[Top Agency Series] Streamlining Design From Concept to Production With Julie Olson

Julie Olson is the Owner and CEO of Turner Lee Consulting & Design, a full-service design agency specializing in brand development, customer research, package design, and print services. Under her leadership, Turner Lee has collaborated with major brands such as Hewlett-Packard and the Golden State Warriors, providing streamlined and cost-effective design solutions. Julie also serves as the SURF Foundation Board Chair and contributes to academia as an adjunct professor at Black Hills State University, mentoring students in personal selling and entrepreneurship.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:43] Julie Olson discusses her early career and founding Turner Lee Consulting & Design
• [05:59] The evolution of technology and how it impacted the trajectory of Turner Lee
• [08:41] How Turner Lee acquired its first major client
• [11:57] The key roles Julie prioritized hiring as her agency grew in capacity and capability
• [14:22] Turner Lee’s pricing model
• [16:33] Software and processes that propelled Turner Lee to streamline operations successfully
• [19:22] Turner Lee’s customer success stories 
• [25:28] Julie’s approach to teaching personal selling and fostering student entrepreneurship
• [30:54] Challenges of growing an agency and niching
• [37:01] Tips for work-life balance
• [43:11] Julie’s fascination with physics and its potential influence on business innovation

In this episode…

In today’s fast-paced marketplace, innovative design solutions are pivotal for brands to stay ahead of the competition. By breaking the mold and combining the precision of science with the creativity of design, how can companies redefine their approach to branding and packaging? Can synergy between seemingly unrelated worlds like science and design result in business success?

An innovator in developing efficient and successful design strategies, Julie Olson shares how she transformed the design agency landscape by pioneering a virtual model as early as 1998 — before it became mainstream. By immersing herself in her clients’ environments and processes, she could tailor her services precisely to their needs. This approach saved time and resources and established her company’s reputation as a leader in efficiency and innovation. Julie’s unconventional methods led to collaborations with high-profile clients, including Hewlett-Packard, demonstrating that understanding client needs deeply can bridge any industry.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Julie Olson, Owner and CEO of Turner Lee Consulting & Design, about redefining agency operations and client relationships. Julie discusses how Turner Lee came to be, how it acquired its first major client, the tools and processes that streamlined its operations, and her approach to teaching personal selling and fostering student entrepreneurship. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Julie Olson on LinkedIn
• Turner Lee Consulting & Design

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav
• The Heart of the Soul: Emotional Awareness by Gary Zukav and Linda Francis
• The SURF Foundation

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Always keep learning. After you think you know it all, you don’t. Strive to find a way to be better.”
• “Relationships are at the core of success, from securing a dream client to inspiring the next generation.”
• “If we spent more time understanding the clients, we were better able to hit the mark faster and right on.”
• “It’s a little ‘out there’ in terms of the universe, but I love it, and I’m so blessed to learn about it.”
• “I think when you can see it and you can experience it, it’s not a scary thing, it becomes something that you can achieve.”

Action Steps:

1. Immerse yourself in client context: Spending time in your client’s environment helps you understand their specific needs and challenges, leading to more effective solutions.
2. Streamline processes with technology: This tackles the issue of version control and communication delays, ensuring all stakeholders are on the same page and reducing waste of time and resources.
3. Cultivate a diverse network: Expand your reach and open doors to unexpected partnerships.
4. Commit to continuous learning: Seeking to improve your knowledge and skills helps you stay adaptable and innovative, addressing the ever-evolving challenges in your field.
5. Focus on relationship building: Prioritize creating and maintaining strong relationships with clients and colleagues, as these connections are crucial for long-term success.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Julie Olson. You can check them out at Turnerlee.com. And Julie, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of podcasts people should check out. Since this is part of the top agency series, there was a really good one with Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps pair agencies with private equity. He’s got the Second Bite Podcast. He helps sell agencies. He calls it the Second Bite Podcast, because sometimes when they sell and the private equity sells again, sometimes the founder makes more on the second bite than they did on the first when they first sold. So there is a really good episode about valuation space, the agency, space and businesses, M&A that was a really good one.

Another good one was Adi Klevit. Adi Klevit has a company. She is a done-for-you, company that helps companies create SOPs. They go in, they help with Client Onboarding, they can help with staff onboarding, and they will help document all of your SOPs, put them into a portal so that they can be accessed. So we’re going to be talking about streamlining operations on this interview. That was really good. We geeked out about our favorite productivity tools and, you know, just our favorite software and everything like that. You can check those out on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships.

How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So usually we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the hosts, they create amazing content, create amazing relationships, most importantly, run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and the companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com or emails that [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce Julie Olson. She is a CEO and owner of Turner Lee Consulting Design. They are a full-service design agency specializing in brand development, customer research, package design, as well as print services. They’ve been helping companies for over 26 years developing efficient and successful design. They work on anything from logos to website to handling production, and they print for thousands of products worldwide. They worked with companies such as HP, the Golden State Warriors and many more over the years. And their TLC designed to print processes help companies avoid pitfalls of print and streamline and provide a transparent design collaboration, and ultimately, that helps save time and money. Julie, thanks for joining me.

Julie Olson 3:28 

Thank you for having me. That was a perfect description.

Jeremy Weisz 3:32 

Awesome. And I want to start off with and we’ll dig into a little bit of the things you did for HP, the Gold State Warriors, but just talk about Turner Lee for a second and what you do.

Julie Olson 3:43 

Oh, awesome. Thank you. Well, in my early stages of work, I work with a lot of large agencies in California, in the Bay Area, and that’s how I got my start, and actually worked for different companies that help me understand the process better. So, for example, market research innovation. So one of my first jobs was in market research and sensory evaluation with products that we all know and use every day, everything from Sarah Lee to Quaker to Craft and Budweiser. I was the official taste tester for the Budweiser sensory testing. It was a great learning experience and then pretty good, it was very insightful and helped me develop my love and understanding of how packaging and products are married and work better together. And then from there, working with a lot of large agencies and understanding the agency world.

And I decided that I wanted to start my own agency 26 years ago, and we wanted to be different in a way that we could be more effective working with our customers. And that meant that I created one of the first virtual agencies. They all told me I was going to fail and that you needed a fancy address with fancy leather couches and fancy artwork. But I said, no, it’s not the way I’m going to roll. So I spent my time, actually, in our clients offices, understanding their process and the way they work and what struggles they were having to better understand how we could provide a full suite of integrated services with them.

Jeremy Weisz 5:38 

So we’re talking at that point, people now are listening like, of course, virtual, but back in 1998 that was not normal at all. Not normal. I don’t even know, what was the internet like at that point? And because I’m sure design has changed a little bit of the way you go about generating ideas and things like that too.

Julie Olson 5:59 

It was a very different world — it was. It was a lot more, you know, in the office, creative collaboration with teams, which took a very long time, and you were in basically a bubble in your office, instead of where you should be with your clients, understanding their products and then some of the hurdles that they were facing. So from that point, I realized that when we would create creative pitches or packaging designs, or even print advertising, sometimes we were way off the mark of what our customers wanted. And to me, that was just a huge waste of time and waste of money. So that was the opening door and idea in my brain that if we spent more time understanding the clients and their product and their packaging needs or campaign needs, that we were better able to hit the mark faster and right on.

Jeremy Weisz 6:57 

What did you learn, Julie, early on, you said you did taste testing and stuff with Budweiser and some of these big companies. What was an instance you remember about maybe the feedback that you gave or had, or the collaboration of the feedback that was happening around the table?

Julie Olson 7:17 

It was really brilliant scientific models that we would do qualitative and quantitative testing with large focus groups, and then our own testing too. And the biggest thing I learned is that combined with the quantitative and qualitative, you can come up with the best product outcome. Like, for example, we tested a lot of salad dressings, and yeah, you’d have a great salad dressing, but the way that the bottle was in the shape and the opening or the orifice of the salad dressing, it would just pour all over your salad so, and then, as a result, people would have a negative connotation, because I learned that if you really address all the sensory aspects of a product and its packaging and how they work together, you can have a better outcome for your consumers, and therefore they’ll love the product better. So that was my big takeaway.

Jeremy Weisz 8:22 

Talk about your first client. You strike out on your own. It’s a risk, right? You could have kept working with these big companies under another, I don’t know less risk working for someone. Talk about, how’d you get your first client?

Julie Olson 8:41 

That’s a great question. Excuse me, my neighbor in California worked for one of the largest corrugated manufacturing plants. So he sold cardboard. We were having a glass of wine one night, and he said, you know, I’m just so sick of these agencies that don’t know print and don’t know what they’re printing on the substrate material. I just wish there was a way that there is an agency that knew what they were doing that by the time they designed something, it would actually work on print. And so it was like, what a great idea. Why don’t I go in and train your sales team on what to look for with production artwork, and how I can maybe train the agencies, or train your client, HP, in this case, how to bridge that gap, because there was an enormous amount of waste in money and time and design, and design, and that’s very ineffective for our clients.

So I basically immersed myself in the print industry. Learned how to print the most effectively on corrugated material and the flexo presses and the litho presses, and went to Hewlett Packard and pitched them. And said, I think I can do it better, because I understand. And I said, If I can just have one product. Yeah, one product, one package, and I guarantee you that I’ll be at least 50, if not 75% less cost and increase your time to market at least 50% and I did, and that one package started with another and another, and today, after 26 years of having that customer, that client, we’ve created hundreds and thousands of packaging all over the world.

Jeremy Weisz 10:38 

What was the original product?

Julie Olson 10:41 

The original product was a large monitor in a cardboard box. And when you print that large, sometimes you don’t have a real clear design that can print on black soap, which is like a big rubber stamp. And so we created an opportunity to have more flashy design on a lit label, which we then stuck to the corrugated box, so you had a better experience on shelf.

Jeremy Weisz 11:11 

So what was the issue? Is issue wasn’t coming out right the first time, and they have to kept print. They have to keep printing them with a lot of waste?

Julie Olson 11:19 

A ton of waste, not only materials, but time and money. So a lot of times, agencies didn’t understand the die line, which is almost like a map of how you cut out that box, and the exact measurements of it. So if you don’t have that right, when you’re designing the artwork and it goes to press, you have to throw it all away.

Jeremy Weisz 11:44 

Talk about the evolution of hiring, right? So that point is just you, what were some of the important positions you put in place over time?

Julie Olson 11:57 

Definitely, designers. So instead of having a lot of high-end management, I really developed expert designers who also then became my team. So there’s not a lot of middle management, there’s just people who are experts at design and experts in understanding the print process and what we’re printing on, and how to get the best results and the best process. Process is really key as well. And so from that, we’ve actually designed some of our own systems, so where we’re able to, because back in the day, it was really difficult to review and approve artwork. You’re doing it by email, and then somebody doesn’t see it because they’re behind on email, and we’ve already sent out version three. So, we did a lot of research and ended up developing our own tools for transparency and increase productivity, so people can review and approve the artwork and just keep things flowing.

Jeremy Weisz 13:09 

And then so the next ones were designers. And then what about after that? What were other important positions?

Julie Olson 13:17 

Oh, gosh, we have developed experts in terms of reviewing content and every single detail that goes on a package, because we’re moving so quickly, and we’re taking the content and copy from what we’re provided, and then we have to send that through translations and get it translated in hundreds of languages. We need to have somebody who can spot something that somebody on the team may have missed. So those are really big eye-catchers, if you will.

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