#3 :: Speeding Up to Get Through and Improve, with Aaron Keller - Capsule

During 2020, some have slowed down while others have sped up and actually improved the way they do things. One such example is Capsule, a Minnesota-based creative shop that builds intellectual property for high profile clients all over the world. Hear from cofounder and managing principal, Aaron Keller on how trust is critical, how the pandemic actually made him feel closer to people and what NASCAR can teach us about working with catastrophe.

Capsule: http://capsule.us/ 

Recorded on 10.27.2020

TRANSCRIPT

[Music & Intro]

Laurie Pillow: Welcome to the 100 CEO Project Podcast

Andrea Spirov: We're talking with Aaron Keller today, an author and the co-founder and managing principal of Capsule, an award-winning special projects marketing firm founded in 1999 and based in Minneapolis. Capsule is focused on identity, naming, visual and messaging elements for clients like Stahl, Patagonia, Herman Miller, Smartwool, Target, 3M, Caribou Coffee, and many others. Aaron, thanks for being here. 

Aaron Keller: Thanks for having me.

AS: So in your 2016 book, The Physics of Brand, Understand the Forces Behind Brands That Matter, you and your co-authors argue that time is the most dear human resource because we all die. So smart brands work hard to save people time and allow them to enjoy time. So I'm wondering how you relate the concept of time and silver linings during this crazy time we've had in 2020.

AK: Yeah, so what's interesting is that this year, we actually have more time, most people would have more time, right, because they’re not commuting and other things. And they also don't have activities they can do. So you can't go out to concerts and events and places. So you can't be as busy with your time or have your time filled with the traditional stuff. So you almost have to find new things to do. And I naturally, as an optimist, I've, you know, in business being an optimist, you have to constantly look to the horizon and try to find new things that are positive that are happening. One of the things that we've done is spend more time, having our staff get more educated, smarter about what to do, by adding new tools and methods and ways of working, that save us time and save our clients time. And use the efficiencies of the digital platforms that we have available to us. And it transforms different parts of our business in a really positive way. And we also, that initial time, when we went deep into COVID, we spent a lot of time building up our, our runway for events, for future potential clients, and, and really rethinking pieces of our business. So using that extra time as much as we possibly could, mainly because we trusted our team to go out and do what they needed to do. No one's going to be in their seat. You can't overlook whether or not someone’s doing their job. So you just have to trust and engage them with things that get them excited about the future, not afraid of or basically complaining and not doing anything at all. So we did that. We got people excited about what we could be coming out of this.

3:25

AS: Do you feel like you had that trust before going in? Or was this something that surprised you or that you cultivated during the time?

AK: I didn't realize we had it. It was, you know, it's a two way street. Trust is, right. Employees trusted us and we trusted employees. They trusted that we had their back and we were going to do everything we could to keep the entire team together, which we did. And then we trusted them and that they were going to put forth every bit of energy and their capabilities to perform for clients and do great work. And they did. Now, you know, I'm certain that someone actually, somebody once said, you know, when they have something spinning on their computer that they have to download from the server or something happening, they go over to do laundry, of course, in the middle of the day. You can't do that when you're in the office. But that's just a better use of their time. I think it’s great. Because it's blurring the lines between ones work and ones personal time and personal life. And we're in the business of creating intellectual property for clients. So it's hard to blur the line when your brain is not working. Right. Try to shut your brain down. Try not to think about something, especially a really interesting complex problem that’s put in front of you, it's almost impossible to turn that off. So if you hire the right people that are very much engaged and want to do what they do, they're going to be working on it. Right? Their brains are going to be working on it - you can't bill that time. But we're project based, and it's not a big deal. To me, well, I thought of your idea in the shower, so we bill our shower. But then, you know, we're constantly in the sense of it working. Their brains are working. So there are times when, of course, you have to actually work on a computer to make your idea come to life in real form, digital form, printing physical form, but our team has done that. They’ve deliberately delivered on stuff that's fast and impressive. 

We had a, we were walking into the pandemic with a client, that's Chinese-owned, but they're out of Canada. We were doing a research project, we did this research in store. So inside of retail environments. So as you can imagine that shut down. But it was right at the stage, literally, we were, the team was about to fly to China. And in two weeks, we were going to go and we got shut down as far as we're not going. No one can travel to China, from China. And so as much as the team immediately said, No, we're going to find another way. We said, well, maybe we shouldn't find another way, maybe. Let's figure out another way to do research, which we did. Or they did, and delivered to the client in such an amazing way. They did video interviews, because people there weren't in stores either. So we had to send them artefacts to review. We talked about - we did all these video diaries, essentially. And it worked out incredibly well. The client was very pleased with what came out of that. And it was that quick and nimble adaptation to what we're facing. Right. 

What's also great about it is they saw themselves do it. We saw everybody do it. So now we know we can do it. Right now we just need another challenge. Right? And it's now basically the number of clients that come to us since become the next challenge. Can we do this one? It seems a little bit fast. We just had two big naming projects that came through at furious speed, like naming really big things, and a week or two at the most, really a week. Which is hard to do very fast. But we did. We did. We made it happen. It was great.

AS: I'm sitting here thinking as a creative that sometimes, I feel like sometimes clients don't realize that you're on all the time, at least for me, I'm always obsessed, fully immersed. I'm thinking about it when I'm not supposed to be thinking about it. So I was going to say don't tell them you do it faster, they might think you’re going to charge less.

7:31

AK: No, no. Faster means more expensive.

But you're right, right. We’re always on. You have to be. Now we might not be on for any one particular client. Right? The problem you're usually solving in your subconscious is the most challenging one. Or perhaps your subconscious is working on all of them at the same time, it's just a matter of... because I find that if you let a client insert their problem into my mind and let me work on it. But even if I haven't sat down and crafted something around it, I'll have something for them by the time I see them again, you know, in whatever time period that is. An answer, a thought, some perspective on it. You just need time with it, essentially. Back to that time thought.

8:11

LP: I want to back up to making your staff or your team, excited about bigger challenges. So did you do something specific to get them really excited about this time, where there's so much uncertainty?

AK: Yeah, I mean, we were open and transparent with our communication about everything that was going on in the business so they could hear it and talk about it. Not down to the minutiae, but enough that they could feel confident in what we were planning what we were doing, and they can see how hard we were, as partners in the firm, working on this effort. And I would say optimism, knowing that, I refer to it as the NASCAR rule, which is an odd little phrase. But they tell NASCAR drivers, if you're headed into an accident, if there's an accident on the track, you're supposed to accelerate into the accident, not decelerate, right, which seems a little counterintuitive, right? If you were driving in that situation, you would slow down in an accident situation, but they're told to speed up. They’re told to speed up because they want to get through it. They want to go through that situation, right? And in a pandemic, this is a cultural accident, cultural, firestorm of ugliness, we sped up. Instead of slowing down. We went headfirst into it in every way we could. We gave those signals in everything we looked at as far as adopting new tools, going deep into Mural and all kinds of ways... and then also a daily check-in, so you have that, that watercooler time during pre-COVID, right, or just for us, it was around the kitchen table, in the office or the kitchen counter. We didn't have that anymore. So we did daily check-ins. And for the first three months, they were filled with stuff to talk about. After that first started, we didn’t have as much to talk about because we see each other every day. So time, you know, we had to fill it with exercises, but the team has jumped in with exercises. So let's do these word exercises. So let's do this thing. And so they started to fill in, which is amazing. We haven't had to - and then because they want to see everybody and connect. And it also feels good. And this is one of your communities, just a basic human thing. Your work community is an important community of yours and being able to connect with people and see how they're doing and hear their stories. Good or bad, whatever is happening in their world. Yeah, but I would say probably the central one was optimism and accelerating into this as much as we possibly, reasonably could. 

LP: I love the analogy.

AK: Kind of a small tangent. My co-author seems to look through the lens of economics more often than anything else, even though he's got an advertising background, Mr. Dan Wallace. I [had] a call with him. And it was somewhat depressing, because he would look at it through the lens of okay, the recession we're heading into...is it a V recession, a U recession. He said well, it might be an L recession. I'm like, what? What's an L recession? No. That's not a good shape. We can’t have a L recession...no. I’m like, Dan, I’m not talking to you for awhile.

11:45

LP: So speaking of getting out of one's head and sharing it with other people. Are you willing to share some of the silver linings that you found throughout this year? 

AK: I feel closer to people all around the world than I do to people next door, certainly during those early stages. Where you couldn't even get close to your neighbors or anybody in your initial circles, right. I was having conversations with people from the Olympics. Amazing all over the world kinds of conversations. So I felt closer to people around the world but not to the people next door, which was definitely a silver lining. Because you can, you can see that your reach is much farther than you realize, you know, you're not just in the city you're in. You can get very far with your conversations and everybody speaking. And that's the other thing - it was a global pandemic. And everybody was facing very similar things. That was a big one, but figuring out how to work in this environment, get to know people in this environment and not be able to shake hands, but yet still have good solid personal relationships. Because the kind of stuff we do is, is often a very trusted thing for a client, to brand. To touch that is a very essential element of the organization if they know the value of it, so they have to trust you and to be able to get that trust in this environment is critical. So figuring that out was a big silver lining for us. Yeah, I would say just the new work methods have been a phenomenal silver lining and the conversations and new tools have made it more efficient, honestly, to do the work faster for clients and faster for us. Not necessarily less expensive though.

And the Think and Ink...we’ve had the CMO of the New York Times. How would I ever have done that having the previous one that took place in our office, right? It's amazing how far you can reach and how willing people are to have an hour conversation, sit down and chat, right? And do this. Huge silver lining for all of us.

14:07

AS: Last time we talked, you mentioned that at the beginning of it, you thought if you could just keep the team together, that you guys would get through this. So some companies have made layoffs, they've cut resources trying to preserve their runway. So what made you go the other way?

AK: Yeah, optimism, I suppose. Looking back on it, you could have said at one point in time, maybe it was ignorance, because optimism and ignorance sometimes get confused. But we have a really talented team, we already run pretty lean. And we were coming into it busy anyway. So you know, with us, we have a certain number of clients and projects every year; it's not a large number. We can see those numbers either coming through or not coming through in new projects or new clients. So we knew our runway and it was solid. And so we looked at like, well...Some people have used this as an excuse to trim and to remove people. I don't prescribe to that. As a philosophy that just doesn't make sense to me. Because you basically are cutting out knowledge and experience and you can't pop another person in there and get that exact thing out of that person. And so I don't like to see that happen. 

We spend a lot of time with our team to make sure that they're knowledgeable and capable of doing what they're doing. And we teach them some really interesting skills around the things we do. So we want to keep them around. It takes a lot more time to rebuild those things. So that was probably a big part of it. Yeah, and we kept the team. And we had one person leave. She kind of got, not burnt out on design...maybe a little burnt out on design in general during this, but other than that, we've kept the team and now we've been adding to the team, because we've gotten so busy, which is really nice. But yeah, it's been absolutely amazing to keep them around. And it was a promise I made to them to make sure we do this, right, so they could have confidence in where we're going as a firm and that they were part of that. Because we're in the intellectual property business, right, and these are the people walking around with the intellectual property who are going to be able to create that for clients. The people, I'd say, are the biggest assets, but I don't like to call them assets either because they’re certainly much more than that.

16:29

AS: So everyone gets a finishing question tailored to them. And yours is, what's your number one piece of branding advice for companies right now here? And where are we? October 27 2020.

AK: Trust is at the center of all brands, and all relationships with brands. Consider the things you're doing and whether you're doing them in desperation, whether you're doing them in a positive outlook on the world and will they build trust or deteriorate trust, right? That's an important thing. There's a lot of possibilities, definitely during a recession, to discount things, to coupon, to destroy the value in what you're providing, or whatever the offering is. Be cautious about that. Be careful about that, be thoughtful about it. Because you need trust. And in this time period, trust is even more critical than anything else. So people want to be around trusted brands. And so, and they'll remember the ones that did and didn't do good. And then invest in innovation. Innovation around the experience, innovation around an understanding of the brand story. And then of course, innovation of the product specifically itself. That’s my advice.

AS: Thank you so much.

AK: Thank you, thank you both. 

[Music]

LP: Aaron Keller, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. We had a blast. And to those listening, you can find Aaron and his team online at Capsule.us.

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Hosted by: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow

Writing and research: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow

Edited by: Laurie Pillow

Produced by: Laurie Pillow, Andrea Spirov