Jeremy Weisz 16:12
That’s really interesting. The last thing I would think of, oh, creative agency is hiring data scientists, right? So what made you decide to go that route?
Paulo Salomao 16:28
It is because of the responsibility I believe we have as advertisers and the promise that we make to our clients, there’s an immense amount of trust and responsibility I believe that we have with the budgets that we that we get, and I take, as an entrepreneur, I’ve always looked with an entrepreneur lens of how important those dollars are and how important making them work hard it is for our clients. And without knowing, it’s just trying to minimize the guesswork, right? Not to say that everything there’s part of advertising and communications that you can it’s more quantifiable than qualifiable. Sorry, qualifiable, more than quantifiable. So you, you can’t, not everything is predictable. There’s sentiments, and there’s especially when it comes to awareness, like, if you’re talking about tactics from top to bottom, there’s a lot of intuition that goes into it.
There’s a lot of experience that goes into that type of work and communications. But when you talk about mid-funnel and lower funnel, no matter what, we should be assessing this. We should be looking at, and especially how things change so fast nowadays, how platforms and algorithms are changing constantly, how trends and how people are actually spending the time where they’re spending time changes constantly. I’ve always believed, is the part of the work is, the least we could do nowadays, is to assess and be able to measure what we’re doing, so we can stop and continue what is right, what is wrong, and so on. And so I believe that is a crucial part of our work.
Jeremy Weisz 18:29
Yeah, so a key part of the kind of evolution of the hires, one was really the realization of bringing on data scientists to do some deep analyzation of the numbers. What was another kind of key role or hire that was part of the journey for you?
Paulo Salomao 18:47
Part of the journey, in that sense, to me, was more than a hire now at this point, is to maintain the culture of being performance-driven. So creative advertising is, I believe, has for carries a very long, at least in Canada, a very, it’s coming straight from schools and how they’re prepared for the workforce, and how the system itself in the industry segregates creative and, or puts creative in a pedestal, you know, and how creative how you actually even perform through a career. What is success in the creative department or a career. I think all I try to I believe it’s not set for success and how the world and communications is moving forward. So for that reason, I have even been running a workshop with one of the most reputable colleges in Canada.
For advertising, my opinion, which is Humber College, and I’m a huge, huge fan of them, and I’ve been working in running workshops with Humber College for the past six years, for the fourth year advertising program, and helping bringing and influencing the new generation of how platform, how to create content for platforms, and how to look at social platforms and how things are moving every year we’re changing the workshop content, because things are changing all the time. So here, maintain the creative element and the intuition element, while also reinforcing how important it is for everyone, no matter what role you’re in, the performance of the work that we do is extremely important, is the second, I think, most important thing that we were able to accomplish, and I keep my focus on.
Jeremy Weisz 20:53
Talk about that for a second, and maintaining culture. What are some of the things that you have implemented throughout the years that have helped?
Paulo Salomao 21:03
Jeremy, I’ll tell you one thing, as an entrepreneur, since Covid I dove my head into operations, and I wish I had 10 years ago, somebody had told me a lot more about it, and I had learned a lot more, because, God bless the people in this world that does operations, and understands corporate operations I preach. I find it fascinating. So the things that I have implemented come from professionals that I have hired to support the operations work in the past, the operations of the agency, as well as my own studies with books and mentorship as well as coaching. So I have invested a lot into bringing that expertise in house in order to support those theories and culture and building culture.
So it definitely starts with the vision. And the vision of a company needs to be clear and concise, and so in turn, you can internalize and you can externalize, so everybody understands what we are here for, and what is the why we exist. And second most important is what role each one year plays in achieving that mission. So I speak, and I think repetition is very important. So I constantly, and I add in every single stack that we have, our USB and our mission. So I’m here to, I’m the flag barrier to remind everyone and stay making sure that we’re staying within our mission and accomplishing it, and measuring as well how well we and how close we’re getting to our goals and so on. So I think all of that structure, it is what keeps our culture together and making sure we all understand what the values, what’s important, and so on. So again, performance being one of them, right?
Jeremy Weisz 23:12
It’s funny, you’re talking about, when we talk about culture, and then kind of going to vision, and that also relates to kind of operations and culture. So it kind of goes back to vision. I’m listening to this kind of series of lectures from Jim Camp, who wrote the book Start With No: The Negotiating Tools That Pros Don’t Want You To Know but really the overall, if I were to sum up, like, all of these lectures, he talks about, is vision. People are like, oh, we want to win, win, or whatever. He’s like, no. He’s like, I don’t believe in any of that stuff. I believe in a vision.
And if you have a clear vision, and you accomplish that vision, and it’s not about getting it for more or less in the negotiations, it’s like, if you accomplish your vision, then that’s what you set out to do. So it’s very interesting you talk about that. What are some of the resources you mentioned books, possibly people, what are some of the resources that you’ve used to kind of go deeper in the world of operations?
Paulo Salomao 24:24
I do a lot, first mentorship, I’ve learned to ask and how important it is. I am very fortunate to be surrounded by incredible, incredible, accomplished professionals, CEOs of CMOS, like people that have accomplished marvelous things in the industry. So I reach out to them, and I ask for their time. I ask for recommendations. I ask for support, like in knowledge, that’s definitely one of them. Second I do value professions, and more than I value money and making money, so to me, the more I can bring and I can pay for the service of people that are professionals at that certain areas that we need growth, and we need help, I’ve always invested on it, and I believe not having venture capital, not having tights with anyone being bootstrapped and being set up the way we are we I can make those calls and very fast and invest in the company, invest in our support and our knowledge and total knowledge.
I believe in my own knowledge as well. Books, 100% I read a lot, and I have a lot of books on the go. In fact, I even have a Kindle account where I have books here, Kindles that people on our team, they can take home and read it and bring it back. And so I give, I truly believe in reading abs. And there’s a lot of great books out there, and love to recommend at the end, too.
Jeremy Weisz 26:10
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. What are some of your favorites?
Paulo Salomao 26:13
My favorite is, right now, it’s always about timing. So right now, the one so when it comes to operations, definitely, What The Heck is EOS? is one of the ones that I one that I apply a lot. Traction as well.
Jeremy Weisz 26:28
Gino was a guest, so people could check out that episode with Gino Traction. Great book.
Paulo Salomao 26:33
Both of them are amazing books. Another one that I’ve been reading a lot and have a lot of notes is TheCoaching Habit. So my coach actually was the one that recommended and absolutely loved both of the books that Vice Trap and The Coaching Habit. And the last one that I’ll put there, there’s a bunch of others, but the other one that I’ve been reading a lot I recommend a lot, is Smart Brevity, which is a fantastic book on how to write with confidence and short and I’ve always believed that communication, I think it’s so important, and I recommend everyone. When I meet them, I say, you have to read this book. It’s small, it’s very technical. It helps you. It gives you guidance, like it’s an absolute book. I say everyone should be reading.
Jeremy Weisz 27:23
I’m looking at it now. It looks like Jim Van de Hay and Mike Allen. Is that the one? Yes, yeah. So it’s Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More With Less. Love it. I’ll have to check that one out. I have some credits on my audible, and the other one’s The Coaching Habit looks like Michael Bungay Stanier and Daniel Matei. Is that the right one? Okay, say less, ask more, and change the way you lead forever.
Paulo Salomao 27:51
Yes, amazing books.
Jeremy Weisz 27:53
Awesome. Thank you. That’s fantastic. I’ll check those out. I’m curious how your role is to change and evolved, right? You started off as a freelancer, then you were still doing the work, and then you had staff, and that will kind of take us up to, I know you’re tackling certain problems right now as a founder, but what were some of the roles and how they changed throughout your King Ursa journey?
Paulo Salomao 28:20
I initially, of course, started as a consultant creative director, art director, if you will. And then from there, as we start evolving, I went back to be a full time creative director, which was my last role at agencies. And from there, I think, I just follow the natural progress of our industry, and from Creative Director. We were able to hire creative directors that did a much better job than I did. So I kept replacing myself with better people every time, every time we could like with better and more qualified professionals to do what I was doing.
So that’s led me to be an executive creative director, and from there, we have, once we hired an executive credit director who’s still with us today, Grant Cleland. I have a huge respect for him. I became CCO chief creative officer. And as we were big enough, and all the Covid changes that happened, I then I assumed the CEO leadership position, which was that was, to me, was the biggest transition I believed in, the most change that I that I believe that you know, happened in my career, was the moment 2022, beginning of 2022 when I took over as a CEO and Founder CEO.
Jeremy Weisz 29:55
So you’re tackling certain problems now. Let’s talk about trust and what you’re speaking about on trust.
Paulo Salomao 30:08
So trust has been, to give you a bit of context, last year I had my talk, and I release information about my past and how I got to some of I believe in the where we come from, do help shape us? How we’re face the world and future, and how we’re brought up, I think has, of course, has a huge influence in who we are. And I was brought up by a very strong mother who was to me, she has always been the symbol of accomplishment and of everything in my life. And I was actually also brought up by two older sisters. So I usually joke that I was brought up by three mothers, so to this day, they still treat me like I’m 16 and I don’t know what I’m talking about, which is fine, I locked them to death. So I played that role quite well. And my mother was a criminal lawyer in Brazil.
She worked as a detective, as an investigator in narcotics, like she’s a very strong, strong woman with strong principles and strong values. And I’ve always believed that intensively, intensely. I remember, I couldn’t bring two cents back home from buying bread at the corner, because she would tell us, she would teach us the importance of trust and importance in a very kind way, like, how important that was for us to go back and actually say the mistake was made, and with integrity and with humanity, and I believe, I’ve always carried that with me. And I believe that trust and loyalty is everything, like you lose trust, or I think it’s a hard thing to get back. I believe trust you gain by being your full self, accepting who you are as a human being, as a professional and accept the mistakes will be made, accept that expectations can only set you for failure.
I think we need to be clear about what right expectations of what is expected, so that transparency is goes hand in hand and for me, the one thing that I promised myself when I left the ad agencies that are that agencies was I want to work with clients, not for clients, with clients that I can trust, that they can trust me, that we can build a relationship with our formality, with all that we’re able to tell each other what is how, because from I believe formality gets on the way of accomplish, of innovation, of moving and publish things faster and in the way I think it can get process, too much process and too much formality gets on the way.
I think losing the inhibition to be able to say as it is, and get to the bottom of the problem, removing oneself, it’s the most effective things and efficient thing that we can do professionally and psychologically. So you create, I believe in psychological safety. So when you create the psychological safety that allows people to fail, because you can, like one of, one of the my biggest sentences, quotes that I love and I repeat constantly, Sir Ken Robinson’s quote, which is, you cannot accomplish anything new if you’re not prepared to be wrong, like I’m, don’t quote me on the exact words, but that’s the idea of it. So then you have to trust in order to create the new. Because the new and the innovation and how you work, and what the output is, and whatever that is comes out of the people, and how you’re working together, how you trust each other together.
And just to end that part, the one thing I spoke last year about trust was the three things that I saw and the most successful client relationships that I’ve ever had, and that we have to this day are when we encounter humble leaders, true, true, humble leaders without evil on the table, that are sitting down and saying, let’s solve a problem. Let’s work together on this. Leaders that empower their teams so their trust their teams to fail as well, and trust their teams to learn from failure and move forward and so an environment that empowers people to grow through failure as well, and clients that value their partners. So should valuing your partnerships, like from not just us, but as us as well, valuing our partners, or if we’re working with another media company, although we sell media, we value their. In the work. We value our PR partners that come and work with us. We value our clients. They’re working with us like so there it’s mutual, and it’s extremely important.
Jeremy Weisz 35:09
No thanks for sharing that, that’s really valuable to hear. And I love to go from trust. I know you talk about the value of emotion. I did quickly look up that quote by Sir Ken Robinson looks like he also has a TED Talk in 2006 and it’s called, Do Schools Kill Creativity. I have to check that out. As he said, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. So I love that. Thanks for sharing that.
Paulo Salomao 35:43
If you’re a parent, you have to watch that. You have to watch that TED Talk, number one TED talk at ted.com 100%.
Jeremy Weisz 35:51
Love it. I’m gonna watch it today. The value of emotion.
Paulo Salomao 35:57
Yes, and this is the topic that I’m speaking this year, and I have a few speaking engagements that I’m working on. So this is a thesis that I’m just working on right now, but it is imperative that as we enter this economy of scale, and now on top of it, with AI, automating a lot of the skill that we are really part of. Automation is it can lead to, I don’t want to call it cold but less humane approaches when it comes to communication, which is the last thing, it’s so counterintuitive to what is needed nowadays, we can’t forget that consumers are not consumers anymore. They’re continue to be and have always been, people, and we need to look at them as people, at us as people, and if we cannot get into the trap of that short-term sale gain versus the long tail, long-term brand building and relationship building with consumers.
And I believe that it is imperative that we continue to exercise creativity, and which leads to emotional connections with consumers, to continue to build emotional financial consumers and so fight that with the craziness that is happening out there, with a whole how convoluted that the world is today with the information and like to break through it. Emotion is extremely, extremely important to having a process of communications. One like, to me, it’s the one thing we focus a lot here, not to lose that. And has proven to us in results that it’s incredible how you see the how that comes, how much difference that makes in performance. So yeah, it’s definitely something that we’re focusing a lot on.
Jeremy Weisz 38:13
Paulo, I just want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey, your lessons, and some of these amazing resources as well. I want to encourage people to check out kingursa.com maybe like, just subconsciously, that’s like your mom and sisters all packed into one that Mother Bear. So really appreciate you. Check out kingursa.com, more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Paulo, thanks so much.
Paulo Salomao 38:38
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
