Your people are more valuable than anything - Megan Morass, Full Fat

Episode 29 - THAT MOMENT

Megan Morass started Full Fat in January 2012, in her early twenties, in the middle of the second wave of the financial crisis. She wasn't planning to build the largest music and festival communications agency in Europe. She just watched the agency she worked at fall apart and thought she and her co-founder could do it better.

"We were in a really cool agency, and our team were doing so well, but the agency wasn't working. So in that naivety of young 20s... we thought, we can do this."

What followed was over a decade of learning, sometimes painfully, what actually holds a creative business together. Not talent. Not chaos. Something in between the two.

The Agency That Had Everything Except Structure

The agency Megan left behind was full of brilliant people, several of whom went on to run marketing for the Olympics or lead major beauty brands. What it lacked wasn't talent, it was systems strong enough to withstand the unpredictability of the industry around it.

"The systems and the processes of the agency were not rigid or not strong enough to withstand the chaos of the environment."

That tension, between the freedom creativity needs and the structure a business needs to survive, became the thread running through everything Megan built afterwards. Too much rigidity smothers the work. Too little, and brilliant people can't turn ideas into anything sustainable.

When the Founding Team Fell Apart

Full Fat grew fast, working with Warehouse Project, Parklife and festivals across Europe. Then the original founding partnership collapsed.

"We'd gone into that feeling as though this was the dream team, and it was, without going into too much detail, a complete shock... the business went from seemingly being extremely in a position of strength to being in a very vulnerable position."

The money wasn't where they thought it was. The relationships weren't as solid as they'd assumed. It coincided with a client roster full of passionate, underfunded music institutions, exactly the kind of business that's emotionally rewarding and financially precarious in equal measure. Megan and her remaining co-founder, Ella, had to decide whether to rebuild from the ground up or walk away entirely.

Why Culture Needs Money

Out of that period came a belief Megan holds firmly, even when it puts her at odds with other creatives: culture and creative output need money, because they need freedom and stability to exist at all.

"If a child is worried about how they're getting fed... they're going to pursue things that are going to take them in that direction and are not going to allow them to follow their dreams. And it's the same thing with culture."

That belief reshaped what Full Fat does. Rather than working purely on cultural passion projects with unstable budgets, the agency now sits at the intersection of commerce and culture, helping brands earn genuine cultural relevance rather than renting an audience through follower counts.

The Cultural Resonance Index

Frustrated with telling clients to "trust us" with no way to prove cultural strategy actually works, Megan spent four years building a scoring framework called the Cultural Resonance Index. It scores a brand out of 120 across five weighted areas: impact, cultural context, audience psychographics, behavioural triggers, and positive emotional strategy.

"The resonance or the relatability of the content is becoming more important than the number of people that follow that particular creator."

The framework is built with neuroscientists and psychologists, and Megan is candid about one of its underlying motivations: as someone who lives with depression, she's determined that whatever Full Fat creates makes people feel better scrolling through it, not worse.

Leading Honestly

Megan has been open about a chronic depressive period between 2018 and 2020, severe enough that she had to step back from the business while her co-founder Ella ran it. She came off medication after seven years, and she talks openly with her team about the ongoing work of managing her mental health rather than masking it.

"I stopped understanding what was my emotion and what was a fallacy. I couldn't quite grasp if it was me or if it was the pill."

That transparency extends to admitting mistakes in real time. Megan describes a recent call where exhaustion and stress led her to snap at a client-facing team under pressure, followed by pulling the team together the next day to apologise and own the misstep publicly.

"I trust this team. This team are excellent, and I am acting from a place of fear... it was a really grounding moment for me."

About Supo:

Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.

For more information about Supo: ⁠www.supo.co.uk

About Full Fat

A Certified B Corp culture agency built from festival and music PR into one of Europe's leading brand and culture consultancies, working with brands including 1664 Bière and MASAJ, and creator of the Cultural Resonance Index, a scientifically backed framework for measuring and building brand equity through cultural relevance.

For more information about Full Fat: https://www.wearefullfat.com/

Megan's story isn't about avoiding chaos. It's about learning which parts of it to protect and which parts need holding together. Listen to the full conversation.