems.
Learn what works, who we want to work with and what kind of company we actually want to build.
Then talk about it.
But at some point, “we’re intentionally invisible” started sounding a lot like “we probably need a website.”
And that became my second project.
I thought this one would be easier.
It wasn’t.
When your father is the client
This time, the client was sitting across the table.
And he was my father.
Anyone who has ever worked with their own parent probably knows that this is a very particular kind of client relationship.
On the surface, the task was simple:
Build a website for GRF.
But the website was actually the last part.
First came much harder questions.
How do you explain GRF to someone who has never heard of it - in a matter of minutes?
What should they see first?
What should they understand?
What do we say now, and what do we leave for later?
What should GRF look like?
And perhaps hardest of all:
What should GRF sound like?
That’s where what I had learned at university and my experience at FCB became especially relevant again.
Except this time, there was no finished client brief.
We were the client.
And we had to write the brief ourselves.
There were many versions.
Plenty of copy that felt right one day and wrong the next.
Long discussions about a single sentence.
And probably more conversations about headline sizes than I would like to admit.
But through that process, I started to understand GRF much better.
Not only what it does.
But why it exists.
From the other side
When I think about my first months at GRF, the most interesting part isn’t learning new software or learning how to build a website.
It is that, for the first time, I am seeing up close a world I had spent my whole life observing from the other side.
As a child, I saw presentations, travel, phone calls and agency people around my father.
Later, I started studying that world at university.
At FCB, I started working in it myself.
And now, at GRF, I am experiencing something different again:
building something from the beginning.
Looking back, my first two projects actually followed a very logical order.
First, I had to understand how GRF works on the inside.
Then I could help explain what GRF is to the outside world.
And both projects taught me something similar.
Before the system, there was research.
Before the website, there were questions.
Execution came later.
Maybe that has been the most valuable lesson so far.
Early in your career, you spend a lot of time thinking about how to do the task you were given well.
At GRF, I’m starting to learn that sometimes the more important question comes before that:
Are we solving the right problem in the first place?