Natasha Louckevitch: “Don’t expect respect; GET IT by wearing your convictions like skin and your vulnerability as a superhero cape!”

Don’t expect respect. GET IT by wearing your convictions like skin and your vulnerability as a superhero cape!Your team needs a leader, but also someone they can admire. Give them a purpose, and they will give you the passion you need to thrive. As a part of my series about strong female leaders, I had […]

Don’t expect respect. GET IT by wearing your convictions like skin and your vulnerability as a superhero cape!
Your team needs a leader, but also someone they can admire. Give them a purpose, and they will give you the passion you need to thrive.

As a part of my series about strong female leaders, I had the pleasure of interviewing Natasha Louckevitch.

Natasha is an experienced and awarded Executive Producer. She specialized in international production, strategy, development, and localization. (NA, LATAM, EMEA, AND JAPAC)

She worked on her authorial movies from script to post-production. These experiences helped mold her passion for finding and nurturing new talent and made her the well-rounded Executive Producer she is today.

Her favorite aspect of the many hats she wears is to solve problems regardless of the level of difficulty. In her career, she was responsible for creating teams to enable creatives all over the world to come together and disrupt the status quo. Besides working in the entertainment industry, in her advertising career, she worked with clients such as:

Colgate-Palmolive, Nestle, Kraft, Mondelez, SC Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott, and P&G.

She produced more than 100 commercials in over 20 countries.

In 2007, after finishing her studies at NYU, Natasha continued the path on her career and had the opportunity to leave and work in Brazil, (her native country), Argentina and France. Today, Natasha, along with her husband and their two sons, moved to the creative and thriving capital of Texas, Austin, where she opened her production company C/Purpose. Only one year into it, the company’s first produced web-series for a local winemaker — ‘Dandy’-, got selected for more than eight festivals worldwide and is quickly navigating between the worlds of cinema and advertising. Recently, the series got officially selected for Rebelfest London 2019 and shortlisted for a LIA. (London International Awards)

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Ihave always loved to tell stories. I loved to connect with people on that deep level and make them feel seen. Growing up, it felt like a superpower! It came naturally to me in the form of creating lyrics, poems, stories, characters, jokes, etc. My first “Big Break,” was when I was a ten-year-old girl in Brazil. My grandmother passed away, and I was close to her. I felt very lonely when she died and could only think about her and nothing else for many, many weeks after she passed.

At school, I wrote a verse poem about our relationship. I wasn’t trying to get attention or recognition. It genuinely was a necessity to put into words, the immense pain I was feeling.

I didn’t over-think it, and I wasn’t specifically trying to achieve anything.

That poem not only got me a 10 in school, but it was all everyone talked about for a long time. And as my family later decided, it made it’s the way to her tombstone forever.

It gave me the feeling that even more than when I made people laugh, (I was a bit of a clown), sharing sadness made everyone process it better and feel less lonely. (Including myself!)

When I grew a little older, I started to find out other media to express myself. And I fell in love with filmmaking.

In Brazil, when I was choosing a career path, filmmaking wasn’t exactly something you could rely upon as a career path that would ever pay your bills.

So, I compromised and went into advertising.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

Not only was I opening a new company, but also arriving in a new country with two young boys. For those who haven’t done it before, think of it as opening two companies at the same time. So, when we got our first official project, I had realistic expectations about it. It was a web-series about a local Rose wine.

The results surpassed all my expectations by large. It brought more awareness and revenue to the brand, and we got many world-wide awards for it. (Including a nomination for Raindance Film Festival in London, which is supposed to be strictly Indie Filmmaking.)

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?’

Funniest is easier. I prefer to answer this question than ones about the worst mistakes! I have learned that yelling at a printer won’t make it work. And the biggest lesson from that is that you should always plug it to the outlet for it to do its job!

(It can happen to the best of us. 🙂

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

The market is changing. A lot of companies are bringing their content ‘in-house.’ With that, production companies have a chance to go back to their original intent: to produce!

Let me explain.

The vast majority of advertising production companies in the world, regardless of what they “sell” as their reason to exist, work as ‘production services.’ Meaning they receive a script from the ad agency and then follow a rigorous set of rules on how to shoot.

And although some are better at their craft than others, the majority of production companies don’t get to put much creative input, thru no fault of their own. This reality is standard practice.

With the industry shifting, production companies have more room to participate, and sometimes even take over completely, on the creative process.

Our company was born with the intent of providing among technical skills, a vision for their content and business altogether. We are looking for clients and projects that we can creatively and organically help grow.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Yes! We are on the pre-production stages of a TV series that has Austin (the city) as a significant character as New York was to Sex and The City.

It is ‘Breaking Bad’ meets ‘Burn After Reading.’

Besides entertaining people, we hope to contribute to transforming Austin as a go-to place for production.

Right now, it’s still concentrated mainly in New York and Los Angeles, even though Austin is rapidly growing.

We are involving exciting people. We feel confident that the series will help to bring more projects, investors and even people from the film industry as a whole.

What advice would you give to other female leaders to help their team to thrive?

Be bold and be prepared to thicken your skin.

Don’t expect respect. GET IT by wearing your convictions like skin and your vulnerability as a superhero cape!

Your team needs a leader, but also someone they can admire. Give them a purpose, and they will give you the passion you need to thrive.

What advice would you give to other female leaders about the best way to manage a large team?

To hire people who are smarter than you. Yes, it is a cliché, but it’s there for a reason. You need to know the ranks your business entails, and then, proceed to research who are the best people out there that you can afford. Even if they do cost an extra dollar, it will save you time and money! Trust me!

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I am a survivor of abuse. With that, came a fair amount of C-PTSD. As I was engaged in larger and larger projects, it became more and more difficult for me to concentrate. In that sense, if it wasn’t for these two men, I couldn’t have done it; My therapist, who is a special person and very competent in what he does, as well as my amazing husband.

My husband and I been married for sixteen years. We’ve been together through thick and thin. He was always supportive and always pushed me to do more. Even when I got too tired and wanted to give up, he was still there either whispering or screaming, ‘You can do more. I believe in you.’

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

On a daily basis, I try to better myself as a human being. I make and made mistakes. I’m working on being kinder to myself whenever I get things wrong. I try to fix it, instead of dwelling on it.

Other than that, whenever I can, I donate my time to mentor other female advertisers/producers or volunteer to a nonprofit with my skills. And I always learn so much from volunteering and mentoring. It truly is rewarding!

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

I got great advice and mentorship. However, some things, even when a third party tells you, you won’t get to understand until you go thru them. So, my advice here would be to seek mentorship from people you admire, (you would be surprised by how open people are when you ask for their mentorship) and go for it! Take that leap of faith!

My accountant, who is also a friend, always told me: ‘There is no better (and more expensive) school than the school of life. There’s no way around it.’

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

I would love to see more small companies doing what mine does, although there are a few.

We reserve a few (paid) working periods of the employees so that they can engage in social causes of their choice. It could be something as simple as organizing donations from our colleagues and delivering everything at the closest Goodwill or volunteering for a non-profit organization.

— Published on May 29, 2020