Brent Wardrop 16:38
Okay, yeah. Yeah, because it has been me for a long, long time. And there’s a wonderful joy in that. Yeah, awesome. Okay, so I think what was most noticeable was the first hire. So I had been working with a client. And at this time, I’m a designer, just a print designer, and they had their own copywriter, copywriter botched the job, I didn’t QA it went to press big mistakes, lost the account. So my first hire was a writer, because I figured if I’m going to be responsible for it, then I better own the whole process. And it’s funny, because the reason I’ve started the company, you know, on one hand, it was out of money, but it’s a very quickly after that initial experience on hiring, my first hire was really around, making sure that we provided a quality product to the client. And I’ve always been driven by that, it’s because that engenders deeper relationships, and the money always kind of came later. And then I think, how do you find that writer? I don’t know, I don’t remember. It’s like, 20 plus years ago. Yeah, cuz I never really socially was active in the community, because again, I didn’t even know this was a thing. Like, I didn’t even know there was, like, I knew nothing. I knew I didn’t know anything about ad agencies, marketing agencies, I knew zero, I just kind of got successful doing this and thought, oh, I can make money doing this and just did it. So yeah, the first writer. And then people come and go. And then there was a point where we’re getting too busy, where I had to hire other designers. And at first that was hard to take, because I really love the whole creative, like actually doing the production work. But for me to be able to, because at that time I was out representing the company, right, wearing, you know, cool clothes and out meeting all day, and then I’d work all night. That was my schedule, right? I like it was crazy. And then ultimately, I hired people to do the work so that I could actually function properly.
Jeremy Weisz 17:41
Talk about that schedule for a second. Yeah, so wake up what you did and actually went to bed, in those days, what did that what did that span look like? Oh, God, I don’t know if you remember those days, but like, oh, I can’t forget those days. Right?
Brent Wardrop 19:28
It’s funny. I’ve never really talked about it much with anyone. Thanks for giving me the air on that. It was delicious. It was exciting. Like every day was a hunt. And every night it was like, bring it home, bring it home. And I’m a very social person. I love people. I genuinely love people. And to go out and meet new people during the day. I mean, it wasn’t every day because I didn’t get meetings every day. But as it got busy, I I’d be out hustling Yeah. And, and then at night, you know, I mean, again, I had come off a relationship. So I wasn’t really in a headspace to, you know, plug in anything else. And I was probably preparing myself on a lot of different levels. You know, like the whole music thing. I didn’t talk about my music career for 10 years. At all, to anybody. And it’s a bit of a good story, but the truth of it was, it was such a hard chapter and I decided I was sealing that up and putting it away. And, but back to your question, there was a time that we evolved into become what is now called a digital agency. So being active at the very beginning of user interface, web, we started getting web stuff. So I started buying web guys, because I couldn’t do the work. So that was actually probably the first key hires were people that had skill sets that I had no ability time wise, or interest in learning, as far as coding and that sort of thing. And that’s never been my jam, not my thing. And so we took the business to the point where we were almost 30 people at that time just doing enterprise websites, and I hated it, I absolutely hated it. Because it was all technology. And it was, it wasn’t about making that…
Jeremy Weisz 21:26
Because it wasn’t your thing, it wasn’t the design.
Brent Wardrop 21:29
Well, you know, like, so this is my personal thing. This isn’t a company ethic, but my personal thing is, you know, if you take money from someone, you know, back to that whole idea of that people put their self in your hands a little bit, as a client, I’ve always been sensitive to whenever you hire me for, you got to make a definitive return on. Right. So I’ve been more interested in what is now called performance marketing, and always being able to show the efficacy and the wisdom in hiring my company, and with web at that time, this is the land of like, our largest site was like 12,000 pages in seven languages, like complex beasts. Did they support a company? For sure? Did they deliver on its larger company goals? Absolutely. But could they really sit down and go, you know what, through that investment of x, we made this? Probably not, and so in the end, you know, things were already starting to dive with, you know, the advent of companies overseas doing web for a dime on the dollar. So, literally, totally, we pivoted the agency, to an area that we’re much more interested in as a group. And that’s more b2c work that, that develops relationships between brands and their customers, which is what we do today. But I do want to point something out, you asked about pivotal hires, I have a partner now, Dustin Brown is terrific, amazing guy. And he came to the agency as a sales guys, and he’s been a new business guy. And he also came with experience from one of Canada’s larger agencies. And he’s a real creative guy that has a lot of drive. And very soon in a relationship, I knew that if I didn’t make him an offer, to become part of the company in a real definitive way, he’d find his own path. And so he’s been with the agency now, it’s gonna be 13 or 14 years, he’s been a partner for 10 of those. So this whole pivot into more of the public facing b2c was a big part of him coming on board. So I saw the decline of business in the pure digital space, as far as websites go, and pivoted, and it was risky at that time, that was another real dark time. I had to leverage my house to keep things going, you know, because there’s a dip in income and it was tough, and this was all 2012 the echo of 2008 and so you know, riding that wave, I honestly don’t know if I even answered your question.
Jeremy Weisz 24:27
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like the higher as we went from writer because you want to own the you’re responsible you want to own the process. Yeah. And it went to getting a lot of work, that you need to hire more people like you to get step out of that and then you are getting demands for other stuff so you Brent when people and then another one obviously was a partner, a sales partner and I’m curious on the partner front, you want to keep you saw this person. They’re gonna be amazing. You wanted to keep them. People say partner and it means different things. What were your thoughts on keeping this person? Did that look like? And you don’t have to say numbers, but did it look like I’m gonna give them an equity stake? Does it look like you know what did that? Yeah, I think components you want to include that means partner to you.
Brent Wardrop 25:19
It was an equity stake. It was a scenario where he could earn in a way that benefited like as the whole company prospered. He would have a share of that prospering because he was so instrumental in its growth, which has proven to be true. Absolutely.
Jeremy Weisz 25:42
What advice did you get around setting up equity stake? Because here’s the thing. Yeah, but like you just said, Yeah, you look back. You were hustling you’re working? Who knows? 20 hours a day, you have leveraged your house? And now you bring someone in? Yeah. It’s a big deal. Right? How did you think about, what advice did you get around? How do I structure this equity stake?
Brent Wardrop 26:11
I didn’t get enough. I went to some lawyers talk to some lawyers. At that time, I was still suffering, the view that it’s about me, and I’m going to just figure it out. And I’ll do it. And I didn’t have the wherewithal to really seek out a number of opinions, a number of, I didn’t see the value in it and understand it. Now. I’m fortunate, it’s turned out terrific for us. But there’s some things I might have changed. But from a larger material fact, I’m very happy. It’s been a very good partnership. And yeah, he has been, I’ll say, we have been instrumental because we’re really good. We’re not the same. We’re very different people. And I think what I knew was it wasn’t just his ability in new business, because he’s running all of our strategy. Now. He still contributes to new business, both he and I still go out and have the work to, but it was seeing all of the other character attributes that laddered up to this is the right guy.
Jeremy Weisz 27:33
How did you with the equity part? And you don’t have to say numbers, but how did you set it up? Like? Did it vest over a year? Over a couple of years? How did you decide? Did you have to pay anything in or is just part of it? How did you think of setting up the equity piece?
Brent Wardrop 27:52
Okay, so I’m going to answer the question of how I did, I’m not going to say whether it was good or not, because I don’t know, because it’s the only experience I have. Because I’ve had this discussion with others. And they’ve been fairly feeling that it should have been done a different way. But the way it was done was at the time he was new business. And so it seemed the most rational thing to do was to attach it to a vesting on revenue associated with new business over a period of time. And so as as each milestone was achieved, more equity was disbursed to him.
Jeremy Weisz 28:31
Yep. So it was based off of revenue. It was based off revenue. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense. So it’s kind of like a base of where the company is at. And then as we increase, you kind of give them equity based on these milestone increases.
Brent Wardrop 28:46
Well, and I’m sure you’ve run into this with other people. You’ve talked to Jeremy, but one of the biggest challenges for a company that’s bootstrap from zero is that, I getting around the idea of KPIs and what are they? What are measurable results, like, it’s so laborious to even figure out how to get granular and someone’s performance and still be out, hustling and doing the work. Right. So the dollars was easy to measure.
Jeremy Weisz 29:17
What were people disagreeing with in that when people when you’ve had conversations?
Brent Wardrop 29:23
I think the biggest thing that’s come out and I don’t want to be too revealing, because, you know, there’s, you know, other people involved in this conversation, specifically my partner for sure. But I think the biggest thing has been around me not requiring him to buy in. A lot of people have said that people that buy in care-more Maybe, maybe not, I haven’t seen any wavering on his caring for the company or his goals or so. So my experience has been it’s been good.
Jeremy Weisz 29:59
Yeah, but It’s all your experience. Right? So I want to talk about some of the work you do. Yeah, and let me I’m going to share my screen for a second. You can see here if you’re listening to the audio only there is a video and we’re on elementalinc.com. And if you look at this page, I’m going to scroll down to the our work, they’ve done some amazing work. I watched a bunch of these videos are really cool. I love the Oceana ones that drop in the ocean. I want to talk about the no excuses day. Because you were mentioning measurable results, you’re talking about human connection, and I feel like this one kind of encapsulates those things. Can you talk about what you did with no excuses?
Brent Wardrop 30:50
Yeah, so no excuses day was for an organization called seen, seen as a loyalty program that at the time was called by Scotiabank, one of the big five banks in Canada and Cineplex which is a large theater, the largest hands down by far. Movie Theater Company. And we’ve been working with scene for 13 years now. And this was done in just before COVID theater before. So 2019. And we had been building up with seen over these 13 years, on how to keep their members engaged. It’s like any other organization, it’s about getting new members in this case, versus consumers or customers. And getting engagement getting them to actively be a participant in the organization or in the event. And so what happened was, we were tasked by seen to come up with a really big campaign, something that that was really going to move the needle, we had already taken the brand from 1.8 million to over almost 13 million members, which is about a third of the population of Canada. And when you look at actually who’s active in the loyalty program, it’s probably two thirds or maybe even higher of Canadian from a demographic perspective. But so this campaign, the idea of it was, as we went forward and tried to figure out how we were going to deal with it, is we landed on the idea of creating a specific day, like an event. And making something of that event, and developing a campaign that would lead up and trickle into and accelerate excitement and desire to that day. And the Insight was found, really through truth that was about the simple truth, that even though when people lash back up, just for our members outside Canada, seen as a really big deal here. Like it’s a really big deal. And what it was, it’s changed now because they brought on other partners. But fundamentally, you would go to movies, earn points and go to Fritzi free movies. And they widen that they have a number of other partners like restaurants and all sorts of like other event and entertainment. Now they’re tied into grocery so you can use your points a lot of places, but at the time, it was all about entertainment. So the Insight was about, people want to have fun, but they’ll make excuses not to have fun. And to really vet the idea we just went out on the street with a camcorder and a kitten today still calm camp. It’s a phone, sorry, a phone.
Jeremy Weisz 33:35
I know what you mean by that.
Brent Wardrop 33:37
Ask people, ask people that, like do you ever make excuses when your friends call you to go have fun? And overwhelmingly people on the street be like, yeah, yes, sometimes I do. And then we’d ask them, what did you say? It was everything like, Oh, I got to take care of my cat. I got to do my hair, right? People would come up with all sorts of and they just want to sit in their house and watch TV. They just don’t want to go out. They don’t want to socialize. And it became the insight on it was, it’s all about knowing that people make excuses, and encouraging them. Let’s not make excuses. Let’s get together. And let’s have fun. Let’s have a moment. And that moment is brought to you by scene. And it was a massive success. The pickup on it was huge. It was a national event. It was actually listed as a day like a national holiday. And it was called scene No excuses day. In fact, we got such pick up on it. It was even featured in a joke by Ellen DeGeneres on our TV show, which is quite something for a Canadian thing to be referenced on an American broadcast show, which was quite an endorsement for us. And to date, this is the biggest thing that scene has done. That was very successful. We’re surprised at how much Pickup we had with new members that were stimulated to join us. And but more so just the actual activity that was measured over a six week cycle before the event, it outpaced every projection to the point of where for the agency, we won a number of meaningful goals for this work. And it’s work that as an agency, we’re very, very proud of.
Jeremy Weisz 35:22
Talk a little bit about the creative process in this right. I mean, there’s a lot of work that goes into this, what are some of the stages that you had to go through to get to them product?
Brent Wardrop 35:32
Well, it all starts with the brief of what the client wants. And what we tried to. And again, this was easier with this client, because we have such a long standing relationship, we understand each other, we know how to work together. But it was really does distill down what they wanted to achieve from an organizational perspective, and not the thing. Right, so many times clients come and they have in their head already of what…
Jeremy Weisz 35:59
They just want a video or something. And they’re not talking about they’re talking about the features and other benefits.
Brent Wardrop 36:04
Yeah, and you know, what’s so funny is almost every time they’re wrong, almost every time that isn’t the actual thing they need. That’d be like going to your doctor, right and prescribing the drug you need. Although I’m sure there’s people that
Jeremy Weisz 36:17
All the time. But they could be wrong, that would not be good. Right.
Brent Wardrop 36:24
Exactly. But yeah, they basically identified that they wanted to see a lift in engagement, they wanted to be over the 10 years were with them, it was a highly pragmatic relationship where it was very much trying to very drive work, like drive engagement through very direct communications. And what was delightful about the ask from the client is they wanted a pure brand move, they wanted to increase brand love, that’s where the whole thing started. They just wanted to, for people to love what they’re all about. And there was such a wonderful purity to it. So back to the creative process, sorry, I tend to go off the rails a little bit, forgive me. We sat down, and we looked at that, and we looked at a number of different potentials, like I think most agencies do. And we tackled it from three potential perspective, ways we could go forward. And we gave them an idea that was kind of in line to the things they had done before, but with one or two steps away, and then one that was more adventurous, and then the one they chose was, you’ve never done anything like this. And they put their heart and their money behind it, you know, because the idea was just purely about this day, and then deriving activity over a longer period into a day. So it’s almost like reversing a traditional model, where you’re going to run out a home for six weeks cycles, or 12 week cycles. So we’re in this case, we just backed it out, and started dripping, because the client has a lot of owned, right, that they have 13 million members. So the ability to talk to these members was available through email, and through apps. And it’s a movie theater. So we ran like pseudo advertisements, pre show, right. So there was a lot of avenues for us to tap. And so the creative process, really, in fact, I would say the hardest thing was to stay pure to the idea of it just being a day about getting together and having fun. And staying simple and true to that idea of don’t make an excuse. Come on, let’s go play.
Jeremy Weisz 38:44
It sounds like it took on a life of its own. And it’s pretty cool that it created a holiday
Brent Wardrop 38:53
I think you’re right, and when we all look at work that we all admire, they all tend to start in our in a room somewhere in an agency, actually, I’d say that they start together with a client in a room somewhere. But then when they become something of their own, nobody owns it anymore. Everybody owns it. Right? And, and I would argue that’s what brand love is all about is when it’s not just the brand that owns the brand anymore. The community is now a part of it. And I think besides the accolades that we received, endorsing the quality of our thinking, which is amazing, especially when you consider whence I came. The look at that, and you see that the community really gets a lot of us, there’s a real purity to the work of the value. It brings people. It was great.
Jeremy Weisz 39:47
Thanks for sharing that. Brent. I have one last question. Before I ask it. I want to point people to check out elementalinc.com to learn more about what Brent and their company are doing. Check it out. encourage you to check out their our webpage, they have some amazing videos including I like the CFL one. It’s pretty cool. And they have some really amazing ones with Oceana as well check those out. My last question is, early on, I find that there’s a lot of accidental agency owners, they just stumble into it, however, and there isn’t like a clear path. And we’re just kind of doing it. And then over time, we develop help and mentors. And I know, it’s funny, because we are actually at the same event a couple days ago, and we didn’t bump into each other at EO eccentric, and talk about some of your most influential mentors, and maybe a piece of advice. It could be from EO, I imagine there’s a number of people that have been influential to helping.
Brent Wardrop 40:57
There have, there definitely have, I wish I had prepped for this a little bit before, you know, I think, I think that for me, I’ve learned so much from so many different people, it’s really hard to, like, I’ve never had a formal mentor. So if I had, that’d be easy to say, this guy. But along the way, I’ve had some incredible clients actually that have been sensitive to the fact of my knowledge in the industry and to even share what other people have done for them. You know, so that I could refine, you know, my personal approach and also influence the agency to, to better serve our clients and that respect. My dad, my dad, I mean, this is probably so quite right, that I’m gonna say all my dad, but the truth of it is my dad, I had a very friction filled relationship. But he did leave me one thing that was been really helpful. And he drilled it into my head, as far as I remember, he would always say, if you’re going to do something, do it right or don’t do it. And that, I don’t think I realized it until into my 30s that I’d actually been living by that for as long as I can remember, so I’m not an athlete. I admire athletes immensely. I love watching various sports and what they go through but I’m not that guy. And as soon as I knew I’m not that guy, I’m done. I’m done trying to be that guy. And all the way along, finding things because you don’t really know what you’re good at. At remember in high school, you’d go to all these different clubs, oh, camera club or something club and then you turn on something that was really just turned you on. You’re good at I think people I never stopped doing that. I’m still doing that. I’m still trying to find new things that maybe I can noodle away with. And it doesn’t have to be professionally related. Just I’m curious. And let’s get it. There’s a lot to explore.
Jeremy Weisz 43:11
Brent, I want to be the first one to thank you. I love that dude, writer. Don’t do it. And actually, Magic Johnson. I know that we saw him speak told a similar story with him and his dad when he’s helping his dad pick up trash. And so it really resonated like similar concepts. So I just want to be the first one to thank you. Brent, thank you so much for sharing your journey story. And everyone check out elementalinc.com And thanks everyone.
