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Joel Calkins: Hello, and welcome to the master in the Hustle interview series. I'm your host, Joel Caulkins, and today I'm joined by Aaron Shirts, who is a founder and principal of Mentor creative group. Aaron. Thank you so much for joining me today. Would you like to take a couple of minutes to tell us a little bit more about who you are, and a little bit more about your company.
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Aaron Shurts: Yeah, sure. Thanks. Joel.
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Aaron Shurts: Yeah. So my name's Aaron.
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Aaron Shurts: like, Joel said, I'm the owner founder of Mentor Creative Group. We're a digital agency in Seattle, Washington.
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Aaron Shurts: Just coming up on our tenth year. Anniversary.
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Aaron Shurts: So I started the company as the individual
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Aaron Shurts: sole founder doing everything. Our focus is in
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Aaron Shurts: kind of all things. Digital design. A lot of people usually say, Well, what does that mean?
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Aaron Shurts: What do you actually do so. A little bit of context of that would just be most of the we work with clients. And most of the work that we do is usually designing and building
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Aaron Shurts: websites.
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Aaron Shurts: mobile apps.
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Aaron Shurts: digital experiences
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Aaron Shurts: all things kind of interactive. And then also
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Aaron Shurts: a lot of digital marketing.
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Aaron Shurts: Naturally, when you have a client that comes to you and says, Hey, can you help me? For example, Bill design and build my e-commerce website?
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Aaron Shurts: The next question is great. You. You built this great thing for me and we launched it. Can you help me market and get people to come to it
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Aaron Shurts: or help me sell more of my products. And so
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Aaron Shurts: that's everything that we do. We design a lot of campaigns?
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Aaron Shurts: That could be
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Aaron Shurts: digital campaigns. It could be print collateral. Majority of it's digital all the way to TV commercials, you know. So everything in between is kind of where we sit. But our roots have always been started in kind of the product space. So where I what I was speaking about before about kind of experiences.
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Aaron Shurts: Yeah. So it started with me as the the kind of sole person. And then
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Aaron Shurts: grew
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Aaron Shurts: to where we have at any given moment. Around 15 to 20 people that are working for us.
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Aaron Shurts: we have kind of a core group of full time.
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Aaron Shurts: Individuals.
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Aaron Shurts: If you think of if you know anything about product
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Aaron Shurts: development. Usually there's a team involved in that
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Aaron Shurts: and so that team is usually different roles. And that's how kind of how we're structured where we have
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Aaron Shurts: designers and engineers
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Aaron Shurts: and product.
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Aaron Shurts: Managers or
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Aaron Shurts: project managers, really. And then the count side.
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Aaron Shurts: And so all those individuals are part of our core team that are full time.
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Aaron Shurts: And then
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Aaron Shurts: the way that the company was structured
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Aaron Shurts: was kind of a direct outcome of
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Aaron Shurts: some of my previous experience at larger
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Aaron Shurts: global agencies.
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Aaron Shurts: And a lot of it was what what I didn't want to do or what what I learned, that you is like kind of the bad way to do things. In my opinion.
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Aaron Shurts: because a lot of my previous
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Aaron Shurts: wife.
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Aaron Shurts: I was a creative director.
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Aaron Shurts: and it was a large agency. So there was around 150 just at one location. Again, it was a global agency, but just a single location in Seattle
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Aaron Shurts: 150.
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Aaron Shurts: That's a lot of people to make sure that you've got that are billable and make sure that they're on projects and utilized. And so a lot of what was happening there was I was going in my last 6 months, 9 months project to project and triaging, you know. Why is this.
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Aaron Shurts: What's why is this having issues? What's the the problem here?
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Aaron Shurts: And a lot of that had to do less about the client and the project. It was about the people.
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Aaron Shurts: and it was about how it was staffed, and a lot of what was happening was
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Aaron Shurts: new project would come in, and it would be staffed by people that were not on a project, so they weren't being billed.
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Aaron Shurts: and so didn't matter
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Aaron Shurts: what their level of experience was
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Aaron Shurts: like. If they're super junior, or if they've got years of experience or their experience within that subject, matter and space.
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Aaron Shurts: it was they're available. Put them on this because we have to get them billable.
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Aaron Shurts: And so that was creating all kinds of problems. It was like, Oh, this person hates this person that they're on this project with, or they have this political issue with this this client that they're working for, and they don't believe in what they're doing kind of the whole myriad of things, but it all had to do with
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Aaron Shurts: how it was staffed. And so I thought, you know, there's there's got to be a better way to do this. I don't want to do that.
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Aaron Shurts: If I'm gonna start my own company.
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Aaron Shurts: And so that was kind of how it how it all began
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Aaron Shurts: and that's how we do it today. So you know, we have a kind of our core group. And then we have
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Aaron Shurts: the larger network of people that are contractors, freelancers, agency partners, specialists
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Aaron Shurts: in certain areas.
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Aaron Shurts: So that way, we can be kind of true consultants and a agnostic to how we approach solutions for clients.
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Aaron Shurts: Because a lot of times with our business clients will come to us and say, Hey.
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Aaron Shurts: here's the problem that we're trying to solve. But we don't know what the solution to that problem is. And
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Aaron Shurts: there's kind of 2 ways to approach that you have the standard business model, where you may be
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Aaron Shurts: the platform shop. And you say, Hey, I'm going to sell you this product.
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Aaron Shurts: and we're going to try to make this product
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Aaron Shurts: fit into the thing that you have a problem with. Let's make it solve that
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Aaron Shurts: or you have the camp that we sit on, which is, we're we're not that.
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Aaron Shurts: And we actually are. Just gonna try to hear what your your needs are.
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Aaron Shurts: and then try to
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Aaron Shurts: come up with the solution or possible solutions that could potentially work for you
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Aaron Shurts: and then
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Aaron Shurts: help implement those. And so neither of those are really wrong. They're just kind of 2 different ways to go about it. And that's what we that was what we've done and kind of. That's how we do it today.
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Joel Calkins: That's awesome. So yeah, as you started your your new company, you mentioned a couple of things that stuck out to me the first in terms of, you know, starting with the the problem, understanding the problem and then building the right solution
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Joel Calkins: and doing that with a cross functional team. So you got your your product to project manager, your designer, your
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Joel Calkins: developers.
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Joel Calkins: Can you give me an example of a time or a time? You were particularly proud
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Joel Calkins: of what you created, or what you solve for
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Joel Calkins: for a particular client.
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Aaron Shurts: There's always different stories that can be told. You know, about all the different things that we do. I would say that this one's
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Aaron Shurts: kind of fun. So, and I can talk
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Aaron Shurts: openly about it.
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Aaron Shurts: Northwest brand. They're smaller. It's not a I mean, we work with a lot of enterprise companies.
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Aaron Shurts: Lot of those stories I can't really tell, you know. So
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Aaron Shurts: otherwise I would just be taking talking in generalities. Which isn't that interesting to listen to. But
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Aaron Shurts: the one company here locally is called Zeke's Pizza.
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Aaron Shurts: other Northwest Brand. They've been around
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Aaron Shurts: since the grunge day era of, you know, early days of grunge in Seattle. And so
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Aaron Shurts: it was a
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Aaron Shurts: they're a client that came during Covid.
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Aaron Shurts: which was also kind of why, part of why, it's something we're proud of is because during that time.
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Aaron Shurts: you know, we lost
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Aaron Shurts: 90% of our business in a week. When Covid hit
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Aaron Shurts: almost had to shut the doors completely.
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Aaron Shurts: And a lot of that was because, you know, we do so much work our our. We're kind of
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Aaron Shurts: agnostic in terms of
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Aaron Shurts: sector.
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Aaron Shurts: And you know who we go after who we sell to.
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Aaron Shurts: But we have a lot of experience in the e-commerce and retail space.
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Aaron Shurts: It. Once you get experience in one area, clients naturally come to you because you have that experience. Right? So that's that's kind of where I came from and how we built things, and
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Aaron Shurts: So
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Aaron Shurts: Covid happened, lost a ton of business retail closed down, and then, you know, things kind of came alive again.
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Aaron Shurts: But during the the shutdown everyone was trying to figure out.
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Aaron Shurts: how are we going to sell?
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Aaron Shurts: What are we gonna do now?
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Aaron Shurts: And there was a
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Aaron Shurts: a panel
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Aaron Shurts: for Puget Sound business journal.
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Aaron Shurts: and Zeke's.
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Aaron Shurts: One of the founders was on that panel, and it just so happened that
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Aaron Shurts: one of my team members who's on the sales team with me
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Aaron Shurts: was on that
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Aaron Shurts: on that call kind of just on the zoom call, listening in kind of hearing what they had to say. Well, how are they dealing with the pandemic? What are they doing?
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Aaron Shurts: And a lot of what they talked about was how they were really struggling with
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Aaron Shurts: how to go digital.
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Aaron Shurts: because everything that they'd done so for, you know, and historically.
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Aaron Shurts: Was very traditional, very like pen to paper.
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Aaron Shurts: I mean, they had. You know it systems because you you have to have point of sales and things like that to run restaurants right? But it was still very archaic, and how they were approaching it, and a lot of what they wanted to do
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Aaron Shurts: was change the organization so that way they could
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Aaron Shurts: get away from having to have have large
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Aaron Shurts: head count and staff because they couldn't anymore, because everything was shut down to move to digital so that people could be self serve right. And so we're listening to that
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Aaron Shurts: and and kind of hearing. Well, we feel like we could help them.
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Aaron Shurts: And my colleague, her name is Britt. She reached out to them directly.
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Aaron Shurts: and she kind of prides herself in her emails, to people like really thinking, listening about what what their needs are and kind of what I was talking about before, like, how can we actually help them?
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Aaron Shurts: And you know, coming from an event like that.
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Aaron Shurts: they even said it themselves. They had like 50 emails that came from that of people being like, Hey, we want to work with you.
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Aaron Shurts: And what she kind of said to them
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Aaron Shurts: resonated and stood out to them. So that's how we got a call
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Aaron Shurts: and had a meeting with them
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Aaron Shurts: that turned into
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Aaron Shurts: redesigning and rebuilding, re-platforming their website.
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Aaron Shurts: And a lot of times this is what happens like we. We do one thing for a client, and then they they trust us.
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Aaron Shurts: and then they want us to help them with the next thing, and then the next thing. And that's exactly what happened.
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Aaron Shurts: We did that first, and then it became, hey? Can you help us with
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Aaron Shurts: our point of sales solution, because what we have now.
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Aaron Shurts: you know, is is so outdated we can't really do a lot of the things that we want to do
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Aaron Shurts: And so we need to. We know we need to switch that.
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Aaron Shurts: But we don't necessarily trust ourselves to make that decision completely.
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Aaron Shurts: because that's not our our background. Right? So we help them with that just talking to vendors and auditing. And
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Aaron Shurts: I'm going through a whole sort of Rfp process. I guess if you want to call it that, even though it was more discovery
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Aaron Shurts: and then giving our recommendations and working with them on that, and then they implemented it. They switched everything over and kind of we helped them along the way
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Aaron Shurts: which then led to
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Aaron Shurts: hey? Now, now, can you help us with our internal.
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Aaron Shurts: IT systems.
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Aaron Shurts: I mean, we're not an It company, right? But we have so many partners and people we've worked with in the past that that are like we sit so adjacent to that integrate with all those systems.
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Aaron Shurts: And we've had to build those and architect this systems before. It was like, sure we can. First, we gotta figure out what you even have.
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Aaron Shurts: So we ended up, you know, having people in physical stores going through every single store location.
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Aaron Shurts: trying to map out how everything had been set up for them because they didn't know
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Aaron Shurts: and their it support. The people that were there originally aren't on staff anymore, because everybody left during Covid right?
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Aaron Shurts: And so then that happened. And
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Aaron Shurts: you know, it's now we're moving into more of the marketing space for them. Right? So it's like a continued relationship that
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Aaron Shurts: we don't do. It's not like
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Aaron Shurts: it's our highest
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Aaron Shurts: grossing
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Aaron Shurts: client we've ever had. But it's
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Aaron Shurts: someone that we love working with.
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Aaron Shurts: I've had them out on the the boat with me fishing, you know. It's like someone that every time you see them. It's a pleasant conversation. Everyone enjoys working with them.
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Aaron Shurts: And you know we we hear great feedback, and they trust us. And that's what's the most important thing. Obviously, we have to stay in business. Right? You gotta make money.
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Aaron Shurts: Keep your head a lot head of flow. But
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Aaron Shurts: Do you work on how to work with people that
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Aaron Shurts: that are fun to be around
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Aaron Shurts: and you enjoy. And that's one of those
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Aaron Shurts: those clients that I think we're we're all pretty proud of.
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Joel Calkins: I like what you said there about, you know, building that trust, and that is clear.
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Joel Calkins: you know, starting from what it sounds like helping them with their website
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Joel Calkins: to the department of sale to some of the it. And now the marketing, you've been able to grow that
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Joel Calkins: that relationship with them because you've been able to show that you're solving their problems in very real ways, probably tangible ways
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Joel Calkins: that you know meets their needs. And so I think it's really important for people that are either watching this or listening to this.
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Joel Calkins: to understand, like
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Joel Calkins: under starting with the problem first, that's the kind of result
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Joel Calkins: that you could get
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Joel Calkins: so if you'd humor me just for a bit you, you talk about the design of things, and it sounds like you do design web design. Obviously a point of sales system is also an experience. Right? It's it's also
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Joel Calkins: the digital meeting, the the physical world. How do you navigate, or what are your preferred? I guess methods or processes to navigate those challenges.
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Aaron Shurts: just as far as as as how to design for them. You mean.
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Joel Calkins: Yeah, like, how do you start with that problem and then flush it out and test solutions and then get.
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Aaron Shurts: Yeah, yeah, that's great.
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Aaron Shurts: I mean, a lot of that has to do with the design process. Which
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Aaron Shurts: is kind of a framework
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Aaron Shurts: that anybody can use. We've been talking a lot about that. In fact, we're we're working on a presentation that we can go and and give to to businesses
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Aaron Shurts: and at the Enterprise level. Say, here's how you can take that design process and apply that to any business decision that you may have.
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Aaron Shurts: A lot of people. They find out what we do. And they're like, oh, well, I'm not a creative. I could never do any of that.
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Aaron Shurts: And it's like, yeah. But the process to get there is not like voodoo magic.
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Aaron Shurts: Right? There's there's a logic to all of this that anybody can use
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Aaron Shurts: to get from this unknown space
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Aaron Shurts: to an answer.
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Aaron Shurts: The difference between.
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Aaron Shurts: you know, a creative and a business person.
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Aaron Shurts: The only real difference is kind of how we use our brains and how we think about things. But
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Aaron Shurts: the methods the same. So a lot of what we do is kind of using that structure. And the structure is is
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Aaron Shurts: pretty standard. You know. A problem
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Aaron Shurts: is given to us.
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Aaron Shurts: And first thing you do is you research that right? You talk to the person you find out as much information as you can about that.
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Aaron Shurts: A lot of that is just the why behind things right? Just come asking you those questions. They may give you an answer. And it's like, okay. Well, why do you think that?
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Aaron Shurts: So the more you dig and investigate
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Aaron Shurts: the more information you have to then go and research further for yourself.
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Aaron Shurts: And so a lot of that starts with stakeholder research.
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Aaron Shurts: and we conduct our own. And then we talk to users like they're gonna be the ones that you know, if it's a consumer that's target market target audience.
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Aaron Shurts: an end user, anyone that would be within the space of kind of who's going to be
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Aaron Shurts: consuming this
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Aaron Shurts: is who it makes sense to speak to
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Aaron Shurts: because they're the ones that are going to give you the true answer.
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Aaron Shurts: And he asked those questions in a way that's unbiased when as much as you can. So that way.
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Aaron Shurts: they're not telling you what
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Aaron Shurts: you they think you want to hear and then also, they're not just
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Aaron Shurts: saying things that they think they want
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Aaron Shurts: right. Because if you ask somebody.
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Aaron Shurts: you know, if you could have any car you want.
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Aaron Shurts: They're gonna give you something that like shoots, laser beams and flies through the air right? And that's that's
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Aaron Shurts: it's way, too open-ended.
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Aaron Shurts: So a lot of this, you know, we spend a lot of time.
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Aaron Shurts: With what kinds of questions are we asking?
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Aaron Shurts: why are we asking, what are you trying to get what's the goal from that? Once we have all that information, a lot of times
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Aaron Shurts: the answers start presenting themselves from a design perspective
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Aaron Shurts: before we've ever have to sit down with pen to paper. Right? You you you start hearing kind of the common theme that's running amongst people. It may be, they may be saying.
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Aaron Shurts: we all value
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Aaron Shurts: the imagery that's being shown, for whatever it is you're talking about like that might be thumb something that people it keeps keeps coming up right. And it's the the blue blazer versus the pink one, right? And everyone loves that
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Aaron Shurts: that answers your design. Hierarchy is what we would call that. If everyone loves that, then that's the first thing you should be showing right. And it's the largest thing you should be showing
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Aaron Shurts: it's like logical solutioning. Right?
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Aaron Shurts: And so that same process.
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Aaron Shurts: it doesn't matter
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Aaron Shurts: what you're applying it to. If you're talking about deploying a sales system. Right? You're still doing the same thing. You're still asking those same questions, still trying to talk to users and find out what's important to them. What's important to the business. Take all those requirements.
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Aaron Shurts: and then use those to
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Aaron Shurts: to kind of stack, rank, everything right? What's the most important thing?
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Aaron Shurts: And what's the least important. And once you have that you can use that to, you know, base all of your decisions off of
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Aaron Shurts: from there. That's where kind of the the
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Aaron Shurts: as a designer. Your creative kind of
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Aaron Shurts: experience comes in.
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Aaron Shurts: A lot of that is just looking at what's been done before, because kind of everything has been at this point.
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Aaron Shurts: But it's using all that inspiration.
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Aaron Shurts: To then help solve the problem that you have at hand.
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Aaron Shurts: yeah. So I mean, that's how we go about it. That's generally the same process that everyone go uses.
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Aaron Shurts: You get to the point where you finally do have something that is tangible for someone to see and react to and then you put that in front of people and get their feedback, and then you iterate on it.
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Aaron Shurts: And that's the same way with with software, the same way with architecting a solution. You you build it and you test it. There's been so much focus on
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Aaron Shurts: kind of an agile process within the last 15 years.
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Aaron Shurts: I mean, that's why. Right then, in order to move fast.
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Aaron Shurts: You have to be willing to sacrifice perfection in order to get something out there and learn from it.
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Aaron Shurts: And so I think that's where a lot of larger enterprise companies fall down a lot of times is
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Aaron Shurts: they spend so much time getting a product to market. By the time it's actually out there.
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Aaron Shurts: You have
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Aaron Shurts: startups that have come in and done that, you know, 2 years ago.
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Joel Calkins: Red, right.
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Aaron Shurts: Even though it was on their roadmap 2 years ago, took the start up 6 months to get there. It took them 2 years to get there right.
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Joel Calkins: Absolutely, and it doesn't matter how much thinking you put into it
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Joel Calkins: until it hits
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Joel Calkins: the market until people actually can use it. You really don't know what you've got, how effective it is. And so.
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Aaron Shurts: Exactly.
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Joel Calkins: Yeah. Getting it sooner than later is gonna give you way. More information
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Joel Calkins: ultimately get you time to money
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Joel Calkins: faster than you would otherwise. And so
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Joel Calkins: no, that's a good word.
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Joel Calkins: So, Aaron, I want to talk a little bit about your journey as a as a business owner. Entrepreneur like you said that you were
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Joel Calkins: with a global agency, I think, is what you said prior to starting up the the Mentor creative group.
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Joel Calkins: As you made that shift.
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Joel Calkins: What were maybe some of the things you learned as an owner that you didn't realize were going to be important.
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Joel Calkins: Before you got into it.
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Aaron Shurts: Yeah, I mean, I saw that question come through that you you
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Aaron Shurts: sent over to me earlier, and
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Aaron Shurts: I've just been thinking about a lot about that one. And it's kind of hard to answer, because it's like, you never realize a business owner.
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Aaron Shurts: You don't know what's gonna happen.
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Aaron Shurts: You know your business. You know how to run it. But what you don't know is
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Aaron Shurts: that a global pandemic is going to hit.
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Aaron Shurts: You don't know that you're gonna get sued.
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Aaron Shurts: You don't know that your business partner in in my case I had one in the early days, and
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Aaron Shurts: That person decided to leave the company and literally vanished for for a year. No one could find them.
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Aaron Shurts: That person.
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Aaron Shurts: So you know you you there's just things that happen that you can't predict right? And I think that's the the harder part. When asked that question, it's like.
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Aaron Shurts: what are some of the things that. You know.
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Aaron Shurts: you didn't realize we're gonna be important. And it's like, well.
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Aaron Shurts: things that you do know are that are important are the same things that are always important. Right? It's the people are super important.
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Aaron Shurts: How you manage your finances and your capital is super important.
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Aaron Shurts: taking risks. Calculated risks is important
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Aaron Shurts: for a while.
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Aaron Shurts: and I still feel like this to a certain extent. But
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Aaron Shurts: in the early days of the business it felt like I was taking a gamble almost every single day. Right? It was like.
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Aaron Shurts: if I do this.
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Aaron Shurts: what will happen right if I make this one decision? Is the company gonna stay alive
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Aaron Shurts: or
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Aaron Shurts: or not.
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Joel Calkins: Yeah.
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Aaron Shurts: And so.
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Aaron Shurts: you know, when you're at that point, it's a tough place to be.
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Aaron Shurts: It can be kind of fun especially if you have a good, a high propensity for risk. I do not so
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Aaron Shurts: so that it was a challenge. So you know a lot of overthinking a lot of late nights waking up kind of having freak outs in the middle of the night.
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Aaron Shurts: Of what am I doing? I can't believe I just said yes to this thing that could cost the company, you know
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Aaron Shurts: a hundred $1,000, or whatever it may be.
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Aaron Shurts: But yeah, I mean, those are some of the the things that come to mind. You can never really account for the ups and downs. But
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Aaron Shurts: The important thing that I've found is trying to build kind of that network of other business owners that you can go to
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Aaron Shurts: and have conversations that
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Aaron Shurts: your team doesn't understand. But they're never gonna understand what you're going through as a business owner, because you can't you? You can't really, even if they knew
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Aaron Shurts: everything behind the scenes.
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Aaron Shurts: they're still not gonna understand, because they're not the owner of the company.
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Aaron Shurts: right? And so
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Aaron Shurts: having a network of other business owners and kind of what you're doing even is is super important because you have somebody that I mean, I just got off a call before this a couple of hours ago.
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Aaron Shurts: and that same network was like, Hey, I'm having an Hr issue at at my company. Can you guys just have a quick call? And we can talk about this because I want to hear what
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Aaron Shurts: has happened.
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Aaron Shurts: what you guys have to say about it, what you would do.
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Aaron Shurts: And
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Aaron Shurts: you know those are those are great
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Aaron Shurts: networks to have. It just so happened that
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Aaron Shurts: a lot of my
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Aaron Shurts: relationships and contacts. One of them kind of referred me to
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Aaron Shurts: a global organization called entrepreneurs entrepreneurs organization. Eo.
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Aaron Shurts: that is a global group.
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Aaron Shurts: If you're a company, a business owner of a certain size.
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Aaron Shurts: you can join that
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Aaron Shurts: and then, all of a sudden, you're in a chapter group like I'm here are the Seattle chapter.
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Aaron Shurts: and you are then part of a smaller group.
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Aaron Shurts: and you get to know those people really well. You have real candid conversations with them about about your business, about their business.
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Aaron Shurts: And it's super helpful. And that's just there's many of them that are the groups that are like that that are out there.
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Aaron Shurts: But you know a lot of that.
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Aaron Shurts: I started out doing just
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Aaron Shurts: having other agency friends, you know, get together and we bitch about stuff. We talk about the same things, you know, but
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Aaron Shurts: even with that you can. I can still call those people up and be like, hey, here's the the thing that I'm have you ever had this issue before. You know, what would you do?
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Aaron Shurts: Because, you know, if you're questioned, you, just you just can't
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Aaron Shurts: predict
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Aaron Shurts: what's going to be easy, and what's going to be hard, and some of the things that you think are going to be easy are super hard.
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Aaron Shurts: you know.
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Joel Calkins: Fully.
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Joel Calkins: And and so you you hit on a an interesting theme, which is, you know, for any business owner, any business leader. Anybody that's taking risk is that ability to stay resilient because tough ends are gonna happen right? You're gonna have
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Joel Calkins: issues where maybe you do make a decision that didn't go your way, or you like. In your case.
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Joel Calkins: You had a partner who stepped out of the business and you had to figure out what you're gonna do
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Joel Calkins: but I like what you said about having people around you in those times to kind of help you
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Joel Calkins: think through you through those issues. It's probably a good reminder that you're not alone, or you don't have to be alone in this
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Joel Calkins: so that's a very good call out. So, Aaron. I based again on that theme you know you mentioned. You know there's times when you know something will wake you up in the middle of the night. So
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Joel Calkins: where you're at right now, being almost 10 years into this company, what are the challenges that you face today? What are those things that kind of keep you up at night.
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Aaron Shurts: Yeah, great question. A lot of the time. A lot of the challenges are kind of still the same. I mean the biggest thing that that has been hard for us.
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Aaron Shurts: and it's always a challenge is growth
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Aaron Shurts: like we, the goal of the company
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Aaron Shurts: we have. We have some lofty goals, I mean, one of our our goals
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Aaron Shurts: is to be
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Aaron Shurts: the best design.
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Aaron Shurts: Firm
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Aaron Shurts: of our size in the country.
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Aaron Shurts: And so when you set a lofty goal like that. There's going to be challenges
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Aaron Shurts: associated with it.
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Aaron Shurts: But part of the reason that we set that goal is is to help us in growing the company.
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Aaron Shurts: We've tried multiple times. We've hovered around the same size for
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Aaron Shurts: gosh
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Aaron Shurts: 6 or 7 years out of the 10
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Aaron Shurts: and we haven't quite figured out how to get over that hurdle. We've tried a couple of times different things, different methods. We've
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Aaron Shurts: opened. We opened a
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Aaron Shurts: another
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Aaron Shurts: location
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Aaron Shurts: down in Dallas 2 days before the world shut down.
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Aaron Shurts: You know, we never knew that that was gonna happen right
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Aaron Shurts: And so
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Aaron Shurts: by the time we got to the point where we were cash flow positive on that
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Aaron Shurts: we lost the person that we'd hired down there, and we were so exhausted it was like, we have to just focus on staying alive here in Seattle right?
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Aaron Shurts: and we've tried to to to build team, I think.
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Aaron Shurts: where we're at now is
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Aaron Shurts: settling more into our slow growth and being okay with that, I think that's been a challenge
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Aaron Shurts: as a business owner, especially if you have kind of lofty goals it it it's very much a 2 steps or one step forward, and like 5 steps backwards kind of approach. And it's I think it's part of being a business owner unless you get Super lucky
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Aaron Shurts: right? And you're in the right place the right time.
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Aaron Shurts: You've got the thing that almost nobody else has, and you can explode from that.
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Aaron Shurts: Being a consultancy is totally different than a product company
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Aaron Shurts: don't have investors, everything that we
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Aaron Shurts: all the revenue we have
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Aaron Shurts: comes from the work that we do with clients.
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Aaron Shurts: and we've never taken on outside investment.
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Aaron Shurts: And so
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Aaron Shurts: that has, Matt.
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Aaron Shurts: that you do have to grow slowly.
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Aaron Shurts: But we're also pretty conservative and how we manage the business. So we've in our history. We've never had to lay a person off, even through Covid
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Aaron Shurts: Super, proud of that.
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Joel Calkins: Yeah.
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Aaron Shurts: Got really close
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Aaron Shurts: can't tell you how close we were. But
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Aaron Shurts: but yeah, we've never had a laying one off. Obviously people have come and gone. For other reasons.
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Aaron Shurts: And
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Aaron Shurts: we do our best to, you know. Give back to our employees and make sure that everyone's taken care of.
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Aaron Shurts: and in a small company you can be pretty flexible
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Aaron Shurts: with how you do things. And that that's can be another challenge, you know.
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Aaron Shurts: as the economy kind of
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Aaron Shurts: the highs and lows of the economy happen.
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Aaron Shurts: we feel that especially in a tech city like Seattle.
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Aaron Shurts: where, when
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Aaron Shurts: tech is booming.
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Aaron Shurts: All of the talent is getting sucked up by
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Aaron Shurts: the largest
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Aaron Shurts: companies that are out there, and it just so happens we have some of the largest ones in the world right here. Right? And so with that
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Aaron Shurts: salaries Skyrocket.
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Aaron Shurts: As an agency of our size, we can't compete with that.
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Aaron Shurts: And so that that becomes a challenge on the resource side.
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Aaron Shurts: So how do you keep people
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Aaron Shurts: when they've got recruiters beating down their door, offering like a hundred k. Over what they're making here. Right?
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Aaron Shurts: And so for us the company culture is super important.
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Aaron Shurts: and what I mean by that is
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Aaron Shurts: giving people flexibility.
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Aaron Shurts: To take care of themselves, to work the way they need to
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Aaron Shurts: to get their work done, to trust them
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Aaron Shurts: to get their work done, and when when they, when they don't
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Aaron Shurts: have a candid conversation with them.
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Aaron Shurts: know that if there is one person
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Aaron Shurts: that you know
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Aaron Shurts: isn't following through or doing what they need to do. It's impacting everyone because we're a small team.
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Aaron Shurts: we
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Aaron Shurts: take a company retreat every year, get out of here and go work on our goals for the upcoming year. This year we we took the whole team to Whistler.
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Aaron Shurts: and, you know, had a great time worked on
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Aaron Shurts: work things for a while, and then went and had fun on the slopes, you know. So like we try to do things like that, too.
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Aaron Shurts: We
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Aaron Shurts: we are a hybrid kind of team right now. So
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Aaron Shurts: 3 days in office, 2 days out of office. I'm in the office right now.
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Aaron Shurts: And we've been that way
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Aaron Shurts: for ever since
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Aaron Shurts: we kind of came back from.
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Aaron Shurts: you know the lockdown
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Aaron Shurts: for better or worse. You know a lot a lot of people didn't want to come back.
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Aaron Shurts: But we we felt like
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Aaron Shurts: it was so important to have collaboration
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Aaron Shurts: as a creative team.
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Aaron Shurts: Because it's so much easier to have multiple minds together in a room, looking at something and thinking about a solution and bouncing ideas off each other versus over a zoom call and trying to manage that through a screen.
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Aaron Shurts: And so we've we went that route. That meant a lot of change. I know you kind of had a question around adaptability and and how you manage that, and how you'd be successful and adapt over time. And
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Aaron Shurts: that's been one of the big challenges is just
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Aaron Shurts: how do we
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Aaron Shurts: manage the team dynamic
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Aaron Shurts: going forward? When you know so many people have gone remote, gotten rid of offices?
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Aaron Shurts: And we've kind of kept ours. But that meant that.
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Aaron Shurts: you know, in our old office we had 3 people.
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Aaron Shurts: 4 people ever in the office at a time, and we had all this square footage. And it was like.
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Aaron Shurts: Why are we even here, you know, so downsizing and finding a space that makes sense for the team and figuring that out.
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Aaron Shurts: That was a challenge that that wasn't until recent that we finally figured it out after moving 2 times, you know. So
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Aaron Shurts: so those those kind of things.
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Aaron Shurts: yeah.
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Aaron Shurts: nice.
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Joel Calkins: So I got one more question for you. Erin. What's next? What's next for the Mentor creative group.
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Aaron Shurts: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, we'd like to. I'd love to double the head, count
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Aaron Shurts: and grow
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Aaron Shurts: mainly.
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Aaron Shurts: I mean, obviously.
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Aaron Shurts: sustainability is always an issue at at a
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Aaron Shurts: an agency right? We have in flow with
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Aaron Shurts: the work that comes in and goes out.
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Aaron Shurts: and the economy affects that a great deal.
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Aaron Shurts: because if
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Aaron Shurts: if businesses are pulling back.
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Aaron Shurts: then they're not hiring us right?
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Aaron Shurts: and so
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Aaron Shurts: you know, I would love to get to the point where
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Aaron Shurts: we have
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Aaron Shurts: a larger team.
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Aaron Shurts: potentially a couple locations.
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Aaron Shurts: That's we've we've been working toward for the last 5 years.
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Aaron Shurts: Just continue to grow the the different client relationships that we have.
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Aaron Shurts: We do great work.
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Aaron Shurts: and it's not.
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Aaron Shurts: That's not the issue. It's more you know, we're competing with
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Aaron Shurts: a lot of other
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Aaron Shurts: agencies and firms, and even individuals.
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Aaron Shurts: you know, for work.
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Aaron Shurts: So that's a challenge.
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Aaron Shurts: We've looked at a lot of different things, you know? Do we grow slowly over time? Do we merge with someone else? What does that mean? We've been approached a few different times around.
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Aaron Shurts: An acquisition, you know. So
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Aaron Shurts: you know, those things are always
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Aaron Shurts: interesting to us, but we haven't taken leap yet, because it has to be, you know, a good scenario for everyone, as I said before, like our people are really important to us.
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Aaron Shurts: and so anything that we do impacts them.
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Aaron Shurts: Whether that's hiring more people here to grow the team or elsewhere to grow the team or
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Aaron Shurts: partnering with with another firm right?
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Aaron Shurts: So it's kinda hard to say. But you know we still have our sites on on.
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Aaron Shurts: you know, continuing to, to, to do great work.
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Aaron Shurts: Make sure, like, I said, that
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Aaron Shurts: we are known nationally for the work that we do
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Aaron Shurts: and that we continue
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Aaron Shurts: focusing on the culture that we have.
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Joel Calkins: That's awesome.
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Joel Calkins: Aaron. Thank you so much for your time. I do appreciate it. I've been talking with Aaron Shirts, who is the founder principle of the Mentor creative group again. Thank you so much. I will be excited to see where you end up.
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Aaron Shurts: Yeah, great thanks. Thanks for the time.
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Joel Calkins: Yeah, absolutely.
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Aaron Shurts: As a pleasure.
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Aaron Shurts: Alright! Take care!
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Joel Calkins: You too.
