Baby Got Backstory

BGBS 033: Erik Boles | Gearmunk | What's Your Favorite TV Show?

Erik Boles, founder of Gearmunk, is a serial entrepreneur that has built five companies, exited three, and is now gearing up to host the biggest outdoor industry virtual trade show in the world. As a successful entrepreneur, Erik always has his finger on the pulse of how to build a brand but also realizes that while the fundamentals are the same, the game is always changing. He is taking risks, following his heart, solving problems, and looking for opportunities.  Prepare yourself to learn from one of the most successful entrepreneurs! 

What we’re talking about

• From Childhood Fun to Digital Expert
• Consumers Are Forcing Changes In Marketing
• GearMunk, A Pathway for Transformation

From Childhood Fun to Digital Expert

Erik grew up in Colorado and was introduced to the tech world when his parents got him an Apple II. It was there that his love of technology began, and it continued to grow. He began his first startup in 1996 by writing HTML code and continued his trend into technology throughout his career. He has consulted in the digital space for brands such as REI, DSW Shoes, Cabela’s, American Eagle Outfitters. It is his out of the box thinking that has catapulted multiple companies into success.

Consumers Are Forcing Changes In Marketing

Marketing used to be a one-way conversation between brands and customers, with brands doing all the talking, now it has become a multi-channel dialog, with the customers deciding where they want to consume content and how. After consulting in the digital space for brands such as REI, DSW Shoes, Cabela’s, American Eagle Outfitters, Erik founded GearMunk in 2013 to give consumers a pathway to allow their voices and opinions to be heard by brands. GearMunk has designed a system to allow for cottage brands to be discovered by the public without having to go broke trying to finance their marketing for awareness.

GearMunk, A Pathway for Transformation

GearMunk is an online, video-based, gear review platform that is democratizing the outdoor gear industry, and changing the way brands interact with consumers. It is a rewards and community-based system, that allows the reviewer to earn a credibility score, which allows the reviewer to be paired up with a brand that could give you discounts, free gear, and demo gear. Would you like to connect with brands by giving your honest opinion on their products? 

LINKS MENTIONED

GearMunk GearMunk’s Facebook GearMunk’s Instagram GearMunk Twitter Thin Air Gear Show (Virtual Trade Show)

SPONSOR

Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 6:54 - 7:18 (24 sec EB) There’s all these great brands out there...whether it’s climbing gear, skiing gear, whatever.
• 37:05 - 37:20 (15 sec EB) We know that statistically now...their whole job is to sell products.
• 37:21 - 37:59 (38 sec EB) What we do trust...that’s coming from a brand voice.
• 39:17 - 39:27 (10 sec EB) If you can tell your story...it’s worth it.
• 43:20 - 43:42 (22 sec EB) Brands are finally realizing...the way the consumer wants.
• 49:18 - 49:52 (34 sec EB) These big shows have always been...that made that happen.
• 54:20 - 54:35 (15 sec EB) I love the challenge of changing...whether you’re a brand or a consumer.

QUOTES

1. All good gear deserves a chance. - EB
2. People try to make the startup fit into their lifestyle, rather than making that startup their lifestyle. - EB
3. The rule of good enough applies in almost everything. - EB
4. Virtual trade shows aren’t the way of the future, but no trade show will be successful without a virtual component. - EB
5. The market wants what the market wants, and it doesn’t care if it hurts your feelings or not. - EB

Podcast Transcript

Erik Boles 0:02 You know, I know people that don't have everything they want, like, they just don't complain about it. It's the ones that complain about it. And usually, my first question is, what's your favorite TV show? And if they answer that question I'm like, then it's your fault. You don't have everything you want. Because you could not watch that TV show and have an extra hour every single day, to be busting your ass to build a startup or doing something about you not having everything you want. You're making choices, which is totally fine. If that's your jam, that's your jam. But don't complain that you've been served a bad deal when you are proactively making a choice on how you spend your time. Marc Gutman 0:41 podcasting from Boulder, Colorado, this is the baby got backstory Podcast, where we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators, and entrepreneurs. I like big backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host Marc Gutman. Marc Gutman, and on today's episode of Baby got backstory, how a serial entrepreneur built five companies exited three, and is now gearing up to host the biggest outdoor industry trade show in the world. Now, if you like and enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over at iTunes. iTunes uses these as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on the Apple charts. And ratings help us to build an audience, which then helps us to continue to produce this show. And today's episode, we are talking to Erik Boles, a serial entrepreneur who has started five companies and exited three. Currently, he is the founder of Gearmunk, an online gear review platform that is democratizing the outdoor industry and changing the way brands interact with consumers. What struck me about the conversation you're about to hear is that Erik is a technologist futurist advocate outdoor enthusiast, and has his finger on the pulse of not only what it means to build a brand, but also realizes while the fundamentals are the same, the game is always changing. Listen up to how Erik describes the changes that technology has brought to brand and marketing, and how our own consumer tastes have changed rapidly. were once used to be a one-way conversation between brands and their customers, with brands doing all the talking, and the brands would decide where and how to tell their story, pushing out anything they wanted via TV commercials, or print ads and newspapers. Now it has become a multi-channel dialogue with the customers deciding where they want to consume content and how the consumer has a voice and is loudly using it. Erik points out that those brands that aren't aware of this are going to be in big trouble in the future, if not already the story is one of taking risks, following his heart, solving problems and looking for opportunities. And this is his story. So Erik, what is Gearmunk? Erik Boles 3:18 So Gearmunk is a virtual video-based platform all-around outdoor gear reviews, hiking, skiing, backpacking, paddling, camping, biking, climbing, etc. With the added flair that it is a rewards-based system. And it's community-based. So rather than listening to a few people tell you what gear you should buy, you're getting the wisdom of the crowds, and they're incentivized through algorithms to be genuine and be honest, because then you're in a credibility score, like a wine score or something similar. And that determines what rewards you get and we start to connect you with brands that find you interesting and they give you discounts and free gear and demo gear and all that Those kinds of deals. Marc Gutman 4:01 So when I was working in the movie business, we had this concept that we call like a high concept comedy, you know, and it was this idea that it was a little bit more complex. But at the end of the day, it was still a comedy. And as you're talking, you know, I was like, Wow, that sounds really complex. But I'm sure that it's fairly simple. Where did the idea come from? I mean, I like to think that most businesses are born either out of inspiration, frustration or desperation was Gearmunk born out of either of those? Erik Boles 4:28 maybe a mix of a couple of those, right? So I started my first startup back in 96. I've always been in the tech space. We've always done things that I've heard everybody Tell me Oh, that'll never work. Well, we've had three exits and then one that you know made money but we never exited. And now we're on to number five and through bad decisions and too much drinking. I took a job with the fourth-largest newspaper company in the US and went on to lead them in digital media. Till I realized that newspapers We'll never really understand what that word digital media means. And so there was the frustration component, right is that I knew that there was a better way to do stuff. And then on the digital side, I consulted for a lot of brands, like like like Rei Cabela's DFW issues, American Eagle Outfitters, things like that. And once you understand the outdoor ecosystem, and you learn that these these these retailers, they're not telling you the whole picture because they're there to drive sales, which is great. It's exactly what they should be doing. But you're not really getting the best. You're not getting the best reviews. You're seeing the five-star reviews and not the one-star reviews. And in fact, Amazon was the first company that we went to showed you side by side, the five star the one star, what's the best review? What's the worst review and everybody in the industry was like, Oh my gosh, I'm showing the worst review. And so they obviously only show five-star reviews versus the one that is the most valuable. So we kind of predicted some time ago that five-star reviews would start to go away. Because they're, they're immediately broken, right? If you're the kind of person that says, Well, I never get five stars, so four is as high as I go. Well, thank you. This is why we can't have nice things, you've ruined it for everyone. And now we have this broken system because you've done it on a 25 5075 to 100% scale versus 20, 40, 60, 80 100 by eliminating the fifth star. And now we're seeing like Netflix goes to a thumbs up or a thumbs down. So ours is really based on was this review helpful? not helpful, and how genuine was it? So a bunch of different that's actually a 21 point algorithm. So really kind of sift through like what makes this a credible review and that that's what really determines your credibility score. And what we kind of saw was, okay, there's all these great brands out there that are probably you know, the north face and Patagonia and arc corrects and all these cool companies, but there's also So thousands of brands out there, these cottage brands that nobody has ever even seen before. And they're making amazing stuff. And we're like, there's got to be a way to get these brands in front of consumers that are looking for the next latest, greatest gear, whether it's climbing gear skiing here, whatever, you know, and we ran across this company that nobody's ever heard of. And they had this backpack and this guy was showing it to me was a ski backpack. And she was like, unzip that pocket on the bottom. And there are these two little plastic t handles on webbing. And I'm like, I don't really understand what this is. And you pull the webbing out and when you let go, it retracts in on a reel, and I'm like, okay, I still don't get it. She's like, you're skiing, you're with your kids. You're on a cat trail, where your kids can't ski because they're young, whatever. They come up to you. Unzip this pocket, grab these t handles, you ski drag them behind you. And when you get to a point where they can go down elegant, they let go and they retract into the backpack. And I was like, Oh my God, why does everybody own one of these? And she's like because we're not big enough. We don't have the capital to get into any retailers, whether it be specialty or Rei. So nobody's ever heard of us. And I was like, okay, we're gonna make sure that people hear about you. And so that's really the inspirational side is, you know, we think all good gear deserves a chance. And we're the platform to do that. Marc Gutman 8:20 Oh, my gosh, there's like so much to unpack right there. But first, sorry, no, no, it's great. Like first I can't even believe that that ski tote thing exists. I can't tell you how many times like I've either a well, first I tried to reteach myself to ski because I'm a snowboarder, and I was a hazard on the slopes to myself and my children. And then my motto was screaming Hey, Ruby, put out your arm. And as I came by my snowboard, I would yank her arm out of her socket and get her going, you know? Exactly. You totally get it. Yeah, totally. And so, Wow, that's so awesome. But what I heard in there to Erik was just these this amalgamation of, of the ideals of fairness credibility, your background in tech and then this like love for the outdoors. So, you know, let's take a step back and talk a little bit about your upbringing. I mean was young Erik I mean were these things that were when you were nine years old are these ideas that were swirling around your head at the time? Erik Boles 9:18 So my dad was a high school administrator, literally from since the literally the day I was born. And you know, one of the I amazing parents still do, but they one of the smart things they did when I was young when the apple two computer came out, so I'm aging myself a little bit. They were like, this kid needs a computer. So they bought a computer and that's back, you know, when computers were $3.3 million, or whatever for an apple, and that kind of began my love of that environment. And I just kind of took off and it was with me all through high school and I was kind of that way Your kid that was like, really into computers, but also was like, you know, a starter on the football team and blah, blah, blah and all that stuff. And, and so it's always just kind of stuck with me being around computers my entire life. And then I took a short stint and was a firefighter for 10 years in Washington State. And, you know, everybody had CompuServe and, and whatever. But then AOL came out, which was really the first, you know, an integrated environment where people could do cool stuff. And we saw AOL. And all of a sudden, I was like, there's a business model here, like AOL is going to change the way people perceive being online. And you know, this was really pre-internet because they all were just a closed ecosystem, but and that's when I launched my first startup and 96. And we sold that in 97. The lessons I got that so we were just a web design shop back in 96. Right, we just did web development, and back then Nobody knew how to write HTML, there was no drag and drop HTML editors to build web pages. There was none of that stuff. So you had to know HTML. And you didn't have to really be good at it. Because every single website looked like shit. So anybody could be a web designer. So that was great. You know, I remember like talking to this one customer. They're like, Hey, can you do that little mailbox. We're like, the door opens and the envelope comes out in the envelope goes back in the door closes. And I was like, yeah, we can do that. They're like, we want that. And I was like, no problem. And now I look back on that. And I'm like, Oh, my God, why did I not talk them out of that. But back then that was cool. But working with these businesses, and they were like, Hey, you know, it'd be really great if we didn't have to have a printer on every single person's desk and a dial-up internet account for every single person in our office. So when we sold the first company, which was incidentally named Cowlitz, internet advertising and internet design, because that's we were in Cowlitz County, Washington. And that's what I would love to have my first lesson in branding that you don't name your business Cowlitz Cuz nobody knows what it means or how to spell it. And from there, when we saw that we're like, let's start doing networking for businesses where you say, okay, you bring in one DSL line, you have one printer, everybody prints to it, everybody's online all the time, whatever. And so we started that company. And we sold that. And that's really when in late 98, early 99, that's really when we started to see networking or dynamic websites take off, right? So PHP, and MySQL and database driven dynamic type websites where, where it wasn't just a static webpage that looked like a digital phone book. And the problem that everybody had was, okay, I go to Company A, and they design, my back end, my PHP, my whatever, my Java, my JavaScript, and then they move it to our servers, and everything breaks. And the hosting environment blames the people that wrote the code and the people that wrote the code, blame the hosting environment, and we're like, Alright, well, we don't really want to get into front end web development, because we already know from 1996, we're really not very good at that. So why don't we build a hosting company that also does development. Everything lives in one environment. There's one throat to choke when something breaks, and then partner with front end web development firms. So that's what we did. And that was one of those things that back then everybody was like, how that you can make a business off of building dynamic back end websites. And I said, You know, I think by 2010, I think 75% of the internet will be driven dynamically. Well, it was actually 2004. And it was 99% of it. But everybody thought it was a stupid idea. And so we did that. And we became the largest hosting company in the state of Colorado and hosted stuff not only in Colorado, but nationwide. And we sold that and one of the companies that we hosted was all of the properties for freedom communications, which is the fourth-largest newspaper company or was until they broke apart and we hosted Every single one of the 118 properties. When we sold the company, they said, We need somebody to run interactive, why don't you come do that. And I said, I'll come on for six months, but I don't really believe in anything that you do at the newspaper level, I don't think you'll ever be successful. And so I'll give you six months. And seven years later, I looked at my watch, and I was like, holy shit, I'm still working for a newspaper. I gotta go. Marc Gutman 14:24 And so interactive. I mean, like, you took this and maybe for our listeners, you can set the stage because you went through a real big chunk of history there. And like, I mean, I remember AOL. I remember I got on it, like, like I didn't, like no one really knew what kind of like screen name you're supposed to have. And most people have like anonymous names, where now I'm like, Hey, I'm Marc Gutman on everything right or Marc at Wildstory. But like then I was cinema star. You know, that was like my name. I was like, you had to have like some like real fancy name. And then and then you moved into and just for our listeners, maybe you can even set the stage like what is a dynamic website at that time, the back end like what's going on, what are the complexities because I remember, like building websites was like moving mountains. And I think to your point it had it was nothing like it is today with WordPress or Wix or any of these other options that people have. Yeah, if you could just like kind of remind us what that time was like when you're when you're talking about dynamic development. Erik Boles 15:19 Yeah. So so you know, back Back then it was like you would write this static HTML, which is Hypertext Markup Language and you would, you know, you would literally go into like a text editor. And if you wanted text to be bold, you would do a, an open bracket, a B, and then a close bracket, and you would type the words you wanted, then you would put open bracket slash be closed bracket, and that was opening the bold tag and closing the bold tag. And you're right, it was like moving mountains. Well, then people were like, I wonder if there's a way that somebody could email me directly from my website. And that you know, was kind of the birth of PHP which is a coding language and uses a database Based on the back end, where, you know, somebody feels like we see him everywhere today, right? You're like, hey, contact us, you only put in your name, and your email address and your message, well back then that'll have to be custom written as well, there was none of this, like drag a form in and drop it and all sudden, you had a contact form, like you had to go through and write all of the code on the back end to make that work. And more and more people were saying, you know, we want to be able to, you know, have a contact form or have other dynamic content. You know, I mean, today we look at it, and it's like, well, yeah, I'll just go write a blog post, and it'll load, it'll just update the front end of my website. And that's super easy. You know, back in the late 90s, as you said, that was moving mountains. And so the only way to do that really well for customers was to write that interface where they could go in type stuff. And then we got to the point where when you type stuff, you would click on the B button for bold or the you for underline or the eye for italic, and you know, left center, right, justify all those things. So that's really what we were doing. was building that back end infrastructure for our customers, where they could have this dynamically driven website that relied on all this back end code, and more robust servers to host it. Marc Gutman 17:11 And like, how long did it take back in the day to make a form? For example? Erik Boles 17:15 Oh, gosh, I mean, you would spend 15, 20, 25 minutes I mean, you know, writing that code, obviously, once you have the code written, you just kind of copy and paste it into whoever's website and go through and just change the, the relevant, relevant information, but, you know, early on testing and all that, and then the security vulnerabilities are involved, you know, I mean, you know, to your point, it's like, now if I want a contact form, I drag it in, center it, maybe put a border around it, and the whole thing takes 45 seconds. And back then, I mean, it was easily 15,20 minutes to write anything useful in PHP, Marc Gutman 17:51 and you had to be a specialist. Erik Boles 17:52 That's right. Marc Gutman 17:54 What brought you from Cowlitz to Colorado? Erik Boles 17:58 So I was actually born and raised in Colorado. Otto, I moved out to Washington to work for the fire department. And, you know, Fire Department jobs are really not that easy to come by, and you apply all over the place because that's what I really wanted to do as a firefighter. So, you know, in the late 99 that's where Yeah, 99 I was like, Alright, we'll move back to Colorado. And that's where the third company that the hosting company, which was Rocky Mountain web tech came from, and then we sold that and went to work for you know, freedom communications and newspaper company. Marc Gutman 18:30 Yeah, and I love that and we have a lot of similarities in the fact that kind of bouncing from different disciplines and so, you know, how did you come to the conclusion that you know, firefighting wasn't for you and then how did you muster up the courage or the gumption to make a change because I know my own past and story those are always the hardest, you know, when you're like, oh, man, I've got like, the metaphorical sunk cost of like, I'm here I'm a firefighter. I've invested in this like making a change. Gonna be difficult. I don't know if it was like that for you. But you know, I'm just kind of at a turtle editorializing with my own experience. I mean, it wasn't like that for you. Erik Boles 19:08 Yeah, well, very much. And you know, and I think I think that's really the big thing about building a startup going out on your own doing those type of things is that, you know, in in in the mid-90s, I mean, I was 25 years old, and it's like, of course, I'm gonna do this because you're young and, and, you know, you've got the world by the tail and, and you don't have a whole lot of things at risk. Now, you know, being a startup number five, and much older, I certainly see where people are way more apprehensive to build that startup, but, you know, kind of what drove me into it was I was like, there's, there's, there's money here, you know, oddly, they don't, they don't pay you a whole lot to go into burning buildings for a living. Oddly, you think they'd pay a lot more but they don't. So, I was like, you know, and, and the great thing about being a firefighter is it's the best part-time job you'll ever have. Because you work 20 on 48 dot 24 on 48 off. So really, it's, you've got all the time in the world to do something else. And then when the first one, when you call, it's advertising, that design really took off. And then we sold that. And then we parlayed that money into, you know, the, the networking group, which was the bowls group. And that really took off and I was like, I think I've got to make a decision here. Like, I'm either gonna, I'm either gonna start running startups full time, or I'm gonna, or I'm gonna do other stuff like, like fire department and whatever and all that. And so that's really when I when I made the decision that you know, it's probably a lot safer and healthier have a lifestyle to kind of go this direction. So that's what I did and, you know, yeah, so that that's, that's kind of how that worked out. Marc Gutman 20:46 Yeah. And so being such a seasoned entrepreneur and kind of going through the process, so many different times, like what's what's scary about a startup, Erik Boles 20:56 everything, everything. I think the big I think that I think people that start a startup, whether it be a tech startup, whether it be a true startup or just an entrepreneurial venture, whether it be hanging open a coffee shop, which is arguably easier because a blueprint is there, right? It's like there are hundreds of thousands of coffee shops, all you have to do is really follow their model and make something unique. It's still very, very scary, because you're like, we don't know if it's gonna work. We don't know if people will use it. We don't know any of those things. But, but I think probably the biggest misstep that I see people make in doing that is they're half pregnant throughout the process. So it is a I'm gonna invest as much time into this as I can, but I really can't because I've got to do X, Y, and Z as well. And I've got to have this job which I fully understand, you know, you've got to have your nine to five to pay the bills and feed the kids and, and pay the mortgage and all that. But the biggest misstep is I've got to have that, but I've got another, you know, 12 hours. A day might asleep a little bit of sleep, where I could be working on this. But I've also got, you know, whatever my favorite three TV shows are and things like that. So they really try to make the startup fit into their lifestyle, rather than making that startup their lifestyle. And I think that's where almost all of them fail, because they just don't put in the time and the effort. And that's what, that's where you get the words, the horror stories. I've you know, it's so brutal starting a startup, as long as you're willing to commit to it, man, it's really not that tough. Marc Gutman 22:29 Yeah, it's kind of like, it's kind of like that saying, you know, this plane has no landing gear, right? If you if you're flying the plane and no, you can't land it, you're probably gonna fly it versus if you know, you can touch down and you have a safety net or you just don't have the energy because you're working another job. It's really difficult. Erik Boles 22:47 Yeah, that's that that's, that's a great analogy, you know, and, you know, this is this is the issue that I take with everybody that that complains about how they they don't have everything they want in life and whatever and No, I know people that don't have everything they want, like, they just don't complain about it. It's the ones that complain about it. And usually my first question is, what's your favorite TV show? And if they answer that question I'm like, then it's your fault. You don't have everything you want. Because you could not watch that TV show and have an extra hour every single day to be busting your ass to build a startup or doing something about you not having everything you want. You're making choices which is totally fine that if that's your jam, that's your jam. But don't complain that you've been served a bad deal when you are proactively making a choice on how you spend your time. Marc Gutman 23:34 Well said and having gone through startup land myself, I know exactly what you mean. So let's kind of go back a little bit to your career and you know, you started off in a more traditional advertising space you then got into what and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm hearing it is less of a traditional advertising space more of a technology space. You're doing back Development you're doing hosting, then you get into interactive with freedom was that again more of a traditional advertising role? Erik Boles 24:10 Well, so they freedom did something very, very smart early on, and that is they created an entire interactive division. And then every city, whether it be Orange County, or Lima, Ohio, or Florida or whatever, or Colorado, they had a separate building away from the newspaper that was their interactive team. And we led all of the online efforts, then somebody at a corporate level made a decision that it was really stupid to have two offices, and they could work a whole lot better together, if they were all in the same building. So they took all the interactive people and stuck them into the newspaper building. Which, if you ever want to kill creativity in interactor person, stick them in a newsroom with a bunch of journalists and that will happen almost instantly. And that's exactly what happened. And it's not their fault. I mean, journalists are our bread through school, and whatever to say. Our job is to be the fourth estate, get all the news, get all the facts and tell the story The next morning in print and put it on somebody's doorstep, it's just not the way that people consume information anymore. And they did not all of these blanket statements immediately invalidate themselves. But the majority of print journalists don't really have a desire to do anything online. They're their passion, they're fueled and they're driven by writing, you know, 13 column inches of news or 20 inches of column column column inches of news and printing it the next day and spending three four days on it. You know, rather than being like hey, here's a story let's get it up on you know, New York Times calm and let's get it up there in the next hour. You know, and so it's kind of changed for them because the world the rule of good enough applies in almost everything right so when I think it was five camera with the airline was but you know, when Captain Sullenberger landed his Airbus In the Hudson River, The New York Times USA Today Washington Post printed a story about it the next day, and nobody cared, because I got everything I needed to know about that plane crash from people that were standing on the wing of the plane on Twitter, within 10 minutes. Right. So nobody read their stories. So, yeah, I got a little bit off topic there for ya know, and I apologize. But yeah, that's, you know, it's that that's kind of what literally drove me out of the newspaper industry was, we were setting a budget in, I think it was 2005 or 2006. And we had budgeted laptops, air cards and video cameras, and we were going to write them the portal where they could go out and shoot video and upload that video to their various news websites, whether it be the Orange County Register or whatever. And I had a editor, take their glasses off and look at me and said video on the internet. That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. And I was like, wow, I gotta go. Marc Gutman 26:58 That's awesome. That's kind of like my story. Like when I first saw a camera phone I was like that is the dumbest thing I've ever seen who is ever gonna want to take a picture with their camera now granted the technology was awful and it looked like a you were you know in some like Vaseline smeared world or something like that but for those that had the fourth right and the you know, the vision and the foresight and all that kind of stuff, they saw it coming. I did not Erik Boles 27:23 Yeah, you know that back then, like, you know, me being again on the on the on the more technical side, it's like you couldn't walk into a data center if you had a camera phone in your pocket and the early days of camera phones they made you check it at the front desk, because you couldn't take pictures inside the data centers. Now you can you know, it just be everyone had to check their phone you know, I mean, there's no like, that's everyone's everyone's got a capture device, of course. That's right. Marc Gutman 27:51 This episode brought to you by wildstory. Wait, isn't that your company? It is and without the generous Support of wildstory, this show would not be possible. A brand isn't a logo or a tagline, or even your product. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company. It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. Wildstory helps progressive founders and savvy marketers build purpose-driven brands that connect their business goals with the customers they want to serve. So that both the business and the customer needs are met. This results in crazy, happy, loyal customers that purchase again and again. And this is great for business. If that sounds like something you and your team might want to learn more about, reach out @ www.wildstory.com and we'd be happy to tell you more. Now back to our show. So you're going through your career and you got out of that that business and you founded another tech company, I believe Is that correct? Erik Boles 29:01 Yeah. So So number four was, we were like, okay, we know that this was literally on the tail ends of the of the video on the internet. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard story. And me and a buddy of mine, Brian went to lunch. And, you know, we literally, I said, we're going to lunch, we're going to outside Johnny's, and there's a good chance I'm going to drink a beer during lunch or I might come back with a deer rifle because I can't handle the stupidity inside this building. And over lunch, we started talking, we were like, What if there was a, like an online video show that was all about the outdoors. And so we kind of put together what was at the time Colorado outside of TV, and there was a destination guide. So like Breckenridge or Vail or Aspen or Park City or whatever, and like everything you want to do when you go to Breckenridge on a ski vacation. There was a Activity Guide. So once a week there was a full HD video that was all about, you know, some activity whether it be skiing or whether it be mountain biking or something like that we cover a specific trail. And then there was a gear guide. And that gear guide was the latest gear, you know, the type of gear like, you know, avalanche gear for winter season, the kind of stuff you need for camping, all those different types of things. And really, we're like, Okay, how the heck do we do the gear guide, because we don't really want to go out and spend hundreds of thousand dollars a year. So I cold called somebody in marketing at Rei corporate in Seattle. And I said, Hey, you don't know me. My name is Erik, I live in Colorado, we're going to do this really weird thing. We're going to do this gear guide. But we don't really want to buy a whole bunch of gear and we're not the experts on gear. So we'd like to do it in an Rei store in Colorado Springs with your gear and your staff because they're experts. And she said, that's a great idea. How do we get started? And I said, I don't know because I didn't expect that answer from you. She was like, Okay, fair enough. She was like, why don't you call me back when you figure it out. And I was like, okay, have a good day. And we hung up and I was like Like, that was just a yes, tomorrow. Yeah, I don't. Like I don't I'm not even sure what that just happened. And within two weeks, we had camera gear sitting on my front step, you know, which back then was 10 grand worth of camera stuff and lighting and microphones and audio and all that. And another week later, we were in an Rei store and with lighting and all that and going over camping gear, and backpacks or sleeping bags and bikes and everything else at Rei carries. And that's really what kind of spurred that, that moving forward. And then we expanded that programming as well. It was, um, we were at a at a mountain biking festival and flew to Colorado notice the fruit of that tire festival, and everybody was drinking beer. And I was like, you know, this was in I think, 2007 ish, I think was in 2007. And I said, you know, I've got this buddy of mine that does a stupid wine show. And he gets a ton of views, and everybody watches it. And I was like, why don't we do a craft beer show? We all love craft beer. Why don't we start a craft beer show because There's a real tie between people drinking beer and mountain biking, skiing, hiking, backpacking, it's it seems like they kind of go together. So under that same company, we launched what was known as beer, tap TV. And 435 episodes later, of all HD video, and that's back when putting HD video putting 1018 to 1920. By 1080 HD video on the internet was super expensive. And you paid for everybody that viewed it. And we had like, right around a million viewers a month and that's back in 2007 2000 2008 2009. And so that that's when, you know, we had beer, tap TV and all that and, you know, again, we made money out of it, but it was never really an equitable company just because there was so much overhead in it. And, you know, I talked to a buddy of mine that worked for Ford Motor Company, he's like, we love what you do. We love the show and how irreverent you are, and we would really as Ford Motor Ford Motor Company, we would love to advertise There's a problem. We sell cars, use it on a camera and get drunk. And those two don't really go together very well. And I'm like, No, you're right, they don't. So you know that that's back when being irreverent on the internet was like, still kind of a risky brand move for advertisers, they didn't really want to tie their name to it. So it was really, it was a lot harder to monetize, that we think that would be a whole lot easier and more successful now in 2020. But But back then that was a little bit tougher to do. So we shut that down. And I kind of went on to do other things. Marc Gutman 33:35 Yeah, I mean, what was that, like that day? Did you shut down? Was that a frustrating moment? Erik Boles 33:39 You know, I really don't think it was it. There was certainly amongst everybody, all of us are together and, and we were like, you know, it's kind of sad. But it was at that point where we'd like we had tried so hard to monetize it, and we were just too early, and then the marketing ecosystem wasn't ready for it yet. Which kind of seems to be kind of you know, The tone of everything I've done is I'm just too early for it. But, um, so it was almost like a sigh of relief, you know, when we was like, we don't have to do this anymore and worry about, you know, how do we pay for hosting? And how do we pay for this? And how do we pay for that, you know, all those different elements that went with it and, and when you look at the at the alcohol world, whether it's wine, beer or spirits, they have at the federal level, what's called the three-party system, meaning that if I am New Belgium brewing company that makes that tighter beer, I cannot sell my beer directly to you as the liquor store. The federal government steps in and says you have to go through a distributor, well, distributors, own territories, and nobody else can be in their territory. So essentially, it's like the beer mafia. That distributor says, I can set the price. And so for every dollar that's made on on a six-pack of beer, it's like, some crazy number like 65 cents of that dollar goes to the distributor, another 20 cents of that dollar. goes to the liquor store. And then as the brewery you get to pick up what's ever left, what's whatever's remaining? The 15 cents remaining? Marc Gutman 35:07 Yeah, that's gotta be frustrating. I mean, just being a futurist, being someone who's about efficiency and about making the experience better and seeing all that inefficiency and all that waste, Erik Boles 35:17 right? Yeah. And you know, and then there comes at a rubber bands again, right? Like we had this deal. Were not Anheuser Busch, but we're like their own by now. Anyways, they, um, they said, Hey, we really want to fly you guys to Germany and come look at the at the back brewery and blah, blah, blah, do a live show from there and we're like, yeah, we're in like, we won't even charge you money. We're in. And then we said something that was very much untoward about Budweiser. Between the time they had said that and the time that we were actually going to sign the deal. And they watched the episode apparently and heard that we didn't say great things about Budweiser, and they just kind of pulled out of that. Deal entirely. So we missed that opportunity as well. But there was that, you know, there was that, you know, you get it doing a podcast, right? It's like, yeah, I can either like, toe the company line, or I can just be honest and whatever. And then we're getting to that age now, where it's like not even getting there. We've been there for five to seven years, but we're in that space now, where it's like, this is what people listen to his podcasts, you know, like this one, that that are that are genuine and real. And they don't listen to the, you know, the ones that are that are toeing the company line. Marc Gutman 36:28 Absolutely. I mean, that, that authenticity, and just like, you know, the transparency of a brand and, you know, also, you know, realizing that we're all people whether you're a brand, a consumer, someone running the, you know, the beer, the beer show, whatever, right, like, and I think as consumers, we can super sniff out when it's inauthentic. And when it's a paid placement and when someone is just, you know, selling us and we hate that and I have to imagine that that's also, you know, a big motivation for you and Gearmunk. Erik Boles 36:57 Yeah, absolutely. And then that's it. You're exactly right, you hit the nail on the head, right is that we know when we know statistically now that like 91% of consumers do not trust brand messaging, they just don't they know that they're being lied to. And even when we're not being lied to, we think we're being lied to, because their whole job is to sell product. So what we do trust is our, you know, we have a know like and trust environment around people that resonate with us and a regular people just like us, whether that'd be a blogger or a YouTuber, or an Instagram or a podcaster, or whatever, whatever walk they come from, those are the people that we build that, that that that affiliation with or that affinity with. And so when they say, hey, I've got this great pair of hiking boots, or I just bought the brand new Fiat or you know, I bought, you know, this baseball bat or this dress or whatever, we intrinsically trust them way more than we trust somebody that's that's coming from a brand voice. So really, we're The Smart Money is for brands and brands are finally starting to realize this. There's been obviously the front runners that figured this out years ago. And then there's the huge monolithic brands that think they can't be disrupted. We call those the newspaper brands. They, they feel like you know, we're too big we can't be disrupted we have too much money. And really, the way to sell is by getting you know, is by channeling all your efforts, not into print magazines, or TV magazine or TV ads, radio ads or whatever. It's by getting your, your brand in front of bloggers, podcasters YouTubers, Instagrammers tick talkers, whatever, you know, it's interesting that you know, in 2007, or he's like, I'll never be on Twitter. That's the dumbest thing ever. And then eventually they were on Twitter and then in 2011, they were like Instagram how Bane are you? Hell no. As a brand, we're not gonna be on Instagram. And then eventually they were on Instagram so you think that they would learn their lesson and now in the marketing world, we're still hearing from brands. Tik tok tik tok is stupid. Well, that's stupid Tik Tok just had 313 million downloads in q1 of 2020. And they're almost a billion downloads now in North America for for for Tik Tok. So, you know, there's certain brands that just simply are never going to get it. But you're right. It's like, you know, if you can tell your story through a channel that has an audience, you know, whether that audience is 10,000, or whether that audience is a million, you know, it's worth it. Marc Gutman 39:28 Yeah. And you'd mentioned that, you know, historically, you felt like, you know, the name of the game for Erik Boles is like, hey, you're ahead of your time, you're pushing new ground, you're forging new ground. Do you feel that way with Gearmunk? Erik Boles 39:40 Not now, I don't, but I did. When we first sat down to start talking about this. With gearmunk many, many years ago. We were like, you know, we're getting out of the, you know, we're getting out of the newspaper game. We're going to do this blah, blah, blah. And then we got into the outdoor industry and the outdoor industry just simply wasn't ready for it yet. They're just not digitally, forward. And you know, a lot of the smaller brands that that can't go into retail because they don't have the capital to distribute, you know, 150 backpacks or 1000 or 10,000, whatever. So that's why you always see the Northeast is Patagonia is whatever because does send you that product. And if you're a small brand, you're like, Okay, there's a lot of challenges to getting into retail, right? One is, I don't have the capital to send them 1000 backpacks. So let's say somebody gives you a loan, and you can go make 1000 backpacks, or you have an investor, and you send them 1000 backpacks. If they don't sell all thousand of them, the way that environment works is they send you back, whatever they don't sell. So if they send you back 600 backpacks, they only pay for 400 of the backpacks, you get the 600 back and you have to figure out what to do with those now. And you know, you've lost money on that. And you know, in addition if if I'm if I have my backpack hanging on one peg in a specialty outdoor store, and now I have to convince that salesperson to sell my backpack One of the bigger, you know, well known brands, and if I'm the account rep for a bigger unknown brand, I just come in and say, Hey, the person that sells the most northface this month, we're going to spiff you guys 2500 bucks. I just bought every single salesperson in the building for 30 days, nobody's going to sell your backpack because they're all selling mine, because they want that 2500 bucks. So the younger brands that have never had this opportunity, they're like, we see the opportunity and what Gearmunk is doing here and in the email and those types of things that we do, and they've been huge adopters of it. And then there are some bigger brands that get it that that have a more digitally focused or more technically aware team and they're like no, we want to be part of this. But uh, it and you know, the other thing is that big brands are afraid of anything that has democratized You know, when you've got millions and millions and millions of marketing dollars, it's really easy to on level the playing field just by being loud noisy and you can't hear any other brands, you know, if I'm a small brand and I take out a 160 page black and white ad in the back of a magazine that everybody reads, and if I'm, you know, the north face or Patagonia or one of those, and I take out a two page full color spread, which I can afford, and I do it every single month for 24 months, you're probably never going to see that small brand in the back because you're so attracted to this big brand. So yeah, so the small brands got it and now, oddly enough with with with the global pandemic pandemic of COVID-19, and all these brands, we've been talking to saying you better have a direct to consumer channel and they're like, No, no, no, we go through retail. And retailers have been like, we don't want to have any comp play. We want people coming directly into our store. And I'm like, you don't understand that the customer owns their journey. Now you don't you don't dictate how the customer buys stuff. And if you dictate, they have to come into your store. They'll just go get it on Amazon or Zappos or a billion other places or backcountry calm or Rei and So they, they, you know, they, they didn't do any of those things. And now all of a sudden, the government said you will be closing your day your doors for at least 70 days, retailers are afraid as they probably should be. And I'm hoping that they recover because I got my start in high school working in especially retail shop right here in Colorado doing selling outdoor gear. And but brands are finally realizing we have to survive, we have to we have to build a way for our business to move forward. And that is that let us engage with podcasters YouTubers, bloggers, whatever, and all the users that are directly on the Gearmunk app and figure out a way to connect directly with them and drive sales back into our channel the way the consumer wants. So we're we're finally getting to that. That tipping point of everybody finally gets it and realizes what we're doing. And you know, and that that's why we launched you know, the thin air gear show, which is really the outdoor ecosystems first real virtual tradeshow. Marc Gutman 43:57 That's a perfect segue. I was gonna I was gonna ask You just about to get into that. And it's interesting because right before this little segment you were talking about the reluctance for different brands to adopt new social channels. And it mirrors exactly the, the segment you just described about the outdoor industry's reluctance in retail reluctance to adopt new sales channels. And so it was just really interesting to me to hear you, you know, lay out kind of that general overview of brands and social channels, and then kind of how it mirrors what's going on in the way that people want to interact and purchase from brands today. And so, so thank you for that. That's really cool. Yeah. And if you could get into talking to us a little bit about, you know, tell us what thin air is like, what the idea, you know, behind that, how that how that came about, and where we can learn more about it. Sure. So So back in. Gosh, I want to say it was 2015. We were at this huge outdoor trade show in Salt Lake City and we're sitting in these folding chairs with 3000 Erik Boles 45:00 People, 2000 people, whatever it was, and there's a panel up on the stage talking about sustainability, and the environment, and blah, blah, blah, and whatever. And my business partner at the time, Brian looked around the room and all these people and all these booths and all this infrastructure. And he was like, hell yeah, sustainability, give it up for that. And I was like, No kidding. What is the carbon footprint of a show like this? I was like, why is there no virtual tradeshow? And, you know, we're like, oh, we have the next greatest thing, virtual tradeshow. And we started circulating the idea. And, and everybody looked at us, like we had horns growing out of our heads. So we're like, Okay, I guess you guys aren't down to the virtual tradeshow yet. And so we kind of had this idea. And as we started to head into this, this global pandemic, we're like, you know, some of these trade shows are going to be shutting down and, and things of that nature and it's really not so much about capitalizing on that opportunity. It was really more about what do all these small brands They don't have this enormous operating budget, where they can weather the storm. What really happens with them, when they get into this environment is okay, we've got a problem where everything's going to shut down. We have no sales, no, no clear path to sales. How do we fix that? And so that really was kind of the mission behind it. And we're like, we know everybody's gonna be doing zoom conferences, you know, they're gonna be like, Oh, we have a virtual trade show, and it's gonna be a zoom conference. Well, that's not that that's not a trade show at all. That's a webinar and they created the term death by webinar for a reason. It's horrible. So we're like, it's got to be different. It's got to be cool. It's got to be fun. So we've really started to spin the wheels up on that. And then the largest show Outdoor Retailer when it cancelled. We were on the phone with everybody with each other as a team and within five minutes saying, it's time to pull the trigger. We got we got to press on the gas. And we came up we've got a bunch of technology that we wrote on the back end and then we build through you know, Amazon AWS and other things that already exist, but we kind of wrote all the build all the glue, essentially, that holds it together. And we built this environment using several partners and whatever that is truly like a video game like like you pick your avatar and you choose your skin color, your gender, your clothing, your hair, your height, your weight, everything like you fully customize yourself, then you're dropped into this virtual environment where you walk through and there's booths everywhere. And the booths are all fully customized by the brand, just like they would be in a regular trade show. And you walk up and you can interact with everything product displays, you can interact with video, and it's got 3d with what's called 3d spatial voice technology in it. So as you walk up your names above your head, just like it would be in a video game, whether you're playing fortnight or whatever, and they see you coming up and the guy at the booth is like, you know, hey, Erik, I'm, you know, john from you know, mountain Smith or eco-vessel or whatever. Tell me more about you and you're like, hey, I've got this blog, right? Got a podcast, I've got this, I really want to check out what you guys are doing. He's like, great, come right over here. And it's literally real-time voice conversation. And I can hear other people around me just like I went on the show floor having a conversation. And as I get further away, they get quieter. As I get closer, they get louder, and everything's digitized. It's just like being in the real world, other than the fact that you can't physically pick up a hiking boot and feel it in your hands. But that can be done post-show very easily. But it was really something completely different than what anybody else in the outdoor industry was doing. And that's really what spurred us to do it was Let's drive this thing within their show to where you know, these brands can actually have an opportunity to have these conversations and then build all these analytics into the back end so that you know you're not sifting through all your stuff post-show as a brand and saying, Where does the business card that one person that I wanted to talk to? Or if your immediate person saying where was that business card from that one backpack company or that one cooler company. You can't find Because everything is right there like who visited my booth? What did they click on? What did they see? What did they touch? What did they hear? Who did I have conversations with all that's built in. So when the show's over, as a as a media person, you can connect with them and as a brand they can connect with you. And that's the other thing is that, you know, these big shows have always been, let's drive sales into retail so they could sell our product. We're like, there's a better way, the better way is get in touch with influential podcasters bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, etc. Have them tell your story to their audiences and then immediately drive those sales back into your into your product, whether that be at your retail, which is fine, or econ retailer, yourself or direct to consumer. But that just seemed like the logical win for us and has for a long time. And then this really was the cataclysmic event that made that happen, you know, Marc Gutman 49:52 totally and I have a background in that space. And we can talk more about that later. It's not that exciting but I just have some some knowledge there. And, you know, I feel like it's been like pushing a boulder uphill to get people to adopt some of these technologies. And to me, it's just crazy to think about how quickly we've adapted from a brand from a marketing standpoint when forced to do so. And you know, we've been sitting here talking about virtual trade shows and how, you know, they're better for the environment and more effective and all these things, but really, until we're forced with like, Hey, you got to do it. We haven't done it. And I think much like we're seeing with people working from home and flexing schedules, and everyone's like, wait, this, this works just as good, if not better, probably for less money, less footprint, better quality of life. I mean, do you really think that we're going to be able to continue with virtual trade shows and this will be the way of the future? Erik Boles 50:47 I don't think it's the way that I think it is, and it isn't. Let me explain what that means. I think for the foreseeable future. Physical trade shows very much do exist. Humans are humans, we want contact, we want to get opia with that. How'd each other and say hi and pick up products and go have a beer with a friend? I don't think there's any successful trade show going forward that doesn't have a virtual component to it. Marc Gutman 51:12 That's a great distinction. Yeah. And I think it's much like the way that we're interacting with brands today that you've highlighted several times. Like look, you have your, your core brand messaging and channels, but then look, you got to find different channels where your audience also is like a podcast or a YouTube channel or tik tok. Erik Boles 51:28 Right? Marc Gutman 51:29 Yeah, very good. Erik Boles 51:30 Yeah, that's, you know, and then we like, we had a conversation with one brand. And they were like, Well, you know, it's not like they're going like, like, Where are these people gonna go to find good gear? And I'm like, What do you mean, I was like, they're gonna go into one of 3000 different Facebook groups that has 60,000 people in there, where they can ask questions. They're like, well, they're not gonna like buy a hiking boot based on somebody else's recommendation. And I'm like, they're doing it right now. Like, it's been happening for years. And they're like, are they getting the right hiking boot? And I was like, That doesn't matter. Right wrong right or right or wrong hiking doesn't matter what matters to you in the in the outdoor industry is that they're not going into your store and buying from retail, because they're buying online. So you better figure out a way to become a content creator if you're a retailer and add value, add value, add value, so that I know that, you know, when I when I've narrowed down my decision, I'm going to, I'm going to go that direction and you're going to see retailers or brands themselves, follow the Zappos model, right? Which is, Hey, I think I need maybe this one of three different hiking boots, great, we'll send you all three of them, try them on in your home in the comfort of your home, walk around for an hour and each one, see which one feels the best and send back the other twos. Zappos pioneered this over a decade ago, you know, 15 years ago, and you send them back. And so I've got the pair of hiking boots that I want that I know that that are comfortable and I love So, you know, I certainly don't think retail is dead if they choose not to be but if they don't fully embrace and hug and love and make out with the fact that digital is here. And this is the way people are buying shit now, they will be. So you know, it's it's, it's the newspaper model all over again, right? It's like, you know, blogs will be dead nobody's gonna listen to podcasts, whatever, and look where newspapers are now. Right? So you know, the the, the market wants what the market wants, and it doesn't care if it hurts your feelings or not. So you can be as romantic as you want about the way things used to be. But the pirate ship is going that way and you're either on it or you're stuck on the island and the choices pretty much yours. Marc Gutman 53:35 No, I love that tough talk. I really do. You know, like you can, you can deny it all you want doesn't mean the world's gonna change to your point of view. And I think that's something that's so important to understand that really the the customer in the consumer does drive, what we're doing and if we're not focused on that, it's going to be a really tough road. Erik Boles 53:54 Yeah, well, you know, I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson that said, you know, the beautiful thing about science is it does doesn't care what you think about it? Like, it's just science. Like you can believe it or not believe it, you know, you can believe that the earth is flat if you want. science doesn't care if you think that or not. Marc Gutman 54:13 Because we come to a close here, I got one last question for you. What do you love about building brands? Erik Boles 54:20 I love the challenge of changing things. I love moving things forward. I love doing things that haven't been done before, that that make life better for people, whether you're a brand, whether you're a consumer, doing something that's not like, I've never once been in it for the money. It's never been like, I think we can make a billion dollars at this. I mean, I've never built a billion dollar startup my life and I probably never will. I don't think I'm smart enough. But there's this opportunity where again, you know, it was like, we started to discover and we figured this out and then I take 2014 or 15. Again, this big show in Utah that you use in Utah called out retailer, they have the main Convention Center. And then they have what they called back then the pavilions, which are these three enormous like circus tents out in the parking lot in the middle of the summer and the Utah E, which is amazing. And we're like, we wonder what's in there, we went in there. And it's these, you know, 800 startup brands that nobody's ever heard of before. And we're like, the world would be a better place not only for these brands, but for consumers as a whole, that they had way more choice on amazing outdoor gear that are being made by these people. Right? So that's really what drives me is like, you know, how do you create things that just make the world a little bit easier, a little bit better for everybody and you know, and then truly make the outdoors more approachable. You know, there's so many people that are like, of course, I would love to go camping, but I'm not going to drop 2500 bucks on a tent, a pack, a bag, Camp stoves, whatever, you know, bags for the kids, all this other stuff. You don't have to that's the beauty of it is you know Don't have to go out and buy the super expensive name brand stuff. There's all these cool manufacturers out there that are doing such cool stuff. And it really empowers more people to get outdoors get away from video games, you know, get away from the TV, live a better lifestyle. I mean, just everybody wins brands when consumers when you know the outdoors wins. You know, the more people we get outdoors, the less chance or is that somebody the governor level is going to turn it into an apartment complex. Marc Gutman 56:31 And that is Erik Boles. I love his retelling of how brands have been reluctant to adopt the social media and other channels where the customers are. It's crazy to think big brands continue to repeat the same mistakes. You think they learned after they were sure the internet wasn't going to be a big deal. But then again, I'm the guy who thought cameras and phones would never take off. So what do I now? Thank you again to Erik Boles. We'll link to both Gearmunk The Thin Air outdoor show in the show notes, please go ahead and check those out. I for 1am looking forward to attending the Outdoor Retailer show virtually. Well, that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstory.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS so you'll never miss an episode. A lot big stories and I cannot lie to you other storytellers can't deny

BGBS 032: Chad Mellen & Keith Bristol | Knack | What Would We Give to a Friend?

Chad Mellen, co-Founder, and Keith Bristol, Chief Digital Officer, of Knack Bags join us to talk about how they took a pain point and frustration, turned it into an idea, and then developed an entire company around it. They share what they did, the steps they took, and the sheer determination it took to get the prototype made, and the final product flying off the shelf! This is the story of how two career executives broke ranks & built a product that no one else would. If you like stories of trial & error, and ultimate success of the American dream, this is an episode you won’t want to miss! 

What we’re talking about

• An Idea Is Born From the Security Line At the Airport
• From Childhood Admiration To Path Blazing Careers
• Testing, Testing. It’s Launch Time!

 An Idea Is Born From the Security Line At the Airport

Chad Mellen spent most of his career in the branded luxury and premium accessory & retail industries. He has held roles such as CEO, president, CMO, VP Sales & Director across several high end brand name companies. Keith Bristol has previously been a creative director at an ad agency, and was instrumental in building the direct to consumer businesses throughout the US and globally. He has helped launch startups, scale, or progress to acquisition. He also holds the title of “household athletic director”. Both of these men travel extensively for work, and yet, even though they worked in the bag industry, traveling was still cumbersome and frustrating. They were searching for the perfect bag to help make traveling for business, or leisure, a lot easier.

From Childhood Admiration To Path Blazing Careers

 At the end of 2016, when Chad was standing in line to get through security at the airport and trying to dig his ID out of his many bags, he had an idea. What if there was a bag that was multi-function? One bag to do it all! The idea was born, but far from production lines, even though Chad worked in the bag industry. As a child, Chad loved brands & was fascinated with how a logo, a symbol (equities) transmits so much about the product, but also who uses the product. Keith was the same way, but with advertising. He was obsessed with advertising, especially product advertising and branding, as a kid. All this passion and experience led to a business partnership that helped them to develop a product from a simple idea, to one that customers could use to make their lives a lot easier.

Testing, Testing. It’s Launch Time!

Chad and Keith partnered together to use their collective experience, and they formed Knack Bags. From their former jobs, they knew that it was vital to get input from the customers they were hoping to sell to. So they had prototypes made, tested them, got feedback, redesigned, and repeated the entire process again and again until they felt they had the perfect multi-functioning bag. They tested everything from the material the bag was made from, to the zippers that closed it, all the way down to the color of the button you click on when you “Add to Cart”! No detail was too small. Finally, on October 23rd of 2018, they went live with online sales. How fast do you think they sold out? (Spoiler alert: They’re consistently rated with the top name brand bags in the travel industry!) Are you ready to take your idea and turn it into reality? 

 LINKS MENTIONED

Knack Bags Website Knack Bags Facebook Knack Bags Instagram Knack Bags YouTube

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Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 18:55 - 19:34 (39 sec CM) I think the real critical thing is...that’s really challenging for a lot of people.
• 37:41 - 38:24 (43 sec CM) I think that given the blurring...unsustainable multi-bag approach.
• 43:08 - 43:21 (13 sec CM) The biggest moment was when...I was buying a bunch of bags.
• 48:21 - 48:56 (35 sec CM) I just love the fact that our bag...that’s the fundamental point of this product.
• 48:58 - 49:34 (36 sec CM) On the service side...put everything we do through that lens.

QUOTES

1. Why can’t one bag do almost everything, and do it equally well? - CM
2. Knack is all about trying to rethink how people carry their life with them. - CM
3. You have to be willing to take risks & have failures, because in order to lean into that magical side, it’s not always home runs. - MG
4. This is the bag for the mobile professional, and travel is only a portion of what they’re doing. - CM

Podcast Transcript

Chad Mellen 0:03 To me, the biggest moment was when I had to write that first purchase order. And I had to write that first purchase order before we had any kind of financing in place. So basically, I was buying a bunch of bags. And you know, I had a real crisis of confidence that point in time, like, you know, do I really want to do this, but luckily, Keith was on board at that point in time. Again, he kind of balances my things, and he's very optimistic and he was really excited about this. And that meant a ton to me. So, you know, it really helps soothe my nerves to write that purchase order and send that deposit through. Marc Gutman 0:46 podcasting from Boulder, Colorado. This is the baby got backstory Podcast, where we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs like Baxter. And I cannot lie. Hi, I'm your host, Marc Gutman, Marc Gutman, and on today's episode of Baby Got Back story, how to career executives in the bag and luggage industry broke ranks and built the bag that no one else would. Now if you like and enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over in iTunes. iTunes uses these as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on the apple charts. And ratings help us to build an audience, which then helps us to continue to boost the show. Today's episode we're talking to Chad Mellon and Keith Bristol of knack bags. Mac is a new and exciting company that is getting a lot of attention for their unique perspective. One bag for both work and play. Chad is the CEO and founder of knack and has spent his career in the branded luxury and premium accessory and retail industries. As a senior executive, he has been directly responsible for the development and growth of several iconic American and international consumer brands at private, public and private equity owned companies in the writing instrument that means pens, pencils, that same type of thing, luggage, leather goods, handbag and accessory categories. Before knack. He helped co president cmo VP sales and director roles across companies such as at cross to me and coach Keith Bristol is the Chief Digital Officer at knack prior neck. He's been a creative director at an advertising agency and was instrumental in building the direct to consumer businesses for ebags. Calm and to me.com in the US and globally. He has helped launch bootstrap startups scale or progress to acquisition and he's a husband and father I have two daughters, and I love this. The household athletic director, Chad and Keith both met while working at the well known luxury luggage company Tumi and knew that someday they would work together again. They just had to find the right fit. And this is their story. Chad Mellen 3:25 So what's Knack all about? a knack is all about trying to rethink how people carry their life with them. That's really it. And we've said from the very beginning, you know, Keith and I, we just fundamentally don't get the current bag industry. And I've been part of the bag industry for a long time. It's been a lot of time, it coats a lot of time to me. And the idea that you have to put the things that you carry kind of in specialized bags, to get from point A to point B Or not optimize how you carry them? It just doesn't make sense to us. What do I mean by that? If you're going to go to the gym from work, what do you carry? You carry your work bag you carry your gym bag. If you're going to take a quick overnight trip for business, what do you carry, you carry a carry on, you know field or a duffel and you carry your work bag. You know, if you've got a kid you're taking out, you probably have a tote in a diaper bag. It just doesn't make sense. That's how the business is, you know, the industry has been built. They kind of grow businesses by further refining single function bags that match you know, increasingly smaller use cases. And our whole idea was, why can't one bag do almost everything and do it equally well, and that's what max about, you know, it's a business bag. It's an everyday carry bag that also really works well. So the travel bag and gym bag, a bag carry photography equipment in a lot of different uses the whole idea is you now have one bag to live your life. Marc Gutman 5:03 And thank you for that. And that's a great overview of what Knack is and what you stand for. And right now currently you are based in Oregon. And for the both of you, are you both originally from Oregon? Chad Mellen 5:17 Well, actually, we're by Coastal and Keystone, Oregon and Portland and I'm in. I'm actually looking out right now on the beautiful shores Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island Marc Gutman 5:28 vary by Coastal you're about as cooked by Coastal as it gets. Keith Bristol 5:31 We're about is by Coastal as it gets Marc Gutman 5:33 it so Chad, where did you grow up? Chad Mellen 5:36 I was born in New Jersey. And my dad was a marketing executive at Sherwin Williams, which is a paint company and they were in New York City. My mom and dad were both born and bred dyed in the wool New Yorkers. And you know, when I was five, the company said to my dad, you're moving to Cleveland, Ohio. That's where their headquarters were. He thought he was being sent to you know, purgatory or hell, you know, it just This was the worst thing in the world to go from the tri state area to Cleveland, Ohio. So I went when I was five grew up in Cleveland and like my parents loved it. I mean, absolutely loved it. I consider myself in Ohio and Clevelander medine the wool Indians fan and browns fan and you know, brought that curse to my kids. Marc Gutman 6:19 The only thing worse is being Alliance fan because I was raised in Detroit. So I've also brought that curse home to my family so I can relate. Chad Mellen 6:26 Yeah, it's the same thing. At least the Tigers won something recently. Marc Gutman 6:30 That's right. That's right. And Keith, how about you were you grew up? Keith Bristol 6:34 Yeah. So I grew up in Nebraska actually, in the heartland I grew up on a farm. So I you know, it's it's funny, I was the first kind of generation to leave the farm and, like go graduate from college and live in the city. I always wanted to live in city. I don't know why really, I just did. It always just drew drew me always really like just the people and new and different things and farming just wasn't for me. So I kind of left that. behind and yeah, from there I moved to what to school in Nebraska actually and then moved to Colorado. And then recently in the last six years moved to Portland, Oregon. So I migrated West, but I'm definitely a Midwestern or at heart diehard Husker fan. And so Chad and I have a lot of fun with Nebraska, Ohio State, although he has way more fun than I do in the current moment. Recently, recently, yeah, yeah. So Marc Gutman 7:27 yeah, it'll come around. It'll come around. Keith Bristol 7:29 So yeah, that's kind of where I grew up and and sort of my path. Marc Gutman 7:34 Yeah. And so to Midwest guys, like were you both into bags and fashion when you were Chad Mellen 7:42 young men, you know, it's funny. I guess you could say mark, I was pretty oblivious about everything, like right through college. And no, I wasn't at all I love brands. And that's something that I carry with me the idea of a brand has always fascinated me. The idea of That, you know, kind of a logo and a symbol and an aura. You know, what we call equities now can actually transmit so much information not only about product, but about the person who uses the product. absolutely fascinated me. So that's probably the only thing that I can say that really kind of drove me to where I am now. Keith Bristol 8:22 Yeah, I would actually, it's kind of funny because I didn't realize that chat. But I was the same way. I was a little bit more like that with advertising. So I was really obsessed with advertising. I just loved any kind of advertising as a kid Prop, any product advertising, anything like that. And so in branding, I thought was just really a cool thing. So that's why I started my career actually out as in an ad agency as a creative art director and a creative director. And how I got into bags actually was a complete fluke. I was in Denver, and I moved to Denver for a startup. And that was back in the dot bomb days when everything kind of was really really high and then it crashed really, really hard and ended up being at that company for like six months or eight months. It went under and I was looking for a place to land and I found e bags and I really really liked e bags because they had a, you know, kind of a more mature leadership group. And I it's funny because when I started I was like, oh bags, like that's not really that interesting. I'll be in bags for like, I don't know, six months or something. And lo and behold, I was there for over nine years and I got to work with some amazing people and kind of found my love for bags then. And then kind of reconnected with Chad. So that's kind of my bag connection. But now I'm obsessed with bags. Obviously! Marc Gutman 9:44 totally. And it's so interesting. Thinking about that time and going back in time and thinking about ebags because I think for listeners on our show, like they don't like it's even in the name ebags like the revolutionary part about That whole business was that you purchased online, you know, and then they start to extend the brand a little bit into their their own product line but but thinking about just, you know, how revolutionary was that when you when you got there and you're like, we're actually like selling bags on the internet? Keith Bristol 10:16 tremendously revolutionary. I mean, you know, the guys that founded it left Samsonite, because they wanted Samsonite. To do that. They wanted to sell online and Sam's like, oh, no one will ever buy online. And frankly, I think we were one of only three startups pure play startups to make it through the.the.com era back then. So it was pretty, it was a pretty amazing accomplishment and all the things that we had to go through for that. So So yeah, that was that was kind of a, you know, that was really amazing for me to be part of that. And even like you said, the name back then you had to be called a something because people didn't really know what e commerce was, you know, and gosh, how especially In the last, you know, couple months how much it's changed drastically for so many companies. That's always been what I've done online commerce, even after I left ebags but in how Chad and I met was when he was at to me. We actually ran the tv.com website and back then to we did only have line drawings for their for their product, you remember that Chad said and then we had to reshoot we reshot everything for them to put it online to sell online. And that was like a big, big deal. It's just it's funny to kind of look back now and just think how, like second nature that is now but back then it was pretty groundbreaking. Marc Gutman 11:41 Yeah. Did you know what you were doing? Or were you kind of breaking breaking eggs as you went it? Was it new ground? I mean, like, I don't think there was a lot of people that had a ton of expertise in any commerce in that way into that scale. Keith Bristol 11:55 Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, you but that there wasn't really a lot of experience because we are We were really on the forefront of it, you know, there weren't a lot of people selling pure plays, selling online. I mean, there are definitely companies out there that had an online presence. And a lot of them were just had branding sites, they weren't even ecommerce back then. So a lot of it was, you know, for us just figuring it out. And, you know, sometimes it was going with your gut, but we were really big into testing things. And that's always kind of stuck with me We test and see how people you know, react and down to like, what's what is the color of the button that they're supposed to click and what's the word on the button? And so we were really big believers in that and that's something I've taken with me everywhere I go and we you know, we do that here as well. So yeah, that's, Chad Mellen 12:46 you know, Mark one of the stories Keith told me later on in our career is after we flew out to Denver, you know, we'd be the to meet he flew out to Denver to say, hey, let's, let's do this partnership where he bags and to me work together to launch to me calm You know, the ebags guys are just knocking it out of the park during the presentation. They're saying great things and we're all you know, this is great. It's fantastic. Can't wait to work with them. We left the building and said, Okay, guys, let's go ahead, we'll we'll, you know, tie the deal together. And let's go ahead and then what did you say Keith? after we left? Keith Bristol 13:21 Yeah, so after, after the, the, to me, executives left the building, we all just kind of looked at each other like, okay, now how are we going to do this? And who's gonna do it? Like, what? We don't know what we're doing? We're doing, like, how to run an e commerce site. But we weren't really expecting to say yes, let's move forward with this because we had the backstory to that is we had tried to get to me to sell on ebags for Gosh, probably since the beginning of time, that that ebags launched. So to me was sort of that brand that we really, really wanted we aspired to get. So when they, you know, talk to us about running their site, everyone's kind of like, yeah, we'll do it. We can totally do it when they left was like, how are we gonna do it? Do it. So it's kind of funny now this the two sides to tell those stories and it worked out great. I mean, worked out great. Yeah, to me was thrilled with it. We were thrilled with it. And, you know, I obviously met wonderful people there. And to this day, some dearest friends that I have her from too many bags, times and it's fun to kind of come back together with Chad to start, you know, knack based on all of our history that way. So it's pretty cool. Marc Gutman 14:28 Yeah, so let's rewind a little bit and talk about that. So we're both of your first forays into the bag world. So Chad, like how did you get into this industry and how'd you get started? Chad Mellen 14:41 Uh, so I left college and went to work for a strategy consultant in New York. And, and again, as I said, as a little oblivious going through school, I was kind of following the herd mentality in our school either one of two things you went to work for an investment bank, you went to work for a consultant And, you know, I picked the consulting room, kind of I don't even know really why. And I ended up with a firm called Kurt's on associates. That was a strategy firm that focused on apparel, textiles retail. And what I found after about two or three months, there was I loved that industry just loved it. And of course, I knew that they did this going into it, but I really didn't understand it. And, you know, I'm gonna give give a little bit of my experience away here. We were, we were dealing with people back then our clients were just amazing like that. Polo Ralph Lauren, I was working directly with Peter strong, who ran that company for a long time. At Saks Fifth Avenue was one of our clients and I was working with Bert tans D there, you know, these are like real icons in luxury, branded business. And the most important thing was I had a client At coach, division of Sara Lee back then, and I got to know Lou Frankfort as a client pretty well and he said you know, why don't you come and work for me and I did. I went and became head of business development and then later head of men's products and product marketing and work with Lou who just taught me so much and you know, kind of one of the first aHa's in my career with Lou was how important a mentor is. And and the product was great you know, love the coach product. And this was way back. You know, again, I'm dating myself but this was you know, way back in the 90s. And Coach was about 100 million dollar brand at that point in time. And it just launched stores you know, about five years beforehand It was really a small business, a relatively small business and was starting to grow like a weed and the product is just fantastic. And the the kind of the smell of the leather and you know, going into the sample rooms and seeing the hides there. And how these guys picked out the right height and how it caught it and designed around it. It was just fascinating to me. And so the product really grabbed me, but then also, the brand grabbed me. And one of the things that that Lou said to me and said to a lot of people back then it still stays with me to this day. And we use it at knack is that in a brand like coach which, you know, is a consumer brand, but also has a fashion element to it. You've got to balance logic and magic. And I thought that was just so really on spot on logic and magic. You know, it's not all logic. This is not a spreadsheet business. There is some sort of element to that spiritual almost, you know, why do people like that color? Why do people like that shape? Why do people like that texture that's that's kind of a magic portion of it. And that's not something that I have much skill set in but the last portion of it also has to work with a magic potion to create this brand and this aura and this product. And you know, balancing logic and magic is something that I've absolutely carried with the rest of my career. Marc Gutman 18:13 Yeah, and I totally love that. I mean, I, I speak a lot. And on the stage, I talk about that a lot when it comes to branding and building a brand that it really is this combination illogical and magical. And I'm sure you know, obviously, I didn't invent that it was it was passed down to me by other brand builders as well. And I firmly believe it. And that's one of the things that I love about it. And it's also a little frustrating about it sometimes, you know, that's the challenge. I mean, that it's, it's easier when we're talking about the logical side and putting things in a framework. It's a little harder on the magical side. And I think, at least from my experience, you have to be willing to take risks and to have some failures because in order to lean into that magical side, it's not always homeruns Chad Mellen 18:54 Well, it also I think the real critical thing is as a manager A business or an owner of a business that that really is trying to work on both sides of the equation, you've got to learn how to kind of straddle, and, and manage and talk to and relate to people that are on the logical side as well as people that are on the magical side, you know, I found that, in my experience, people that are creatively oriented, just don't respond to the same kind of stimulus and direction and encouragement as people on the logical side of the business. And I think that's really challenging for a lot of people. And it's something that's been challenging for me, but, you know, I'd like to think I've kind of figured it out, and and very comfortable working with people on both sides of that equation. Marc Gutman 19:44 And that's well said, and I think that, you know, again, from my perspective that you know, branding today isn't, you know, about logos and colors and in an icon icons, but it really is more about bridging those two sides. And being the bridge as a leader in the organization to maintain that, that feeling that purpose, that culture, all those things that go into being a brand. So, I love that. So why don't you guys take me back to ebags you guys are working there. If one of you could first just paint the picture, kind of like, you know, Keith was doing a little bit of that talking about what's going on there. But I really want to paint the picture because when I look at, you know, the company today, and this is not a you know, I'm not here to bash on ebags but, you know, back then there was like something super revolutionary and something super cool. And today it's kind of like I'm not sure where they are in the in the whole mix of things. But what was it like for you guys working at E bags and what were you both doing there? Chad Mellen 20:40 Well, I think Keith needs to answer that first. I was at to me I was, you know, I was head of marketing. I was the chief marketing officer and head of product to me. So I would travel out to Denver and work with these guys. I don't know Keith probably once every month or two for a couple days, which is always a blast. But Keith was the one that was really living the day to day life that he begs. Yeah. So, Keith Bristol 21:06 yeah. So I mean, I can't speak to what's happened recently, because I haven't been there. It's been a while since I've been there to be honest. So but but when I was there, I mean, it was it was crazy. It was really, you know, we were the nice thing about ebags. And what drew me to it, honestly, and I said this earlier was the leadership. You know, I, when I first got into working in startups, I was the first one that I worked with was a we're all in our 20s. And there was just really no leadership and it was kind of a chaotic, to say the least. And so what I was looking for was really somebody that understood business and was running the business. So that's kind of what drew me to ebags not necessarily the bags part. I'm a huge fan of john and Peter and those guys that started the company because they weren't like I said they were they came from Samsonite, they were a little bit more had more experience. So they weren't your typical 20 some, you know, CEOs Have a startup. There's nothing wrong with that. Those folks are great too. But at the time, that's what I was looking for. And, you know, we were coming right when I got there was sort of right when the.com kind of started right bomb started happening. So it was very challenging from the beginning. And of course, back then, people weren't buying as much online. And so, you know, we kind of had to earn that trust. And, and the biggest thing I think, that I took from my experience at ebags was just again, you mentioned it, Mark is taking risks. I mean, we had to take risks too. Especially doing something as pioneering as we were doing back then. And it's kind of funny to say that now because it's not that pioneering anymore, but back then it was it. So taking risks and also measuring and testing was so important. And the one thing I kind of took away is you know, from john Lord marketing, I think he's probably one of the definitely one of my mentors and he was such a visionary. He just really that's why he left Stanford. Because he really felt like there was a place for this and Samson, I didn't want to do it. So he wanted to be able to do it on his own. And the guy just really had a vision I always I tell the story to a lot of people, he he came in one day and he's always he always would come in with like, Hey, you guys gotta check this out or check that out. And one day is like, Okay, you guys all have to be told the whole company like you guys have to sign up for Facebook. This thing Facebook is gonna change the world. It's gonna change, you know, how people are, you know, perceived the internet, we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, whatever, you know, it's in again, this is when Facebook first came out. So we signed up for it, and kind of just left it and nothing really happened. And you know, like, what is price six or eight months later, like, all of a sudden, you get Bing, friend requests, friend requests, friend requests, and it was like, all of a sudden this thing just like, took off and it was crazy. But he had that vision of like, realizing that you you know at the time, there were a lot of people that were doubting what that would do, but he always sort of had that vision of like, this will be a game changer. And so I've always kind of looked at things, new opportunities, you know, and I brought that to everything that I've done sense is to look at new opportunities as, as just that, like, it's something we should try if it makes sense. I mean, obviously, you can't try everything and you can't do everything you want to do, but you have to try to look for that future thing of what's gonna, you know, happen next. And so, you know, it was also built with really, really smart people. I mean, they did a great job of, of hiring and bringing on really talented people that you can, you know, give them a direction and they run with it, and they're motivated. And I think that's what really, you know, they had great leadership, and they had great people that work there and that were driven. So those two things, and I think the product was really, really good. I mean, everyone needs bags, as we all know, but so it's a little bit of that, like, you've got to have all that working together. And as far as like where they are, again, I can't really say I know when I was They're there. You know, we went through quite a bit of stuff, obviously with, we went made it through the dot bomb. As I mentioned, we made it through 911 a lot of challenges with all that stuff. But through it all, I think we just persevered. I mean, I know that's kind of cheesy, but like you, you just really have to face all the challenges that come with a startup and with building a business. Because there's going to be things that like that you can't control and what we're dealing with right now you can't control. But if you have really good people that are that are passionate and want to, you know, build something the right way, you're going to find a way to do it. So as it got bigger, obviously it changed because you get you get more people in there. And when I think when I left there were we had changed offices and I don't even remember is like 150 people. I think when I started it was like 80 I was there kind of the first year in so it definitely changed a lot, you know a little bit more layers and different things like that which slowed things down a little bit. And that's The thing I love about what we're doing, we're small and nimble right now. And, you know, if somebody has an idea, they just run with it. And we jump on a call and talk about it, and it Marc Gutman 26:09 and we do it. Keith Bristol 26:10 And we test it and make sure that that it works. So Marc Gutman 26:14 yeah, thank you for that. My apologies. I have right here that you both met it to me. And somehow I had the the signals crossed about. Keith Bristol 26:22 Yeah, no problem. And yeah, that's how we met is with like I said, we tried to get to me and to me really was interested in doing their own e commerce site. But they didn't have the technology background. So we brought our technology background to run the to eat.com site, and then for the last probably four or five years that I was in ebags. I ran the division that ran to be calm. So that that way and yeah, that's exactly how Chad and I met so we met and you know, I say this all the time. Like you meet people throughout your career that you're like, I'd really like to work with that guy again, or, or girl or whatever, but Chad was always one of those folks that I really, really had a lot of respect for. And, and I always said, you know, I'd love to work with him again someday. And in fact, we tried to do it a couple times. But he couldn't convince me to move to the east coast in and this sort of this sort of worked. And it's interesting because he would, he came to me with the idea of knack. I have kind of two criteria that I look for when I'm looking for my next opportunity. And one is the product like does it resonate with me and, and when he told me about it, I was immediately hooked because I travel a lot. I travel for one to two days, and I'm like, Oh my god, I don't know how many times I've stuffed a backpack full of crap and couldn't make it work or I pack a carry on quarter of the way full because I had to. And I was like, Oh my god, I would love to be able to travel with one bag and just expand it when I can. So I love that concept. And then I really, of course, like working with Chad and admired him a lot. I think we actually balanced each other out. lot, you know, a lot of the things that he brings to the table and his strengths are not mine, and vice versa. And so it was just a great fit. And he actually wanted me to move to the east coast again. And I was like, I just moved to Portland. And it's, it's not, not in the cards for me. But if you're ever open for doing this and building a remote team, I would be interested because I've, I've managed teams remotely for, I don't know, 10 years of my life, and worked with offshore development teams, and so on and so forth. So it's, that was nothing new to me. It's a little bit more new to Chad. And so he's like, I don't think that that's kind of what we're looking for right now. But, you know, we'll stay in touch and so I kind of advised and just sort of helped while he was kind of working through some things and then he calls me one day he's like, you're never gonna believe where the designer The bag is located. I was like, where he goes Portland, Oregon. And there's a backstory there but but I was He's like, you know, if you're up for Doing this and you're still interested, let's try it and see how it works. And we agreed that we would be upfront with each other. And if things weren't working, that we would figure something else out. But so far, it's been really, really great. We've been able to hire people from around the country, really, really smart people. And they all again, it's, they're all dedicated, and they are hard working, and they know what they're doing. And it's been great. And especially with this current situation, it hasn't impacted us working standpoint, obviously, it's impacted us in other ways like everyone else. But from a work standpoint, we've all worked remotely since we started the company. So it's been a, it's been a fun thing to be able to do that and build this team. You know, the way we've built it is is pretty, pretty unique. And I think it's interestingly enough, I think it's kind of a sign of the future. I think there gonna be a lot more companies that that end up doing this because you can find really great people, wherever you want to find them and if you're organized about it, you can Grow a company like this. So Marc Gutman 30:05 this episode brought to you by wild story. Wait, isn't that your company? It is. And without the generous support of wild story, this show would not be possible. A brand isn't a logo or a tagline, or even your product. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company. It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. Wild story helps progressive founders and savvy marketers build purpose driven brands that connect their business goals with the customers they want to serve. So that both the business and the customer needs are met. This results in crazy, happy, loyal customers that purchase again and again. And this is great for business. If that sounds like something you and your team might want to learn more about, reach out @ www.wildstory.com and we'd be happy To tell you more. Now back to our show. Chad, so where were you in your career in your life when you said, Hey, I'm going to, I'm gonna start a new Bad Company. Chad Mellen 31:17 It's a great question a little bit of backstory after coach I left and as we talked about went to work to me, as chief marketing officer to the tiny little company back then, and worked closely with the founder, Charlie Clifford. And, you know, went through real tough times real great times. You know, the the 911 time in a travel bag company was just devastating. And fire the entire marketing staff, you know, we all took salary cuts. It was devastating. Sounds familiar to today? Right? Absolutely. It's like, wow, I never thought I'd have to do this twice in my career. But the business popped back up. As a great brand great product, great team. And we sold the business to a private equity firm. And I left and went to Rhode Island to become chief marketing officer and head of sales at at cross writing comedy. So the first time I had been since my consulting career out of the bag industry, and, you know, was CEO across for a while, sold that business in 2015, to a private equity firm, after I learned the hard way that it's not really a winning strategy to you know, fight against a secular consumer trend. Writing instruments, unfortunately, are going one way and it's, it was tough. But anyway, after I left and 15 took some time off, did some consulting, learn to play piano poorly, you know, had some fun. But ultimately, uh, two things happened. I started to work on a totally different startup with a friend of mine. Going to build Docker who had been the founder of interactive search holdings, which was a company that had survived the dot bomb and you know, had their big brand was I want calm. So, and Bill and I were trying to do this, this crazy thing with Donor Advised funds and democratizing them and trying to bring them to companies as a benefit for employees to attract millennials. So it kind of got a little bit of the entrepreneurial bug in me at that point in time. So we were working on that. Ultimately, we decided not to proceed for a bunch of reasons but at the end of that kind of time period, I took a fishing trip to Costa Rica with with some friends, and it was a short weekend trip, but you know, still doing this Mike giving account with Bill and I had a business backpack with me. I had a duffel with me that had some fishing gear in it and you know, a couple pairs of shorts and some flip flops. And as I think flew from Boston down to San Jose airport. I'm walking around with two bags, both have filled in a place that speaks Spanish. I don't speak any Spanish. So I've got these two bags of guy, you know, a cup of coffee in my hand. I've got my phone out with my Spanish translator app to try to figure out where to go. And I'm sweating bags are falling off my shoulder and said, this is just a terrible, terrible experience. I said, you know, I've been out of the bag business for a while, the first thing I do when I get back from this fishing trip, so I'm going to go buy a bag that carries my business stuff, and it's going to carry my you know, my travel stuff my clothes at the same time. I don't want to stick my underwear in my toothbrush next to my laptop, you know, so kind of the existing bags didn't work for me. So I got back to the States. And look for this bag, this bag that did two things at once. And it didn't exist. It didn't exist anywhere. You know, because I've been in this category for a while I knew all the brands, I knew the places to buy them. And I was shocked mark that this didn't exist. It just was such an aha for me. And then I remember going to New York to visit with some people and just sitting in a coffee shop and looking out the window. And the amount of folks that had two or three bags that they were carrying, was shocking to me. Hey, like I said, Jim bags, diaper bags, tote bags, purses, backpacks, business cases, wheel bags, duffels. I mean, all these things, people are carrying multiple bags. I said, this makes no sense. And I knew like me, these people didn't have another option. That's when the AI hit me. And I said, You know what, it's time to get back in the bag bag category. So I reached out to Charlie Clifford. And he and I had been doing some work together at that point in time and said, you know, what do you think of this idea? And he said, I think that's a pretty good idea. And I kind of kicked it off at that point in time. So this was a Probably the end of 2016. Marc Gutman 36:03 Yeah, and like all really good ideas, it seems really obvious and simple. Chad Mellen 36:09 so obvious, so obvious. But then you step back and realize why no company has ever done this, because it is so different than the prevailing business model, which I said is you grow your business by figuring out the 10 needs that Mark has, and creating 10 different bags for each one of those needs. And you know, you figure out more needs, you figure out more bags. And, and that's so the idea of creating multiple function bags that do a lot of things really well, is just foreign. It's anathema to to the, you know, the current category. So that's why I think it never got done, frankly. But as I said, I looked at this and said, this makes no sense. We've got to fix it. Marc Gutman 36:52 Yeah. And I think the whole business philosophy of selling more by selling less is fairly new. You know, more, you know, there's some companies adopting that But I totally can understand that a big bad company looks and says, hey, we've got X amount of consumers how do we and fans and people in our network how do we sell them more they're not another bag another bag and I've I've fallen victim to that myself where you start to have a billion bags and I've got camera bags and I have you know messenger bags and backpacks and at the travel bag and I have the travel bag for when I want to be a little more business I have the travel bag for when I want to be a little more adventure like like it's crazy and now I'm like drowning in bags that I don't use. Chad Mellen 37:31 That's exactly it. So I look at this and like Okay, first of all, this is really not a sustainable approach. You know, this is consumerism run rampant. Secondly, I think that given the blurring of people's professional life and their personal life and how those two lives intermingle all the time, it's just the fact that people carry a bunch of stuff with them every day. You know, it's not like 20 years ago where you had real cut and dried start to work day. into the workday gave you enough time to do stuff after the work day before the workday in your own time. It just doesn't exist. So people are much more flexible and dynamic mobile, you know, professionals are a big portion of the workforce going from point A to point B and not working at a set office. You know, all these folks were being really ill served by this, you know, unsustainable multi bagger approach. Marc Gutman 38:24 Yeah. And so you have this idea and you float it by other industry, other industry experts and and you know, they're like, good idea and then so what's the process like what like, What don't we know about starting a bad company? I mean, do you just go in and make some sketches and and have in so it yourself and oh, this is great. I mean, like, like, walk us a little bit through like, what that process looks like. Chad Mellen 38:47 Well, I told you it's getting back to the my logic and magic comment. You know, I've got a lot of the logic side of me I don't have much the magic side, so I'm not selling anything that anyone wants to buy so much. You know, one of the beauties of being an experienced though say, or an older entrepreneur, first time entrepreneur is that you actually have a network. And you know, we're so lucky Keith and I that we can call on some of the most successful people in this categories direct to consumer fields or this category supply chain fields are this categories factories, or this category is branding and marketing and really pick their brains because they know us they worked with us. So you know, I was really lucky that I was able to call some of the best factories both here in the United States as well as overseas and try to start getting an idea of is this even constructible this type of bag, I was able to find through kind of our friends network, great possible designers that I could then talk to and say okay, here's the vision, help me bring it to life. You know, help me make this into a three dimensional thing. And you're these are guys that are really experience. I was able to To talk to marketers that, you know, normally wouldn't have touched a brand new startup and concept phase to really help refine our thinking. So, you know, what did I do? I went and talked to a lot of people and then started spending a little bit money on on designs with a designer that we ended up meeting with who had worked at the north face and had a lot of experience. We got introduced, and I'd met a couple of my factories and and brought the designs to them and say, Is this manufacturable? And they said, Yeah, we'll do some prototypes for you. They did some prototypes and some more prototypes, and about a year and a half of prototyping. And, you know, all at the same time, while this kind of magic was happening, the logic side of the business was was being worked on. We had the business plans, put together the financing setup, understand how we're going to sell to the consumer, you know, what the vehicles we're all that sort of stuff. And I think if I step back, Mark, if I had any clue at that point in time? all the questions that we had to answer, I don't think I ever would have started this. It's just you know, in retrospect, it's overwhelming. But I think, you know, entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic and ignorant at the same time, which is a bit of a dangerous combination. And thank God we are thank God we were else this wouldn't have gotten off the ground. Marc Gutman 41:21 Yeah, what did that first bag that first prototype look like? Do you remember it? Uh, Chad Mellen 41:25 yeah. It's right here. I keep it. It actually, you know, it came out pretty well. It proved concept right away. And so it really it looked kind of the way we wanted it to work kind of the way we wanted it to. So we said, you know, what, we know this can we can do this. And the interesting thing is the price was kind of where we wanted to. So then it just became a process of working with designers and developers in the factory to iterate it. And then the most important thing is once we have some thing that was kind of, we were somewhat proud of. We then started showing it to consumers and getting feedback, both in terms of how they use it, what features they wanted, what features they didn't. And since that point in time, our net community has really been part and parcel of our development, not only our product development, but our service development or service offering. Marc Gutman 42:22 Well, that was a lot of kindness on that first bag. Like what wasn't working what was like when you got it where Chad Mellen 42:28 you're like, Ah, it was it was too heavy. The zippers didn't open really easily it you know, the pocketing wasn't right. So there was just not functional pocketing to the whole thing. So we had to really think about it, you know, but the size was right. And it actually did work. So anyway, it there was a lot of things that we had to work on and you just start knocking them off. Marc Gutman 42:55 Yeah, and it's, you know, now you're looking at it and you kind of chuckle but I mean Was there a moment when your heart sort of dropped or you felt like oh man, like, maybe this won't work. Chad Mellen 43:07 So, to me, the biggest moment was when I had to write that first purchase order. And I had to write that first purchase order before we had any kind of financing in place. So basically, I was buying a bunch of bags. And you know, I had a real crisis of confidence at that point in time, like, you know, do I really want to do this, but luckily, Keith was on board at that point in time was, you know, really, one of the things that Keith is is really optimistic and he kind of balances My, my, I don't wanna say pessimism, but, you know, I questioned a lot of things and he's very optimistic, and he was really excited about this. And that meant a ton to me. So, you know, it really helped soothes my nerves to write that purchase order and send that deposit through. Marc Gutman 43:56 Yeah, I can imagine as a new brand Look, I mean, a very easy To you would be like, does the world really need another bag? You know? And so there is this this confidence, this belief in yourself against the world. And I can just imagine that when you're writing that first purchase order, you're like, this is either going to be great, or I'm going to be giving birthday and holiday gifts of our prototype bag for the next 10 years to everyone I know. Chad Mellen 44:21 That's exactly literally that is an exact quote. I remember saying to my family, I hope you like this bag. You're gonna get Marc Gutman 44:28 it for a long time. That's right. And so you bought some bags, but do you remember the first bag that you sold? Chad Mellen 44:37 The first neck? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So when we launched the business online, October 23 19, or 2018, and, you know, Keith had everything ready to go on the site. And I just remember that it goes live and I'm literally watching that first order to come through The first order didn't come through, we actually had a pretty good day. And I remember the guy know the guy that bought it. And like, this is a great, great feeling. And then, you know, more orders came through. It's like that cartoon where you see the speedometer click, and then it clicks again. And then it clicks a little faster. And, you know, it was just such a high see something like that and say, you know, what, there are people out there that actually get this and like this, Marc Gutman 45:27 that what about the first person that maybe came back to you and wasn't happy? Chad Mellen 45:32 Well, I'd like to say that I'm the harshest critic of the bag. You know, I look at this bag and I see about 50 things I'd like to do differently or that don't work the way I'd like to. I have yet to have anyone come back and identify all 50 things. So you know, usually it's confirmation when someone comes back and says, not for me didn't like it. It's confirmation that we just have to do better, you know, the next iteration the next version of the best has to be better. Marc Gutman 46:01 Yeah. And so you're a brand that you know, a big part of your messaging, a big part of your positioning was like, hey, you're traveling a lot and doing these one or two day trips. This is the perfect bag for you know, how in this current climate being the marketers that you are, I mean, how are you handling that and starting to change your positioning in your in your branding? Chad Mellen 46:21 Yeah, the real the real positioning about this is, it's the bag for a mobile professional and travels only a portion of what they're doing. So in actual fact, it's not the travel side of the business or the current environment. That's, that's impacting us. The fact that people are still sitting in their homes, you know, they're not going to see clients, they're not going to the office, they're not going to work out at the coffee shop, they're not going to the gym. So you know, that's really the issue. But fundamentally, we believe that's going to change so right now we stay the course we really want to reinforce and we are reinforcing that we are a bag For what is going to happen when all these safer at home orders are lifted. And that's really, I think, a fundamental trend away from dedicated offices, five day a week commutes to those dedicated offices, you know, this, this pandemic that we're going through and the crisis it's creating, I believe and we all believe firmly is going to create a much greater number of mobile trout mobile professionals working from home part the debt part of the time working from clients part of the time working in an office part of the time, that environment is right for one bag. brand. Marc Gutman 47:40 Yeah, and you know, so I recently became a private owner of an app bag and I will say that there are some real differences in in the knack bag and the way they you both are approaching this, this challenge. What are your some of your favorite you know, features that you just love about? The Mac that you know, you're like, aha Like I finally you know, I mean I think there's something so amazingly great about being into something that you care about and then being able to make it the way you want to make it because someone else isn't like what what features perhaps were big breakthroughs for you? Chad Mellen 48:15 Well, there's two things one is actually product and the other brand related the product thing is I just love the fact that our bag, weighs looks feels like an everyday professional backpack kind of backpack you put your laptop in and take to work. But then it's got this fully functional, hidden expandable suitcase attached to it. That basically you you open it up and expand it when you want to use it. And you close it and you know get rid of it when you don't want to use it. So essentially, it is an everyday bag that that doubles really well as a travel bag. I love that about it. And that's the fundamental point of this product. But, you know, on the service side, the business brand One of the things that Keith and I said from the very beginning, mark that, that it's been a guiding principle of our brand and our business, we don't do anything if we wouldn't have done it for a friend. And what do I mean by that? If we're thinking about sending out or doing a marketing program or doing a product, the first question we asked ourselves is, would we send this to a friend? Would we give this to a friend, what a friend find this a value? And, you know, I like to think that all of us at knack put everything we do through that lens. And I'm really proud of that. You know, if you talk about to our customers about our customer service, if you talk to our customers about our approach to quality and our approach to our team, we really try not to do anything that we wouldn't do, you know, for good friend. You know, maybe that's a derivation of the golden rule but but it really has helped us and and I'm really proud of that. Marc Gutman 50:00 Yeah, and, you know, we had a former guest on the podcast, Jed rose. And he said something to me that really stood with me and I think is relevant. He said, you can really tell a lot about a person, by the bag they carry in the shoes that they wear. And I'm like, oh, man, I agree. What can we tell about the neck person, you know, someone carrying a neck bag? Chad Mellen 50:24 I think, you know, Keith, I'm interested to hear what you say. But one, I'd like to think that you see someone carrying that but they're smart. You know, they're smart in a lot of ways. They're smart about sustainability. You know, they're not buying into consumerism, you know, I think you'd have 50 bags. They're smart, and that they found a bag that serves multiple needs, that they've got one bag that serves multiple needs that they've got, you know, they're smart, they're smart, because they're not wearing a walking billboard. You know, it's not like we've got logos emblazoned all over the product. So I think it's a smart consumer. It's a person that kind of You know, is a bit discerning and gets it. Keith Bristol 51:03 Yeah, I was I was actually going to say well educated and entrepreneurial, you know, somebody who's, you know, out there doing cutting edge stuff and wants to be on the cutting edge of, of not only a bag but whatever they're doing in their life, you know, we've got a lot of executives that carry our bags that you know, whether they're startup CEOs or just people out there trying to do new things. I I that's how I would envision our customers and that's really a lot of the feedback we get from them and and, and then yeah, kind of going back to you know what Chad was saying one thing you know, back to the I don't want to rehash this But back to kind of the features and things. I agree with what Chad saying. I mean, for me, just the everyday use of this bag has been like really great for me personally, I like the top pocket because I can grab stuff out of it and and easily access my wallet or my keys or whatever is there but I'll tell you what the offer moment for me is when I traveled the first time, it completely changes the way you travel. And that's, you know, whether you're taking a road trip or taking a flight, you know, not really hit me when I was able to walk on the plane the last minute and put the bag underneath the seat. I didn't have to fight for over headspace. And then the best part was when I had to do a layover, and I didn't have to check my bags, that gate check. As I walk off the plane, the whole lineup of people waiting to get their bags. I was like, wow, this that would normally be me waiting for my bag. But I'm actually just walking by you know, I'm gonna go meet a buddy for a beer. And I can get there 20 minutes sooner than I normally would. I mean, we start adding that up if you're traveling all the time, it's it was the real aha moment for me. I'm like, wow, this is actually a game changer. So So yeah, I did not to backtrack, but I wanted to get that in before I before I moved on. But But the other thing that I think is really, really great about what we're doing is, and Chad alluded to this, but I'm a huge believer in really, really good customer service. And and listening to our customer. I just think through the years, it's just I look at the brands that I really like. And I've always had really good brand experiences, whether I have a problem with the product or I have a question. They're always really good about it. So I think we've invested a lot of time and energy in listening to our customer and actually working with them and listening to them, you know, if they've got a problem, or sometimes, you know, like you said, Every once in a while that bags just not for that person. And we have a generous return policy and so all those things, I think, if people don't like this version, they're like, I like the concept, but I may like this, I'm going to come back for the next version. And that to me is really the most important in building a brand because as Chad said, he looks at the bag and sees 50 things I look at it and see I don't see 50 Chad, I see maybe 40 that I'd like to change and so you know it's not it there aren't it's not going to fit everyone in we want to be able to You know, make sure that people are happy with their purchase. And if they're not, that's, that's okay, too. I think that's super critical. Marc Gutman 54:06 Where's the name NEC come from? Chad Mellen 54:09 Oh, God, I hate that question. You know, the canned answer mark is that, oh, people have a knack for, you know, carrying their stuff around with them. That's the canned answer. The real answer is, we just spent a lot of time trying to find a great name that resonated to both Keith and me that wasn't already taken in this category. And we went through a lot. So you know, this this bag was almost George, frankly. And we you know, we're kind of giving up at that point in time. But But yeah, it's it's really a it was something about you know, ultimately people have a knack they're smart they get it and they know how to get from point A to point B's like that. Well, Marc Gutman 54:51 I actually love that answer. I just released a podcast maybe two weeks ago, there was a naming masterclass right is basically went through like how are we now names and we and it's all about finding the right name, not the perfect name. And, and it's okay, more than okay to do it the way you did it as long as you have a story kind of behind it what you do so, I mean, I think that's a great answer. And I think that's really relevant. I think that, you know, a lot of times people think there has to be this like moment for their name where it represents the exact time that they were spoken to from above and got the idea for the business. But that's not the case at all. So yeah, I appreciate appreciate you sharing that because I think that a lot of people can can learn from that as well. So if they come to the, to the end here, what does the future look like for NEC? Chad Mellen 55:39 Well, I think, as I said, given what we see as really a fundamental change in how people work that's coming out of this current crisis, we think we're in great shape to take this to take advantage of that and really, you know, when I say take advantage it I mean really help people cope. With this new work environment, our product really reduces friction and in their daily life, it makes it easier to get out their front door. And you know, we believe firmly in helping people get out their front door. You know, both Keith and I have had really the benefit of being able to travel all over, you know, I've visited over 40 countries in my life. And I'm a firm believer in getting out the front door meeting people. And we can make that a little easier. And we can make this future world where you know, your commutes a little more challenging, and you're where you work is a little more challenging. If we can make that easier for our consumer. I think we will and I think it'll be great. Marc Gutman 56:40 Chad Keith, thank you so much for coming by and sharing your story. We'll make sure to link to nack in the show notes. For those of you that don't like show notes, it's snack bags.com knackbs.com. Keith Bristol 56:57 Thank you, Mark. Appreciate you having us. We it was A lot of fun chatting with you and thanks again. Chad Mellen 57:02 Yeah, thanks mark. I really appreciate it. Marc Gutman 57:10 And that is Chad Mullen and Keith Bristol of knack bags. I love chats insight that it was his network and experience that has allowed him to be a successful entrepreneur and really understand what makes a great brand. Too often, I think there's a misconception that you need to start a company day one, and go out and claim your personal legend. There's a lot to be said to building your learning and your network for brands that are doing it right. And then taking that knowledge and launching your company when you are ready. Thank you again to Chad Mullen and Keith Bristol of knack bags. If you're looking for a great looking bag that is fit for both work and play. I encourage you to check them out. Well, that's the show. Until next time Make sure to visit our website www.wildstory.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS, so you'll never miss an episode. A like big stories and I cannot lie to you other storytellers can't deny

BGBS 031: Marty Neumeier | Level C | Let Yourself Imagine Greater Things

What if you were given the ability to learn from one of the leading brand experts in the country? Pull up a seat because we get to do just that in our episode with Marty Neumeier! Marty is a world-renowned author and leading experts on how to build your business & brand strategy. He has worked with big-name companies such as Apple, Netscape, Symantec, Kraft Foods, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Riot Games, and Capital One to help advance their brands and cultures. Today he is sharing some of his tactics and wisdom with us in Episode 31 of Baby Got Backstory. This is one of the most informative and inspiring stories you will ever hear. 

What we’re talking about

• Marty Neumeier’s Story: From Grade School to College Graduate
• The Path from Young Career Man to Leading Branding Expert
• Teaching The Branding Theory 

Marty Neumeier’s Story: From Grade School to College Graduate

At the tender age of 7, Marty announced to his 2nd grade class that he wanted to be a “commercial artist”. Marty’s mother had gone to art school, and taught him to draw at a young age. It was with this training that he became the school’s artist. This love and skill for art and design led to a college education at Art Center in Los Angeles, CA. 

The Path from Young Career Man to Leading Branding Expert

 Early in his career, Marty wisely realized that you couldn’t be a high end, successful graphic designer if you didn’t have control over the words you use in your layouts. He learned copywriting to add to his list of esteemed skills so his designs would blend seamlessly with the graphics. As his career progressed, he also discovered that some of his projects were more successful than others, which led to the “branding” design. After he put his theories, skills, and expertise to work, his work took off! At the age of 40, Marty catapulted himself into a leading expert.

Teaching The Branding Theory

Marty is so confident in how his branding strategy works that he said you’d probably be better off taking a CBO (chief branding officer) position than starting your own company. You’d probably make more money! Your reputation can have value beyond the product you’re producing. When you have a specialty that no one else has & its valuable to companies, and you can prove it, you have no competition really. This is the essence of building your branding strategy. Are you ready to take your brand to the next level, and learn from the best of the best?   LINKS MENTIONED Level C Brand School Scramble by Marty Neumeier The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier Zag by Marty Neumeier Metaskills by Marty Neumeier Level C Branding School

SPONSOR

Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 9:13 - 9:25 (12 sec MN) Why is it that sometimes my work...it was accidentally on strategy.
• 11:48 - 12:38 (50 sec MN) The more I started working in this area....in order to be successful together.
• 16:24 - 17:13 (49 sec MN) It’s hard to keep up with what’s happening...some really interesting ways of looking at their work.
• 32:03 - 32:33 (30 sec MN) Branding is more about strategy...It really rises to a higher level in a company or business.
• 35:00 - 35:39 (39 sec MN) The stuff that makes customers loyal...That area of work is called branding.

QUOTES

1. Branding is a field that brings business people and creative people together. - MN 
2. A brand isn’t a logo or a tagline, or even your product. A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company. It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room. - Marc Gutman
3. Branding deserves a spot right next to the CEO. That level of leadership has to be all about brand. - MN
4. We’re in a paradigm shift caused by the pandemic and collapse of the economy that’s going to shake everything up. It’s going to shake the snow globe & create a lot of opportunity for people that can embrace change and find a place in this new future whatever it looks like. It’s going to be the future we’ve been trying to make happen, but we got stuck because of tradition. - MN
5. Long term strategy is helping customers become who they want to become. And if you can do that, you’ll be very valuable to your customers and they will stick with you beyond reason. - MN
6. Most people don’t know that branding is more than logos. It’s much more than that. MN
7. A company has to have a purpose beyond making money today if they want to succeed. - MN

Podcast Transcript

Marty Neumeier 0:02 Who's gonna work for a company that just wants to, you know, increase shareholder demands? It's just boring. It makes you want to take a take a shower. After you come back from work, there's nothing there for anybody. No, we live in a world of human beings. So we want to think that what we're doing has value to people real value and that we're leaving the world a better place because of what we're doing. Marc Gutman 0:30 podcasting, Boulder, Colorado. This is the baby got backstory podcast, we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like big backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, Marc Gutman, and on today's episode of Baby got backstory. How one of the world's most famous branding experts didn't even Start that part of his career until the ripe young age of 40. Now, if you like and enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over at iTunes. iTunes uses these as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on the apple charts. And ratings help us to build an audience which then helps us continue to produce the show. On today's episode, we are talking to one of my heroes, branding expert, Marty neumeier. Much of what I do every day, and aspire to do comes from the teachings of Marty. I have consumed his thoughts, his books, and his philosophies, and I consider him a living legend. Most people in marketing, not just branding on at least one of his distinctive white books with the big black type across the front. And for those of you who don't know Marty Neumeier. He's an author, designer and brand advisor whose mission is to bring the principles and processes of design to business. His series of Whiteboard books include zag, which was named one of the top hundred business books of all time in the design full company, a best selling guide to non stop innovation. His first book, the brand gap, and the one that I've come to love and many of my branding colleagues have come to love has been read by more than 23 million people since 2003. A sequel, the brand flip lays out a new process for building brands in the age of social media and customer dominance. And his latest book scramble is a business thriller about how to build a brand quickly with agile strategy. In 1996, Marty founded critique magazine, the first journal about design thinking, think about that he was one of the first to be talking about design thinking. He has worked with innovative companies such as Apple, Netscape, Symantec, Kraft Foods, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Riot Games, and Capital One to help advance their brands and cultures. Marty was gracious to drop in for a long interview on the baby gap backstory Podcast, where we discuss the importance of brand and branding, how branding ads and during value to a business and why those businesses that focus on brand will be successful on the other side of this pandemic. And those that don't are going to be in trouble. Our conversation ranges from Marty's early days of branding, The Beatles, Leonardo da Vinci ageism in the creative field, and what the future might look like for all of us. Marty says that branding is a field that brings business people and creative people together, and I couldn't agree more. And here is Marty Neumeier. This episode brought to you by wild story. Wait, isn't that your company it is. And without the generous support of wild story, this show would not be possible. A brand isn't a logo or a tagline, or even your product. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company. It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. Wild story helps progressive founders and savvy marketers build purpose driven brands that connect their business goals with the customers they want to serve, so that both the business and the customer needs are met. This results in crazy, happy, loyal customers that purchase again and again, and this is great for business. If that sounds like something you and your team might want to learn more about, reach out @ www.wildstory.com and we'd be happy to tell you more. Now back to our show. Marty, you're an acclaimed author having written several books on the topic of branding books like the brand flip zag, and the brand gap, you are considered an expert on the topic of branding. And you're the director of CEO branding for liquid agency in Silicon Valley. And you also teach a five tier program on brand mastery through your own company level C. So we do have a sense and an idea of where the story is going. But what I really want to know is where did it start? Marty? Were you always into branding and branding? The idea of branding as a young kid? Marty Neumeier 5:34 I was not I didn't know that word existed, you know, but I did get into communications pretty early, at least in my head. I was seven years old when I announced to my second grade class that I wanted to be a commercial artist. And everyone said, Well, you know what, and the only reason I even knew that job title existed is because my mother went to art school. She had taught me how to draw. And I took to it pretty well and became known for that. And by the second grade, I was the artist for the school. So that has a huge effect. Huge pull for kids when they're, you know, they're told at a young age that they're special for something. And so, I think it was right then I said, You know what, that's what, that's what I am. And all I have to do is wait long enough to be one. Marc Gutman 6:28 At that time, what was a commercial artist? What does that even mean? Marty Neumeier 6:32 I think, you know, I thought it was like an illustrator. You know, someone who does illustrations for magazine covers and for anything signs, signage, trademarks, anything like that. I had no idea, you know, but I knew drawing was involved. And I could do that. So as soon as I was old enough, I got myself into art school at Art Center in Los Angeles. And that's that was my gonna be my track and somewhere Along the way, I just realized I think was probably 20 years old, maybe even a little younger, that you could not be a really successful high end graphic designer, if you didn't have control over the words that were that you used in your, you know, on your in your layouts and so forth. Because that you can't separate graphics and communication in the word part of communication. And I was having trouble finding copywriters to work with that I could work with as equal partners, you know, because the way copywriters worked in those days is they thought about the, the intent of the communication and they wrote some things and they handed it to you and you would kind of illustrate it or lay it out as an ad or article or you know, whatever it is, and that isn't really what I wanted to ask not the way I wanted to do it. So I wanted to you know what Work with copy people from a team together. And I, you know, I tried to make that work. But eventually I figured it was easier to learn how to do the copywriting part myself, I could go a lot faster, and there'd be no gap between the words and the pictures, they would be they would each contribute, contributed equally. And so that led me to the writing side of communication. And I just kept doing that and, you know, built a studio, doing all that kind of graphic design and some advertising, and reports, corporate identity, all the kinds of things that could make money for designers. And it wasn't until I don't know probably I was 40 or something like that, that I realized that there was a gap between what I thought good work was and what a company thought good work was and the gap. The reason for the gap is that they didn't know what I was trying to achieve or if it was any good at all. And I really didn't know what the business was trying to achieve. I just knew my little part of it. And sometimes I would, you know, get lucky and the company would prosper because of the work I did. And I always thought, Well, why, why is it that sometimes my work is really valuable to a company? And other times? It's not? Well, it happened that when it when it worked for the company, it was because it had it accidentally was on strategy. So I started just thinking about what is strategy and what is business? What's the difference between business strategy and design strategy? Can it can it all be one thing? And so that led me to the world of branding and starting with positioning those great books by trout and Reese, starting in 1970. They opened up a whole world for me talking about the the strategic intent of communication of advertising and marketing and so forth, which I didn't know existed. So you know, because designers what, what do we do? We, we look at the work that other designers have done through the ages. And we want to fit into that continuum. So we try to do this great, exciting, inspirational work, but not really, with with regard to what companies are trying to achieve. Of course, we think we are, but unless you're really intimate with what a company or a CEO is trying to do, you're guessing a bit. So I needed to look into that. So that was a lot of reading a lot of experimentation. And, you know, nothing's easy. It takes years and years to be good at something. So but I would say I was probably 40 by the time I really saw the problem. Marc Gutman 10:40 Right. So that's have so many questions. All right. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, I mean, just that one alone, like I think so often in our careers, you know, we think we either have to figure it all out really early or that by 40. We should have figured it all out. It's really interesting to me that it like what you're best known for at least how often Know you, and you've been a huge influence on my career didn't even really happen until you were 40. And beyond that, that just like blows my mind Marty Neumeier 11:09 and mostly beyond. And I think we're really started to become clear to me is when I was I was probably 50. At this point, I decided I would publish a magazine about the thinking behind graphic design was really the first journal about design thinking, focused on graphic design thinking. It was called critique magazine. And so critique was filled with interviews and articles about famous graphic designers and advertising people and the thought processes behind their work. And the more I started working in this area, I realized the less we actually knew about what we were doing, we really didn't know what we were doing. There's a lot of kind of mythology about What makes good design what makes good advertising, good marketing, but it wasn't there was no framework for it, there was no structure, you know, that would lead you to the solution that would really drive a business forward. And then I realized what what that framework is its branding. It's the kind of playing field that brings business people and creative people together, we can all agree that this is a game worth playing. But we have to know our parts, we have to play our roles, we have to take our positions on the field and know what we're doing and where we're headed, in order to be successful together. And so when I figured that out, I ice pretty much changed my whole orientation to my work and stop trying to help graphic designers understand business, which is what I was doing with the magazine. It's like, you know, pay attention to business because this is where you this is where you're going. work takes flight, you know from you, you really have to understand what you're doing for companies to be successful in this. Most designers didn't want to hear that they really happy just doing the work the way they wanted to do. But so I, I decided to turn the other way towards business people and say, Hey, business people, CEOs, marketing people, design can do tons of stuff for you have no idea how powerful it is, if you just knew how to harness it, so I created a business helping companies get their arms and heads around this whole idea of branding and design and creativity as a consultant, and that worked great and built a company on that and wrote the book, the brand gap to define the problem. The problem is the gap between design and business strategy. And so that became the really became a focus of my work ever since I kept writing books on the same subject because it, it's actually rich with opportunity. So that's what I've been doing. I've got eight books now all around this topic of, of the brand gap, and the role of creativity in business and the opportunity for business of utilizing design in a way that can, you know, really drive like off the charts results for the company. Marc Gutman 14:29 Yeah, and I don't want to harp on this too much. But I'm still so fascinated about how, and I do want to talk to you about your books and get into those because I'm a big student of those. But I'm just so fascinated that these books came so late to you and that this kind of second career came later. And the reason I'm so fascinated is it's really personal for me. I mean, we see in our industry, you know this this idea of ageism is like rampant, you know, especially in the creative field and design and branding. It's all about younger creatives and younger people in it. What's the younger generation doing? And? And yet the the the wisdom and the perspective is all coming for you after 40. And I mean, do you ever run into that today? Do you find that? You know, how do you maintain relevance? How do you stay relevant as you get older in the creative space, and you have all these younger people pushing on you? Marty Neumeier 15:20 Well, you know, I think what I've noticed is that whatever you ate, how will you know if you're already in business, if you're late, let's say solidly working in an industry. By the time you're 30, you're going to be equal in your ability to accomplish things as someone who's in their 70s I think he, you just bring something different to it. So if you're 30, you're going to bring an awareness of the latest stuff that's happening in culture, right? Because you're going to be like, that's what you're going to care about is that stuff that's all around you, everyday, all that stuff. You're going to be right there with it. And you can bring that knowledge to your work. Now. You may not have the wisdom of someone who's 60 or 70. But you've got that. And you've got energy and new ideas and very little baggage, right? So as you get older, you have to deal with, like what you are what you already know is your problem. You know, what you think is true and right and correct, you have to keep reinventing that for yourself. And that gets difficult because it's hard to keep up with what's happening now in culture and also do the things you really need to do, which is to learn from the past. I mean, that's where the wisdom comes from. It's like looking at the whole sweep of history going way back. Like, it's great to, you know, think about what the latest advertising agencies doing but also like check in on Aristotle, you know, he had some really amazing insights that you could learn from. Now, you know, someone who's 30 is probably not going to spend a lot of time thinking about Aristotle, but by the end of your career, be looking back at history. And trying to mind history for all its great wisdom and bringing that up today. And you also have a duty and an opportunity to teach younger people, some really interesting ways of looking at their work. And by the same token, younger people can bring that, that fresh world to you so that you're not totally out of touch with what's happening. But you get out of touch because you get ideas that have worked for you, and they keep working for you. So you don't want to have to work so hard to stay up with everything. But also you're spending time broadening your knowledge base, and that, you know, that just takes time away from staying in tune with what's on television or what's on what's on kwibi You know, this week, so everyone has advantages. That's why someone who's 30 can compete with someone who's 70 in vice versa, as you have different strengths. Marc Gutman 17:58 I love that. Thank you. So you start every book that you have at least the ones I've had, and I've read. So I don't say every book release, the ones I've read with an intro to that book that you're holding that is essentially an anti book. Right? You always you make these mentions that, hey, this is the fewest words possible. You make it a point to tell the reader that you've bought a short yet dense and informative book. Like why are short books so important to you? Like, why why do you always enjoy your book that way? Marty Neumeier 18:28 Well, if they are short, I do. It's for a reason. And the reason is, we're all very busy, you know, doing our jobs and it's hard to find the time to move into new new territory, a new area of understanding and keep working and you know, bring in the, in the money to pay the rent and all that. So, you know, why would I, like try to monopolize somebody's time I want them to get out and start using this immediately. But at the same time, I don't want to offer them a shallow sense of anything, I want everything to be as deep as possible. So to do that, you have to really work on compressing your information down to the simplest possible way to say it. So that it a communicates clearly and B sticks in your head. So that's, that's actually the work of, you know, copywriters, that's what they do, they figure out say something in the least amount of space. So that that skill that I've developed has served me well. And it has an author's just gonna use copywriting skills, and also design skills. So designers can make things visual, that maybe aren't typically visual to help people understand it and help it stick in your head. So there's those two skills together, especially when you use them in tandem. One on one equals three. So that's, that's the nice thing that I can bring to it. Other than that, it's just reading and learning and trying out things testing, doing research and all these things that I'm addicted to now at this time. Part of my life, I just love learning more and more about it. So I just take that information, and I use my design and writing skills to make a book that communicates clearly just goes right into your brain like a laser and, and sticks there because it's, you know, if I do it well enough, it's memorable. So but having said that, I've got a book that's not like that meta skills, which is 300 pages of much, it's deep material that stays deep, doesn't, it's not simplified, because it has to be that way. So I'll on that book that's about developing skills for the, for the century, especially after the pandemic, you know, we're going to have a lot of new opportunities, and it's going to require new skills. So there are five skills that I write about meta skills, which are skills that that can help you create or learn new skills, there's sort of a skill of skilling yourself. That makes any sense. So that book is different. And then I also wrote one called scramble that is not visual. It's, it's a thriller. So it's a business thriller that I use to explain the idea of Agile strategy. So this is for strategy, business strategy and brand strategy together. How do you create it? How do you do it fast and do it well enough in our fast moving world of business today, so that it's been an interesting process is to learn how to communicate business material in through story. And I think it's working well. So I'll probably do some more of those too. But the whiteboard books, the ones you're referring to, like the brand gap, the brain flip, zag, those are the you know, the highly visual quirky fun, condensed brand books. Marc Gutman 21:49 Yeah, thanks. Thanks for sharing that. How do you decide what what topics to write on? I mean, writing a book is no small feat. It's certainly a lot of dedication and time so has to be something that You know, is worth doing? How do you decide what you're going to write on? And what's worth your time? Marty Neumeier 22:05 And not I think it's being honest. I think it's, I write about stuff that bugs me. You know, when I think like, you know, people should really think about something in this way or not the way they're thinking about it, or the world really needs to change to embrace x. And typically, in the beginning, I don't even see what it is that I'm going to write about very clearly, it takes a while to kind of go, yeah, that's the problem. It's, you know, none of us really see this problem, but it's a real problem. And I can fix this, you know, I can, I can unleash people's creativity. So we all can fix this. And so, I mean, the brand gap started just out of frustration that, you know, I couldn't seem to get designers to care enough about business to know what they were doing within a business. I couldn't get business people to care enough about design so that they can manage it. Well. That that is really A last opportunity of like two bodies of knowledge that are very sophisticated, that can't work together and need to work together. So, you know, so the brand gap, and then and then when I was doing the brand gap, you know, talking about it and giving workshops people would say, yeah, these five disciplines that are in the brand gap, you know, differentiation, innovation, etc. That really makes sense. But the differentiation when where you have to be different than everybody else. That one is really counterintuitive to me. I'm not really sure I get that or I'm not on board for that. I just think you know, we need to do someone's making a lot of money in one area, you do what they do, and you will make money too. And that's not how it works. So I decided I have to drill down on differentiation. So zigzag became a drill down book, just this idea of positioning in positioning for difference making your company different, making it The only in its category so that you don't have to compete head to head with anybody and you your profit margins can be higher. And that takes, you know, a definite effort to do that. I mean, it doesn't come naturally to people we don't, we're not different, but naturally know people. Some people can't help be different than maybe that's an advantage. But a lot of people just want to be the same. They just want to fit in, they just want to be professionals. And that's actually not a very good kind of impulse for, for becoming great in your industry and for standing out and having a brand that's really valuable. You have to purposefully do something different than your competitors. So that needed a book, right. And so that succeeded really well. And then I started to realize, well, you know, even if you understand all this material, you as a company, you can't build a brand unless your company understands the whole concept of branding, they have to have all the processes in place to embrace and protect that brand. And that record that's going to require a culture change. You have to change the culture and to be to become innovative and to become brand focused and brand lead. So I wrote the design for company that introduced I think it was the first book about design thinking. So that's that's how I, I write these books. I have, like, a burr under my saddle. And I just have to, I get angry, angry enough to write a book. Marc Gutman 25:38 So interesting. And you were, you're like, right on the forefront of design thinking. I didn't realize that your book was potentially the first book I had always kind of attributed design thinking to this thing that I do invented. Where did design thinking come from, if not from there? Marty Neumeier 25:53 Well, God bless you. I mean, they have been so helpful to the design field by explaining All this stuff and paving the way for everybody else. at my office in Palo Alto, Palo Alto, when I started this, I was writing the brand gap. I was in a little like a warehouse, because I just shut down my other business. And it was full of all the junk from my last business. And I was there by myself, writing my book right across the street was at the IDEO headquarters. And so I got to know those guys and really become familiar with their, what they were doing. And they wrote a lot about this topic, too. So we're probably doing this at the same time. But I think my book was the first one to use design to actually describe the process of design thinking in its simplest, simplest way. IDEO followed with some very specific books about design thinking, and so did a lot of other people. But even before that, my magazine critique was about design thinking. So, you know, I'm not claiming credit for inventing design thinking but I would say it was in the Air probably as early as 1990 Marc Gutman 27:01 Wow, that's quite a bit of history. I love that. I love that. And so, you know, one thing I love about your story is is what I'm gathering and please correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth or summing up incorrectly is that you've tried a lot of different things. Like you haven't just said, Hey, I'm just gonna try this, you know, magazine and design thinking, I'm just going to be a designer, like, you've really given yourself the ability to try different things, see if they work, you know, in success for you. Also, it doesn't sound like it's a zero sum game. Like, I would suggest that critique magazine was a success. But at some point, you shut it down and then you know, you're doing something different. So, you know, can you talk a little bit about this like propensity to to try different things to sprout out, I mean, to sprout up to contract to kind of do it over and over again? Marty Neumeier 27:50 Well, you know, what I like about being a designer is the ability, the freedom that you have to invent, to innovate to, to experiment a little bit. And even when I was just, you know, in my 20s doing design, I always wanted to try different ways of communicating, you know, different ways of using graphics, words and pictures and combination, all that kind of stuff. I mean, it was just endless fun. trying all these things. I think all I did was the take that same impulse to be inventive and move it up to a higher level of like, Can I be inventive? With the concept of the work? Can I be inventive with the strategy behind it? Can I be inventive with my own career? You know, kind of do I have to do this all the time? Not that I didn't want to do it, but I just thought there's always something to explore. So maybe it's just a kind of curiosity and adventurousness that I developed early on. Then I was a big fan of The Beatles. This is back in when I was in high school, The Beatles came out. And up to that time, you know, music was great rock and roll was great. And I, you know, played a guitar and I listened very closely to music since I was probably 10 years old. And I loved all the newness, the novelty of, you know, the top 40 and all kinds of stuff. When the Beatles came out, it was something like at a much higher level of creativity to me, much more intellectual, but still fun and accessible. And what they would do is they would give you some music that you could accept, and then it'll start to really like, for its difference. And then just when you were comfortable with that, they'd come out with more music that was a little more different, like they were always exploring. So every step they took, was pulling you further into some area that you weren't expecting. And I just love that I just thought that's what I want my career to be. I want to be exploring every opportunity in this like, breaking the mold every time I can and so, but at the same time being a serious person So who's, you know, is making a living with it and, and is in demand by industry and all that. So, you know, you can, you could do crazy stuff every day of the week, and never really amount to anything in your life. So you don't want to do that. So you have to kind of stick with something. But I always wanted to be like trying something new pushing the ball forward down the field. And that's the joy of it for me. So I would say, kind of reinvented myself but every 10 years, like in a fairly serious way, but not in a way that would surprise anybody. It's just like, maybe just take a step to the left or to the right or the elite a little bit of a leap forward. Or it just means really, that you have to be willing to abandon what was working before to try something that might not work. But you know, that that's kind of a defining characteristic for me. So it's, you know, I love doing it, and I still love doing it. So that's why I'm when I look back, I could never have predicted I'd be teaching branding right now, to professionals. I just, you know, I wouldn't even know what it was. I just wanted to be a commercial artist, you know? So don't don't hold yourself back and say no, I'm an accountant. And I can't be anything but an accountant. You'd surprise yourself just, you know, imagine something else you might enjoy and take a few steps towards and see if you like that. And eventually you'll jump and do that. And that will be great until it's not and then you'll be ready to jump again. Marc Gutman 31:33 I mean, and so in that light, Do you consider yourself a brander? Or a marketer? Marty Neumeier 31:37 Oh, brander Yeah. To me marketing. It's way more tactical than branding. So marketing is really about how do I sell stuff now? How do I create revenues this quarter? Like it's, it's an ongoing challenge. It's like you're in a live sports event. You're you're playing on the field, and you've got to like Score score score. Branding is more about the strategy. It's a long term, it's a long game. And so it's more like having a sports career than a sports game, you know, for the company, it's, it's really thinking about how do we make money now and 20 years from now, to make sure that we've grown in the last 20 years we've grown, we've become more important, more solid, less vulnerable to the shifting winds, or that kind of stuff. So it's, it's really rises to a higher level in a in a company or in a business. I would say, I'm starting. This has taken me a long time to to believe this. But the more I study this and research it and test it, the more I think branding deserves a spot right next to the CEO at that level of leadership has to be all about brand. So think about someone who is variable successful at this Steve Jobs. CEO of Apple, you know was the world's maybe still is the world's most successful rich company out there. And he was his title was CEO, but he didn't really do the kinds of things that CEOs are known to do. He didn't really care that much about shareholders and taking care of them. He didn't look at spreadsheets and worry about finance. I mean, that was somebody else's job. His job was to make sure you had customers like rabid customers, rabidly loyal customers who would buy anything that he decided to put out, and he worked really hard at that was fanatical about it. And so that, you know, it's very rare for Steve Jobs to put out a product that just wasn't successful. He did it but you know, it happens. But he was very careful about being successful every time out making sure that the product they were producing and selling was the right product at the moment. And so what does that take? Well, it takes some sense of what your customers want, you have to think like a customer, you have to understand your customers really well. You have to take responsibility for their delight, right? So he had to create the products that he thought they would need, if they only knew they existed. He had to make sure that the products were unique, somewhat unique Anyway, you know, they didn't have to be the first but they had to be the best that they had in hand, put an apple look and feel that they were designed beautifully that they worked beautifully. Pet, they had the ethos of Apple, all that stuff. That's a lot of work. And it typically it takes one very strong willed person to make that happen. So that person needs to be pretty high up in a company, whether he's the CEO or she's the CEO, or this is what I would say is more practical is a CBO chief brand officer. There needs to be somebody response for that stuff, the stuff that makes customers loyal. That's that's the highest level work you can do in the company. The rest is mostly operations and bookkeeping. So you don't have a company without customers. Right? You can have customers without having a very good company, you don't last long. But you could do it, the customers are the main thing. And so we're to really designing is not your designing customers. And that is tricky work. And we're just now starting to understand how it's possible to make that happen. And that area of work is called branding. Marc Gutman 35:40 And so why do you think that we're not seeing that more often today? Why are we not seeing more people having CEOs and people sitting right next to the CEO and thinking more like Steve Jobs and less like, what we kind of see as a traditional CEO, which is, you know, hey, I gotta take care of shareholders and financial spreadsheets and whatnot? Marty Neumeier 36:00 I think it's that that tradition makes things, you know, keeps things from changing tradition. You know, we've been having, you know, businesses been going on for, for many centuries now really picked up in the 1500s. And that's really going well. And schools reflect the knowledge base that you need to be in business, and they are very slow to change. They should move slowly. And so it takes innovators to kind of break out of that. And until enough of them are successful, nobody's willing to follow. It's, it's just too important to to succeed. I mean, success is so important that people don't take risks, they're risk averse. And the bigger the company is, the less risky they tend to be. But then you see, you know, people like Steve Jobs, you know, hugely successful people are going so how do we do that? I mean, where do you where what's To go to to learn how to do that, well, Steve Jobs didn't go to any school, he figured it out. And I think we're still at that figuring out stage. But it's, you know, it's the reason I started level C with my partner and the, and the star is to bring this little part, which I think is gonna be a much bigger part of the business called branding up to a level of professionalism so that it's a thing, like people know that this is the work that we're doing. In fact, it could be the central work of any company is creating, and just the normal CEO skills are not gonna do that for you. Right. So, so who's gonna do it? Well, I think it's gonna, I think it's going to be a lot of business people getting into branding, but it's also going to be a lot of people who are creative, more creative, that really know how to communicate and do strategy to understand the social element of a business, getting in and taking A lot of responsibility. So that's what we're looking for. It's happening. It's not happening as fast as I thought it would considering how powerful it is. But um, you know, things take their they take as long as they take and but I think that's the direction we're going in, and there's no turning back. Marc Gutman 38:15 Well, thank you for sharing that. I mean, the thing I find like, and I'm sure you run into this all the time as well, like anytime I talk to a client, anytime we start branding, and I'm like, Hey, tell me who you want to be like, they're like, I want to be like Steve Jobs. I want to be like apple, but they don't want to do the things that make them wait. Marty Neumeier 38:35 Yeah, so yeah, they want the results without doing the work, sir. Yeah, but but that's, that's the job of consultants and writers, people like me, teachers to say, okay, there's actually a way to do this. You have to, this is what you need to know about it. A lot of things in your company or change to make this happen. You know, Apple is not that just wasn't one person. Apple is all bunch of people under one person's direction doing things in a way that no other company was doing. And so there are lots of companies out there experimenting with that now to apples just happens to be that one of the earliest and the most beautiful of them, you know, the most perfect of them, but it's, it's happening everywhere. So I just think it's frustrating for people like you probably because you can see where things need to move to. And they're not moving fast enough. But just think about all the people that don't have that vision yet. They haven't seen it. It's going to take a lot of time. And eventually though, I think you'll, you'll go to the university and you'll get a branding degree, you know, and it'll be really robust. It'll be great. And maybe you'll even have to take some art classes or other you know, creative classes to go along with that. And I think that'll be great. I think the world gods. This is my theory, okay. The world got split. up into two paths back in the Renaissance. In the exam, the renaissance of a really smart talented person was Leonardo da Vinci, because he would. He was artistic and creative, super creative. But it was also really scientific and logical at the same time he could do both of those things he made those two things work together as one. So it's a metaphor for having your left brain and right brain working together as one unit. And what I what I think happened was that that example his example, which we now know about, was unknown, because his notebooks never out. I mean, he meant to publish those notebooks but he was afraid to publishing because he didn't want to lose any. He didn't want to because his competitors are like up so he kept those notebooks very secret. Meaning to always meaning to publish them when he before he died and he never got around to it. And then he gave the the project to his assistant before he died. So you you get them published to him. And the assistant Francesco melty failed to do it. Also, he wasn't very good follow through either. And so those notebooks just got lost. They filtered out into various houses in Europe, and they were, he was basically unknown for 200 years, nobody knew. Nobody had that example of how you can use art and science equally, to make something that nice by itself. So art went one way became like what we know now is just kind of art for people's homes and museums and everything. And then then we got, you know, science went into manufacturing and all kinds of stuff like that, and never the twain shall meet. So, business has had, you know, 100 years of being mostly about science and logic and dollars and cents and just being very narrowly defined. And now we need that example of Leonardo da Vinci we need we need the creativity, the logic, the magic and the logic, working together to create a company that last that's really important, and we don't have that anymore. So we're trying to get it back. That's what's happening. So universities have the ability to, to post the art and the science programs back together so that they influence each other. And, and then that, in turn, will influence business management. And we'll see business that is businesses that are much more human focused, and that will be good for business that'll be good for capitalism. It's going to be good for society, good for everything. And at this point, it's up to the creative people to make that case. Because I don't think traditionally educated business people Know how to get that I think they want it, they want jobs, they don't know how to do it. If you know how to do it, then you should be in there pitching, you know, you've got to get in there and connect the dots for business people and and make all this possible. So that's what I did there. And I mean the fight, you know, to, to bring humanity back into the business, not just because I want it that way, but because it'll be successful that way. And I'm thinking, we're apparently we're in a paradigm shift right now, caused by the pandemic and the collapse of the economy. That's gonna shake everything up. It's gonna shake the snow globe, and create a lot of opportunity for people who can embrace change, and find a place in this new future what it's like, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be the future we've been trying to make happen, but we got stuck because of tradition. So, tradition is getting broken up right now, at least temporarily. And that's that's a chance to to get And do some new things, I think what'll happen, businesses will become more brand focused. So they'll try to delight customers more, they'll try to protect customers instead of just milking them for their cash, you know, which is not a very good long term strategy. long term strategy is helping customers become who they want to become. And if you can do that, you'll be very valuable to your customers, and they will stick with you beyond reason, though, though, they'll stick with you, even when you're not doing a good job if they trust you, because you're human helping them. It's very simple. But we just don't have the framework to understand that from a business standpoint. So, you know, I'm working on I got eight books on the subject, and I'm certainly finding a lot of CEOs that are interested in in adopting a more brand focused way of leadership. So I think it's going well, I just think you only have so many years in your career, and you could easily get frustrated that it's not moving fast enough, but it moves as fast as it moves. Marc Gutman 45:10 And such is life. I mean, I love your vision of what the snow globe may look like, on the other side of this, but, you know, what's hard about branding? Like, what, what just what doesn't the normal person see or What don't we now, like what's hard about this as a discipline? Marty Neumeier 45:27 Well, the first thing is that most people don't know that branding is more than logos. I mean, that's, that's, you know, the vast majority of the world thinks branding is about sticking logos on things or you know, colors and typefaces maybe, or maybe advertising or, you know, marketing. Branding is not it's much more than that. It's it's about giving customers something that makes them better people and in the largest sense, and, yes, that is that that demands To make products that they think are valuable, that are respectful of them and society and the environment, it means communicating the values of those products or services in a clear way that so they understand what it does for me, it requires that companies build themselves around their brand and have a purpose that's, that goes further than just wanting to make profit. I mean, you know, a company needs to have a purpose beyond making money. Today, if they want to succeed, if their only purpose is to grow to be a 5 million $5 billion company and sell it off to somebody else. They'll probably succeed at that, but they won't create anything of lasting value. They'll just their company will be absorbed by somebody else. may or may not do anything good with it. So you can do that. But if you want to create businesses that last and create that are satisfying to everybody You need to think about purpose, what's the purpose of this company beyond making money? What What do we want to do for the world? And so, I'm pretty cheered up about that, that actually, that message got through to people. There's very few instances anymore where you see that, you know, a statement on somebody's website that says the purpose of our company is to return or to, to increase shareholder returns, or something really bland. Having only to do with profitability, it's always got to be more than that, because who's gonna work for a company that just wants to, you know, increase shareholder dividends, it's just boring. It's, it's, it makes you want to take a take a shower. After you come back from work, it's like, you know, it's just, there's nothing there for anybody. No, we live in a world of human beings. So we want to think that what we're doing has value to people real value and then leaving the world a better place because of what we're doing. It's not easy to do but that's the That's the that's the goal, really great companies. So an apple service certainly that way, if you want to go back to them, Apple wants to improve everybody's minds, you know, I mean, they want to push evolution forward. So it's pretty big. And you can go to work and be happy about doing that kind of work. Google, for example, I don't trust them as much as I used to, but they had the right idea when they started out, which was, let's catalog all the world's information and make it easily accessible to everybody. Well, that's pretty cool. I mean, I certainly benefited from that. It's really helped me in writing my books and learning and all kinds of stuff is to get all this free information about the world. Oh, people are like getting in line to work for Google. I mean, in the stock valuation reacted appropriately to that, you know, it's super valuable. Amazon stock is doing really well. Amazon has a very narrow, missing permission. Which is to be the most customer centric company in the world. I think they've done that. They haven't been great, necessarily to their employees or to other businesses, they've kind of trampled. You know, the competitors. And I think they owe the world a lot after their success, and they need to pay back pay back for that. But you could see how having that lofty goal is what really drove them to such heights. So you need that. And so be careful what you wish for to whatever you decide you want to do for the world, you may be very successful. So you have to start them thinking about well, have we done any damage? And we how do we get a net positive out of our contribution to the world? Oh, Marc Gutman 49:49 I just want to think about that for a second. let that simmer, settle a little bit. Marty Neumeier 49:54 Yeah, so I mean, I've been talking a lot about sort of like ideas of branding and everything but it also is important at And surface level of branding, like what you say how you say it, you know, what are the messages? Like? What kind of words are they using? What is their poetry? And is there? Are they powerful words? Or are the images sticky to you? You know? Are they beautiful? Are they memorable, all these kinds of things that we typically think of as being in the realm of branding, they are still important, right? So important at every level. So I think for me, having come from advertising, marketing, design, and having been in the trenches, was really a good background for going into brand strategy and brand education because I know what it takes to do it. It's not easy. It's as hard as any kind of art form and takes as many brains and skills and all that kind of stuff and collaboration to do that as anything else. And I really think without that, you may have great strategy. You may have great intentions. But the rubber never meets the road because you don't do a very good job on the actual stuff that people see the, what we call the touch points. So all that the design of all those touch points, the places where customers come in contact with the brand, they have to be great. They have to be clear, beautiful, powerful, all those kinds of things. And you could spend your whole career just learning how to do some of those things. And that's fine. For me. I just felt like I did a lot of those things. And I was getting frustrated that maybe my work wasn't landing the way it should, in a business way. The business sense what connecting or it wasn't being appreciated for it in some cases, or maybe as being too appreciated for it because it really wasn't working. That's not very, that's not very satisfying thing. So I just felt the, for me the place I could go to do the good was is intact. This whole idea of branding, how can it get everyone on the same page so we can all work together to do something good for customers and the company and society. It's all it's all there and branding. I mean, you definitely can do it. And it's gonna take every ounce of effort that you have to be good at it, which I really love. I just love it to be challenging. Marc Gutman 52:23 Yeah, and you know, that that's a great segue into to this question for you in that we've spoken a lot about what companies can do around branding and benefit from branding. But what advice do you have for people like myself, brand strategist, agency owners, like what should we be looking to, in order to be you know that that next level, the leaders and branding and delivering the most value to our clients, which is obviously what we should be wanting to do, Marty Neumeier 52:51 but you can deliver value at different levels. So one is, um, you can be the person that does the design or the message creation. Four touch points, essentially, which is where I started. The important thing there is understanding where you fit in, like, what's, what's this branding thing that I'm contributing to what is what's expected of me? How do I know when I've been successful? How can I sell what I'm doing? Because I can prove that it's successful in in the right context that makes sense to businessperson. So there's that. And then then you might move on to move into brand strategy. And then you have to be the connector between all these touch points, the creation of these touch points and some business results. You have to be able to sell that and manage that. So how do you do that while you you read? So I do everything. I read about it. And then I try it out. You have to have a theory before you practice it. So practice is great. You can learn a lot from your own experience, but without a theory to test against. You really don't learn that much. So you need to have a theory. Like oh, maybe I try this and measure that result in See how it is I'll give you a concrete example because I'm getting a bit abstract here. So once upon a time, I will have a design firm and I was designing the retail packages for for business software. That's I decided that I could specialize in there and probably be the only one that knew enough about it to, to warrant being paid a lot of money for it, essentially. So if I could be the first one to really understand how to design the software package so that people in the store would pick it up and look at it and go, That's for me, I'm going to pay $200 for that, that product, just based on a package. So I thought if you could do that your work would be very valuable to a company. So that that's that's what I did is I just learned how to do that really, really, really well. While I was doing that, I understood that I started to realize when I talked with my clients that they I would, I would have to ask them questions like, okay, for this package that we're designing, I need you to tell me the one reason that people are gonna want to buy this product instead of the one right next to it that does the same similar thing. Why would they want to buy this word processing program instead of the word processing program right next door on the shelf? And they would say, Well, I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't know. I don't know why we have no, wait a minute, we have these features. This feature this feature this feature that I could say, well, you know, this other product has this feature, this feature this feature also, how does yours differ? Well, we have this other feature that you missed, we have that. Is that important? Well, no, that's not really important. Okay. So we have a problem. Your product is not different than the other one. And they will say, Oh, yeah, you're right. And I've been I would say, if you had something that would really differentiate you from the competition, then we could play that up. And we can make a big deal out of that one thing that you have that that other product doesn't have. So then they are saying, you want to come to the meeting where we're going to be talking about the next iteration of the software, because your views would be really interesting. And so I was learning strategy. And I started reading more about it, like, what is a business strategy? How does? How do you know when you're successful? How do you measure it, all those kinds of things. And soon I got to the point where the packages that we were designing, were selling the software so well, that could like increase sales, three to five times over the previous line just by changing the package. When companies found that out, then they realize they could they would pay a lot of money for that service. And I didn't need to be charging by the hour anymore. I could charge by the packets and I could charge anything along that really because no one else knew how to do this. That was the Huge, you know, a Tiffany for me that the price you charge for something doesn't isn't based on the hours you put into it. It's based on what it does, you know, because all my life I've been charging by the hour. So I started charging quite a bit of money for these software packages. And then it got to the point where because we went to the store and we tested these are prototypes in a store with actual customers, we got to know the salespeople in the store and the store owners and so forth is because we're there all the time testing prototypes on the shelf to see which one would be the best selling selling package. After a while when a software publisher would bring their product to a store like CompUSA which was a big deal at the time I guess there's been fries is another one who was maybe fries is still going I don't know. They go into the store with the product. say look, we have this new product and we Can you? Will you take it? Will you put it on the shelves? And I'll say, Well, you know, we don't bother demonstrating the product. We know it works. I mean, you guys know what you're doing. It's not our job to test your product. We'll assume that the product works. But your package is just not good enough. You know, it just it's not. Why do they have this opinion? Because they've been talking to us for years. And seeing what we knew to be a good package and being in on this conversation, until they knew enough about it to say, No, that's never gonna sell you got everything in the wrong place in their package. You just like it's a mess. We can't take a package like that. So go back and redo it. And we'll, we'll talk about it. And the publisher would say, well, we pay out. We paid $50,000 for this. I don't know what else we can do. And they write out our name and my phone number and give it to them and say, Look, talk to these guys. they'll fix you up and come back. So it wasn't, you know, long before we were charging $80,000 for a package for the same package, we would have charged $10,000 for years ago, but now we know more about it. And you know, we have a reputation for it, we have a brand, our brand is the people that do the software packages. And we got, you know, all the work came through us. So that, to me, was just eye opening, that, you know, that when your reputation could have a value, beyond the actual value of what you're producing. Just the reputation alone is worth money to your client or your customer. So that's what I would say is anybody in consulting can do the same thing when you have a specialty that no one else has, and it's valuable to companies and you can prove it. You have no competition really. And when you charge more for that service, it doesn't hurt your chances of making money. It actually probably enhances your chances. Because they cost a lot. If they think you're the best at something, you better cost a lot. So this is a, you know, a situation in which charging more money actually makes you seem more valuable. And that's where you want to be. And that's what Brandon can do. So once you know that and you have a sense of how to get there, what's stopping you, I mean, figure out what you're going to do that's really different than anybody else that's very valuable, and preferably in an area growing, where you can grow with it. And just do that. Just present yourself as a specialist in something and make sure that you are the best in that something on it, you can prove it. And you'll enjoy that because you'll get more you'll make more money, you'll have more options. You'll have more respectful clients, fewer competitors. And eventually if you get tired of doing that same thing over and over you reinvent your Marc Gutman 1:01:02 That's a great share. Thank you, Marty. I so appreciate it. So you're always reinventing yourself. what's what's next for Marty neumeier? Marty Neumeier 1:01:12 Well, I think what I'm doing what's next now it's pretty new this thing called level C. Level C is a boutique brand school that pops up anywhere in the world. It tends to be mostly popping up in Europe, in London, and also then in the US, several times a year. And professionals like you take classes that are just two day intensive workshops where you learn something specific about branding. So there's five levels, so you're learning five levels of branding, and it gives you enough material to probably keep you busy for a year or two, using all this stuff and making money from it, and so you're ready to go up to that next level. If you choose to do that. Some people won't just take the first master class and become a certified person. specialists and they'll just use that for five to 10 years you know, and do really well with it. Some will say though, I love that and I'm doing well but I want to drill down into strategy more become a strategist, also the money's better than being a strategist. So that may be one of the reasons they want to do it. So they take this next masterclass and they learn that and from there they can go to become a brand architect, which is working on complex three dimensional brands where you've got multiple brands that you're juggling and, and creating the architecture for it's called brand architecture tell all the brands fit together inside a company, how the portfolio is assembled, which is really valuable work. From there, we believe that a lot of people will want to become brand trainers. Because when you start to instruct people in your subject area, you learn a lot more than you learn. To get to that point, so you know, when you if you really want to learn something, teach it. That's the that's the saying. And I think that's very true for everybody I know so. So the fourth level of the level c brand program is being an instructor. And after you learn how to do that, and you've, you've taught some classes, semester classes, you're ready to teach that to a CEO or to a whole company, right? So we hope that people will go into the top of the brand master level, which will equip them along with their other skills that they've been learning the whole time to be CEOs to be grounded officer or somebody very high up in a company that has influence over the whole brand. So that's the top level and when they graduate from that they'll go have their hands full and go have a lot of work. We're starting to see lots of need for cheap, cheap brand. Are you talking about that before? Why is that Where there are a lot of Chief brand officer as well there are going to be in they're already starting to pop up these openings for for that position. Part of it is it's new so you have to sell yourself is that you have to say look I do is I work at the top of an organization to manage all the stuff that makes customers loyal. And then you your salary figure and hope you get a job and the salaries for this kind of work that we're seeing already even in this earlier. Our will take your breath away. I mean, I had no idea that that kind of pay that much to get people of that caliber, but they will I'm not gonna throw around figures because I'm not. I think that could be manipulative, but let's just say that they're there. They're breathtaking. You probably be better off taking one of these jobs than starting your own company. Let's put it that way. think you'd make more money. So that's exciting. And so you know, I've got I've got my hands full, we're creating these classes, one, one class per year, it's a lot of work to put together, a class takes about a year. So we've we're up to the second class now. Next year, we'll have level three, next year, level four, next year, low level five. And we're getting people that are taking all the just moving up through all the courses in the new people getting in all the time. So the result of this that I find really exciting and satisfying is that it's building a whole community of people that understand branding in a certain way, in a very clear, simple way. But with all different kinds of talents, and backgrounds, so they're all bringing their themselves to this, but they're using the same framework as each other. And so they can all work together. And so there'll be thousands of people that could actually work on teams together at various levels. After we're done with this, we'll probably never be done with it. I just think It'll probably just keep growing. But I'm not looking for the next thing yet. Let's just put it that way. Marc Gutman 1:06:06 And we'll make sure to link to level C in the show notes so that everyone has access to that and can look into that. I know I'm excited about some of the events you have coming later this year. So we'll make sure to link to that in the show notes. Marty, as we close out here, What do you think it your 20 year old self would say to you if you ran into him today? Marty Neumeier 1:06:27 To me, because he would not be interested in me. My 20 year old self said, Why would I care anything about branding? All I care about is design. So but I would probably be mystified actually. In fact, most of my students are much older than 20. So they're, you know, anywhere from 30 to 74 have been in business they're successful already at some level. They just want to take it to the next level. So I don't have a lot of 20 year olds. But if I were but looking back if I were to talk to my 20 year old self, I might ask him advice. No, I would probably say, Don't limit yourself to what you thought you could be. Let yourself imagine greater things. Like, the main thing you have to do is find out what you admire about other people in the world, the work they're doing, and and share yourself as yourself that you could actually do work at that level. If you want to write like Hemingway, you could write like Hemingway, if you're 20 years old, there's nothing stopping you from learning how to do that. It's gonna take you a while it may take your whole life, but you can do it you don't have to say oh, I'm no genius. You know, Einstein, you might be an Einstein. in your own way, you're not gonna be Einstein, Einstein, you're gonna be you are inside. So I think I was just reassured myself that my younger That, don't think small, think big and give yourself time to take that journey. Just go one step at a time. Don't kill yourself. Just keep focused. Keep pushing, keep stretching, you'll get there. Marc Gutman 1:08:19 And that is Marty Neumeier. I just loved his idea of always reinventing himself and always exploring, just like the Beatles. I also firmly believe that branding does belong right next to the CEO, if we're not there already. Huge thank you again to Marty and level C. You can find out more about level C and the certification Marty teaches in the show notes. Well, that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstory.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS. See, you'll never miss an episode. big stories and I cannot lie to you other storytellers Katz denies

BGBS 030: Geoff Smart | ghSMART Part 2 | Who: Hiring Tips

BGBS 030: Geoff Smart | Part 2: Who: Hiring Tips

Founder of ghSMART & Co, Geoff Smart is sharing how he studied under Peter Drucker and found his calling to help businesses solve their number one problem; who to hire and how to bring them on the team. As the creator of a Fortune 500 company that is regularly voted one of the top businesses to work for, Geoff tells us his step by step process of hiring with a 90% success rate. Prepare yourself to learn crucial information in how to build your dream team.

What we’re talking about

• The Number One Problem in Business Today
• Ineffective Ways Businesses Interview Candidates
• How to Hire With a 90% Success Rate

The Number One Problem in Business Today

ghSMART & Co is one of the best leadership consulting firms in the world. Geoff Smart discusses the number one problem in business today, hiring. When asked, CEOs report that the top two problems today are talent and technology disruption.

Ineffective Ways Businesses Interview Candidates

The current practices of businesses hiring process can be said to be ineffective, inefficient, and miss the mark by a mile. This isn’t necessarily their fault. A “good hiring” process isn’t being taught in school. Most frame the interview around hypothetical situations and questions. This only gives you hypothetical answers.

How to Hire With a 90% Success Rate

Geoff gives us his highly successful step by step hiring process, information that top companies pay thousands of dollars to learn. Are you ready to elevate your company by building your dream team?

LINKS MENTIONED

Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart Leadocracy: Hiring More Great Leaders (Like You) into Government by Geoff Smart Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success by Geoff Smart

SPONSOR

Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 10:55 - 11:18 (23 sec GS) One of the principles of good hiring...daunting challenge of picking the right people.
• 12:23 - 12:53 (30 sec GS) When you’re in a great job...it could be really miserable.

QUOTES

1. One fad is to ask people hypothetical questions. When you ask people hypothetical questions, they give you hypothetical answers. And those answers don’t tend to be grounded in reality about how people actually behave or perform on the job. GS
2. The goal is to have 90% hiring success vs. 50% hiring success by following the steps. GS

Podcast Transcript

Geoff Smart 0:02 You know, when you're in a great job, like your life is great. Like, it just is like, we spend so much of our, our lives working. You know, if you're really engaged in your in your work and you love your job, it's a wonderful thing and that if that job fits really well, it has a huge effect on your life satisfaction. And if a job is mismatching, you know the personality of your colleagues as wrong as kind of offer the actual work itself, the content of the work, they really like, you know, it can be really miserable. Marc Gutman 0:35 podcasting, Boulder, Colorado. This is the baby got backstory podcast. we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like big back stories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman. I'm Marc Gutman in today's special episode of baby Got backstory. part two of our interview with hiring expert Dr. Geoff smart of gh smart. In our last episode, Geoff shared his story of how he studied under legendary business guru Peter Drucker and found his calling to help businesses solve their number one problem, who to hire, who to bring on the team. After spending years studying this question and working with thousands of companies, Geoff is back to share his process for hiring the right person. Every time I improve this stuff works. And the good news is you can do it yourself. Listen closely as Geoff shares his process. This is the secret goods people. This is the stuff Geoff's clients pay huge fees for and you can get it right here. Right now. So, Geoff, I'm looking at your book right now, on the covering. It's called "Who" On the cover and really big type. It says solve your number one problem. Yeah, what is the number one problem we need to solve? Geoff Smart 2:13 So the number one problem is hiring. And that's based on an economist cover article from a few years ago, it declared after surveying thousands or 10s of thousands of business and government leaders, like what's the biggest problem facing our world, it's talent. And so also top universities, poll CEOs all the time, every year you know, hey, what are the biggest things on your, on your mind? and talent and technology? disruption are typically one in two and talent and being like, you know, how do you hire and develop talented teams, so our marketing people at Random House or publisher, or like write a book on hiring is sounds boring and it sounds like an HR manual. So let's not market it like hey, here's like the world's greatest book on hiring Instead, let's make this the nothing short of the solution to your number one problem. And so I liked that I appreciated their guidance. That's why we call it who, because that's, you know, when you're in boardrooms or you're hanging out with government leaders or you're hanging out with entrepreneurs, the you know, some of those important sensitive, scary exciting conversations are around like Who are we hiring or who's not working out in our company who might need to get fired? Who this who that Who should we pair with this important initiative? So the who questions we thought Oh, also deserve the title who because the who stuffs your number one problem also thanks a nod out to Jim Collins. Good to Great first get the right people on the on the bus and in the right seats. And he he has a quote in good degrade I hope I get this right. I said the the most important decisions in business are not the what decisions. They're the who decisions. So according to the economist, according to leading universities who survey thousand CEOs, According to Jim Collins himself, this topic of hiring and picking the right people and building a talented team is the number one problem in business. So we set out to write the the top selling book on the number one problem in business. And we did and so that's that feels good, like the whole circle was completed. It's like here's this daunting challenge that so many business leaders say they struggle with, let's use our our research and our experiences with clients and try to you know, shape a nice simple framework to help leaders solve their number one problem. Marc Gutman 4:48 It is a problem and I feel a little like guilty admitting this, but until I heard you speak and I read your book, I like hated hiring. I'm like, I loathed it. Like it was something that like, made me feel it. And now I can't say that I love it today. I'm better now and thanks to your book and your, in your methodology. It's helped me quite a bit. But I get the feeling that you love it. Like what do you if that's true, what do you love about it? Geoff Smart 5:16 What's wrong with me? Why do I learned because here's why, it's important. When you get it wrong. It's painful and costly when you get it right. It's a company maker. And so so just, you know, doesn't matter as a matter. Yeah, like it matters so much. So that's one reason I like it. The other reason I like it is, most people do it wrong. They just do it wrong. They do it the wrong way, according to a century of research by thousands of academics and lots of consultants who study this stuff for a living, and by doing it, but by having most people doing it wrong, that provides an edge or a source of competitive advantage for those who choose to learn how Do it right. And so it's fun. It's like a superpower. It's like you go when there's a government leader, or we're working with a governor. And you know how, if you can imagine and in government land, hiring a cabinet, you know, your top team, your top like 20 leaders, after you just won an election in November, and then you've got like a month and a half until your inauguration to like, higher, higher higher up this whole team from scratch. The hiring success rates of governors putting their cabinets together is abysmal. So if you get them to be honest, they would admit it's even worse than the 50% hiring success rate that business people say that they achieved. So imagine all the problems that causes at scale, right? Oh, you know, in government or business or wherever, or if you have like a, you know, a 50% or worse, hiring success rate. taxpayer dollars get wasted. Fraud happens, you know, dishonesty happens, bad results happen. So I love the main reason I love hirings just because I feel like it really is the most important question to get right. And in any organization you're trying to lead, and the fact that we have knowledge about, you know, good methods and bad methods. And, and, and it's not widespread, and most people do it wrong, makes that extra exciting as well. Marc Gutman 7:21 Yeah, why do we do it wrong? I mean, we're, you know, we're kind of smart people as a whole as a species. Like why did we get this wrong? Why can't we figure this thing out? Geoff Smart 7:30 Yeah. So unlike finance and accounting, 101 and marketing, and you know, other disciplines that have clear methods that we get taught in school, good hiring until fairly recently hasn't been taught anywhere you don't learn it in high school, you don't take a class on it in college, and even at some of the best business schools in the world are my colleagues will go teach a you know, one class period on on on good hiring methods. You know, across a two year MBA program, so the short answers, you know, you're, you're not taught how to do it. And then like, Well, why can't we come up with hiring methods that are intuitive or whatever? It's because our intuition is wrong a lot. For example, one very common way to interview people for jobs is to ask them hypothetical questions. And this is like a whole fad that started in the 90s. And you see it today, people, you know, Hey, Marc, how would you resolve a conflict with a colleague? How would you How would you it's a hypothetical question. And then marc goes, Oh, you know, I would sit that colleague down, and we'd have a conversation about our goals. And we would work through our differences. And we'd come up with a win win solution, and say, Oh, great. So what do we know about Marc? We don't know anything about marc, we just know that marc can say what he would do in a hypothetical situation. It seems like useful data. It's just not. When you ask people hypothetical questions. They give you hypothetical answers. And those answers don't tend to be grounded in reality about How they actually behave or perform on the job. So they're like a bunch of things like that, that, that once I pointed out, you might go. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, asking people hypothetical questions is dumb. But if you go watch 100 managers, interviewing people's fresh off campuses, or for not for profits or in governments are not for profits, you know, big, big ones are or businesses. There's a ton of that hypothetical interviewing going on. So anyway, it's like, you know, you don't get taught it. People invent their own intuitive approaches. I had one guy, I remembered a semiconductor company, tell me or tell a bunch of us I was doing a keynote over a lunchtime retreat, this company was having he, at the beginning of my thing. He said, I know, I know, you're going to tell us the Holy Grail for hiring. But he's like, I just got to share this really great approach that I use for hiring people. And I said, well, what's that? And he said, Yeah, I like to ask people what kind of animal animal they'd be, and why. And everyone kinda laughed to that. I said, Well, how do you know what the right answer is? And he said, I developed a whole, you know, a whole matrix of like, what different, different answers mean? And I'm like, Oh, that's great. What? And how has it helped you be a successful hiring manager? And he said, No, no, I'm terrible at hiring, but at least it cuts the boredom of the process. So it's like, why are we bad at hiring, we're bad at hiring because the best methods aren't taught to us in school, and aren't really taught to us on the job. And then, you know, you kind of fill the void with intuitive approaches that you think might work but, you know, aren't really grounded in science or reality. I'm also people, it's awkward, right? I mean, sitting and trying to, you know, get to know somebody is a bit awkward. I think a lot of people feel just simply uncomfortable with it. So they try to talk about the weather or sports teams or they sort of talk about anything and you know, one of the principles of good interviewing and hiring us, you're not supposed to talk about just anything because If you are just making conversation with somebody that's not a very, like data driven way to evaluate their capabilities, and it's just like chatting, chatting doesn't make for good interviews, but is the way that a lot of untrained folks default when they're faced with the daunting challenge of, of picking the right people. Marc Gutman 11:18 Yeah, and I also think, you know, a couple things, you know, just from my own experience, it takes a lot of work. It's not easy, so just anything that's good, it takes some work and you got to put some, put some work into it. And also like, as you start to get down the process, like I personally start to feel bad like I have this like, guilt about you know, bringing people through a process and and I could tell myself look, this is all about making sure it's a right fit for them and that they're gonna be successful long term, but I do have this like, sense of like, I feel bad and like, you know, and I've even made bad hiring decisions because I feel bad. And of course, we know those don't work out but, and I've experienced that myself. Geoff Smart 11:52 Yeah, I hear you. You're nice and you're empathetic. And yeah, you're judging people. Like it's a weird thing. It's a weird kind of almost like A natural structure for to be judging people. But to your point, yeah, if you're better at both sides, the employee perspective in play and the hiring manager, use better methods for judging the other one, then you'll have a greater chance of a good match happening and when a good match happens, I guess that's one of the other thing is I just really feel strongly about and why I love this topic of hiring is, you know, when you're in a great job, like your life is great. Like, it just is like, we spend so much of our, our lives working. If you're really engaged in your in your work and you love your job. It's a wonderful thing, and that if the job fits really well, it has a huge effect on your life satisfaction. And if a job is a mismatch, ie you know, the personality of your colleagues as wrong as kind of off or the actual work itself, the content of the work, they don't really like, you know, it can be really miserable. And I saw something I think it was a Gallup poll, maybe six months ago, that only I'm going to get this number wrong by a few percentages that Something like only 29% of people love their jobs and the rest don't and that's sad to me so I think yeah two point on it takes hard work on both sides to really figure out if a job is a good fit and maybe that explains partially why folks who get busy and you know have so many entrepreneurs I know you know feel like they have so many fires to put out it's very difficult and it's understandably difficult for them to sit down and you know, have write out a scorecard and you know, do some of the other best practices to to increase the the hiring success rate. Marc Gutman 13:37 This episode brought to you by wild story. Wait, isn't that your company? It is. And without the generous support of wild story, this show would not be possible. A brand isn't a logo or a tagline or even your product. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company. It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. Wildstory helps progressive founders and savvy marketers build purpose driven brands that connect their business goals with the customers they want to serve. So that both the business and the customer needs are met. This results in crazy, happy, loyal customers that purchase again and again. And this is great for business. If that sounds like something you and your team might want to learn more about, reach out @ www.wildstory.com. And we'd be happy to tell you more. Now back to our show. Speaking consists of other things that can create issues around that. And right now we're in the middle as you mentioned, a big pandemic and like how is your current How is the current situation changed your thinking on hiring and leadership like like, how are you approaching this in a different matter? Are you? Geoff Smart 14:54 Yeah, let's see here. So let's let's think about this for a moment. So the principles Good hiring, I think still apply, we could talk about those later. But as you're creating the criteria for who you're hiring, or as you're actually doing interviews by video or by phone rather than in person, I think it actually slightly increases the importance of making sure all the checklist items are hit, because you can't just throw time in person time with with someone as a solution to the problem. So you know, like maybe pre pandemic even allows the hiring process can work pretty well. If you just spend a ton of ton of ton of in person time with with the people you're thinking about hiring like so that's, that's kind of like a bad return on investment. timewise. But you can get to a pretty good answer just by spending a ton of time in person with people. Well, you can't do that in a pandemic. So guess what? You have to default then to the best practices and be more like surgical with how you spend time with folks. By video or by phone, doing reference calls, etc, you gotta like, do all that stuff if you want to achieve 90% hiring success, which is what the goal is the goal is to have 90% hiring success versus 50% hiring success by by following the steps. And then I think as your, I think it's and it's just harder. So you better have a much better value proposition for an employee, if you expect him or her to leave a great company and join your company in the middle of a pandemic. So I think the energy and the empathy required to really bond with someone and to have them trust you enough to leave their perfectly good job in the middle of a pandemic and join your company is higher, I think the bar is higher than in a, you know, than in a more stable environment. So bottom line is, I think it's just as important as it always is. And I think it's even more important that folks follow a discipline process to get it right. Marc Gutman 16:56 Yeah, and you know, and there's people going to be, you know, it's hard, hard to get someone to But also, given what we're seeing in the headlines and what we know, anecdotally, there's potentially some really great candidates out there that can come join your company. And yes, be that difference maker in a way and that they're going to be looking for things like you talked about, like that Harvard case studies student talked about, like, why should I come join your company? And also, you know, finding that right match or there's some principles of good hiring, that you're able to share with, you know, with the audience so that they might be able to get a leg up? Geoff Smart 17:29 Sure. You bet. And I'm with you on that. I think it's smart to because it's hard to forecast in this environment, demand and revenue. I think it's smart to follow these great steps for hiring that I'm about to describe, but then maybe hold on just a moment and not actually start the person right away, but to build kind of like a virtual bench of talent, that as the business conditions get increasingly clearer and you can forecast you know, revenue etc, then all of a sudden, you can like snap all these great folks off the bat. So, so just like a little bit of caution there, because I think it is hard no matter what industry folks are in today, other than hospitals and maybe Amazon, it's hard to know what you're doing, you know, obviously, tons of activity these days, it's hard to forecast revenue. So in the environment, like like we're in right now, with increased importance. These are the four steps of good hiring, that we find are associated with a 90% hiring success rate. Now imagine, Marc, you hired 10 people, like nine out of 10 people work out great. And we define hiring success super simply, just as a year after you hire the person, are you glad you hired them or not? And so, if the goal is 90% hiring success, here are the four steps and these are outlined in our book, and they're super important in the during a time of crisis. One The first step is called the scorecard. And so one big mistake in hiring is is just using like the name of a job as a, as a proxy for a scorecard. Like we're trying to hire a marketing coordinator. Okay, well, what does that actually mean? You know, what do you need the person to deliver? What are the outcomes that you'll you'll measure their success based on? So what are the competencies that are really important for this role and for our, our firm? Um, so that first step is creating a scorecard writing out basically like the criteria of what you expect the person to accomplish is step one, step two, is called the source step. And there's a couple ways to do that. Well, actually, one unexpected way to source lots of good candidates is to pay incentives here existing employees to source people, and it can be like 500 bucks, or, you know, dinner out, or, you know, as much as $10,000, we've heard, aren't like to offer a referral fee to existing employees to do the hard work to really source in more good people. So that's One, one hint on source. On the third step is called the Select step. So this is this is where the interviews are really important. So in the Select step, you need to have a good intro interview where you know, you try not to be too eager, you know, and you basically just have like a career conversation with someone, you know, what are your career goals? What are some of your strengths? What are some of the things you're not as good at, you'd have like a really kind of enjoyable, substantive, initial call with someone that's like, we call that the screening interview. And then when you have, when you've narrowed down the list of candidates for like a key job to maybe two or three, then you you wheel out the heavy artillery. And you do one of these who interviews, which is long, it's like two hours plus for a senior hire, where you sit there and interview them about their their whole life kind of in chronological order. So starting back in the school age, what were some highlights and lowlights of the school years, and then let's talk about each job and talk about What you're hired to do, and what you accomplished, and what some low points were, and mistakes, who you worked with, and like, what what your boss was like to work with, and what your boss would say, was like working with you. And then Why'd you leave that job and what comes next. So doing like a really thorough walkthrough someone's resume in chronological order, like that is a really key step. And then the final step, the fourth and final step, we call sell, which is once you've decided, hey, this person really has accomplished great things against the scorecard. We want them you know, we're very confident that they're going to do a great job, then you have to figure out how to sell them and to your earlier question, like how do you persuade them to leave another company and trust you, you know, especially during a time of crisis, and join your company, and we we did a big study for the who book of successful entrepreneurs and we asked them like, how did you sell people on joining your company, and generally, it was like a checklist of like, one or more of five things that make Someone want to join your company. And they all start with the letter F, as in Foxtrot. So fit. So sell them on the fit, Hey, your strengths and talents match, you know, like this, you fit what we're what we're all about your values etc. Family, which is basically like hey, you know zere if you have a significant other are they? Are they comfortable with you joining our firm? Do they have any questions like, you know how and obviously it's a steer clear of asking people questions like whether they're pregnant or planning on having a baby anytime soon or asking any questions that are not appropriate for for an interview. But you can certainly ask people if they're, if they're relevant family members or supportive of their taking a new job, whether your company, what else fortune is a third app, it's like telling people what they're likely to make and not be guessing them. But just showing them how their compensation is calculated, and what it could be expected to grow to over the next few years about very important So clarity is key freedom. So I'm deciding what freedoms people will have working for you, is really key. Everybody really wants a high degree of freedom these days. And so emphasizing that as pretty key and fun as the last one. So basically, hey, what's fun about working at your company, and it's like, what the actual content of the work, you know, the teamwork, that collegiality, letting them talk to people and really get a sense for what's fun about working at your company is the fifth and final F, and the five F's for selling. So those are like the almost like a checklist that we use that we teach our clients to use around, you know, let's make sure we're communicating a brand message for hire for joining this company that hits you know, one or more of those five apps that are important to the person. Marc Gutman 23:48 Well, thanks for sharing that. And you know, I know this is all supported and comes out of years and years of study and years of years of science and work but like as you go through the steps, it doesn't sound that bad. All Geoff Smart 24:00 right. Thank you. Yeah, I love that. And so it's weird. It's people who've read our books or clients say things like, yeah, this is like, really common sense. But it's kind of uncommon practice. Marc Gutman 24:14 Yeah. And and I can I can speak from experience of going through it gives you a framework, it gives you an ability. I mean, I'm an emotional as you mentioned person, and I can tend to let that get in the way of my decisions, versus really tying things to outcomes like you outlined in the scorecard. And we we hire people, we wonder, why can't they do this thing that we wanted, because we didn't tell them and we didn't lay it out, or they don't know yet how they're being measured. So really appreciate you laying out those four steps as well as the five apps and in for everyone that's interested, that's definitely in the handbook and in detail, and because it does go into depth and gives it great examples on that book as well. So thanks a lot for that, Geoff. You bet. So Geoff, what's next for you in gh smart? Geoff Smart 24:57 Wow, what's next? All right. That's fun question. Let's see here. So our growth story is pretty simple. There's nothing next for me. It's I'm just I love my job. I love being chairman and founder of ghsmart is an awesome platform. So I will continue to play my role, every now and then I like to do a stint in some form of public service. So like a few years ago, I took nine months off to work full time for a governor that was up for reelection, who was trying to figure out whether or not to keep the team intact, like, you know, sir, who is going to stay who is not going to stay in the team. So I was like chief talent Officer of a 20,000 person $30 billion budget, state. And that was super fun. So that was, so I'd like to stay with gh smart, continue to do my work as chairman and founder here, and then kind of toggle out for brief stints of public service helping leaders of whether it's not for profits or government To to hire, and develop talented teams. It's kind of my thing I like I just really enjoy that, that work. And that's about it. So my role is this plus some community service public service since in the future that the firm's future is like focusing on three things. So, with our SEO clients, we only help them with a narrow set of problems. And so we want to keep widening the problems that we help our SEO clients to solve. So for example, back in the early days of gh smart, we're very focused on helping CEOs and investors, assessing senior talent like that was it that's all we did, and then we added coaching, so we're going to assess the talent, we're going to coach the talent, and then we move from the individual focus to more of a team focus. So today, we help senior leaders and their teams, you know, hire and develop talent and run the team at full power, as we say, in the future, you know, I think they're gonna be awesome. there other things, other problems that CEOs face that are leadership oriented that we can help them solve. We don't do any compensation work today. We don't do any large scale, organizational culture monitoring kind of work today like aligning culture to strategy. There's just a bunch of things that we could do for CEOs that we, we just don't have solutions for yet. So take, you know, kind of continue to expand the set of solutions that we offer, which is number one. Number two is geographic expansion. So there with 12 offices around the US and only one internationally, it's in London. We started at three years ago. It's doing great. And we'd like to expand from London to continental Europe. So that's, that's on the docket for the near term. We'd like to open a Southeast Asian hub in the next three years or so. Probably Singapore or possibly Hong Kong, and then expand in Asia that way. And then at that point, figure out what our Latin American Europe or Latin America Can Middle East and Africa expansion plans are. So geographic expansion is a second party. And then the third one is a little bit longer term, it's using digital technology to first help our consultants. be smarter, no pun intended, and serving clients, you know, with advanced data analytics and predictive analytics and that kind of thing. And we have this huge database of all these, all these successful and unsuccessful careers, folks for 25 years that we've, we've studied and gotten outcome data for. So figuring out how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to make our consultants that much smarter with their advice and counsel on helping you hire helping you manage your career. And then, you know, creating new products and services using technology beyond just consulting to companies would be the longer term goal on our product and services expansion. So like maybe one day you know ghsmart will primarily be a management consulting leader. advisory firm as we are today, but it'd be really neat to have two or three or four other business units that, you know, still serve the same overall brand vision of helping leaders be successful. But do it in different ways, whether it's, you know, products or database access or other automated services, who knows, maybe one day we'll go and, you know, we'll, we'll create matching technologies to help you know, the, the marks of the future, manage your career strategy, and to be able to get real time probabilistic data from us on choices. You're thinking about making like, Oh, hey, if you want to turn left in your career, that has a 6% chance of making you happy if you turn right, it's gonna as a 94% chance of making you happy, you know, to apply statistics and probabilities. I tell people make more confident decisions with their careers and with how they lead their teams. It's kind of a medium term, pet project that we're putting a bunch of into these days. So in summary, what's future future for the firm is do more for CEOs. Number one, number two is carefully expand geographically. And then number three is invest in digital technologies to make our, our work that much more valuable for our clients, and that much more enjoyable to deliver for our people. Marc Gutman 30:20 And I have no doubt that you'll be able to make that happen. Geoff, as we wrap up here, if you ran into your 20 year old self, what do you think he'd say to you today? Geoff Smart 30:31 I think my 20 year old self would say, Good job for staying true to a few things that really important. Family is super important to me. So I, the way I grew gh smart, has allowed me to, you know, put family first and so that's something when I was 20. I was like, I really want to do interesting things in my career, but I really would love to have a successful family. So today I have seven kids. perfect wife Lauren, and I've got two kids on the We're pregnant with twins that are coming. We're pregnant. She's pregnant with twins are coming in July. So we'll have nine kids if you can believe that. Marc Gutman 31:07 Congratulations. That's incredible. Geoff Smart 31:09 Yeah, this massive amount of children. We're very, very family focused. And I make a ton of time for my family so I feel good about that. I don't live with regrets of like, Oh, you know entrepreneur has been great but you know, missed out on family. So I think family success, I'd be proud of the 20 year old me was looking forward. And then on the smart side and just the entrepreneurial side, I really do feel good about my colleagues and employment opportunity that they they get and seem to really enjoy here. And then the value that clients are getting. So I think the 20 year old me 20 year old me would have said that maybe the like 30 year old man should have invested more energy and software earlier and kind of like, you know, had something to show for the the, you know, the rise of technology. It doesn't pissed me off a little bit that Google was founded a year after my firm was, and you know, like, yeah, and we're 120 people and we did 70 million in revenue last year, which is like great nothing to sneeze at. But yeah, I'd say like 20 year old me would have shaken his head and said, Hey, you should have gotten you know, more of a dog in the technology hunt earlier. So just to be balanced, but overall, I don't know 20 year old me Would it be like yeah, keep keep up the good work on on putting family first Keep up the good work on hiring people and giving them a ton of freedom and having them really you know, enjoy their work and have a life outside of work. And I guess the 20 year old me would have courage me today to keep innovating and keep you know, the foot on the gas pedal of experimenting and never getting to like smugger or believing believing our own press a few well so staying humble and I guess like kind of like the the Andy Grove but see Have Intel enough paranoid to, to always work hard and push against our overall business strategy and making sure that we're living by the values and the credo. So yeah, I think net net, my 20 year old self would would be pretty happy, while also giving me some advice and things that I should be focused on for the future. Marc Gutman 33:25 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to Geoff smart and ghsmart and company. I can't express what value the information you share today is. Thank you. Oh, and if you and I were in an interview, and you asked me what animal I'd be, probably a turtle. Well, that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstory.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS, so you'll never miss an episode. I like big backstories and I cannot lie to you other storytellers can't deny.

BGBS 029: Geoff Smart | ghSMART Part 1 | Part 1: Yes, You Can Have It All

BGBS 029: Geoff Smart | Part 1: Yes, You Can Have It All

Geoff Smart, founder and chairman of ghSMART & Co is sharing how his dream of having a fulfilling job and great life turned into one of the most successful hiring firms in the world. Geoff routinely advises Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaire entrepreneurs, and heads of states and discusses the importance of being a servant leader along with the companies he has looked up to over the years. Geoff shares how failure led to his own business launch and how you can sustain job satisfaction within your company. This conversation was so great and informative, that this is only part 1 of 2. Prepare to be inspired by one man who took his dream and made it a reality.

What we’re talking about

• Geoff Smart’s Story: From Young Interests to a World-Renowned Leadership Company
• The Story of How ghSMART & Co Got Its Name
• Keeping It Fresh, Sustaining High Job Satisfaction, and the Definition of Leadership

Geoff Smart’s Story: From Young Interests to a World-Renowned Leadership Company

Living in Chicago, at the age of 8, George wanted to be either a CIA agent or newscaster, but as he grew, his dreams changed. In high school, Geoff was already interested in leadership. He was reading books by Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, and Milton Friedman. As a leader in sports and his school paper, his interest in leadership took hold and grew to a passion. With a father as an industrial psychologist, Geoff had a wonderful mentor right at home. He studied Economics at Northwestern when his mother scored him an internship at a venture capital firm where he learned that it’s not what you invest in, but who you invest in. Following college, Geoff was lucky enough to get to study under Peter Drucker, the “Founder of Modern Management”. After Geoff failed to get an internship at McKinsey & Co Consulting, he founded his own company. Geoff also shares that he decided to develop his own business because of his desire to help others with a more methodical approach to leadership, as well as his belief that “those that want to work hard and have an impact can also have a life”. It was at this time that ghSMART & Co was born.

The Story Of How ghSMART & Co Got Its Name

The story of how ghSMART & Co got its name is interesting, but a story that Geoff is proud of. The “gh” are his first two initials, but he decided to make them lower case because he wanted to be sure others knew he was a servant leader. The last part, SMART, is all capitals because Geoff says it’s his colleagues that put the SMART in ghSMART. It also emulates one of the companies Smart looked up to while doing his doctoral dissertation, McKinsey & Co. It’s these small details and practices that Geoff uses which has helped foster a positive culture and skyrocketed his retention rate to over 90%!

Keeping It Fresh, Sustaining High Job Satisfaction, and the Definition of Leadership

Put innovation to work. Listen to thoughts and ideas from clients & colleagues. If there’s some part of your work description that you no longer like or others can do better, delegate it or give it to someone who is better at it. Geoff’s definition of leadership is “helping a group of people figure out what it wants, and then formulate & execute a plan to get it”. When Geoff was talking about their brandstory, he said they have three ideas that intersect. 1) Maximize the positive impact you’re making. 2) Do work that really matters. 3) Get paid for it so you can have a life outside of work! Are you living your brand story?

LINKS MENTIONED

Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart Leadocracy: Hiring More Great Leaders (Like You) into Government by Geoff Smart Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success by Geoff Smart

SPONSOR

Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 32:40 - 33:23 (43 sec GS) - Guarantee the thing that’s hardest, but most important to your customer...if we are not successful, you don’t pay.
• 37:50 - 38:32 (42 sec GS) - I had learned from an early age...that’s how you grow a professional services business.
• 46:07 - 46:40 (33 sec GS) - At its core, I think leadership is about helping improve people’s lives and...for the people that you’re serving.

QUOTES

1. Who you hire can make, or break, a company. - GS
2. It’s not what you do, but who you do it with. - GS
3. Those that want to work hard and have an impact can also have a life. - GS
4. I had learned from an early age by watching other successful entrepreneurs, that the more you can hire great folks & let them have the spotlight, the better if you want to scale a top tier business. - GS

Podcast Transcript

Geoff Smart 0:02 And he pulls me aside like forcefully grabs my shoulder like almost in cotton comfortably so like a real rough shoulder graph and he leans in to whisper in my ear. He said, You know I like the vision for for your business, but it's too ambitious and nobody likes a know it all. And he said it in a whisper at about 100 decibel because his mic picked it up and like that 50 people behind me to start laughing because I just basically got schooled by Peter Drucker on the value of humility when you know when creating a business plan. Marc Gutman 0:39 podcasting from Boulder, Colorado, this is the baby got backstory podcast, we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like big backstories and I cannot lie. I am your host Marc Gutman. Marc Gutman, and on today's episode of Baby Got Back story. How a dream to have a fulfilling job in a great life turned into one of the most successful hiring firms in the world. I don't know about you, but I hate hiring. I hate everything about it. I hate that I don't know what I'm doing. Or if I'm doing it right, or if the person I'm about to bring on the team will be awesome, or a complete disaster. Or at least that's how I used to feel about hiring. Until a few years back, I had the privilege of hearing Geoff Smart of gh smart speak. I remember looking at his name on the agenda in thinking, Oh, no, hiring yuck. But it's in these moments when we think we know our perspective on a topic that we are usually totally surprised. I was captivated by Geoff's story and his methodologies. And after I saw him speak, I read his book and then implemented his process. I read a ton of business books. And I would have to say that who Geoff's book on hiring is in my all time top five. Because as Geoff shares with us who you hire, will make or break a company, and it's totally actionable, I was able to implement what Geoff teaches immediately and see the results. Geoff knew from an early age that he wanted to help people and quickly saw that it wasn't what you did, but who you did it with. And this is his story. Geoff, let's talk about how your story starts. I mean, let's go back to the beginning. Did you dream of all this? Did you dream of an existence to help leaders amplify their positive impact on the world and when you were a kid, like what was life like for eight year old Geoff, what was your credo back then? Geoff Smart 2:57 Thanks, Mark. It's a pleasure to be on your show. I always thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur. There's just something exciting about the idea of you know, inventing something, or or creating a business from nothing in the let's see here, winding the clock back to the the eight year old me wanted to be an a CIA agent or or a newscaster. I did like the idea of analytics and doing impactful things. I was a CIA draw. And then the idea of using verbal or written communication to tell stories and to help people was the job of becoming a newscaster. So that was the the early roots around age eight the idea for gh smart came to me as a college freshman. I was studying economics. My mom actually had scored me an internship working at a venture capital firm. And what I was struck by was, how the name of the game for succeeding and that field was I kept hearing all about not what you invest in, but who you invest in. And yet all these investors were spending all their time, you know, looking at products and looking, you know, forecasting financials and doing all this, all this what stuff when it seems like the key to success, lay more in the who, so that the kernel of the idea for the firm was born in '91. And then I actually ended up founding our firm, June 16 1995. Marc Gutman 4:28 Nice. Where'd you grow up? Where did you you spend your formative years? Geoff Smart 4:31 Yeah, I grew up in the Chicagoland area. Some I'm from Chicago. And those are my formative years, and I've lived in Los Angeles. And now for the last dozen years or so. I've lived in Colorado. Marc Gutman 4:45 Yeah. And you mentioned your mother. What did your parents do for a living? What was what was the upbringing the influence like there? Geoff Smart 4:51 Yeah, my mom was a speech therapist. So she she got a master's degree in, in speech therapy. So we all my sister Kate, and I had to have Be very articulate growing up, mark two, because my mom would help us with our Annunciation, my father was a had a PhD in industrial psychology, which he would tell you, he, he kind of like, took a class and college, loved it and gotten to that field, which is basically like the, the formal process of, of studying human behavior as it relates to work. So he was obviously a big mentor in the early days hearing stories of, of helping advise companies on their people problems. So those are, those were my two parental influences. And I have a younger sister Kate, who is more socially skilled than I was always more popular and as a as a great person. She lives in the Chicagoland area today. Marc Gutman 5:49 That's always the younger sister Kate, who's more socially aware and more popular. It's just the way it goes. Geoff Smart 5:53 Yes. embarrassingly So, for me as I'm slightly more introverted And focus on my studies that my sister seemed like she always had, you know, 10 to 20 friends over at the house at any given time. Marc Gutman 6:06 So when you you know, heard your dad come home from work and talk about his day and talk about the importance of of leadership and dynamics in the workplace. I mean, was that something that was interesting to you at the time? Or were you kind of not interested in where you are, like thinking of other things like what were you into in like high school? Geoff Smart 6:22 Yeah, the topic of leadership always was very, very interesting to me. So, as a big bookworm, so Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, Milton Friedman, the economist who is all about freedom. These were early books I read that really, really resonated so yeah, through through leadership, I guess in sports and leadership and you know, like running this high school newspaper and, you know, little things like that early on, and then reading these you know, books about how to effectively lead your team. You know, it really was a passion area. I always felt like the difference between elevating the quality of human life or having human life, life be harmed is, you know, comes down to leadership, whether it's governments, military businesses, etc. So yeah, I've always been a big fan of the topic of leadership and always curious and interested in, in what other people think, are the keys to success. So that was a real interest early on. And so there's fun. This is let's see, the 90s private equity was kind of becoming a big deal as a career strategy consulting and investment banking were still very popular. So but I coming out of college didn't go right to work. Instead, I went and got a masters and a PhD in psychology, focused on business as you know, in business, they call it organizational behavior. in psychology, they call it you know, organizational psychology, but I got to go study with Peter Drucker out in Clermont in California, he was about 80 years old at the time and had long been concerned. The father of management so is it's kind of like Sitting at the feet of Socrates and learning from the master. And it was good fun and surfing on the weekends. So it was really the best of both worlds. Marc Gutman 8:12 Drucker in surfing, it sounds like a documentary that Yeah. Geoff Smart 8:16 It was really great fun as seriously good times. Marc Gutman 8:20 Yeah. For our listeners who don't know, can you give a 32nd primer on who Peter Drucker is and why he's relevant. Geoff Smart 8:27 Yeah, you bet. So the study of leadership and management really became formalized about, I don't know, 70 years ago or so. Peter Drucker was a Austrian journalist. And he was just fascinated with with the success or failure of organizations. So he could have made, you know, millions or billions, but instead decided to stay academic. So he taught at Claremont for decades and decades, just outside of Los Angeles. And I remember, you know, for example, here's how big a deal he was. When he was just sort of in his free time, advising CEOs, like ag lafley, the CEO of Procter and Gamble, would fly in. And, you know, take a limo out to Peter's house and they would just sort of like float in. And Peter Drucker's pool it a little pool in his backyard. And, and I asked, Well, you know, how much do you charge for that? Just out of curiosity? I remember Peter he said $50,000. I said, $50,000 to flow into your pool. And he said, Yeah, you got to charge something otherwise people don't take the advice seriously. And so that was kind of in a you know, it was fascinating studying with me. I think he's written more Harvard Business Review articles, and more top selling books on on management than anybody. That's why if you like Wikipedia, Peter Drucker, they refer to him as the father of the field of management. Marc Gutman 9:52 Yeah, and he really mean at that time, and even before it was like the movie stars business still is I mean, I'm looking around and I'm like, surrounded by Peter Drucker books, and Yeah, and things like that. I mean, if you know, those are the first things you know, when you get mentored, someone says, You know what, go read this book, the five most important questions, you know, you need to, you need to you need to learn some Peter Drucker. So thank you for sharing that. I think it's important to give context. And so you're there, you're in Claremont, you're, you're doing your thing you went and you found a mentor, and Peter. And now Do you know what you're gonna do after? Do you have a sense? Are you just collecting the knowledge are you just, you know, because that's the way I approached my university study, I just I kind of went, I was going to use that to figure out what I wanted to do, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Geoff Smart 10:33 So in contrast to going to college, I was at Northwestern studied economics. I didn't know what I wanted to do. At that point, I had had that internship with a venture capital firm, but by the time I graduated, I made a very conscious choice, to study with Peter Drucker to go do a PhD. And and to really like double click on this area of hiring leaders, either from the perspective of a venture capitalist, how do you bet on the right people or that that perspective of You know, a CEO or a board, you know, how do you pick the right leader? So I was actually very focused and on wanting to get, you know, deep and experienced and an expert on that, that specific leadership question. So, I grad schools for years. The PhD dissertation that I did was specifically on studying how venture capitalists evaluate and then choose to who to invest in. And it was fun. There's a famous venture capitalist private equity investor named Henry Kravis, you know, from KKR. Marc Gutman 11:32 Yep. Geoff Smart 11:33 He went to he went to the school, he went to Claremont or grad school, so I called him up to be in my study. And his assistant told me No, thank you. And I called her a second time. She said, No, I called her a third time begging her. I'm like, Hey, I'm a PhD student. I'm doing a topic that I think is going to be of interest to to Mr. Travis, you know, he's sure he you know, he won't be in my study. I'd really love to get us participation. So she Basically just told me to stop calling. But I didn't mark as we were entrepreneurs or are persistent. So I called her a fourth time. And I told her that I would stop calling and bugging her. If she would please just show him this, like one paragraph description of the study that I was working on. And if he said No, I wouldn't call back again. But if he said yes, then you know we would do. So she said, All right, hold please if she walked in his office, and came back about 30 seconds later and she said, Mr. Kravis, has agreed to be in your class project. I said, Oh, great. So once I got in a billionaire private equity tycoon, a Henry Kravis, in my study, I rapidly got over 50 private equity firms to jump in and be in it. And what I did basically was study how they evaluate management teams. And I looked at half a century of research on what you know what should be the best practices, and then I tested them and I found that investors who followed century of the best practices of of hiring and picking teams Ended up being successful and making more money than those who didn't. And so then that became the colonel for gh smart. And I kind of took that show on the road, told the story. And so our early clients were, were these investor types. And then later we branched out and served, you know, CEOs more broadly. Marc Gutman 13:19 Yeah. And you you've kind of alluded to, you know, when you had that first job of studying economics, or not, so you were studying economics, we had the first job that your mom got you at the Yes, it was, I think it was a venture PE firm. And then you had the kernel, you're like, Oh, my gosh, like, you know, everyone's saying, like, we got to invest in people. And now you have this, you know, where did that interest really blossom between there and deciding to dedicate a good chunk of your life because as you just outlined, when you go to get a doctorate and other things like that, that's a commitment. That's not Yeah, that's it. Like, that's a bigger commitment to tattoo in my mind. So like, you know, like, where what kind of happened in between there to say, you know, what, like, I really want to I think there's something here. Geoff Smart 13:58 Yeah, okay. So if we're being candid and revealing are vulnerable parts of our past mark, I'll share with you that I tried and failed to get an internship at McKinsey during college, I was fascinated by that brand story. You know, these folks who, McKinsey, a great strategy consulting firm advise their CEOs and government leaders on their most important decisions around products and operations and strategies that are so they don't, I mean, technically, they don't really do undergrad internships anyway. So I didn't take it too, personally. But I remember thinking I'd love to work there. It seems like strategy consulting, though, carries at great sacrifice on your lifestyle, also investment banking and investment banks. The idea is that, you know, go there, it's a great way to, you know, have a successful career but, you know, boy, it's kind of rough on on your ability to have a life and have time outside of work. So I'll tell you the, so the two reasons I found a gh smart, you know, one was that earlier reason I was telling you this fascination with the leadership and the idea Bringing a more methodical approach to leadership to help investors and people who run companies be successful. But the second reason I found a gh smart was was basically just this idea of Surely, there's a type of company that should exist where people who want to work hard and have an impact can also have a life. And so it's kind of the cultural story of how do you build a culture? How do you build a firm that has a better culture than what I was seeing in strategy consulting and investment banking, and what would it take to pull that off? So that was I say, equal importance to the client focused reasons for starting gh smart and so I was just so passionate about it, I saw you know, an unmet need in the market. And then I saw an unmet need in the talent market to which is, you know, how do you go do something meaningful and fulfilling and, and not sacrifice your life in the process? So that combo of the two was was so inspiring to me that I just felt weirdly confident and, and focused from eternity. The age that I wanted to go build that business. So at age 23, after opening the back of a ink magazine, you know, where they have all those like classified ads in the background or that ink magazine. One of them said, like, incorporate your business, I think it costs like 300 bucks or something. So like fill this thing out as a second year PhD students, I was still in grad school, filled out this thing. And on March 16 1995, I remember I got the articles of incorporation back for gh smart, and the original vision and purpose for founding the firm really has played out to a great extent you asked me a few minutes ago, you know, if I would have dreamed, you know, gf smart, would have turned out the way it did. And the answer's yes, not to be like arrogant about it. But that was kind of the reason I started to begin with was both on the client side to have an impact and also to create this employment brand, for a place where wildly talented people could go work and still have a life outside of work. Marc Gutman 16:58 And that's really interesting. To me, because going back into that time period, you know, early to mid 90s, I mean, this concept of having a job that you effectively love that gives you fulfillment it gives you meaning. You know, it's financially rewarding and allows you to have a life was not really common have an idea. Geoff Smart 17:19 Yeah, like name one. Yeah. But it wasn't as common places as today and there, you know, there weren't clear examples around. Marc Gutman 17:27 No, not at all. I mean, I remember sitting, you know, having, you know, kind of fights with my own parents, like at the holiday table as I was getting ready to leave college and they're like, Look, you just go get a job. It doesn't matter where you go, it doesn't matter where you have to move. It doesn't matter if you hate it. Just go and get this job. And, you know, even when I'm out talking a little bit, this is a big part of my origin story that really motivated me was this idea that like, I was really in search of finding a job that I love. My dad even at one point when I was really young said to me, I asked him if he liked this job, and we kind of go back and forth and he finally reveals his philosophy and that, you know, they wouldn't call it work. If it was supposed to be a whole lot of fun and so you know I really am resonating with this idea that like and I really want to just nail this idea home to people listening that yeah today everyone is very talking about fulfillment and employers are receptive to that and yeah it's just it's a whole different light kind of market today but back then not so much Geoff Smart 18:20 yeah that's true I appreciate your saying that it did. It did seem like you had to make a trade off right either you go join like a top tier brand and you know, work work your butt off and and maybe not worry about not even think about having life balance or having you know, either having a life outside of work or having the work itself be that fulfilling or you join the Peace Corps. Yeah, and you're become a teacher something where you have this like wonderful mission, but you know, there are other other sacrifices you have to make financially etc. Um, so yeah, that that really was a gaping hole I thought in the employment market. back then. It's still hard today even though so many firms You know, try to give people a great fulfilling work experience, and the chance to have a life outside of work. That's, that's an area that we really focus on. And I feel probably most proud of even more proud than the climate impact we have is the degree to which people really seem to love to work here and and how, you know, it's like gh smart was sort of born in a laboratory. And I did this like, four year long dissertation study on the market. So that's where the client facing part came from. And then just, you know, being mentored by Peter Drucker and others and just trying to really think of what makes an organization truly excellent. Peter Drucker, three listeners is the one credited with saying, culture eats strategy for breakfast. So, you know, focusing on what kind of cultural DNA that we want to bake in the GH smart that you know is even Peter Drucker approved. I wrote a paper mark on the gh smart business plan and gave it to Peter Drucker and I was so excited to try to hear his feedback and be all Inspired by his his loving division, he actually marked me down on the paper because he said he thought it was a little bit unrealistic and ambitious. And so and then this next is really embarrassing. It was you know, older by the time I got to work with him and and learn from him and so he wore a lavalier microphone when he was giving talks at during his classes and he had his his lavalier mic switch hot it was on was before class and we were supposed to all come up and like grab our our papers and so I might go up to get my gh smart business plan paper and he pulls me aside like forcefully grabs my shoulder, like almost uncomfortably so like a real gruff, you know, shoulder grab, and and he leans in to whisper in my ear. He said, You know, I like the vision for for your business, but it's too ambitious and nobody likes a know it all. And he said it in a whisper at about 100 decibels because it's Mike picked it up, and like, you know, that 50 people behind me to start laughing because I just basically, you know, got schooled by Peter Drucker on on the the value of humility when you know, when creating a business plan. So is that that was formative and helps, you know, sort of fuel the fire to make the thing successful. Marc Gutman 21:17 Yeah. So that's funny today, I can only imagine how you must have felt in that moment when you're idle and effectively God in the entrepreneur business world tells you, your business plan. Isn't that good? Geoff Smart 21:32 It's not that good. And all my 50 closest friends are in the background. They hear it Marc Gutman 21:38 Oh, yeah. Even though Yeah, if it's in private, you go back and you say, Yeah, he had some notes for me, but you can't even do that. You can't even like kind of tell your friends you know, you can't smooth it over. Geoff Smart 21:48 And everybody you know, sought the approval of Peter Drucker and so it was as funny as it was a pretty cringe moment, and then mark he died like three or four years after I finished my program. So that was, I was like 20 years ago. So he doesn't know that we kind of nailed it like I, I, in your intro, you're very generous. And you point out some things I'm like really proud of but like, we have 120 colleagues today, we have a 92% retention rate. So people come here, they stay. In other consulting firms, they have more like a 60 70% retention rate. We don't have like a couple hundred clients that are super happy. Harvard Business School wrote a couple and they teach two cases about innovation. Using gh smart as a as an example. It's been really fun being able to go sit there and have people in business school debate, you know, what you did well, and what you could have done better. And that kind of thing. On the books that you mentioned that we've each one of them took about three years plus to research and publish. And we've got like the whole book, you mentioned, stills number one, globally in sales and reviews on the topic of hiring that feels really good lead autocracies. CEO next door power score these all these books have done really great in their categories. And then onto the culture thing this is the thing that I really wish Peter Drucker could know today that you know that that ended up being successful. Glassdoor, you know rates your company anonymously by your own employees. And so at the moment, knock on wood Fingers crossed, you know, we have a 4.9 out of five, rating on glass doors first, like overall, employee satisfaction, which is feels really good. And then there's this like industry rating organization called vault that rates you know, all the big consulting firms and some small ones. And just for 2020, we got rated number one best company to work for in our industry, pushing McKinsey to number two, and Bay into number three for overall employee satisfaction, which is mind blowingly. Cool. And as an entrepreneur who's You know, we've only been around for 25 years and these other firms have been around for nearly 100 years. That that feels very satisfying. On the promise of Yes, like, create some value for clients through helping them hire and develop talented teams, but just as equally important, you know, building this culture where people really want to come here and work and they find the work fulfilling, they find the culture supportive, that that part's extra satisfying. It's hard, and it's weird, and it's, you know, vague, how do you build a culture? How do you, you know, maintain a nourish and that kind of thing. And we're constantly learning and we don't think we've solved, you know, for every problem by any means, but it is. It is super exciting to, you know, see people who have the choice to work anywhere. Choose to join this brand. Marc Gutman 24:38 Yeah, I have to think that when you saw that list, you just couldn't help but think to yourself, take that McKinsey. Geoff Smart 24:44 Yeah. Well, no, no, of course not. McKinsey is great for Bain, great firm and what they're what they do for clients is amazing and the culture they have is different. And if you're up for that, it's a great place to go. If you want to work on who stuff rather than what stuff and you want to Be able to, you know go to your kids channel recital on a Thursday at lunchtime to get smart is is the place you should be. So yeah I have great respect for for other firms and other niches around this world of you know management consulting for sure. But it is fun just to be this you know, super small fry kind of newer, newer firm that has unseated the the classic Titans in this field for best company to work for. Yeah, and in overall satisfaction to sleaze like they're a bunch of categories that give you these ratings for and that one was the one you know, we really wanted to win. And we're surprised and happy that for 2020 we got that one. This episode brought to you by wild story. Wait, isn't that your company? It is and without the generous support of wild story, this show would not be possible. A brand isn't a logo or a tagline or In your product, a brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company. It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. Wild story helps progressive founders and savvy marketers build purpose driven brands that connect their business goals with the customers they want to serve. So that both the business and the customer needs are met. This results in crazy, happy, loyal customers that purchase again and again. And this is great for business. If that sounds like something you and your team might want to learn more about, reach out @ www.wildstory.com and we'd be happy to tell you more. Now back to our show. Marc Gutman 26:46 It's interesting to think how far you've come I mean, when you left you know your studies with Peter and you said you were doing a little bit of this work with investment firms and things like that. Did you have clients day one was this business? Yes, day one or juror think like I kind of put a lot of eggs in the wrong basket. Geoff Smart 27:03 You know why it was funny? My Plan B was always to go just join a consulting firm. I had a runway, which is, you know, grad school and PhD programs in the torturously take a long time. I think my program averaged 10 years from start to finish folks getting done with it. So I figured out right, well, I'll try this j smart thing. And if it doesn't work out, I'll you know, I'll, you know, try to join a regular firm. So I it's weird, it never felt stressful. The early days. We did have I did have clients because I instantly took my PhD dissertation, which was a, which was the largest study ever done that looked at the relationship between how venture investors bet on management teams and the returns they made on deals. And I was getting like tons of keynote opportunities as flying all over the country, telling investors what they need to do to improve their bets on people. And so instantly these these same folks that I was studying just weeks or months prior, you know, we're or pay me to do training and consult with their investment teams on how to improve the way that they invest in people. And then once we start working on the private equity, they're co invested with other, you know, big companies. And so our our brand started to grow beyond the entrepreneurial into more established companies. So yeah, from I'd say the early phase was, you know, still PhD students, tell them the world a bit about our story of how you can improve your success by improving the rigor of your, you know, hiring and evaluation process of people, and how to, you know, build talented teams. And then we had contractors, so I had no money. I had no clients. And I really didn't know anything when I started the company. But it was like this vision of Hey, let's do something cool for people who run our own companies to build valuable ones through people and then must build this this cool culture. And so after the kind of very initial stage Money revenue was coming in from, from companies that want to get better at this, I started hiring contractors, which you don't have to pay full time salaries to. And so that allowed us to grow a bit in scale without taking on risk. So I made an important decision, I guess, because I wasn't confident in myself, or in the concept to raise venture money like so ironically, even though I was serving these investors. I didn't raise any venture money to begin with, because frankly, I just wasn't that sure that, that this culture or this, this firm, was going to be successful, but then through contractors, growing it growing and growing, it was working, and then at some point, I made the decision to switch over to just full time people. So like today, that hundred and 20 of us are all full time, full time with no contractors. And that happened about 10 years after I founded the company. So it's like a slow growth story, testing the market, testing the culture, and then then growth actually really started picking up one size stops managing the business day to day and one of my most talented youngest partners Randy street in 2010. Following the last recession we went through, I appointed him with a great support of my colleagues to be the managing partner. So here, I really gave him the keys to run it day to day in 2010. And he's done a fabulous job of building out everything that we have today. And under his tenure, we've had 90% client satisfaction rates completed every year 90% retention rates of our colleagues exceeded every year and over 20% growth and pre tax profit every year for 10 years. So Randy is really the like key to success of our growth and scaling over the last decade. But I like to think that the the original blueprint of you know, on the strategy side and on the culture side, we're still we're still playing that playbook today. Marc Gutman 30:54 Yeah. And did you ever like come up against in those early days Did anyone say to you like Geoff like It's all great that you want to like, advise on leadership and building great businesses, but like, Hey, man, like, you've not ever done that, Geoff Smart 31:08 right? Yeah. What do you know? You haven't even had a job? Yes, yes, people did say that. I'll tell you though, that the veil of the PhD student thing kind of work. They viewed me as this, like, you know, white lab coat scientist who's here to both study them, as well as to share some best practices. And I think I was pretty despite Peter Drucker's assertion that, that nobody likes to know it all. I was very humble in my posture in the early days, you know, I'm here, oh, you know, you want to improve your hiring success rate from 30% to 60% Plus, Great, well, let's see here. So you know, need to study how you're doing it and talk to a bunch of people. And, you know, share it, we'll share some best practices and we'll help implement these methods that are proven to help you improve how you hire and develop your talent. Oh, here's something that's born out of humility. Do you remember how Domino's had a 30 minute guarantee or your pizzas free? Yeah, of course. So that was huge, right? They took the number one thing in there, and they're, you know, market the brand story of like a pizza. If it's late, you know, that stinks. But if it's early, that's great. And they said, Hey, we're gonna guarantee your pizza in 30 minutes is gonna be hot, it's gonna be there in 30 minutes or you don't pay now later they they massage that commitment because people were the drivers were getting in accidents left and right, trying to rush to deliver pizzas but I took that lesson and I read it and I can't remember what you know, management book way back when but the principle was guarantee the thing that's hardest but most important to your customer. So just like Domino's guaranteed 30 minute pizzas, I guaranteed accurate hiring. And no, none of the other competitors would kind of go so far as to say hey, look, if we do our work, and you're still having hiring mistakes, we'll give you your feedback. So Even to this day, to this day, we're, you know, pitching huge projects these days. I was at a large railroad a couple of weeks ago, you know, we're talking about 10s of millions of dollars of fees for them to improve their hiring and development of senior people, and do some culture change work. And I look, you know, these five board members in the eyes, I said, if we are not successful, you don't pay. And it's funny as that was born from the early days of insecurity, and just not really not knowing anything when I started our business, but wanting to deliver good value to clients and wanting to have it be a great work experience. For our colleagues. This is like money back guarantee concept was a key early answer to the question, Oh, you've never really led anything. And by the way, how Why are you so young, I remember locked into a partner at Bain Capital, one of the most successful private equity firms. And we had been doing a bunch of work for them. And I met one of their senior most partners and he he looked at me and he said, he actually started talking To my colleague, one, someone who worked at my company, and was calling him Geoff, I said, Now I'm Geoff. He said, geez, you're a lot younger than I thought you'd be. I looked him in the eye. And I said, you are to add, having humility and humor, confidence, but also say, hey, yeah, no, that's right. I haven't been a fortune 500 CEO, and literally, I, I don't, I've never had a full time regular job. I did internships and college and grad school, but I started the company when it's 23. So yeah, making fun of myself as just some, you know, egghead, a PhD, but who has a method that does seem to work and by the way, here are the happy other clients, you're in good company. And if you don't feel like you get full value for the dollars you spend, we'll refund your feedback. That was sort of my way of countering the, you know, you seem young and experienced, understandable concern that early clients and colleagues had. Marc Gutman 34:51 So in the early days were the name come from him and I can guess it seems like it might, it might not be that not obvious, but I'd like to ask Geoff Smart 35:00 Yeah, so gh is smart. And company Inc is the official name and th smart. I had, you know, just say a huge industry crush on McKinsey and Company for being a, you know a very respected, impactful firm, a tons of talented people in it. So McKinsey and Company, gh smart and company. So that's where the company came from the gh smart. So my first name is spelled with a G. So Geoff, my middle name is Hudson, and smart as my last name and the brand for gh smart. The way we write it is kind of weird, and I'm proud of this. So gh is lowercase. And then all caps is s ma RT. And I tell people, whether it's colleagues or clients that as the founder and chairman, you know, I'm the GH but I'm lowercase. I'm a servant leader. I'm in service of colleagues and clients. But then it's my my colleagues who put the smart in gh smart and that's why the smart parts all caps, so anyway, super cheesy and hokey but, but true. And that's, that's where our brand story comes from on the little g little H and all caps smart Marc Gutman 36:04 down. I love it. And you know a shout out to your parents because as someone who was bestowed with the last name of Gutman going through, you know, the Geoff Hudson smart might be like a coolest name ever, right? Like it's like a big movie star. And then all of a sudden, like, Hey, I have a consultancy that it you know, deals with thinking and being smart. Wait a second. That's also my name. Like it's great. And so I want to give a shout out to your parents for a shout out for that grant. Great brand name. Yeah, Geoff Smart 36:32 that was lovely. It's hard spelling Geoff with a G on the phone when you know, in my early years whenever I was ordering something from a catalog or whatever, but so I hate it then. But I do like it now. And I appreciate appreciate that. My folks had a marketable last name. Marc Gutman 36:49 Yeah, and I mean, and you're probably gonna deny this because you're humble, but we all know that just with a G are also smarter than just with a J. So that helps to Geoff Smart 36:57 I'm not about to alienate any of your your listeners, Marc Gutman 37:01 all the Geoff's out there. Listeners Geoff Smart 37:04 just as Exactly. We don't want to. We don't want to upset that segment. But yeah, you know, it's I okay, so servant leadership is a theme is something that approached I have great respect for that almost prevented me from naming the firm after myself. But there was something about just like, yes, you're like signing your name and being like, I am putting my full self into this firm that sort of counteracted that hesitation, I had to call it th smart. So, yeah, it was kinda like 70 7030 I was like, I think I'm gonna name it smart, I guess because I appreciate my parents giving me a good name for name and business. But that hesitation was on I never did wanted to be like the Geoff show and have it just be a spotlight on me because I had learned from an early age by watching others, you know, successful entrepreneurs, that the more you can hire great folks, and then let them have this spotlight, the better if you want to scale a Top Tier Business? Unknown Speaker 38:04 Yeah, because scaling a services business isn't that easy. It's not like you can just start to, you know, dial up certain efficiencies and add, you know, more bandwidth in terms of like technology bandwidth or more factory space. I mean, it's people and it's hard. It's not easy. Unknown Speaker 38:19 Yes. So true. I appreciate your saying that, that it really is. It really is about adding and taking care of one colleague at a time. That's how you grow a professional services business. Yeah, I do enviously. Look at some of my technology products, peers who can you know, as you say, you know, put a curve in the growth rate by replicating digital technologies like super scalable fast, but I and the professional services business it really is about adding great people adding great clients adding great people adding great clients and it's more of a linear growth path. It's a lot, it's a marathon. It really feels like you have to sustain a high level of focus and discipline and reliability for yourself. years and years and years, it's not like a, you know, overnight kind of thing. Marc Gutman 39:03 No, not at all. And you know, thinking just about, you know, my own experience and kind of drawing on that. And knowing over the years, it ebbs and flows, and it takes different things to get you excited and keep you coming back. And so for you right now, like what, what's exciting you and keeping you excited in the business? Geoff Smart 39:21 Yeah. Let's see here. So, I have, I love my job. And I, I've done something that I don't see a lot of entrepreneurs do and I spend, you know, through the books and speakings I spent a bunch of time with YPO type folks and entrepreneur, organization type folks, like you great, you know, entrepreneurs around the world, and just kind of comparing notes on successes and failures and that kind of thing. I shrank and narrowed my role significantly. So I get to do just the things that I'm pretty good at that I like to do a lot. So So what keeps it fresh? For me is right if I was like, you know, managing the day to day and I had a whole lot of like, duties on my plate that I didn't love to do, but I sort of had to do because I was the only leader around that would be not fun. But instead I get to do the things that that I love that I'm pretty good at. And those things are honing the vision. And you know, getting my colleagues and clients excited about it is super fun. I still feel like ghsmart's is kind of a leadership laboratory where we're creating our own culture, we're creating our own everything, you know, processes, the way that we tell our story to clients, etc. So honing the vision. That's super fun. We want to see what are the things on recruiting and telling our brand story as an employment brand is one of my favorite things. I talked to the sky yesterday, or Friday who is thinking about joining our firm, and he's just like, he's so talented and so good hearted, has done amazing things in his career and listening to what he really wants. To do in the future stages of his career, and the knowing that he can accomplish that here is exciting to me. It's like, it's not like handing out people's dream jobs to them. I mean, they earned it. But it's the idea of, you know, through our own recruiting process and selection process, being able to talk with these really amazing people and then convince them to come join gh smart, I have a chairman's q&a at the tail end of all the hiring of all of our consultants still, and I love that if I didn't love it, I probably wouldn't do it, but I really, I really enjoy it. I really love like personally welcoming people into the firm and making sure they join business development like so I've had the same email address for 25 years and you know, with the books and other other things, you know, CEOs, investors, etc, will contact me and then and then, you know, sitting with someone who maybe as a new CEO of a huge resort and hotel company worldwide or sitting with the CEOs doing nanotechnology research or sitting with Someone who runs a children's hospital. I mean, it's so cool. Sitting with a new client, with my colleagues, I try not to do all the talking or even hardly any of the talking, but meeting new leaders, and then supporting my colleagues as we, you know, turn them into clients. I think a lot of fun, I still sort of thrill of the chase. And it's, you know, and I know these clients are going to be happy with the work because we measure everything we measure their satisfaction. So to be able to confidently hear them out, help them envision what they're trying to do to succeed, and then offer what we can do to help them and then have them become a client and be really happy is super fulfilling. So I think I think that's a lot of fun. And then I love working with Randy and my firm's leadership team. Randy is a super smart, like, steady decision maker. He's everything. I'm not around, having like the breadth and depth to be a great leader and manager of this firm. It's just a pleasure kicking ideas around together, and then we're super decisive. So it's fun, you know, we'll have different committees and different governance and everything, but our ability to listen to good ideas, either from our colleagues or from our clients, and then take action experiment, you know, kind of in the Agile style of try it and test and learn. That's a lot of fun. So that I don't know what you call that, like innovation, I guess. It's a lot of fun in a firm full of like, good hearted, talented people is a lot of fun. So yeah, it's, although my, my focus areas have abdun flowed and I've been different things over the years, by enthusiasts some level for what we're doing, and the impact has always been high. And then, if there's some part of my, like, personal entrepreneur work portfolio, that I don't really like or that others can do better, I just clean it off, and I give it to someone else who's better at it. So that's sort of advice for how to keep the work fresh and how to keep your own job satisfaction high as you know, if you're on one of these, like multi decade journeys to build a great firm. Marc Gutman 43:59 Well, thank you for sharing that. you'd mentioned Randy street a couple times. How did you get to meet? Geoff Smart 44:04 So we met. Last year, I personally didn't recruit him. One of my colleagues had known a Bain partner and Atlanta, Randy had. He gone to Harvard Business School and Bain and was really successful at Bain. And then he was like number two or number three at the fastest growth company in Georgia at the time. But he wanted to get back to professional services. And he also just sort of loved the topic of leadership. He was a Sunday school teacher, like really good, great speaker. And it was a good match. So we just, you know, we, we got to him through a referral, and then hired him. And then there's about two years after he started at our firm. I think that's right. No, not true. Five years after he started, he was one of the youngest, most talented partners, as a manager and a leader, and we're all Granny, can you please run the firm also, I was getting super burned out on crisis management, and the oh nine recession. And I was kind of like, Oh my gosh, someone else helped me, you know, with the goal setting and the process design and process management and dashboards and just all that. It's the scaffolding you need to build and manage in order to grow the firm. And Randy is so much better at that, than I. So it's been a really special working relationship. We thought originally, you know, every, I don't know, three or four years, we'd rotate the managing partner role. But he's so good, that we're all in agreement. You know, let's just like let him keep running the firm because he's great at it. So I think he's like, not quite 50. So he's young enough, I am hopeful and expect that he'll continue to run the firm for years to come Marc Gutman 45:42 Wow, And during that that segment, you talked in the segment before that, you talked a lot about leadership. I mean, what does leadership mean to you? Like, how do you define that? Geoff Smart 45:49 Yeah, it's funny. I like the simplest definition of leadership. I really like is helping a group of people. Figure out what it wants and then to formulate and execute a plan to get it. So, the LM like, at its core, I think leadership's about helping improve people's lives. And if you as a leader can help facilitate the process of figuring out, you know, what, what are the priorities? What are the what's the goal here, like, what are we trying to do, and then hire and delegate to great people, and then you know, build relationships that are respectful and focused on results, then, you know, you can create great results for for the, for the people that you're serving. So I think I don't know leadership at its core of its health care workers or military or government or for profit or not for profit, is basically about helping focus, human capital to improve the quality of life of other people. And I'm a huge fan of Leadership only counts. If you're helping the customer base however you define customer, and if you're really making a positive impact in the lives of the employee base. So that's, in fact, we're almost we don't say this out loud, I'll share with you mark, because this top secret sort of values assumption, but we actually prioritize our colleagues over customers and shareholders. And it's controversial because this is this age old question of, you know, good leadership, you know, who, who gets priority? And I think most companies are very shareholder focused. And then there's sort of customer focused, and then maybe a distant third, there's Oh, yeah, the employees at th smart right from the beginning. Again, I was like, one of the two equal reasons I started the company was I really wanted to have this be a great place for, for people to build their careers. And so our opinion or the way that we actualize what great leadership is all about, is you Providing just like an amazing work experience for people and then making a positive impact in the lives of customers. And then if you do that really well, yeah, the shareholders will be happy over the long haul. But I think it's kind of fun and slightly controversial that we, we do prioritize our colleagues over, over all other priorities Marc Gutman 48:18 Yeah when you say that with like, what's that look like? Like? How does someone prioritize colleagues over shareholders and customers? Geoff Smart 48:25 Sure, so a pandemic 2020 on our priority list, protecting jobs comes several clicks higher on the priority list than maximizing profits. And that's not easy to say or do lots of companies don't want to do that. They they, you know, when push comes to shove or when challenges arise, they clearly go to kind of propping up short term economic performance at the expense of people's jobs, but we just made it we put a line in the sand and said we're going to protect people's jobs. We're not Anybody off even though you know demand and profitability might be negatively impacted. So that's, that's an example of that as far as like prioritizing people over customers, or this one evil client once, who was doing some saying some hashtag me to stuff to one of my female colleagues. And you know, she called it out. She's like, yeah, here's what this guy's saying. And we were like, Well, yeah, dump the client. And she's like, really? Like, it was like a profitable It was like a profitable prestigious client. We're like, absolutely. Like, like, get rid of that client, like, forget it. And so backing your people and being like, No, no, we're not going to work with bad clients is a fabulous statement of loyalty to your colleagues. When another there's a client prospect were considering taking on who during the initial meeting revealed that, that they write legal contracts that are really advantageous for the CEOs They have the companies they own. And it was kind of like weird ethics stuff. And I am, I'm pretty sure many other consulting firms would still work with, with that client. And I know that because I, after I told the guy that I wouldn't work with him, because I didn't think he was honest, which was not a pleasant conversation. But I told him, I didn't think that we'd be helpful. And given his methods and his way of how he invested and built businesses. You know, it's like inconsistent with our values and our methods. But did he want me? Do you want me to find another firm to serve him? And I asked another firm and I said, this guy's dishonest. And he writes legal contracts that CEOs later regret having signed in order to be in order to make more money. Do you want to work with them? And I, in two seconds, I found another consulting firm in our industry that was willing to work with us, but I didn't want to have my colleagues working with a dishonest client. So that's how, you know, that's how putting colleagues ahead of clients That's what that looks like. Marc Gutman 51:01 Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And previous to you had mentioned that, you know, a big part of your job is sharing the brand story. I mean, what does? What does that mean? Like, how do you define brand story? And how do you go about doing it? You know, what I find is just that, you know, when I use those words, brand story, that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I'd love to hear your take on how you share how you define it, and how you actually go out and share that that story with the world. Geoff Smart 51:25 Sure, well, I appreciate the question. And I think about it in two buckets. The brand story for employees for my colleagues is one message and then one brand and then the brand that that we the brand story we tell for clients is a second one in the brand story for colleagues. I do this kind of like, Do you ever wonder type approach or like, you know as a as a you think about your work, you know, do you ever wonder how you can maximize the positive impact or making you to do work that are really matters and get paid for it and have a life outside of work. Like put those three circles together in a Venn diagram, and name me one firm that allows you to do all three, you know, it's just like really meaningful, fulfilling work, to be able to make money and pay the bills. And then to have a life outside of work. And I, this came this this moment of clarity I had when Randy street my colleague, and I were teaching at Harvard Business School, the GH smart case, where, you know, they, the kids read the, like, the 12 page case, and they talk about what we did wrong and what we could do better, and that kind of thing. And this woman raised her hand is and she said, You know, I used to work for the Peace Corps. And we were really big on on mission and values and really the sort of, you know, why do we exist, and I would bet gh smart hasn't even taken the time to write down why it exists or what it believes And for that reason, I wouldn't I wouldn't want to work there. So she actually, to my face during the class hundred people in the room professor had asked the question like, would you know, would would everyone here work for gh smart or Not? And, and, and why? And so she basically schooled us on you know, hey do you have you have you thought about and written down what your you know your firm sort of credo is and we hadn't we had a you know I think high vision for what what we wanted to do and we had a sensor or values but we actually hadn't taken the time to write out like a credo like the Johnson and Johnson credo or, you know, the and so we walked away from that experience going, Alright, fine. You know, I think we need to now like clearly articulate why we exist. And then make sure the values that we that we identify are the most important ones, that that make up our, the sort of DNA of our culture. So that that brand story of, you know, impactful Work, make money and have a life outside of work. Sora was born, it was an initial vision for why I wanted to join or start the company but it like we really improved that brand story after that kind of embarrassing class period that was like, like 10 years ago or something. And then what we did was we got our entire team together for a year and worked on about 100 drafts of who we are, why we existed, and it ended up being that credo that whose first line that you read at the beginning here, but it starts We exist to help leaders amplify their positive impact on the world. And I felt really good about this because it was a complete team effort to to really like articulate this credo. Yes, we have it in writing. Yes, it's different from other companies. credos are values and, and I think it's really helpful, so I'm thankful for that. calling us out and saying, hey, Peace Corps is pretty good at articulating it's, it's why, you know, I wouldn't work for you guys because I bet you haven't even written it down yet. Well, now we've written it down and we use it for hiring, we use it for performance management and coaching. We use it, you know, to as a, as a benchmark for checking our culture, making sure we're living up to you know, what the brand promise of that employment brand story is. So the employment brand story is like kind of you can have it all, and you can't get that anywhere else. You can, you know, work on Wall Street, make money, but occasionally have existential questions of purpose, and allows the lifestyle, you can work in the Peace Corps, and have a great impact. But, you know, maybe not be able to be pumping your kids 529 College Savings money as much faster as you'd like. And then they're just like a lot of jobs that are just sort of nit you know, as far as the impact you have, as far as the wealth creation opportunities, and as far as your ability to really affect ability and freedom and have a life and enjoy life as as you go. So I don't know, it's not it seems like super obvious, like, why wouldn't a firm like that exist? But that's we've been very conscious of wanting to make sure that Brian's story comes through loud and clear. And that's those are was what I feel good about is behind closed doors and you know, and anonymous environments like last door, our colleagues, you know, point point out that Brian story very uniformly and you know, candidly and, and with honesty like yeah, this is what we get working here, impact money, the ability to have a life. So that brand story was like those three planks. And, and it's, it's a story of, of having it all, and it's hard to pull off in there. It's harder to run a firm that gives people all three of those things than it is to run a firm that maybe takes one for three or two for three. Marc Gutman 56:53 Yeah, and you mentioned that you know, it took you about 100 drafts like what's hard about distilling all that down into a one Page credo or into a vision statement or, you know, these different ways that we articulate our brand story like, what Why 100? drafts? What's hard about that? Geoff Smart 57:09 Yeah, you know, it's a feeling of two thoughts. One is, you don't want it to sound generic, like other companies, because then it's not. It's not really inspiring. And it's not, it's not that helpful. And two is the process of writing your credo of writing the document that says why your firm exists. The process is super important. I don't want to say it's more important than the outcome but you know, really getting input from everybody, you know, administrative assistance, finance people, it people, consultants, senior people, Junior people, that was made clear to us because we we kind of benchmarked other great organizations that created a credo and how they do it, and they all told us, you got to get everybody's input, otherwise, it doesn't feel like it came from everybody, because it didn't. And so we were doing some pro bono work. Around that time with, with the US Navy with their, with the navy seals, and they are known for publicly, I'm not going to share anything private. But they're publicly known for having a really great credo. They call it their ethos, and you can look it up. And it's really compelling. Because it's it's very, it's unique to their organization. So we talked with, with one Navy SEAL commander who had participated in the writing of their credo, you know, a while ago, and I asked him, Well, how did you do it? And he said, Well, the key part was really getting the voice from from everyone, you know, from all the different parts of an organization. And then I said, well, Why'd you do that? And he said, Well, we we had three helicopters that we packed full of people who had, you know, their peers had sort of nominated them to be on this team. And then we stuffed it full of red meat and beer and flew them over to San Clemente Island, which is off because this cornado of San Diego, and we told them, they can't come back until they've written the document that says why we're special and why we exist. I thought, well, that's kind of cool. So we followed suit in that we got, we just got just tons and tons and tons of input from people and then so not wanting it to be generic is one reason to get the 100 drafts. The second reason to do 100 drafts is to have it be like sort of creative and inspiring, in a way that, you know, lives on kind of like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. You know, we the people, like you know, this, you realize, like, sort of how long this documents gonna live. And you really just want it to be inspiring and cool. And that takes drafts versus just saying stuff plainly. And I try to say stuff that calls to a higher purpose and, and is, the third thing is specificity. So there are elements of our DNA that we think are really important. And I wanted to make sure that they all showed up in the credo and in the values and so that took a number of drafts because we'd be like yeah wait a second you know something about we are really talking about sharing our knowledge with the world like isn't you know writing books and sharing our knowledge about leadership with the world part of something that's important to us and then we go yeah and then you know, we wrote in you know, blah blah blah while always protecting client confidentiality we share our knowledge about leadership with the world you know, stuff like that. So being complete and making sure that threads of DNA that make your organization successful Are you know show up in the credo is the other thing that takes a lot of time. Marc Gutman 1:00:36 And that is Dr. Geoff smart of gh smart. Thanks a lot, Geoff. Tune in for the second part of this episode, where he dives into the actual process of who in reveals his five step process for hiring the right person every time. Oh, and our family has a credo, which might as well be the wild story credo and it goes something like this Home is a dream factory. There is no dream too big, too ridiculous or too audacious. No one doesn't think you can achieve whatever you want. It's your dream. So limit. There are no shoulds could or have to choose just dreams and the courage to explore them. Ask what if dreams are the stories we've yet to step into? It's great to have the right dreams. It's even okay to have the wrong dreams. But what we can't have is no dreams, because it's our dreams that shape the world. Well, that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstorm.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS so you'll never miss an episode. A lot big stories and I cannot lie to you. Other storytellers can't deny

BGBS 028: Rob Angel | Pictionary | Game Changer

BGBS 028: Rob Angel | Game Changer

In 1985, Rob Angel, at only 23 years old, took his simple idea and created the wildly popular and phenomenally successful board game Pictionary using only a Webster’s paperback dictionary, a #2 pencil, and a yellow legal pad. Rob and his partners put together the first 1,000 games by hand before selling the game to a major toy company in 2001. Rob’s story is one of passion, optimism, and perseverance. Prepare yourself for a game-changer of a story. You’ll be inspired and motivated to make your own dreams a reality.

What we’re talking about

• Rob Angel’s Story: A Haphazard Bus Ride That Sparked Motivation to Always Be His Own Boss
• A Love of Board Games
• The Development of the Most Successful Board Game in the World

Rob Angel’s Story: A Haphazard Bus Ride Sparked That Motivation to Always Be His Own Boss

With a father in sales and a mother in real estate, Rob learned motivation at a young age. He was only 12 when he rode a haphazard, jalopy bus to a family member’s house for a visit. The bus smelled and the bathroom was backed up, among other problems. And all Rob could think of was having to make the return trip home on that same bus. It was at that time that Rob decided he was going to be wealthy enough to drive his own bus.

A Love of Board Games

Living in the Pacific Northwest, he and his neighborhood friends would play for hours outside. “Gaming” had a very different meaning and experience in the ’80s. It was the center of everything during the winter months, and the first one that caught his attention was a game of strategy, diplomacy, and conquest. It was the game of Risk. Others that caught his attention were Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. It was here that his love of board games was born.

The Development of the Most Successful Board Game in the World

Rob went to college thinking he was going to be a “businessman”, even though he admits he had no idea what that meant. The only idea he had of what a businessman was, was that of his father. But after his father lost his job, Rob switched paths and decided to become an entrepreneur to have control over his future, and not have it dictated by others. He graduated college, but unsure of what to do with his degree, Rob became a waiter to have control over his schedule. In 1985, the game Pictionary was originally created with one of his childhood friends, (also) Rob, after a day of working at the restaurant. As they developed the game, he had two criteria for the words for Pictionary: 1) he had to know what the word meant, and 2) it must conjure up a picture in his mind. The first Pictionary card was “aardvark”. He and his business partners hand-assembled the first 1,000 games in his 900 square foot apartment, but demand quickly outstripped their supply, so they decided to license their game. As they sold millions of games worldwide, the partners made a conscientious choice to stay involved and support new companies as they came on board so that the new companies, and the game, stayed successful. Are you finding ways to make your dream a reality, no matter the sacrifice?

LINKS MENTIONED

Game Changer: The Story of Pictionary and How I Turned a Simple Idea Into the Best Selling Board Game In the World by Rob Angel Pictionary

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Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 8:21 - 9:09 (48 sec RA) Board games were something that were high fidelity...sense of family, and this sense of connection we had with each other lasted for years.
• 42:13 - 42:51 (38 sec RA) All I had to do was sign this piece of paper…and so we went back to work.
• 47:07 - 47:21 (14 sec RA) That’s really a point of my business...rather than getting frustrated.
• 55:12 - 55:28 (16 sec RA) One thing that’s always been important to me...and I think I’ve managed to do that.

QUOTES

1. I was looking for the freedom to be in charge. RA
2. I like to say I’m the smartest guy in the room, because I know I’m not the smartest guy in the room. I know my limitations, and I embrace what I know and what I’m good at. RA
3. The more you explore, the more you experience, the easier it is to find your aardvark, your first step. - RA

Podcast Transcript

Rob Angel 0:02 I get there and it's 80 degrees and I'm sweating and I'm ready to go and I get to the front door, and I realized I forgot my sample. Okay, good one, Rob. So I go back to the car. And, of course, the cars lock and the car still running. I was so nervous, but I forgot to turn the car off. Marc Gutman 0:30 Podcasting from Boulder, Colorado. This is the baby got backstory podcast. we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like being back stories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, Marc Gutman, and today's episode of Baby got backstory. How a 23 year old waiter turned a simple idea into the best selling board game in the world. Now, if you like and enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over at iTunes. iTunes uses these as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on the apple charts. And ratings help us to build an audience, which then helps us continue to produce the show. So go over there and give us a good rating if you think we deserve it. On today's episode, we are talking to rob Angel, the inventor of one of the world's most beloved board games, and one of my all time favorite board games Pictionary in 1985. using just a few simple tools, a Webster's paperback dictionary and number two pencil and a yellow legal pad, Rob created the phenomenally successful and iconic board game. He and his partners put together the first 1000 games by hand in his tiny apartment, and later they ultimately start sold the business to a major toy company in 2001. Rob's story is one of action. Getting in and taking that first step, putting yourself in motion. It's a story of passion, optimism, and perseverance. I loved hearing how Rob took a simple idea and wouldn't accept anything other than becoming the biggest or game in the world. And this is his story. Rob, we're here to discuss how passion and persistence led you to inventing the world-renowned and iconic game Pictionary. Since we know where the story is headed, let's go back and start at the beginning. Did you dream of inventing a board game as a kid when you're growing up in British Columbia? What was little Rob like? Rob Angel 2:56 No, I don't think I was in inventing mode. I was curious. I was I thought engaged and I just had a curiosity about life. And I was always poking my head in places and seeing what was going on. Marc Gutman 3:11 Yeah. And what did that look like? What did life for? You look like in British Columbia? Can you kind of paint the picture for us a little bit? And maybe to kind of set the context to like, what the time period and what's going on at that time. Rob Angel 3:23 So yeah, I grew up in Spokane, Washington. And I was really engaged. It was a really, really great neighborhood. We had about 25 kids and it was in a cul-de-sac. And so the upbringing was one of fun and communication, and just really a great place to grow up really great place to to feel belong. Really. Marc Gutman 3:47 Yeah. And what took your family to Spokane, Rob Angel 3:50 a job. My father got offered a job and he had a fascination with Spokane. And so we settled there when I was about five and It just turned out to be the best move for him and for the family for sure. Marc Gutman 4:04 Okay, what did your father and your inner mother do for a living? Rob Angel 4:08 Dad was a salesman at heart and worked his way up to run Alaska steel and supply which was a big scrap yard with ADD furniture and hardware, all kinds of things. And then my mom was a stay at home mom, but then she decided she wanted to work so she sold real estate work at the local racetrack. So yeah, they both were. Were go-getters. They both didn't sit around. Marc Gutman 4:32 Yeah. And so like when you were young, were you looking at them thinking, wow, I want to follow my parent's footsteps, or do you have a different dream as a youngster Rob Angel 4:39 that, you know, it's funny hindsight, when you look back, and you're asking these questions, I went back and looked at it. So there was a story when I was about 12 years old, and I had to go to Kimberly, excuse me to Calgary, Alberta for Passover. She might not call but I was on this bus. And it was a terrible, terrible ride. It was it smelled and the bathroom backed up. And I can think about when I got up there was I have to do this again when I get back. And so when I got back in the mind of a 12-year-old, it was, you know, Dad, I'm going to be so rich one day, I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy a bus and drive it off a cliff. Well, I think really what I was saying to myself was I'm going to drive my own bias I'm going to be in charge of my life. And that is what I was looking for the freedom to be in charge that was driving that was the driving force between everything I did Marc Gutman 5:42 yeah and and and I can really relate and understand you know, where you're coming from with that, that urge and that that desire to be free and to drive your own boss, but at 12 years old, I'm guessing that probably didn't start driving your own bus either literally or metaphorically, Right then. Rob Angel 5:59 yeah, no And this is all retrospect in hindsight because I told that story and I remember that story. And it was a little precursor and foreshadowing, I think without me knowing it at the time. Marc Gutman 6:13 Yeah. And so Spokane at that time, and I've been to Spokane today, and it's not like what I would consider a really big town. So, at that time, it must have been a really small local town. I mean, what were you involved in as a young boy in school? I mean, did you have favorite subjects? Were you into certain activities? Rob Angel 6:32 Yeah, I enjoyed history and I enjoyed math. I was, I have to be honest, not a very good student. The whole book learning thing went past me but I did assimilate the information and I really enjoyed the reading. And the one thing I really got into was pole vaulting. That was my sport. And I was a championship pole vaulter, which requires a lot of discipline, a lot of practice. And that kind of sets Up to, to figure out how to get things done and I wanted to accomplish Marc Gutman 7:05 now where you pole vaulting in high school or college or both? Rob Angel 7:09 Yeah, I was in college. And I really enjoyed it. I mean, you went fast, and I wound up in my butt a few times, you know, you don't get the leg up and all of a sudden the pole doesn't go the right way and your back and your back, but that was okay. So, yeah, I mean, it was just part of the process, right? It was just part of what happened. Now, it was a few bumps and bruises. But for the most part, I managed to get into pit. Marc Gutman 7:34 Yeah. And so when you kind of look back at that time, do you remember give a first memory of your first game or your first board game that really caught your attention? Rob Angel 7:44 Yeah, the one that when I was go back to his risk, the neighborhood was really tight. So during the winter months when the snow would pile up, we all get together and play games and one of the neighborhood's houses. And I just always loved playing risk was that World domination. Yes. That that really resonated with me. I just love that game. Marc Gutman 8:05 Yeah. And for audience and people that that might have forgotten or weren't alive, then gaming had a very different meaning and connotation and experience than it may. Many people may associate with it today, right? I mean, like, like board games, were something that were high fidelity, and we're rich and experience relative to the time and can you kind of set the stage a little bit about how important those types of games were to your upbringing? Rob Angel 8:36 Oh, it was really important. It was the center of everything during those months, as you say, video games were a solitary endeavor. But when you get four or 5, 10 Kids hung around this game board, that the camaraderie and then the fine and just the fun, really, there wasn't anything dramatic was just fun to do that. And so it created a sense of a family. And, and this connection that we had with each other just lasted for years. And yeah, it was a different vibe. It was a different, a different mindset. But everybody played for the risk clue, monopoly. And eventually, Truffaut pursued and then picturing it, but back then, yeah, board games were, were quite, quite the hub. Marc Gutman 9:25 Yeah, yeah. And so you're playing games you're, you know, just like every other kid who's who's invested in that escapism that entertainment and you're going to, you know, move into high school in college and where did you think you were going to do with your life at that point? Rob Angel 9:42 When I got to college, or before college, I've worked for my father during my summers since I was in eighth grade every summer. And I saw him, you know, be the boss and I I liked how people were watching him. When he was in charge, he was a businessman. And so like a lot of kids, I just wanted to be my dad. So I, I went to school with the idea of being a businessman. I don't know what that meant. But just the thought of that was what I thought I was gonna do. Marc Gutman 10:15 Yeah. Would you think it at that time? Rob Angel 10:17 I have no idea, right? I like the only vision, my voice just went up. the only the only, you know, vision I had was my father. And so that was my world. That was my vision of what a businessman was without really knowing the details. And so I put my mind to go to school to be a business major. Didn't have a discipline didn't at the point when I went at 18 years old. I didn't have a discipline picked out but I thought I'd figure it out. Well, ultimately, in short order, the decision was made for me. Marc Gutman 10:52 And how was that? Rob Angel 10:53 Yeah. I get to college. I get to school, and mom and dad are paying for college. As you know, was was the thing except halfway through my freshman year, my father got fired. And it was like, holy crap. You know, here, here he is the president of this company. And all of a sudden he's out of a job. And it was like, a now what everything I planned for everything that I was looking up to is now gone. And I was had to figure out not only how to pay for college on my own, but I had to figure out what I wanted to do. Because if, because I'm looking at him and remembering that bus drive, because if somebody else is in control of his life, his job his future, that didn't work for me, I had to be in charge. So at that moment, I made the switch from businessman, entrepreneur to I'm going to be in charge of my life and not let anybody else dictate my terms. Marc Gutman 11:46 And so what's that switch look like? I mean, what do you mean you switch to an entrepreneur? Rob Angel 11:50 Well, I started taking classes as I call them, without yes or no answers. I wanted to just explore and experiment with with with business or whatever was going on. And so I just started to expand my mind with the with the idea that I was going to start my own business find something to do on my own. So I gravitated toward those classes, rather than, you know, accounting or, or the like. Marc Gutman 12:18 Yeah, and I think it's interesting because now, this idea of being an entrepreneur is really celebrated. We actually have celebrity entrepreneurs. But back then, you know, and when I when I went to college, being an entrepreneur wasn't necessarily like, a thing, and it wasn't something that was necessarily cool. It was kind of like what you did if you couldn't get a job. Rob Angel 12:43 That is exactly right. Yeah, you put on your resume, entrepreneur, what is that mean? That you know, we're talking 1981 there was no entrepreneurial degree back. I probably didn't know what the word meant. Just articulating it now, so yeah, Was it wasn't something that people strived for. They just were, then this label that everybody was going to be one kind of came out and it made it legitimatize it a little bit. But Marc Gutman 13:15 that's before it's legitimatized. Like, what did your parents think of this? I mean, were they concerned for your, your path and your future at this time? Rob Angel 13:22 No. They always were supportive of what I wanted to do. And keep in mind again, by the second year, I'm paying for college on my own, but they never put myself through but they were always supportive of me and my family, my siblings, whatever we wanted to do was okay with them. As long as we took care of our responsibilities. They were good. Marc Gutman 13:43 Yeah. And I believe you went to Western Washington University, is that correct? Rob Angel 13:48 Yeah. Western Washington and Bellingham, Washington. Marc Gutman 13:50 Great. So you're, you're here at Western Washington, you're like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and you put yourself through college and you come out and I just have to imagine that you're an immediate huge success. You probably haven't get a huge job or buy a huge business and away you go, right? Rob Angel 14:04 You obviously didn't read my bio. Marc Gutman 14:10 Or I did Rob Angel 14:11 or you did clearly. Yeah, no, that didn't quite work out that way. I decided to hitchhiked through Europe for five months after I graduated. So that just seemed like a nice reward that I wanted to do. So I worked through a year waiting tables. And then I went to Europe. But yeah, something Something happened in the interim, as we're, we'll discuss, but yeah, it was. It was, That was my immediate goal. Marc Gutman 14:37 Okay, so you go to Europe, like most most kids around that age do and but you're waiting tables and what's going on with that? what's what's happening with with your life at that point? Rob Angel 14:50 Well, I just graduated from school and waiting tables is how I put myself through school. And and that was For me, at that moment, the ultimate freedom. Remember, I've always said, and I've always lived freedom to do what I want when I want. And how I want to do is always important. So if I wanted more money, I would just work more hours, I wanted to take time off, I'd just get somebody to cover my shift. But I was still with always the backdrop of wanting to do my own thing. It was always at the backdrop of, I want to start my own business, create my own product. And so that was always forefront. And so I moved in when I graduated with three buddies, and we all were waiting waiting tables or restaurant work or whatever, and we get home late. And then one day, one of my roommates says, "Hey, you want to play a game?" "Sure. What is it?" We called it charades on paper. We sketch words out of a dictionary. Okay, you know, I mean, it was like one of those. You're looking I was always looking for an opportunity. But at that moment, the only opportunity I had saw in front of me was fun. I mean, I wasn't thinking of a business, I wasn't thinking of anything like that. And we started playing. And lo and behold, We're up all night playing this silly game. I mean, it was just a blast. And then after several nights are Oh, that's when it started, you know, percolating a little bit or going, wait a minute, this might make a good board game. So all those board games that I played as a kid want to be an entrepreneur, all of a sudden are kind of crashing together to form a plan in my head. Marc Gutman 16:30 Yeah, and what's your roommate's name? And had that game been played before? Or was it really like, just was the genesis right at that moment, like a crazy idea? Rob Angel 16:39 That was something he played with friends at Washington State University. Yeah, he was it was a game they played and it was just an activity. There was no game it was called Word sketch word. And if you get the word right, you get high five and sip your beer Off you go. Marc Gutman 16:56 All right, so you're playing the game and Do you remember That that first, that first night you played and what that was like, Rob Angel 17:05 I remember more of the feeling of it. Because I just remember, it reminded me of home it was. and Rob was his name. He was one of the kids I grew up with. He was one of the kids I play games with. So it was an immediate sense of feeling home when we started playing again. And it was just very comfortable shoe to put on. Marc Gutman 17:27 Yeah, and so you know, to say like, Hey, I have this idea, and I want to do something and I'm going to, you know, go build a game. I mean, people say that all the time. You know, and I think that, you know, I think that's a real kind of misconception about entrepreneurs and building a business. I think, hey, like, if I say it enough, it'll happen but you actually have to, like, do something. So like, what did you do with this epiphany? Did you run out and build the game? Did you sit on it for a while? Rob Angel 17:55 I did nothing. I went, I mean, Yeah, you're exactly right, you've got to take steps. And I was not ready, willing or able to do that. So I went to Europe. But the idea never left my mind. It was always in my head to do this. So when I got back, the one thing that that I couldn't shake is that I just kept kind of telling myself, but, you know, I was just a waiter, and I didn't have the skills. So I kind of just didn't do much with it for a little while I had to get out of that mindset. And the other problem was the physical issue of how do I make a game? Right? I'd like it. There's no internet. I don't know how to fish it to put a game together. I don't know about all the moving parts. And every time I started thinking about all the parts, I kind of, I kind of shut down. And so I had to get past that. And I did when one day my mom sends me Trivial Pursuit. The biggest problem I had was Physically putting the game together was how do I put words into a game? That that is the physical thing I knew people were gonna, we're going to need. And so I till I figured that out, I was kind of stuck. Well, mom says make sure if we pursue open it up. And as we know, there was six questions on the car. And the first question, I read it, and I turned it over the answer is polar bear. And I look at polar bear. Just you know, hey, you know, how you have this, this feeling that something magical has just happened? I mean, it was like, oh, okay, no, wait a minute. I'm thinking what something's going on here. And all of a sudden, it hit me like a ton of bricks. This is aha moment. Then I'll put Pictionary words on cards and make the game that way. I mean, it was like, it was like magic. My roommates thought I was crazy. I'm like, I'm like, yelling. But this is it. And it was really a really a powerful moment. Marc Gutman 20:00 Yeah, it seems so obvious today. But like at the time, what was kind of like, what was the obstacle? I mean, like, what other options were you thinking about in terms of like how to package this game? Rob Angel 20:12 Oh, I overthought everything, and I had not put a game together. So I was thinking, all these things so the major obstacle to getting started started was me. I was the problem. Couldn't get out of my head, however, thought everything all the steps necessary to get it out there. And so while as you said, it seemed obvious, now, that word list excuse me, the the card, that was the catalyst to getting out of my head. Marc Gutman 20:42 Yeah, and I'm really glad that you brought up like the year is 1985. There is no internet. There's not this idea like hey, I'm gonna go out on social media and tell everybody about it. There's not e commerce and it's going to buy go to the traffic store and buy traffic and pump customers. So you're in there, you know, and a lot of times we, we don't realize what's possible until we see or hear someone else do it. So you don't have that that magic of the internet where we can always go, Oh, this person in Africa did this, we can do it too. You know, the world is so small now. So it's 1985, you have this epiphany. I'm going to put the game on cards, and then what happens? Rob Angel 21:22 So I had to break it down because once I saw that, I had to break down the task of creating picture. I couldn't spend my time building a business plan, learning, marketing and all these other things. So I literally broken down to the easiest step, which as we just said, were the words. So I took about a paper, a pencil, and a little Merriam Webster dictionary in the backyard. And I'm sitting there and I open it up, and I write down the first word that makes sense to put into picture and the word was aardvark. I was at aardvark. So I write the word aardvark down. And I literally flops, sweats. I start, I started breathing heavy. It was like, I just wrote a word I had just gotten started. And really what was going through my head was I'm no longer a waiter. I'm a game inventor. That's all it was. It was a mindset. It was a label that I put on myself. And I embraced it. I was a gaming better. And so as soon as I did that switch, as soon as it flipped, I went on to the second word, and the third and the fourth. And from there is what everything just happened and everything built. It was from taking that one small, easiest, first step. It's kind of like people now the first and easiest step is like getting a domain name on GoDaddy. It's like nine bucks. So whatever it is, that just puts it Real right writing that first word made everything real was no longer just an idea rattling around in my head. That's all. Marc Gutman 23:08 Yeah. And what was so great about the word aardvark why is that such a perfect Pictionary word? Rob Angel 23:13 I had two criteria. I didn't want to overthink this process of creating words. Didn't want to get my own way. So if I knew what the word meant, and it conjured up the picture in my mind, you know what, it was hard, easy didn't matter. I wrote it down. And I didn't self at it. I just kept going. And the first word, double a aardvark. Marc Gutman 23:35 Yeah. And you talk now today, when you're out, talking with other entrepreneurs and talking with other people about finding their aardvark. Hmm, what does that mean? Rob Angel 23:47 It means a couple of things, but it mostly means just taking a first small step. Now how you get there is also part of the process. Nobody really knows. I did not know that I would be inventing a game. I didn't wake up one day and said, You know what, I think I'll invent a game. And here I go. Most people don't really know what it is they watch. But But I think most of us know what we don't want. I think it's easier for most people, myself included, to get rid of things till we can find out what we want. It's like, I tell the analogy of a white Somalia. He can smell a glass of wine. And he can tell you in 90 seconds what it is from any vintage anywhere in the world. How do you do that? he says, I can't even memorize every wine in the world says no, I have no idea. But I know what it's not. That gets me to what it is. I know it's not Merlow, I throw those out is not a Cabernet. And he just narrows it down to what it is. And that's what he finds his purpose. That's what he finds out what that wine is. And so finding your aardvark is going down a lot of different paths. Getting a lot of knowledge Things that that aren't in your norm to see what resonates. So the more you explore experience, the more you explore. The more you're curious, the more you'll find it easier to find your artwork. Your first step. Marc Gutman 25:15 Yeah, and thanks for that. And you have all of you know the benefit of perspective today. So now you know what, the aardvark. Meant to you thank you for sharing that. And it's really sound experience, share for all the listeners as well. But you're sitting there, he just wrote down aardvark, you're writing some other names. What happened there? I mean, did you do you incorporate a business? Do you have a storefront? Like, what's going on with this with this idea? Rob Angel 25:44 I like to say that I'm the smartest guy in the room. Because I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room. I know my limitations, and I embrace what I know and what I'm good at and I knew that I had to find partners to fill in not only the holes of what I didn't know, but also were aligned with my mindset, but my vision. It's not just finding pieces of a puzzle. It's finding mental, spiritual, emotional pieces of the puzzle as well. And I knew that Pictionary for it to be successful, had to look good. This was pre internet, it wasn't me to be able to go online and find a graphics design firm. So I one of the first partners I found was a graphic artist that I worked with. He was going to design the game. That was a very key, you're not gonna want to pick up the game. I'm not going to sell it. The other partner was somebody who run the business. Carrie Langston, I know I could, but I just didn't want to run the business. So I found a partner that had that skill set. And so I put together this team of amazing people that have different skill sets, but the same mentality have made the picture a success. Marc Gutman 27:04 Well, and so how did that pitch go down? You know, it's like, Hey, I'm gonna cut you in. But I need you to work for free. Like, I mean, what's going on at that time? Or has there been a little bit of runway established before you went out and got those folks? Rob Angel 27:19 Oh, no, there's, they both were after I started doing play tests. So once I developed the game, I had really bad graphics. But I did some play tests. So I said, hey, look, here's the idea. Here's the game. I need this, this and this. What do you think on Really? I offered them a little piece of the company without because I had no money. I think I think I offered actually, Gary, the graphic artist offered him 2000 bucks, or a piece of the company. I had 46 bucks in the bank. So if he hadn't taken the money, I would have been in trouble. Yeah, exactly. So he took the piece of the company So yeah, so it was it was literally just saying, hey, here I am. And I did ask one gentleman, a friend of mine to join with basically the same sales pitch Hey, I got this great game. It's fun. What do you think you want to come on board can't pay you? And he said no, which was fine, which actually turned in to, really to my advantage. And so they just instantly got what I was trying to do. And then it wasn't, hey, I need an accountant was Hey, I need a partner in this business. What do you think? And after a very short conversation they both agree. Marc Gutman 28:37 Episode brought to you by wild story. Wait, isn't that your company? It is. And without the generous support of wild story, this show would not be possible. A brand isn't a logo or a tagline or even your product. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company. It's what People say about you when you're not in the room. Wild story helps progressive founders and savvy marketers build purpose driven brands that connect their business goals with the customers they want to serve. So that both the business and the customer needs are met. This results in crazy, happy, loyal customers that purchase again and again. And this is great for business. If that sounds like something you and your team might want to learn more about, reach out at www.wildstory.com. And we'd be happy to tell you more. Now back to our show. And so what are play tests? Can you can you give us a little insight into what that looks like? Rob Angel 29:44 Yeah, we had to physically play the game, to see if it was any good to change the rules to find out what work if it didn't work. Maybe the words weren't right, maybe this rule didn't work. And so every time we would play we would take notes And it changed the rules. And we thought I should we thought when we first produced the game, we thought we had the rules just perfect. We didn't, we had to change them four more times after four production runs. So we were, we were we didn't quite get it right. But we were willing to adapt and listen to our customers and and change it if it made sense. And it did for different time. Marc Gutman 30:26 Then what were some of those early mistakes or rule changes that you thought were perfect at the time but, you know, we might recognize as changes to the game. Rob Angel 30:39 I, it made perfect sense to me that unless you guess a word, right, you don't roll the dice. We could not get people to understand that. So if somebody didn't get a word, the other team just automatically roll. And so we had to change the verbiage over and over till finally people understood. They weren't supposed to go Excuse me roll the dice until the guy gets to work, right? People didn't understand the all blame triangle. So we had to be found on that one to more explanation. Marc Gutman 31:12 So when did you sell your very first game? And by the way was it called Pictionary from the start? Where did that name come from? Rob Angel 31:19 It was the three gentlemen that I played with after college, one of them who we were playing and we used to look in the dictionary for words, and he's looking up a word, all of a sudden, he starts playing this old game that he plays is getting called Pictionary, which ultimately became Balderdash, which actually laura Robinson created That and is a good friend of mine now. And it was a bluffing game. And he just said, Well, I'm playing Pictionary, and He kind of looks as you know, pictures diction. Why don't we call this Pictionary? Okay, that was it. resonated. It wasn't a no point in continuing the conversation. It was perfect. Marc Gutman 31:57 Yeah, when it's right, it's right. So when you know you Rob Angel 31:59 Yeah, I was like, Yeah, okay, fine. Move on. That was perfect. Marc Gutman 32:04 So, so Pictionary day one, what do you remember that first sale? What was that like? And who did you sell it to? Rob Angel 32:13 Of course, I remember that first sale. It was to the University of Washington bookstore. And I've never made a sales call before. And so I get there and it's 80 degrees, and I'm sweating and I'm ready to go and I get to the front door. And I realized that forgotten my travel sample sample. Okay, good one, Rob. So I go back to the car. And, of course, the cars lock, and the car still running. I was so nervous, but I forgot to turn the car off. So I'm standing there, and I'm beating on this old beater car of mine. And finally get the back door open. And I I go up to this woman and we go in and I'm thinking I'm gonna be in this big office. My vision, my vision board of what this first sale was going to be, and we wind up on the perfect gun. And I'm like, swooning. And the smells are getting to me. And I'm thinking what that you know, and then I started, why am I on perfume counter? This is this is a bookstore, they're selling perfume. I look around, they're selling mugs. They're selling all kinds of different things. Now this is starting to go Okay, I got a file this way. There's some there's something here. And ultimately, she starts asking me all these questions about advertising landscape shipping, and I was I have no idea what she means. But I you know, I I trusted her to to give me the correct information. She filled out the form. I don't even know how to do that. has a doomsayers, okay, send me the six games. That was it. I walked out my first day. Marc Gutman 33:51 Yeah. And so I imagine you're playing it cool and, and like you've been there before and you get the order and your hands probably shaking and you walk out the door and What does that feel like? Rob Angel 34:03 It was unbelievable. It was, it was validation for all the work that we'd put together my partners and I was it was validation that somebody wanted to buy this darn thing. We've been selling it to our friends and family was great, because we made retail it the math, but but to have somebody take six games was just an overwhelmingly positive, cool feeling. I couldn't, I couldn't stop smiling. It was like, okay, we're on the way. There's like it's like the aardvark. Okay, that was the new aardvark was that for sale. It was an amazing feeling. Marc Gutman 34:44 I can only imagine and so you're on your way you're feeling validated, but not to burst your bubble. It's only six games Rob Angel 34:51 Wait a minute. You know what, we only had 1000 to sell and and there were times when would stand, we can talk about it at an escalator trying to market Pictionary for seven or eight out. And I'd sell two games. I was ecstatic. Maybe it's six games, it's two games. Well, that's six more games that I sold yesterday. It was an exciting, exciting time, those little numbers were really important, because that's six more games in somebody's hands that didn't have yesterday at six more games that people are playing. So we were playing for the long haul. We didn't if we had sold a million games out of the box, probably would have never continued. But by selling six games, it was so important. So liberating, to make us make us go forward. harder and faster. Marc Gutman 35:40 Yeah, and you're playing for the long haul, which I assume means you're probably not making a ton of money at this point. So what are you doing for money at this time just to get by and, like, how are you keeping your spirits up and staying so positive? Like, at any point did you think this this isn't gonna happen? Rob Angel 35:59 All mine Yes, there's plenty of times. I was still waiting tables Margaery my partner was still working last year in a magazine and Jerry was a controller for a company. Yeah, we, we were living on $500 a month. I was still beating a beat up car. But but we're just so much fun, but not knowing what was going to happen one day to the next. Yeah, there was numerous times throughout this whole process where I won't say I wanted to quit. But I will say it just became daunting and overwhelming. But what drove me through, got me through was passion. gets you started. It's like the igniter. But passion fades and never days. When my passion faded. Was time it was just too much. But by by going through that, I started to love what I was doing. I loved my product and love my partners. I love what we were trying to accomplish. And that's what kept me going. And that was it was it was necessary. vision that we had that just kept pushing, pushing. It's just it just got me out of those moments where I said, you know, I'm just gonna stay in bed today and not worry about. Yeah. Marc Gutman 37:10 And so starting in 1985, when you, you know, put that first batch of games together, and that first run was 1000 games that were put together by hand and your apartment. How long did that take? And then, and then what was the next step after you sold 1000 games? Rob Angel 37:27 We put the games together to say by hand, that took about 14 months from the day I said, Okay, let's do this. And we had a few problems like collating of cars, and there was no internet. So we couldn't give our specs to a company and say, here are specs produce a game, we had nine different companies supplying parts, and they were all shipped to my tiny 900 square foot apartment, and we hand-assembled the first thousand game. So that was That was a lot of fun. Actually it was. So now we have 1000 games. Well now I have to sell them we have to market them and that's when the fun that's where the fun really started. Marc Gutman 38:11 Yeah and so maybe I miss misunderstood I it sounded to me like you were doing most of that selling and marketing in person knocking on doors House did you did you move those thousand games? Rob Angel 38:23 Well my Yeah, we did the first thousand games in Seattle and then we wound up ordering more and did those in sounds well kept it local, very important for our growth. I would literally take the game based on this experience. I had university bookstore, realizing Hmm. If anybody sells anything, they might as well sell picture. So I went to real estate companies. Why not? I went to pharmacies, I went to bookstores. I went to department stores. Anybody that sold anything I figured we might as well be selling Pictionary and What that did for us was people that normally wouldn't see a game, saw a picture, people go into norstrom. And they'd see along with the jewelry and handbags and see a game, because back then the only time you ever saw game is when it was a birthday, or the holidays. So now we are alternative distribution in all these different places. Pictionary is top of mind, people that normally wouldn't see it, and that really, really propelled our growth getting in front of them. He The other thing we used to do, we were, we were there was no manual. Let's put it that way on how to do this. So some people say you've got to break the rules. We forgot to ask what the rules were. So we just made our own. We would take the game and go up to a local bar. We'd open it up and we start playing. People go Do you know what? Hey, come play the game with us. And so they would play it. Oh, by the way, you can buy it next door. metropolis. So we were we were shameless, and getting that pencil in people's hands. Marc Gutman 40:06 And so you're growing. But, you know, again, there's seems to be a big gap between the early days and becoming the best selling board game in the world. How is how is the company growing? Like, what's the evolution look like? Is it still just the three of you? Are things changing? Have you? what point are you able to quit your day job? Rob Angel 40:29 When I when I was putting myself on fire when I was working in the restaurant, we used to have flaming coffees and I spilled one day almost let myself on fire. So that was, that was the physical moment I quit. No, we, we hustled our butts off in Seattle, and it took off. And so now we have to figure out how to scale the business. Demand is far outstripping our inventory and way outstripping our ability to fund our growth. So we had to license, the game. That's the only way we're gonna, we're gonna propel ourselves into the big leagues. And so we were approached by Milton Bradley, the biggest board game company in the world. And they came to us with a deal. They wanted a license, and we get to the meeting, and they they go Okay, and they slapped down this box on the table. How would you look at it we go. What's that? You know, well, this is a new picture a box. We're going to design for you guys. Oh, yeah, we're gonna change the, the graphics and the rules, and we're gonna change some of the words we're gonna sell a lot of these. What do you think? No, this is not what our Pictionary is. This is not what we envision. So we finally got a deal on paper. And they give us the biggest royalty rate. They've given anybody I'm 26 years old, I'm I'm beating driving a beater car 500 bucks a month, and I'm ready to sign this deal. But the one thing they wouldn't put in the contract is they would Production packaging without our approval. And I look at that, partners Look at that. And that vision was not aligned with our vision of Pictionary. And we didn't sign. I didn't sign it. All I had to do was sign this piece of paper and my life changes. And because it wasn't in the best interest of me, my partners are Pictionary. We didn't sign it, and we had no plan B. This isn't like, we don't sign this, we have to go we've got this other deal. Our other deal, going back to work slogging it out playing games in public, whatever we had to do to sample that game. But we were willing to do it. And as Simon Sinek calls it, you know, you're just cause it's when you're willing to sacrifice everything for your cause. fixturing was our cost. We were willing to sacrifice, that financial gain. And so we went back to work. Okay, okay. There was a couple of days of like, what have we done, but it was the right decision and Two weeks later, three weeks later, we get an offer, from a joint venture that we never would have gotten had we accepted the first one, we wound up with a bigger royalty rate, all our guarantees, and the guarantee they wouldn't touch the bags. And that was the genesis. And that was that propelled us into the big leagues. Very, very quickly. Marc Gutman 43:20 Yeah. And so I'm totally just impressed and kind of dismayed and, you know, like, you've worked so hard and you have this opportunity, and I get principles and I get values but to leave a deal on the table. Were you all thinking rethinking, like look, we're happy with this being small and what smaller and what it is and us not, you know, having a life our own lives our own livelihood built off of the these efforts, or did you just have faith that you knew that there'd be another deal coming down, you know, into the deal flow? Rob Angel 43:57 We had no idea no, we are We weren't, we weren't happy the way it was because we could see we had this this game it was resonating was going to go huge. And the fact we couldn't do it on our own was frustrated. I mean, it wasn't like, okay, you know, let's let's just see what happens. It's like crap. Let's make it happen. Let's keep working hard. Let's find another deal. So we didn't just sit back, and it wasn't us, saying let's keep it small and keep control. It was us saying this is the wrong deal. And so we waited for something else to come along. But if it did, we would have been okay. We were willing to roll the dice. So no, it was it was clear we needed a deal. But it it just didn't present itself for a while. Marc Gutman 44:44 What was so awful about the packaging? Rob Angel 44:48 You know, like, you know, there's certain memories that you have in your business life. This is one of the top four five from Pictionary. They slap it on the table. We dubbed it The eye chart. It had two problems with it. One, it was back then the trigger pursuit boxes which were square and had a fourfold vote for fold board. That's what they presented Pictionary. The original version was a long blue box that looks like a long shoe box. That was unique. We had to keep that uniqueness. And two, didn't look like in hindsight result it was black and white and it had swirls and you could barely read the name Pictionary. And they. They dumbed it down. We wanted Pictionary on somebody's counter, play plant in see it all the time. This was just ridiculous. It was just bad packaging. Marc Gutman 45:44 Well, it sounds like you're all made the right decision. So you have a licensing partner that they come in. They start to give you the capital that you need to grow and breathe. And what does that run look like for you and the team Rob Angel 45:57 looked amazing. Let me I'm gonna Back up. Just a quick quick side story about the original Pictionary box. It was a long blue box, which we loved, and thought it was great. But we didn't design the box. And then everything in between we see in the packaging. We didn't want to be like everybody else. We wanted to differentiate ourselves. And everybody was doing a fourfold. So we'd wanted something different. So we're talking about it, we're yelling at each other in a very collaborative way. And finally, I get overwhelmed. I go, I'm not feeling anything. So I go and sit at a desk by myself. I call it taking a time, I was just taking a break. there happened to be a picture of excuse me a piece of paper on the desk in front of me. I'm not thinking about the board design or anything else. But I pick it up and all of a sudden, it folds on itself, right folds into thirds. And I look at this thing and I go, Holy moly. That's our new board. That's our differentiation. So we designed the packaging. Round that board, but it never would have happened. Had it not taking that time out and just stop thinking about the problem. And that's really a point of, of my business life is whenever I got overwhelmed, whenever things weren't going right, I would stop. And then creative juices started flowing rather than getting frustrated. Just wanted to just wanted to share that with everybody. Marc Gutman 47:24 And I appreciate that. That's a great piece of insight. Rob Angel 47:27 Yeah, it was it was it was a lot of different things happen because of that. So yeah, so we did a licensing agreement with a joint venture. And they saw the, the trajectory of Pictionary. And so we just started selling the heck out of it all throughout the world. And they turned on the spicket. And the public responded, the public responded, and we just started selling millions of games over the next five years within the United States and an equal amount in Europe. Marc Gutman 47:57 And what are you doing? What's your role with the company at this time? Rob Angel 48:00 My partners and I were unique in that. Normally when a license happens, the license or they just walk away, but we started working harder. We didn't want anybody in charge of our futures. So we didn't want them riding off into the sunset and doing what they want with Pictionary. So we made sure to stay involved. We're coming up with new board games, we're coming up with new words, new packaging, whatever was required to make Pictionary success and keep it a success. We were there. And we would do things like when a new company would come on board in France, please do have us again on a plane, fly over, tell them, tell them what worked, what didn't work. And we supported them because we wanted them to be successful, rather than just hoping they were successful. So we stayed very actively law. Marc Gutman 48:53 And so the company's doing well. I imagine the original founders are making a good living at this point from the board game. You're not waiting tables, as you mentioned, and doing some other things. And so the game continues to rise and you continue to do Wow. And again, is there any moment during this period, rethink where you get in trouble or things just get sideways? Rob Angel 49:15 Yeah, it was 1987. We're already selling millions of games. And when loser draw, comes out the television show, and they launched their board game, as well. And for whatever reason, I thought they were going to wipe us off the mat. They have this television show, and it's a half hour commercial every day. And I think we don't have a chance. It's Burt Reynolds is celebrities. It's all these things. And my mind just couldn't get around it. And I started to panic. And here we are the biggest selling game in the country. But I still had my doubts and a beautiful thing happened. People start didn't know the difference between when loser draw and Pictionary because we were so friendly. established, people thought it was Pictionary with another day, our sales increased, not decreased. So it had a very positive influence on us. Where I originally thought we would do Marc Gutman 50:13 well. And that's, that's a piece of good fortune. So you ride that wave, you ride that wave. Rob Angel 50:19 I one thing we used to do is when when the show came out, we would advertise picture on either end of it. So, before or after, they'd be a Pictionary, TV commercial. People really emphasize that that drawing was Pictionary. Marc Gutman 50:33 Oh, brilliant. And so you make it through that that phase and you keep growing the business and you keep growing the business and, and eventually you come to an exit. Rob Angel 50:48 Yeah, we did. It was time 17 years, from when we launched in 1985. I was but 43 by now and I'd been with The product and the business for 17 years, 16 years. And I'll just be honest with you, you know, I developed other priorities I got married, I had some kids, and my, my passion hadn't faded. And so it was time for me to go in a different direction. And my partners felt the same way. They were ready to move on with their lives as well. Marc Gutman 51:22 Yeah, and so in 2001 you make a deal to sell the business to Mattel. Like, how did that feel? Was it hard? Rob Angel 51:31 Yeah, it it wasn't it wasn't. I mean, you can hear me just kind of stammering a little bit because it was so powerful that when it was going on, and it absolutely at that moment in my life and in time, was the right decision was the right thing to do, because I really did feel I wanted to sell but after being with my partners and and this game and this life for all that time, it was tough. I mean after after the sale, it was like losing a limb was actually Calling I was I was kind of a little wobbly trying to find my way again. So I took a little time off, which turned into several years. But at first, it was hard to refine my way. The family was great. Everything was good. But a little piece of me was gone. Marc Gutman 52:16 Yeah, imagine was really hard. I mean, you had not only built a business, you not only realized your dream, you did it in a way where Pictionary became the best selling board game in the world. So not only like, are you achieving all these goals, but you're like, kind of the king of your category. I mean, that's pretty awesome. pretty rare. Not a lot of people make it that far. And then you're not doing that anymore. So So what did you do? Rob Angel 52:47 I like that King of the category I'm gonna use that. I was pretty good. I decided to basically go back to my roots. So I talked about the bus and talked about being freedom And being in charge of my life. And I went back to them. I continued with that, rather than doing what everybody kept saying, I needed to do a rock, you've got to find a new business, you've got to find a new passion. You've got to start a job and be an entrepreneur all over again. No, I don't. That's your vision of what I should be doing. For me. I want to wake up and take my kids to school. I want to mentor people, I want to be involved in nonprofits. I want to enjoy my life, how I want to enjoy it. So I was plenty busy, but I didn't really need to start a new business. I kept my freedom while giving back and and as you say, being of service to other people. And for me, it worked out really well. And it gave me gave me purpose. Marc Gutman 53:44 Yeah. So what is life look like for you today? Rob Angel 53:47 I'm, I am. Back to that again. I've just finished as you've referenced a book on the Pictionary experience, called game changer. It was a fascinating process to write the book over five years remembering all these stories. And now I am, you know, marketing and promoting it. But it's, it's more just trying to get my story out of how, you know, a 23 year old waiter from Spokane, Washington, had a dream had an idea had a vision, an ally I got started with, with no plan. I didn't know what I was doing half the time. But it worked out. I made it work. And it's just it's just a great story. I think for anybody that has an idea or just wants to be inspired to try something new, or just likes Pictionary and want to know what happened. And so it's, it's been a really, really fun process. Marc Gutman 54:50 And we'll make sure to link to that in the show notes so that all our listeners have access to the book and and know where to find that. Rob as we wind down our time here today If the 20 year old self, your 20 year old self ran into you today, what do you think he'd say? Rob Angel 55:08 You know, I think he'd say, you know, well done. One thing that's always been important to me is to be me, be authentic, Be true to who I am. And I try not to buy into other people's vision of what I should be or shouldn't be. And I think I've managed to do that. So I think the 20 year old Rob felt the same way. And I think it'd be pleased with who we met. Marc Gutman 55:40 And that is Rob Angel. I loved his idea of finding your aardvark, getting started and never looking back. I also appreciate his experience of taking a time out when struggling with a problem. It seems as though the answer you're looking for never comes when you're trying so hard. So often the breakthrough happens when you stop and take a time out. I'll try to do that myself the next time I'm struggling to find a solution. Thank you again to rob Angel. Rob's book can be found at Amazon by searching for game changer, Rob Angel. And you can connect with him on social media on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram at the ROB Angel. Apparently the person with Rob angel is a hairdresser. In case you need that too. We'll make sure to link to all those resources in the show notes. Well, that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstory.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS so you'll never miss an episode. Big stories and I cannot lie to you other storytellers can't deny

BGBS 027: Justin Moss | The Pineapple Agency | Bringing People Together and Making Them Smile

BGBS 027: Justin Moss | Bringing People Together and Making Them Smile

The Pineapple Agency’s founder, Justin Moss is a passionate marketer whose love for events and music festivals merged to create an experiential marketing company that has worked with Proctor & Gamble, Google, Insomnia, Under Armor, Converse and more. Justin is sharing his story of producing raves as a teenager to creating one of the largest music festivals before they were popular, with the NY Times calling Justin “ahead of his time.” Today, he’s helping brands create memories for their consumers with big bold activations, while giving them a better ROI for their marketing spend.

What we’re talking about

• Justin’s Journey From Having A Brain Tumor To Starting His First Business
• Learning From Business Failure To Following Your Passion
• How Experiential Marketing Creates Consumer Loyalty

Justin’s Journey From Having A Brain Tumor To Starting His First Business

Justin was always a rambunctious red-headed child, but at the age of 8 he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and his parents were told he had 12 hours to live without surgery. Even at that point, he was tried hiding from doctors. After months of being in the hospital re-learning how to walk, Justin’s parents filed for bankruptcy, and they moved to Florida. While in Florida, Justin and his brother launched their first business by selling baseball cards. They weren’t simply trading cards though. They would go to shows and have a booth where they would make $2,000-$7,000 per show depending on their inventory.

Learning From Business Failure To Following Your Passion

While living in Florida and figuring out who he was as a person, Justin met a variety of people who helped shape who he became today. He discovered the street pharmaceutical industry and rave scene where no one was excluded and everyone was welcome. Justin produced his first rave at 16 and it was a huge failure. When the lighting and sound guy didn’t show up, Justin discovered he was seen to be invading on other promoters' turf. If this happened today, Justin says he would simply call in a replacement and not waste his time. After doing a lot of behind the scenes work on events, Justin landed on the professional paintball circuit. It was here that he wanted to marry his love for paintball and events which turned out successful, but not in a financial way. Although his event had thousands of attendees, was the biggest music festival at the time, and even had Tony Hawk in attendance, it wasn’t profitable. Justin decided to make a move to Denver and along with 2 others, took his passion for creating music festivals and bringing people together and launched a new experiential marketing agency in 2007.

How Experiential Marketing Creates Consumer Loyalty

Justin cared about building events and experiences and it took customers a long time to get and understand what experiential marketing was. The turning point for his agency was one day while at Buffalo Wild Wings where he was the ultimate card shark...handing his business cards out to anyone who would take one. He received a phone call from a guy who worked at Google and wanted ideas for the Democratic National Convention. Justin and his team executed substantial activation throughout Denver for Google and YouTube and that was the beginning of his success. Ultimately, it wasn’t what Justin loved because his passion was far greater for music and concerts and giving a voice to the consumer for the brand. In 2014, The Pineapple Agency was launched. Brands have guided our thoughts a lot of the way, but by creating experiences and leveraging emotional connections, you’re giving consumers a way to promote your brand and products. Now more than ever, consumers are empowered to say this is an amazing product or brand and I'm going to tell my friends about it. Justin says that if a brand is not at least participating in some sort of experiential campaign, then they will get left behind. Justin and The Pineapple Agency are bridging the gap between creating smiles and moments for consumers and giving brands a better ROI on their marketing spend than traditional social media would. Is your brand creating experiences for your consumers?

LINKS MENTIONED

The Pineapple Agency

SPONSOR

Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 46:11 - 47:05 (54 sec JM) - let me start off by saying...what I loved was this opportunity to create a new music festival.
• 51:50 - 52:44 (54 sec JM) - You’re also giving them a way to promote it….if that makes sense.

QUOTES

1. If a brand is not at least participating in some sort of experiential campaign, you’re going to get left behind.
2. I was a card shark...meaning I’d take my business card and hand it out to anyone who would listen.
3. Do not let experiences fall by the wayside. Humans need experiences and interactions.
4. We bridge the gap between creating smiles and moments and for our clients their marketing strategy and selling their products and services.
5. You’re allowing a brand to get an ROI for dollar for dollar spend for less than what they get on traditional social media.
6. Now more than ever, consumers are empowered to say this is an amazing product or brand and I'm going to tell my friends about it.
7. Brands have guided our thoughts a lot of the way. If brands want the color purple to be popular one year, they’re going to do it.
8. By creating experiences and leveraging emotional connections, you’re giving them a way to promote it.
9. Everything happens for a reason, whatever that reason is.

...

Podcast Transcript

Justin Moss 0:02 It was a success. And still to this day, it was a success in several ways, just not financially. Financially, it was a flop. But as one of my agents that we we worked with, and I won't mention her by name, but you know, one of the things that she had told me was, Justin, if you never do this again, you did it. If you go to burger flipping, you produced the biggest Music Festival at the time, and she was right. Marc Gutman 0:37 Podcasting from Boulder, Colorado, this is the baby got backstory podcast. Where we dive into the story behind the story of today's most inspiring storytellers, creators and entrepreneurs. I like big back stories and I cannot lie. I am your host, Marc Gutman, and on today's episode Baby got backstory, how a savvy marketer combined music festivals, action sports and branding to build an experiential marketing agency that serves brands like Coke, Vivian and Anheuser Busch. Now if you like and enjoy the show, please take a minute or two to rate and review us over at iTunes. iTunes uses these as part of the algorithm that determines ratings on the apple charts. And ratings help us to build an audience, which then helps us continue to produce this show. On today's episode, we are talking to my good friend Justin moss is you're about to hear Justin is a passionate marketer who is fired up about events, music festivals and experiential marketing. Justin is the founder of the pineapple agency, which is known for creating big old activations for companies like Coke rivia n. Anheuser Busch, Procter and Gamble, Google Insomniac, under armor and converse. Those are just a couple recognizable brand names. Pineapple agency is responsible for generating millions of unique media impressions, hundreds of thousands of event attendees and brand loyalists and 10s of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise sold. Justin stories is a wild ride and I can't wait to share it with you. Justin was on the forefront of music festivals in the US. They weren't always a thing. And even the New York Times called HIS EVENT ahead of our time. And this is his story. Justin, what is the pineapple agency? Justin Moss 2:44 The Pineapple Agency is an experiential event marketing agency and I always like to say creative event agency as well because we work on we create live experiences that emotionally connect brands to their consumer and very authentic takeaways, but we also I have a background in concerts and music festivals. So we work very heavily on music festivals currently where we work we work on 17 of some of the biggest music festivals in the world. Everything from operations to production to marketing so we're we're pretty diverse firm. Marc Gutman 3:23 And I do want to get into that and talk a little bit more about what you're doing today and how you got there. But before we do that, let's go back let's go let's go way back was young Justin eight year old Justin, did he think he was going to be an experiential marketer? What was life like for you? At eight years old? Where'd you grow up? Justin Moss 3:39 No, I did. I did definitely didn't think I was going to be experiencial marketer or even in events. I wasn't even I wasn't a huge live event person. I was a rambunctious redhead. I was outside a lot. I rode bikes, I build handmade ramps and did crazy shit. Um, I had a lot of fun. I was very outdoorsy, um, I played a lot of sports. Yeah, I was I was a you know a go getter. I started my first business when I was nine with my brother Brandon. But even then didn't know that I was going to be a an event person or a business owner. But I was definitely a rambunctious eight year old and having, you know, overcome a lot of adversity really young from having a brain tumor to you know, my family filing bankruptcy. So just grew up really quickly. Marc Gutman 4:35 Well, we'll get into all that but brain tumor. Tell me about that. So, you you're eight years old, new and you get a brain tumor? Justin Moss 4:42 Yeah, it was. It was a pretty pretty crazy time. So I was having some severe headaches for for a long time and I was blacking out and my family kept taking me to doctor out Dr. And we were waiting for an MRI to become available because my mom at that time this is 8687 didn't want me to have a CAT scan because she believed that the dyes that they put in your arm and your you know, that goes straight to your brain would cause cancer and that's a whole nother podcast, but um, they finally it was around October 1987 doctors had diagnosed me with food allergies, specifically nuts and chocolate. So for an eight year old, during Halloween, not being able to eat nuts and chocolate, I was like what the fuck? So, um, anyway, I there was a point in time I believe it was a over a period of 24 maybe 48 hours that I became really, really frail and fragile and passed out and my mom and dad had rushed me to the hospital. And they obviously you know, had no choice but to do a CAT scan. It might have been an MRI I really don't know. And essentially they found a really rare tumor that is not normally found in children that was on my cerebellum. And, um, basically, I they gave my mom and dad, you know, the news that if they couldn't subside the tumor and make it smaller, that I probably had about 12 hours to live on, but obviously they had to try to subsided or go in immediately. So, um, luckily they were able to subside it to where they gave my mom and dad a little bit of breathing room this I was rushed to Monmouth County Hospital in New Jersey. And so what ended up happening is the doctors there on gave my parents a choice either have a normal neurosurgeon removed The tumor and I say normal like there's no neurosurgeon that's normal. They're all amazing. You know you got to be a special type of crazy to dig into somebody's brain but on the other alternative was fly me to Philadelphia children's hospital immediately and have a at that time a world renowned child neurology neurosurgeon removed the tumor. And at that time that neurosurgeon was one of the first to remove conjoined twins by the brain. And so basically my parents with guidance from the doctors decided to fly me to Philadelphia Children's Hospital, which still today is one of the most renowned children's hospitals in the world for brain tumors and and neuro neurosurgery. And so they I was flown there, I think within within less than a day, maybe 15-20 hours. Um, I was brought into surgery. I was the first kid to go into surgery fully clothed, because as I told you earlier, I was a rambunctious crazy redhead, and I ran away. And they had to find me in a elevator and I'm not lying. And they didn't strike me down or anything, but they got me into the the emergency surgery. And the last thing I remember is them putting the mask on me and me going to bed and then cutting my clothes off. And then many, many hours later, I came out of surgery. I was awake but not able to walk as the tumor was on my cerebellum. So that affects your your walking and your your balance. Yeah, and that's, that's where it is. I mean, obviously, I could go on and on and on. But that's that's where it ended. Sort of. Marc Gutman 8:50 Yeah, that had to be terrifying. I mean, was there further treatment like your parents and your brother? I mean, that was going on there. Justin Moss 8:58 Yeah, it was. It was pretty, it was, it's pretty surreal if I you know, think back at it now. So my mom was induced with my baby sister on in Staten Island. My mom wanted to have all of her children born in the same hospital. So my mom was induced. And then she was rushed to Philadelphia for my surgery on so I had a new baby sister going into surgery. And then I basically had to learn to walk again. So not in the sense that I didn't know how to do it, but my brain and my body were not working together. So it was months of physical therapy and learning to walk and I wasn't able to get discharged from the hospital until I was able to walk. And so luckily, I think it was about three months, I was finally discharged from the hospital. And um, you know, at that time my father was driving back and forth from New Jersey to Philadelphia pretty much every day. Marc Gutman 10:02 What was his business? Justin Moss 10:04 My father and still is in his in the blinds business window treatments and has had retail stores and at that time he had carpet and tile stores as well. He has been in the business 45 years. Yeah. And so unfortunately, during that time, my father's partner was embezzling money. And so, um, shortly after my tumor, my parents you know, made the difficult decision to file bankruptcy and move the family to South Florida to kind of start over and that's um, you know, Marc Gutman 10:43 What was that like as a kid, you know, like your parents filing for bankruptcy? Were you oblivious or did that like, hit you hard? I mean, I know as a little kid you pick up on a lot of things and certainly being part of a bankrupt family isn't you know, in the cool sector of of young kid, young kid, labels. Justin Moss 11:00 Yeah, I mean, I would say that I was a little bit oblivious, but I understood a little bit on where I grew up in New Jersey was very wealthy area. And, you know, my family, you know, at that time lost everything pretty much So you started realizing, you know, your friend's parents are driving Mercedes is in Cadillacs and your family's driving, you know, a 19 you know, a 20 year old car, you know, or can't do landscaping in their house and you know, just little things like that. But I didn't understand really what was going on until I was much, much older. Luckily, we had, at that time, I had a really close family friend that I ended up staying with, to finish my eighth grade year and my mom and my dad, and I'm sorry, my mom and my brother and my little sister moved to South Florida and my dad stayed in New York City, working for somebody so he could build income, you know, to move everybody. So I understood that that was a little weird and that why am I staying at my friend's house as, you know, an 11-12 year old kid? But it wasn't until I was much older, and understood the gravity of what was going on and that we had family friends bringing us food because my mom and dad were, you know, having a tough time. So, yeah, you know, it, you know, you look back at it now. And it's, you're like, I'm glad that my mom and dad insulated me the way they did you know, my brother and my sister were older than me. So they, they understood more, but they you know, everybody insulated me a little bit more. Marc Gutman 12:44 Yeah, and it must have been tough, but, you know, also during that time, I understand that you and your brother Brandon started your first business together. Justin Moss 12:54 Yeah, yeah. So um, you know, I'm even today I probably didn't think this way back then. But I'm a believer in everything happens for a reason for whatever reason that is, and me and my brother were always big baseball card fans. I was I was a huge baseball fan growing up, and I collected baseball cards and we had a family friend that owned a pharmacy and, um, you know, back then hopefully a lot of your listeners will be around my age will know that pharmacies back then were more mom and pop. And they were not just pharmacies, but they were like small convenience stores. And, um, this family friend every I don't know, so often, you know, more often than none because, you know, I was in the hospital and at home, he would bring me boxes of baseball cards, you know, on open tops, Don Ross baseball cards, and I would open them. So I amassed this huge amount of baseball cards. And so my brother and I had been going to baseball card shows, you know, for a long time, which unfortunately, don't really exist, but we'd go to these card shows, and go and buy baseball cards and sell ours. So what we decided to do was start a baseball card business, but actually setting up a booth at these card shows. So we bought all the showcases, and we started having our mom and dad, you know, schlep us from Pennsylvania to New York to all over jersey, setting up and selling baseball cards. And then on one of the things we segwayed into, and I say pivot, I'll say pivot, but back then I didn't know what pivot meant. We realized let's sell the baseball card holders so the big cardboard boxes and the plastic sleeves. And so we threw my dad, we came across somebody that was buying everything in China, importing, importing it here and we ended up buying baseball cards, supplies and going to shows and selling baseball card supplies. So that was my first quote-unquote, business. Marc Gutman 15:03 When it came of that business? Did it have a name? Did it have an exit? What became of that? Justin Moss 15:09 No, no, it didn't have a name. It was it was, um, you know, we were fondly known as the two brothers at the baseball card shows, but no real official name and it just sort of evaporated nothing really. I can't actually even I mean, obviously, there was no exit. I think, you know, my brother and I just got older and my brother certainly got older and didn't want to schlep around with his younger brother anymore. And we made a little bit of money and, and did good things. We actually tried to get into the bicycle business after that. So that didn't go anywhere. But um, yeah, it just sort of faded away. Marc Gutman 15:53 Which, like, how much money were you making? Are you making like real money? Were you making enough to do anything cool? Justin Moss 15:59 Yeah, I mean, I think to two young kids, we were we were doing pretty well. I mean, we would go to a baseball card show and make anywhere from, you know, a couple of grand to, you know, 5/6/7 grand, you know, it really just depended, you know, it depended on our inventory. My brother was what kind of led the charge of walking around the shows trying to sort of buy and sell some of our inventory to get new inventory. But look at that, at the end of the day, we had no idea what we were doing. We were just two kids making some change. And, you know, of course, at that time, my mom and dad weren't like, well, you owe me for the gas and driving me there. And you know, all the costs that are associated with the business other than paying our fees to go to the card shows. Um, but yeah, I mean, it was it was fun, and I actually learned a lot but I wouldn't say it was. I didn't have any aspirations of becoming a global entrepreneur in the baseball card world. Marc Gutman 17:04 Yeah, and you say you say pocket change, but man, like a couple grand at that age, like, I think in college I lived on like $20 a week. So to give a sense of like, I mean, that's a lot of money. That's really, really great. And so you guys have this, this baseball card business, you get a taste of what it's like to have a business. Then what happens? Do you start another business once your brother goes on and does his own thing? Justin Moss 17:26 Yeah, so we tried to get into the bicycle business, and my brother and I were calling the different bicycle companies. And once again, nothing really happened there. And then I'm, like I said, we ended up moving to South Florida and my life really changed a lot. When we moved to South Florida. It was it was a very different experience. I had understood a little bit more about what had happened with my family. Um, I went to a school that was a very, very different than what I was used to In the sense that was much more cultured, a lot more diverse mix of people. I didn't have any friends. I was very, for many, I'd say, at probably, least till I was 14, or 15. I was I had several different identities in the sense that I didn't know who I wanted to be. I didn't know if I was a skater. I didn't know if I was a thug. I didn't know if I was an athlete, you know, I wasn't sure. And I was, you know, all the kids that I grew up with in New Jersey, I grown up with them, you know, from preschool till Middle School. So that's what I knew. And then moving to Florida, I was meeting all these different groups of people I didn't know and so, but I'm actually glad because I believe that moving to Florida, really shaped it definitely shaped who I am and what I do for a living now. For sure. Marc Gutman 19:00 Yeah, so what was the next business? You started? Like? You're in Florida? Did you just start looking for ways to make money or to flex that entrepreneurial muscle? Justin Moss 19:10 Yeah, I mean, how honest Do you want me to be? Marc Gutman 19:14 As honest as you want to be. Justin Moss 19:17 Um, yeah. So I had discovered the street pharmaceutical industry, and, um, took a liking to that. I think it was because I became friends with everybody very, very quickly. And, you know, I, I always had this knack for, I guess, somewhat being a leader or a seller also, you know, a salesman and so, through that very quickly, I had discovered the rave scene. So for you or those that don't know what that is, it's it's basically the underground music scene for electronic music or as they call it. Me or had brought me to the love of producing and producing events and I absolutely fell in love. And so my next business was I became a rave promoter. And I started promoting on raves in 1990. My first one was in 1996. Marc Gutman 21:22 So how old are you? Just to give some context? Justin Moss 21:24 I turned 40 in May, last May. Marc Gutman 21:26 No, no, no. How old were you? When you when you produce that first rave? Justin Moss 21:29 I'm sorry. Oh, God, I was what? 16-17 maybe I was 15-16 I'd have to do the math, but I think I was 16. Marc Gutman 21:38 That's not very old. I mean, what that first one looked like like, How big was it? Like how much overhead was there? Like, was it a sizable event? Justin Moss 21:46 It was a flop. It was okay, let me back up because it was a flop because we need no money and we lost money. But so it was called Old School jam. And I had rented a warehouse in Fort Myers, Florida and old skate park, it was a skate park warehouse. And I had booked all the DJs now Now, mind you, I didn't know what I was doing. I knew a lot of people, but I didn't know what I was doing, you know, and there's a lot that goes into even a small rave. And so what ended up happening was, I drive to Fort Myers. And and, you know, I think a lot of business people can can relate to at least some part of this story. I go there and what we do, it's called loading and loading in a show. Excuse me, so we're getting ready. We're loading in the show. And my lighting and sound guy never showed up. So he was the same person from from South Florida. He never showed up. And so for hours and hours and hours, I'm panicking, and I'm calling him and I'm calling him and I'm calling him and no answer no answer. He never answers called his roommates, no answer. So I don't know maybe seven, eight o'clock. Call The DJ start showing up now we're talking about not superstar DJs like you see today, but they were, you know, one DJ was from Atlanta, you know, we had some pretty, pretty nice sized DJs You know, I think the total budget was like 12 or $15,000. And basically what ended up happening is we couldn't open and we had no sound we had no lighting we had, I would say at least 1000 people in the parking lot waiting to get in. And so it was a complete failure. It was it was a flop and, and, and Marc Gutman 23:34 how'd that feel, I mean, how'd that feel? You had to like go like, I can imagine that moment. Like you're you're thinking this is going to be this incredible success. You're doing the thing you love to do. I mean, talk about that moment. Take me back to that time where you like, had to like Who did you tell, like, Did you get like, you're gonna I'm imagining fire festival, you know, like, did you did you have to like, Who did you tell us? You have to get on a car and yell Hey, you know,it's the Not gonna happen, like, like, what happened? Justin Moss 24:02 Yeah, I mean, um, I mean, from an emotional standpoint, I was beside myself, I I screamed, I cried, I yelled, I wanted to punch somebody in the face. I you know, just every emotion possible. I felt like a moron. You know, I was a new promoter. You know, nobody knew who I was. Um, but yeah, I mean, yeah, I essentially at some point, I had to make the decision to call it you know, and say, everybody go home, you know, it's, it's not happening and, um, you know, every, you know, there were people that, you know, high five, me and people, you know, the DJs were all sympathetic. And, you know, later on I found out that I basically got screwed over by other promoters and that's why the lighting and sound guy never showed up because I was ascending You know, invading on their turf and taking business away from them. And that's, that's a whole story. But But Marc Gutman 25:08 now what is that story? What happened? They like, they pay that guy off or they pressure him not to show? Justin Moss 25:13 Yeah, they they basically pressured him not to show and, you know, he did it. And years later years later I did another show not years 1998 I did another show and I actually, um, this guy and I sort of had talked throughout the years, you know, and and he ended up doing the lighting for this show in 1998 for free to sort of make up for the show that he screwed me on. And so, but yeah, I mean, he basically got muscled into not showing up. And you know, I would say that is, you know, one of the life lessons and business lessons I learned. You know, of course now being a seasoned event producer, I would have just gotten on The phone and called other lighting and sound companies, you know and said, hey, I've got this warehouse and I've got money, come bring a lighting and sound rig and I wouldn't have spent hours and hours trying to get ahold of this guy because clearly at some point, I should have been like, this guy's not showing up, either he's in a car accident, or he's dead, you know, or whatever, you know. Um, so you, you you live and learn, but it took me a little bit of time to sort of get over that, for sure. Marc Gutman 26:32 Yeah, so how'd you bounce back, which when was your next event? Justin Moss 26:36 So my next event well, so my next event that I fully produced was in 1998. But prior to that, I had been sort of doing underground. No pun intended, underground sort of work and where I was investing in other promoters or other parties, and not you know, my name is wasn't given my production, you know, name, which at that time was end two productions didn't um, I was just sort of behind the scenes if you will. And then in 1998, I partnered with my buddy Vinnie, and another partner, Todd, who Todd ultimately was my partner in several different businesses. But we produced a very, very successful event in Miami, and yeah, we killed it. So yeah, my career just kept going. And we picked ourselves up. Marc Gutman 27:32 Yeah. And so you're starting to promote events and do that, but then you also get into paintball, right? Justin Moss 27:39 Yeah, yeah. So um, you know, I I got into paintball when I was 12 when I moved to South Florida, and I ended up playing in playing professional paintball, and amateur paintball, basically, overall competitive paintball for over 14 years. I went into the paintball business. I opened a paintball field in a store, here in Denver, Colorado when I when I moved here, and ultimately merged my passion for producing fast concerts and live events too painful to kind of move into my next venture, which was music festivals. Marc Gutman 28:23 Yeah, but before we get into that, like, what is professional paintball? Justin Moss 28:27 Oh, it's amazing. It's, it's. So um, without going into too much detail in story, the professional circuit has evolved much a lot over the last, you know, 20 years. But when I first started, the core event was basically Capture the Flag, either five man teams, which would be five on five or 10 man teams 10 on 10 and we played on huge fields. In the middle of the woods, and it was captured the flag and then as the sport evolved, they moved into more of a, what they call a speedball setting. And the whole transition was to try to get paintball on TV. And TV was not friendly could not be friendly. In the woods, you know, there was a lot of, you know, a lot of, you know, hidden objects, you know, the cameras couldn't get good angles. So, speed ball basically developed and was a much faster paced sport. But essentially, you have a group of humans that are have paintball guns today, the paintball guns shoot anywhere up to 20 balls a second, and you're battling it out on a field, five on 510 on 10, or seven on seven on the circuit, you know, spans different cities and states in the United States and then goes over to Europe with a sister league so I played all over the world. Professional paintball. Marc Gutman 30:01 Yeah. And like, you know, what I'm interested in is like, what is the professional part look like? I mean, is this like, kind of like, you know, reminiscent of the movie dodgeball? Are you guys you know, do you have groupies? are you flying around in jets? Or is it more like I mean, like, what is profession? Like, what's the professional circuit? Yeah, as you call it. what's what's the circuit look like for pro paintball? Justin Moss 30:23 Yeah, so it's definitely not NFL. It's more dodgeball for sure. There are definitely groupies. I did not have any. But there are groupies on the so tournament's themselves are made up of amateur and Pro. And so the amateur goes from rookie to amateur to pro and the pro circuit right now today I think is made up of 18 or 20 pro teams. Mind you. I've been out of it for several years now, but I'm usually what you what you had in the sport is you had one person that either owned a paintball field They're owned a paintball business or in one case, there was a doctor that his kids played paintball and he was very wealthy and he started a professional paintball team and funded the team. A lot of times what happens is all your expenses are paid for, to travel and then you have sponsors within the paintball industry that pay for some of that, but also get you equipment. And then when you when you divide up the winnings, and back then the winnings were not very much they were anywhere from 15,000 to 50,000, depending on the sport or depending on the tournament, but you got to remember for 10, 12, 15 guys on a team, you know, it wasn't a lot of money to be honest. And most guys that made the money in the sport like I had a very close friend that back then was, you know, considered the Michael Jordan of the sport. I think he made at one time three 400 grand a year, which is real money for sure. But that was Based on him working for a paintball company, and then also putting his name on products and getting, you know, $1 or $5 per product sold, so it wasn't your true essence of, Hey, I'm signing up for this team and signing a $400,000 contract. Marc Gutman 32:16 Yeah, so you're buying your own drinks pretty much every night. Yeah, that's what I'm gathering. Yeah. And so, so we can move on from Paintball in just a second. But I do have one question. Young Justin moss, the paintball pro paintball Pro. What were you known for? What was like your signature move? Or what were what was your role on the team? Justin Moss 32:35 Yeah, I was known for being very small and fast and pretty. I don't want to say crazy, but I guess a little crazy in the sense that I was what you call a front player and fun players are kind of like a running back. In football where we are sometimes sacrificed. We are running straight down the field where Moving to the most forward position as fast as we can. So there were times that what we also had a bass player for instance in the back player was sort of your on field coach and so for instance, they might say Justin or we had codes but for you know for for clarity or ease I would say Justin gota you know, the steak and I would run as fast as I could to go to the snake or one of my you know, plant one of my signature moves was to run as fast as I could out of the box which they called it you know, the the flag box at the start of the game, and try to shoot as many people as I could running as fast as I could down the field while the rest of my team came behind me. So you had players that would the opposite the opposing team would focus their guns on me, while my team would focus the guns on them and essentially You know, advanced the field and win the game pretty quickly. Marc Gutman 34:07 This episode brought to you by wild story. Wait, isn't that your company? It is. Without the generous support of wild story, this show would not be possible. A brand isn't a logo or a tagline, or even your product. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product service or company. It's what people say about you when you're not in the room. Wild story helps progressive founders and savvy marketers build purpose driven brands that connect their business goals with the customers they want to serve, so that both the business and the customer needs are met. This results in crazy, happy, loyal customers that purchase again and again. And this is great for business. If that sounds like something you and your team might want to learn more about, reach out at www dot wildstorm dot com. And we'd be happy to tell you more. Now back to our show you are you into paintball? and I'm guessing just based on some of the winnings or we're talking about, you're like, yeah, this is cool. But this probably isn't the future for me, this probably isn't gonna help me achieve my goals or be I'm not gonna be long for this world and you're, you're getting into producing music festivals and you produced your first major Music Festival at 22. That must have been that must have been a big, big moment for a young kid. Justin Moss 35:36 Yeah, it was it was you know, once again, if I if I every single emotion that a human can have in that year happened to me. But yeah, I was I was, um, you know, technically at the forefront of producing multi day, multi styles of music festivals in America. I was double by the New York Times is ahead of my time. Now obviously in America we had Woodstock and us fast and staples of the music festival world, so I would never take anything away from those guys and girls that paved the way. Um, but at that time '01-'02 our festivals in America were very jam band related. So the dead we're doing, you know, three day festivals with campaign jam band festivals were popping up with camping, but we didn't have a lot of multi day multi style festivals you had Lollapalooza, but at that time was still very much a tour. Coachella launched in 99. But it was a flop and nobody really knew who they were but they were except for on the West Coast pretty much. And so I started really kind of seeing what was going on in Europe and Asia and Europe had been at that time probably 10 maybe 15 years ahead of us in music festivals, maybe not quite 15, right 10 years ahead of us, they had some major major festivals like love fast and Leeds and reading and just big, big festivals and and so what I wanted to do and then where I got this idea was, I wanted to marry my love of producing an event and paintball and my love for paintball was how do we get paintball into the mainstream? And, you know, people had been trying to do that for years and years and years. And so what I thought of was, well, skateboarding is in the mainstream now. BMX is in the mainstream right now. Moto X is in the mainstream right now. And of course, music is in the mainstream. So let's bring them all together and have a fucking Music Festival, and so on in 2002. I launched Well, the festival actually happened in April of 2002. It was called Beyond extreme sports Music Festival. Calm I had raised a bunch of money from at that time a.com millionaire and ran remember this is in 2000, 2001 and.com millionaires were not really a huge thing. There wasn't a ton of them at the time. And we produced a festival that we had five stages over 75 artists we had Stone Temple Pilots, outcasts, ludicrous. Snoop Dogg method, man, third eye. Marc Gutman 38:38 How'd you do this? So like, you're 22 I imagine you're 21 when you're getting this thing going, maybe even younger. You get someone to give you a ton of money. And you're getting these huge I mean, like how do you pull this together? That's like crazy. Justin Moss 38:51 Yeah, well marc, we're gonna need another couple of hours. So I'll try to streamline at the best I can, but Essentially, just like in 1996, when I didn't know what I was doing producing a rave in 2000 2001 2002, I knew what I was doing producing something. But I had no idea how to produce a multi day music festival that we were trying to get 40/50/60,000 people at. And my background producing underground shows, you know, it was didn't transition very well because we were not used to producing big outdoor shows with big stages. We never booked big huge bands like at that time Stone Temple Pilots was one of the biggest rock bands in the world, you know, and so, we really cut our teeth on making a lot of mistakes, getting a lot of people in the music industry, on our side somehow and believing in what we're doing. Doing and we we bullshitted our way to making it happen. Marc Gutman 40:06 That's crazy to me. And so that went off and and was a huge success. Justin Moss 40:11 Yeah, so it was it was a success. And still to this day, it was a success in several ways, just not financially, financially, it was a flop. But as one of my agents that we worked with, and I won't mention her by name, but you know, at that time, she was an agent for a huge huge ban that we had on the lineup. And, um, you know, one of the things that she had told me was, Justin, if you never do this again, you did it. If you go to burger flipping, you produced the biggest Music Festival at the time. And, and she was right. I mean, we brought some of the biggest artists together. Tony Hawk was there doing a whole extreme sports area. We we It happened, there was thousands and thousands of people there. But we did a lot of things wrong. And because of that, we lost a lot of money. And essentially, we were going to do it again the next year. And that was sort of the business model. And it still is today that it takes two to three up to five years for a festival to become profitable, and build brand awareness. And we had always thought that and we thought that it was going to be longer because once again festivals in America were not, you know, as they weren't really a thing. And what ended up happening was our investor got into some legal trouble. We made some mistakes, and then ultimately, we just had to move on and close the company. And that's when I moved to Denver. Marc Gutman 41:52 Yeah, and then so where does your career go from there? So you, you're close the company, you're, I imagine you have a little bit of your tail between Your legs here. It didn't go the way you wanted. You just shut down what you thought was going to be your future. You moved to Denver. What next? Justin Moss 42:09 Yeah, I definitely was. I'm pretty devastated. You know, I, I that that time and still very much today. My passion is music festivals. My love is bringing people together in mass gatherings like that. And I just I had an opportunity that developed very quickly to open a paintball field in a retail paintball store here in Denver. And so I did that very quickly. Um, so I didn't transition very, I mean, to give you an idea, you know, Joe, but I have to show happened in April, April 12th, 13th, and 14th. I had moved to Denver July 4 weekend and opened my paintball field I want to say by the end of July, August, so trip Additionally, I moved very, very quickly. On the idea of moving here was, I do another business paintballs still very much my passion. I could take the time to decompress, figure out what I did wrong, figure out what I did right? And raise some money and do the festival again or create another festival. And so I started doing that and I did some shows here and there while owning the paintball field, some smaller club shows I consulted on some bigger projects as a festival consultant as festival started gaining some popularity and momentum. And I was just never able to raise capital. I was never a very good capital raiser. I happen to fall into this investor originally, um, and but my partner in the music festival His name's Todd, still very, very dear friend of mine. We had really reached out to a couple of consultants. And, you know, once again, I was still pretty green in the business world, realizing that a lot of consultants were bullshitters. But we ended up finding a consultant that, in the long run turned out to be a complete bullshit, you know, but he brought us together and created sort of this two day working session and brought these two guys in from from another digital marketing agency at the time. And we were basically creating a new music festival. You know, this was 2004 2005 and we were trying to figure out, you know, what was going to be the next big Music Festival and through that session, we had come up with a concept. But But what really happened that was really exciting was, like I said, the country Sultan ended up being, you know, not a consultant and just not a good person. But the other two guys, you know, we became very close with and ultimately, I started basically a backup they had come to me and said, Look, we do digital marketing. There's all sorts of great stuff happening. You guys know live events, you guys built something amazing and you know, still continue to produce amazing things. Let's put that together and look at this new emerging marketing strategy called experiential marketing or if you really want to get down to the roots, guerilla marketing or PR stunts, and why don't we create a new agency that focuses on experiential marketing and so I started my first experiential marketing agency in 2007, with with three other partners. Marc Gutman 45:56 and so it sounds like a great idea, you know, Let's start an experiential marketing. We love this stuff. But who are your first customers? How did you start to get customers? Like what did that look like? Were you immediately good at it? Was it a little rough in the beginning? Justin Moss 46:11 Yeah, it was. Well, let me let me start off by saying that I did not love experiential one I, I actually didn't even care for it. What I cared for was building events and building experiences. And it took me a very long time to really get an understand what experiential was and what marketing was because you got to remember, I came from the event world, I came from concerts and festivals, which was very different than marketing a product, whether it's digital or experiential, because my product was the band. My product was sometimes the brand of the festival, but mostly the band if I'm booking m&m, they're coming to see mmm and that's what I have to market and so I was very resistant, but what I loved was this opportunity to create a new music festival. And while I'm creating this new music festival, and going out and raising money or whatever it was that I was going to do to get this music festival in the ground, I was going to be able to produce things for clients. And so we we struggled with finding clients, because we were, we had great branding, we had great material, but I would say I and another partner were the only real sales guys if you will, the real guy to go out and getters and you know, the other partner was of strategist and can talk the game, but ultimately me and the other guy had to get people on the hook. And so what ended up happening which kind of turned the corner for us and it this is crazy, but I was basically at Buffalo Wild Wings and at the time, I was a card shark Meaning I handed my business card out to anybody that would take it and listen, I got a call. I don't I don't, I can't recollect the timeframe, but I basically get a call. I let's call it a few months later, and it's a gentleman and he's like, hey, it's Glenn. You know, do you remember me? And I'm like, I know. He's like, well, I'm working with Google. And I'm, we're working on the democratic national convention for 2008 in Denver. And I wanted to know, if you can, you know, come up with some ideas and whatnot. And so, long story short, we came up with some ideas, we use their ideas as well and we executed a pretty substantial activation all around a few different areas around Denver for Google and YouTube. Marc Gutman 48:59 And so that must been an amazing opportunity, an amazing break for the business. Justin Moss 49:03 Yeah, I mean, it was it was incredible. But, you know, look over the years we we ran the company until basically 2014. My one partner Todd ended up leaving and then I ended up buying out another partner. And then we did some amazing events. We won some awards, but ultimately, it just wasn't it wasn't what I loved it the way we were operating wasn't anything I enjoyed at the time, you know, once I kind of grew up into the industry, but, you know, unlike my statement earlier, I learned to love experiential marketing and I learned a lot about it and I learned to have just as much passion for experiential marketing as I did for music festivals and concerts. Because of, sort of, I guess part of it was because it was easier for me to get a brand to buy into me creating an experiential campaign for them versus me creating a festival. But at the same time, I just really love giving a voice to the consumer for the brand but also for the consumer and not talking at the consumer but talking with the consumer about a brand or about a product or service. And that's what experiential at the root is. And so I you know, today started the pineapple agency in 2014. And absolutely have never looked back. Marc Gutman 50:36 Now, let's talk about that a little bit, that angle of experiential as the voice of the consumer and that it's for the consumer, like, why is that so important? Justin Moss 50:47 Um, for several for several reasons. One, you know, if you look back at the history of marketing and advertising and then I'm not going to pretend to be a student of it, but You know, brands have guided our thoughts, a lot of the way you know, if brands want the color purple to be popular that year, they're gonna do it, you know, and they're gonna make it popular and you're inundated with it from TV to radio. You know, of course, now you have internet, you know, the small screen TV, and you can't get away with you can't get away from it. It's it's everywhere. It's, it's, and you know now, by creating experiences, by leveraging those emotional connections, you're not only giving the consumer a choice to attend those connect those experiences and those live interactions, but you're also giving them a way to promote it, and a way to promote the brand and the service and the product through social media. Through connectivity, whether it's text messaging, or, or whatever. And so, you know, now more than ever, consumers are empowered to say, you know what, this is an amazing product. This is an amazing brand. And I'm going to tell my friends about it. And oh, by the way, I was involved in this experience that was produced by the brand. But it connected me with the brand and made me feel like I was important and it wasn't about brand it was about this experience. And, you know, versus, you know, here, put a coke in your hand and love it and drink it and then go to the store and buy some because you loved it and drink it, if that makes sense. Marc Gutman 52:47 No, it makes perfect sense. And I think that's a great way that you articulated that. I mean, to me, so much of branding is that you know, especially in the modern era of branding as we've turned and we have to control Have the brand over to the consumer and in control of telling the story to the consumer, now we can influence it, we can give them some information. But ultimately, everyone is out there with their own magical storytelling device in their hands, as well as just the way they do it with their own the old fashioned way with her mouth in their minds, but they're out there telling that story to give them that platform is a great way to further the brand story and allow customers to do an authentic way. Justin Moss 53:29 Absolutely. And And, look, I'm opinionated. And those that know me know that. But I'm also you know, as I've said many times very passionate so that sometimes can clog my opinion. But with that being said, I'm a firm believer that if a brand is not at least participating in some sort of experiential campaign, and I experiential these days is a is used a lot and that could be a Anything from a PR stunt to building a better experience in your tradeshow booth for a b2b, a product launch a PR stunt. Uh, you know, it could be so many things. But I'm a believer that if you're not involved in experiential in some way, then you're gonna get left behind, you know, and you're not, you're not going to be around, you know, similar to the way the website you know, today, you know, in the 90s if you didn't have a website, it was like, yeah, you don't have a website, you know, today, could you imagine any brands larger small, not having some sort of presence on the web? It's, it - wouldn't happen. Marc Gutman 54:42 Yeah, no. And so, experiential is the new internet. Justin Moss 54:46 I mean, to a point, I mean, I guess Yes. I mean, if I'm being honest, I think that experiential is is is is just as important right now. And you know what, it's funny. You know, we're talking in April of 2020. And we're obviously in this this crazy world right now, you know, with this pandemic, and I actually have a letter that is going out in a couple of days to, you know, sort of an open letter to not just my clients but the world, in in that do not let experiences fall by the wayside. We are living right now in these last four or five weeks in a world of digital more than ever, digital live cast, digital, you know, concerts, digital marketing, whatever. But humans need experience they need interaction, and event planners, experiential marketers, live musicians, we need to come together and bring experiences back faster and more powerful than ever when this pandemic is over. Because that's the way the world is going to stay together. And come together even more through live experiences through hugging, through sharing that goose bump moment, watching the Rolling Stones on stage being at an experience for Google or Under Armour, you know, that's how we're going to come together again. Marc Gutman 56:16 Yeah. So thanks for sharing that. That's awesome. I'm fired up. I actually got some, some goosebumps just, you know, thinking about it, because it is tough. And, you know, you've mentioned this several times about how important experiences are how important it is for us to share them as a collective audience. Like, like, what do you love so much about both experiences and experiential marketing? Justin Moss 56:41 Yeah, so in layman's terms or my layman answer is, I love the smiles. I love the, the, the moments that you know you're creating for these, these people. every concert, every festival every experiential campaign, big or small that I have the ability to be at my I go on stage, I stand in the background in the corner. I watch I watch the smiles and I'm I I love it. I think that that's what I was put here to do. bring people together and make them smile. And I think from the more strategic business marketing guy that Justin is, what I love about it is that you are once again giving the voice to the consumer, but you're allowing a brand to get an ROI for dollar for dollar spend for less than they get on traditional media. On they reach KPIs. I believe faster even though they're harder to track through alignment. experience than, say, a TV commercial, but they reach their KPIs and their goals faster through a live experience. So we bridge the gap between creating smiles and moments. And for our clients because we're partners, their marketing strategy and selling their products or services ultimately, you know, so hopefully that made sense. Marc Gutman 58:29 total sense, it makes complete sense. Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate that. So, looking forward, Justin, what's what's next for you in the pineapple agency? Justin Moss 58:39 Yeah, so um, you know, luckily, during this crazy madness, we're still working on we've got some great projects in the pipeline. Some have been postponed. I'm looking, I'm expanding the agency. I'm looking to potentially add one specific vertical of adding more fabrication in house and more digital marketing in house. So that, you know, we're already doing digital marketing for every campaign we do, but maybe potentially as a standalone strategy. And then we've got a very cool unique Music Festival. That Yes, if you remember from earlier I created many, many years ago, that is even more relevant today. I am a believer that this festival could potentially change festivals forever, or at least interaction with festivals from a consumer standpoint. So I my goal is to push that really forward this year, and then who knows the world The world is the world is an amazing place. And, you know, there you know I'm just living it. I'm just living is having some fun and creating some some cool shit, you know? And that's that's what we're here for. And that's what I'm going to continue doing. Marc Gutman 1:00:07 Yeah. So Justin, that going back and thinking back to that young, a nine year old Justin, what would he say if he saw you today where you're at what you're doing? Justin Moss 1:00:18 What would he say? He would? Wow this is this is a good one Mark? I would say I would say he would, he would say, Wow, you you really you really did something great for not just yourself but but humans. You You really, you really you really took your your your passion to the to the masses and the next level and applaud plod me my team, you know. And I think the other thing it says, Wow, you made it past 21 Marc Gutman 1:01:03 And that is Justin moss of the pineapple agency on a mission to bring people together and make them smile. Thanks, Justin. You certainly brought a smile to my face. And thanks for sharing your story. Well, that's the show. Until next time, make sure to visit our website www.wildstorm.com where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Stitcher or via RSS so you'll never miss an episode. Big stories and I cannot lie to you other storytellers can't deny

BGBS 026: Laurence Spiewak | Suerte Tequila | It's Good to Be Lucky

BGBS 026: Laurence Spiewak (Suerte Tequila)

Co-founder, Laurence Spiewak, is sharing how Suerte Tequila came to be.  While it may not have been the most direct route, Laurence is happy with all the adventures his heart has led him on. Find out how a kid from Philly left the family business for occupational therapy, only to again follow his heart and build his own tequila brand.

Learn what’s possible when you follow your heart.

What we’re talking about

• The American Dream and A Call For Adventure
• How the Knowledge of Consumer Packaged Goods Led To Great Tequila
• The Tequila Challenge of The Three-Tier System

The American Dream and A Call For Adventure

Laurence Spiewak is the son of an immigrant. His father taught him what it took to be an entrepreneur and own a successful and lucrative business. While Laurence will be the first to admit he didn’t necessarily have the entrepreneurial spirit early on in life, he did embrace the call to adventure and curiosity about other cultures from a young age. Determined to follow his interests and passions at the time, he convinced the dean at Penn State University to allow him to study both international business and art with the vision of combining the two in some way. He discovered his love for ceramics and the history of deep culture rooted in the art. During this same time, he also soon became aware of many of the environmental issues around the globe and learned he could have a significant impact in the world if he took action. He took this passion for the environment and made the move to Boulder, CO for a year after college, to be exposed to the wilderness. This exposure, however, made him realize how  curious he was to explore even more of the world, and he soon set out to travel and experience Europe and other parts of the world.

He first set off to Whales to live in community and help care for those with developmental disabilities, which had a very big impact on him. After six months in Whales, Laurence traveled through Western Europe, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. These adventures significantly shaped his future. Upon returning home, and knowing he wanted a career where he helped people to have better lives, he went on to study occupational therapy and ultimately went on to run rehab departments in nursing homes in New York. His love for helping people could not quiet the calling from Boulder, Colorado pulling him back.

How the Knowledge of Consumer Packaged Goods Led To Really Good Tequila

After four years of working in nursing homes back in Colorado, Laurence was feeling some sense of burn out. He decided it was time to make a change, and reached out to a friend who had started a natural organic skin care company, asking if he could help grow this entrepreneurial endeavor.  This experience helped to solidify his familiarity with consumer packaged goods. He soon saw that he had a knack for helping entrepreneurs do business and financial planning, and began a career as a consultant.

During this time, Laurence’s friendship with an old co-worker, Lance Sokol continued to grow, bonding over a shared love of drinking and trying new Tequila. They made it their mission to try every tequila out there. Soon realizing they had tried many of the brands out there, and that the really good tequila cost a lot of money, they looked at each other and wondered if it was too crazy of an idea to start their own brand. They already were in the consumer packaged goods world, already knew how to set up products, how to source raw materials, how to create packaging and how to price things. They made a business plan in hopes their dream would become a reality. Lance soon met Pedro Hernandez Barba, a master distiller of tequila in Mexico who was looking for someone in the US to produce tequila for. The three got together and discussed their dreams and created a partnership. Laurence and Lance would act as the importer and brand, and Pedro’s family would act as supplier and distiller.

The Tequila Challenge of The Three-Tier System

Luck seemed to find Laurence, thus suerte or “luck” in Spanish, became the name of their tequila brand. While this adventure seemed to get off the ground flawlessly, there was one challenge they continued to come across. The U.S. has what’s called a Three-Tier System for alcoholic beverages. In the alcoholic beverage industry you have the suppliers, distributors and retailers. So those are the three tiers. You can’t do business on more than any one of those at a time. So a supplier can’t own a distribution business  or vice versa. But even within the distribution piece, most laws have laws that prohibit you from selling directly to customers or directly to retailers. You have to do it with a middle man distributor. Each of those distributors have business in many of the brands they represent, which makes it very competitive until you actually generate some volume. These challenges do present themselves, but Suerte Tequila seems to be doing pretty well for itself, as luck would have it.

What was the last adventure you let your heart take the lead on?

Links Mentioned

Suerte Tequilla

Suerte on Instagram

Suerte on Facebook

Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf’s Education and Anthroposophy

Crystal Ski Shop

Pangea Organics

Madhava

TTB

Sponsor

Wildstory

Timestamps

1. 40:00-40:40 (40 sec LS) But we were at Liquor Mart one night, and we were standing in front… we would start doing some business planning.
2. 41:26-42:22 (56 sec LS) And he met a master distiller in Mexico who was looking… growing a tequila brand
3. 42:58-43:56 (58 sec LS) He told us that he’d be happy to work with us… It wasn’t very difficult.
4. 45:14-46:07  (53 sec LS) I mean, we found it to be very easy… very little trouble getting set up and getting going.
5. 47:50-48:45 (55 sec LS) Suerte means luck, so it’s a great… using the name Suerte Tequila for a tequila brand.

Quotes

1. My father was truly an immigrant himself along with his two parents. He got his start in business later on after high school and, so he was truly living and fulfilling the American dream. (LS)
2. I could have a very significant impact on things in the world if I took the time and set my mind to it and actually got active and got vocal about it. (LS)
3. I had this curiosity to go and explore and to see what the world was like. (LS)
4. I want to just use the money I’ve saved and go travel and explore the world and learn about what else is out there. (LS)
5. There was a huge need in the world for people who are willing and had the patience to actually care for others. (LS)
6. My interest in entrepreneurship started really developing even more strongly at that point because I was working for and helping to run an entrepreneurial endeavor and being exposed to entrepreneurship on a daily basis. (LS)
7. It was one of the best traits that we both brought to the business into the creation of the business, which was that we had no fear, and we had no hesitation. (LS)
8. One of the most incredible parts of being an entrepreneur or starting new businesses is just that, it’s getting them started. (LS)

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BGBS 025: Alec Stern | Constant Contact | I'm Not a Quitter

BGBS 025: Alec Stern

Alec Stern was a kid from New Jersey who had a dream of moving to Boston one day. With his passion for customers and his drive to pursue the life he wanted, Alec co-founded the most well-known email software in the world, Constant Contact. He is sharing how his focus on customers, solving customer problems, and creating value for others helped propel his business to eventually sell for $1.1 billion. Alec is a founder, investor, mentor, and specializes in scaling companies. His story is one of perseverance, resilience, and the true reward of giving back.

Accomplishments are something to build on, not rest on.

What we’re talking about

• The Event That Taught Alec Stern How To Pivot In Life
• How Alec Refused To Take No For An Answer
• Alec’s Advice For All Businesses

The Event That Taught Alec Stern How To Pivot In Life

Growing up, Alec watched his mom transition from a stay-at-home mom to an entrepreneur and business owner, while his father, who was in the textile industry struggled in his ability to balance work and family. Much of Alec’s childhood and high school career revolved around athletics, specifically football and when he broke his back during his senior year of high school, the college athletic scholarships also vanished. Faced with needing to find a new identity, Alec started college as a sociology major and transitioned to business, becoming very involved in campus life. His next pivot came when he had to make the decision to take a job in business while fearing an inability to balance his future family life with work. Thanks to two mentors who were examples of being able to work while being present for their families, Alec knew it was possible to do the same.

How Alec Refused To Take No For An Answer

Alec has refused to take no for an answer more than once in his life. Upon completion of a college project with Prime Computer, Alec wanted to get hired by the company right out of college. This wasn’t something Prime Computers did and all employees hired had 5-10 years of experience and came from large companies, such as IBM and Honeywell. Alec decided to become persistent in his want and need to speak to the Senior VP of Sales and even after being told time after time that his called wouldn’t be taken, Alec opted to be placed on hold until after the Sr. VP came back from a trip to Europe. This resilience is what led him to not only get the call, get the job, but also create a recent graduate hiring program for Prime Computer. This also allowed him to live out his childhood dream of living in Boston.

Alec’s Advice For All Businesses

Alec has co-founded multiple companies, grown companies, sold companies and invests in companies and his goal for Constant Contact was a want to level the playing field for mainstream, small businesses with an easy to use self-service tool. He wanted to drive revenue for businesses instead of being an added expense and the biggest part in ensuring this happened was in delighting the customer. You don’t have to have a finished product to bring to market, but you do have to have focus on your customer and the ability to know who your target customer is. Constant Contact didn’t start with a finished product or revenue, but they had a drive and ability to generate feedback and create a useful product that their customers wanted to use. If a customer said no, Alec took that as “not right now” and would always circle back to the customer.

Are you willing to pivot when faced with a challenge?

LINKS MENTIONED

For your copy of the Pillars for Achieving Startup Success Workbook, text the word PILLARS to 59925.

G20 Ventures

SPONSOR

Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 13:55 – 14:24 (29 sec AS) – I had to sit and really think…not going to let it happen to me again.
• 37:41 – 38: 41 (60 sec AS) – Having started several companies…making sure we could deliver on that.
• 38:43 – 39:37 (54 sec AS) – First and foremost for anyone starting a business…and so we did in a lot of cases.

QUOTES

1. Accomplishments are something to build on, not rest on.
2. My normal was not what others would experience.
3. Life is too short to have it revolve around one defining moment or thing in your life, because the moment it’s taken away from you, then what?
4. We wanted to level the playing field for mainstream small businesses with an easy to use self-service tool.
5. We wanted to drive revenue for the business instead of being an expense.
6. Our mantra was to delight the customer.
7. My mantra is no means not right now.
8. Figure out what you’re going to need to keep your drive going.
9. When I say bring it out to your target customers, it’s not your friends and family, go to total strangers to get true feedback.
10. Know your target customer and their different personas within them and what the message is that will resonate with them.

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BGBS 024: Marc Gutman | Wildstory | Masterclass: How to Name or Rename a Business

BGBS EP024: Naming Master Class Episode

Today we’re talking about the funnel process of naming or renaming a business or product. A name is the first introduction to your product. The right brand name becomes an asset. It can signal differentiation and lock into the consumer’s mind instantly. The right name creates an emotion in us that triggers a buying decision. The wrong name can end up costing the business millions. It's a process that is a combination of the magical and the logical. Learn how to effectively apply this process to your business, whether you're starting fresh with a brand new name, or you’re renaming.

What we’re talking about

• What Is Your Brand Identity?
• The Brainstorming And Research Process Of Selecting A Name
• How To Choose The Best Name For Your Business
• Strategies To Select A Good URL Domain Name
• The Testing Phase For Your Business Name

What Is Your Brand Identity?

The brand gives the name meaning, while the name can also make the brand what it is. Essentially, the brand and the name go hand in hand. Neither one can do it alone. Marc Gutman, of the Baby Got Backstory podcast, starts at the beginning, which is asking the question: what kind of name do you want? What are you trying to communicate with the name? Once this is established, we can start generating anywhere from 100-500 names. These can come from any of the four categories of types of names: descriptive, image-based, abstract, and provenance. Marc also highlights what to avoid when naming a brand.

The Brainstorming And Research Process Of Selecting A Name

Coming up with a name can take as little or as much time that you’re willing to spend. Marc feels that 4 weeks is an ideal range of time because it allows you to adequately brainstorm, give the name time to breathe, and revisit with a new perspective. There are three different approaches to this process, including solo, collaborative workshop, and collaborative co-create. Wildstory specializes in these collaborative workshops. Marc breaks down these exercises that make up these workshops, step by step. The biggest challenge sometimes is choosing who will be the final “decider”. This usually is the founder with small businesses, or the CMO, owner, CEO, or someone else at a larger company. Once you have this “decider” chosen, you then build a brand team. This team should represent all departments, and be communicated within a transparent manner of how the naming process will work. It’s important to have all those involved to feel like the name represents them so that you have advocates and influencers when this name goes live.

How To Choose The Best Name For Your Business

While the name of a business does evoke emotion, Marc stresses the importance of not falling in love with a name. If there is a reason the name does not end up being used, you do not want to find yourself heart-broken. In order to remove bias, and/or unhealthy attachment, Marc has seven criteria to apply so you can ultimately ask, “Is this the right name?” Finally, it is important to realize that it's almost impossible to find the only name in the world for a particular name. As long as it’s not in the same segment or market, you are able to make it unique to your brand. For this to be achieved, Marc has put together a checklist to test your name against.

Strategies To Select A Good URL Domain Name

Far too often, many business owners will get hung up on not having their perfect URL available. This should not be a deal-breaker. You need to use some of that magical creativity and just get imaginative. It’s possible to add another word or two as a domain modifier or use the URL as a call to action. You could use a creative phrase that can reinforce your brand and aid in SEO. You could also use back-end modifiers for your domain as an alternative to .com.

The Testing Phase For Your Business Name

Once you arrive at the testing phase, you will implement high-level clearing searches to determine if there are any conflicts in your industry, such as domain, legal, etc. Start thinking about your name visually in signage, business cards, email signature, and branding merchandise. Does it look right? Start speaking it aloud, in your voicemail, commercials, and conversations. Does it sound right? Could it be potentially offensive or misleading in another language or culture if it were to be used in a global environment? These are all issues to keep in mind, however, always remember to keep the whole naming process fun. This is probably the only time you get to name an awesome business that you love. Do you believe in the magic of your name?

LINKS MENTIONED

SPONSOR

Wildstory

TIMESTAMPS

• 13:37-14:30 (53 sec MG) You know, and I always think that...Awesome, awesome name.
• 51:27- 52:19 (52 sec MG) If you're looking for other ways to generate names...and then abstract or modify it.
• 52:59-53:58 (59 sec MG) So some other frameworks that you can use to generate… mean anything and see if they fit.

QUOTES

1. All rules, under the right circumstances, are meant to be broken. Just understand what you are breaking and why and be conscious that those rules or principles are in place for a reason.
2. You never know where a great name is going to come from.
3. The biggest mistake people make in naming is not allowing themselves to enjoy the process.
4. The right brand name becomes an asset. It can signal differentiation and lock into the consumer's mind instantly.
5. The name only becomes great once the business becomes great. It doesn't matter how awesome your name is if there's no great business behind it.