Chris Atkins on Leadership: WithFeeling in LBB Feature
We’re proud to share that Chris Atkins, co-founder and managing director of WithFeeling, has been featured in LBB Online’s Bossing It series, a long-running editorial spotlight on the people leading the creative industry. The conversation, titled “The Discipline and Honesty Behind Strong Leadership with Chris Atkins,” covers his twenty-year career in music strategy, sonic branding and creative leadership, from washing dishes as a teenager to executive-producing the official theme song for Expo 2020 Dubai, to co-founding WithFeeling and growing the agency into a multi-region studio working with Google, Apple, Amazon, Emirates, Ferrari, TikTok, Marriott and the Saudi Ministry of Tourism. Chris Atkins on leadership is a candid read, written for the people actually running creative businesses. Below, our take on the key themes from the feature, and why the piece is essential reading for anyone building a creative agency right now.
From washing dishes to co-founding WithFeeling
Chris’s story in the LBB piece begins, deliberately, at the bottom. Pouring pints, washing dishes, working in kitchens, the small jobs most career stories quietly edit out. The thread he draws through them is direct. Indeed, the standard you set in the small jobs becomes the standard you set in the bigger ones. For Chris, leadership was never a job title. Rather, it was a habit of work that started early and stayed consistent.
That habit took him through fourteen years at BKP, producing radio and sound for clients across the Middle East, into a senior creative role at Expo 2020 Dubai, and finally into co-founding WithFeeling in 2022 with composer and producer Joe Dickinson. Since then, the agency has picked up a Clio for its sonic identity for the Islamic Arts Biennale, Gold and Silver at the 2025 Transform Awards MEA, and now operates across the UAE, UK, Ireland, Saudi Arabia and the US.
You can see some of that work in our case studies, where the discipline behind every engagement traces back to the same principle Chris talks about in the feature.
The leaders who shaped Chris Atkins on leadership
One of the most interesting threads in the LBB piece is who Chris credits for shaping his style. Early in his career, Grammy-winning producer Kevin Churko gave him a benchmark for combining serious talent with serious work ethic and zero ego. Later, Federica Busa, Marjan Faraidooni and Her Excellency Reem Al Hashimy, the three women he reported into at Expo 2020 Dubai, showed him what calm, generous leadership looks like at scale.
Reem in particular left a lasting impression. With two thousand staff under her at Expo, she somehow remembered everyone’s name, and treated cleaners and heads of state with the same respect. That, Chris says in the piece, is the kind of leader he tries to be every day at WithFeeling.
The lesson he keeps returning to is restrained but powerful. Notably, talent and humility aren’t opposites. More often than people think, they are the same trait in the people who do this best.
Leading through instability, and the lesson it taught him
The most personal section of the LBB conversation is about the regional instability of recent months and the moment it landed on his desk as a founder. Chris talks openly about putting the team ahead of himself, working through cashflow scenarios behind the scenes while staying calm and transparent with the team in the room. As he frames it, leadership is the discipline of staying steady on the outside while doing the hard, often anxious thinking on the inside.
That kind of honesty is rare in founder interviews. Equally, it’s why we’d recommend reading the full LBB feature rather than just our paraphrasing of it. The texture of how a leader actually thinks through something difficult lives in the original, not the summary.
The line that stuck with us most: “I’d rather be leading in the dark than following in the light.”
What the piece tells you about the studio behind it
Chris Atkins on leadership is unusually self-aware throughout the feature. He’s open about his own blind spots, a tendency to over-do, an impatience for people running at lower intensity, a struggle to switch off, and the value of a co-founder who’ll push back honestly when he’s wrong. Furthermore, he’s clear that WithFeeling’s fully-remote, eight-person team is by design, not by accident, and that culture is more important to a company that size than almost anything else.
What we love about the piece is that it doesn’t airbrush the work. It talks candidly about the first time he had to let someone go, the pitches that didn’t go his way, the moments he wasn’t quite at his best in the room. Pitch failures, he writes, are tuition. That framing tells you more about how a creative business is actually run than most marketing pages.
If you’re building a creative agency, leading a team, or just curious about how WithFeeling has grown over the past three years, the piece is worth your time.
Read the full LBB Bossing It feature
You can read the full interview with Chris Atkins on leadership on LBB Online: “The Discipline and Honesty Behind Strong Leadership with Chris Atkins.” The piece is part of LBB’s Bossing It series, which profiles the people leading studios, agencies and production companies across the industry.
We’re enormously grateful to LBB for the feature, and to everyone who has helped shape WithFeeling into the studio it is today.
Ready to talk through what WithFeeling can do for your brand’s sonic identity? Start a conversation with our team.
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