Heartbeat Question: Legacy, Empathy & Craft

Gary:
Hey everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Anything But Typical Podcast. We’ve had some people on here that I’ve known for a long time, and not very many that I’ve known longer than the Jamey Boiter. We’ll talk about that, but it’s fun having you on here, Jamey. Jamey, as we start every Anything But Typical Podcast in a typical fashion, we have a heartbeat question. The heartbeat question is: you are out in public. But this one, you’re going to another Lyle Lovett concert. You’ve gone to every one that he’s been at ever since he’s come to Charlotte, and you’re at another one. But you’re not quite there yet. You’re going from parking garage. It’s probably going to be a big venue. It’s probably going to be at Spectrum Center or something like that. But somebody sees you in the crowd and they go, hey, wait a minute, that’s Jamey Boiter. They start talking about you, not realizing that you can overhear and understand everything they’re saying about you. What would you want somebody to say about you?

Jamey:
Oh, my goodness. First of all, Gary, Ben, thank you. I appreciate you allowing me to be here. It’s probably going to be Knight Theater is where it’s going to be. What I hope they might say is that Jamey Boiter, that guy knows his craft, and he can spot talent a mile away. I hear that he’s always done his work with a great deal of empathy and compassion. He really cares about his clients, and he cares about his people. If I heard them say that, I’m done.

Gary:
Well, you should hear that because that’s true. And I think people do say that about you.

Jamey:
Well, thanks.

The Early Pivot: From Architecture to Graphic Design

Ben:
Jamey is the principal and CEO at BOLTGROUP. But before we get there, I want to go back into motivation into entrepreneurship. Even before that, you made a pivot in college and you were studying architecture, correct? Then you moved into graphic design. Talk us through that pivot because those are not the most related jobs in the world.

Jamey:
I was really struggling in high school deciding what it might be. I had taken some drafting classes; I’d always been artistic as a kid. But your parents want you to be a doctor. I thought I was going to be an architect and was moving in that direction. I took an introductory to graphic design course.

My professor, calling him my first mentor other than my dad, Tom McPeak, had been an art director in the largest CBS affiliate in Kansas City back in the day. He had a copy of the CBS brand standards, and he showed that to me and my head blew up. It was like—this is visual and verbal communication—this is it. This is what I want to do. It’s stylized; it had that mid-century modern feel to it. It was like, okay, that’s what I’ve got to do. I really tried at that point.

There wasn’t a major at Clemson at the time in graphic design. After a lot of consternation and a lot of pushing from him, we applied to a number of design schools that I got into; I chose East Carolina.

Ben:
Yeah, the thing that that was interesting is, I was just researching and looking things up was the skill overlap between those is very similar. Yet the application of it is different. That’s the part that really caught my eye—you could have that same skill, but you found a way to express that skill in a way that fit you significantly better.

Jamey:
Right. It really did. I took that all the way through getting my BFA at ECU. Then when I got out into the marketplace, I was working at other places. One of the things I kept coming back to was the ability to think about things 3 dimensionally from an architectural standpoint. A lot of the work that I was doing around town as a freelance consultant doing environmental graphic design. I was designing signage. I was designing wayfinding systems for buildings and those kinds of things with that touch of design to it and bringing that together. I was mixing all of these things up and at the same time I was trying to learn the craft of being a brand designer and brand strategist.

Ben:
You said you applied to a few different places, and you chose East Carolina. Was there something specific about that? Or is that just where you ended up?

Jamey:
At the time, it was one of the more highly accredited schools of design on the East Coast. I was fortunate to get in, number one. To get into the BFA program, you had to go through their whole program. While I transferred 60-something, 70 hours in there, I still had to go through the whole program. My general college was over, and I went through the design process and after 2 years, I submitted my portfolio for BFA. The year that I was in Graphic Design 2, I think we had 79 students that started; 19 of us got into the BFA program. The rigor that was required to get in and then the rigor to get out. It was challenging, but I think it gave me a leg up.

Gary:
I can tell you this, when I met you in 1995 (thank you, Brian Hill), what I learned was very quickly in Charlotte, the best portfolios in town came from East Carolina. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. (Brandon Scharr, talking about you too.) The rigor that was required.

Another good friend of mine who went to North Carolina State, his father and I were buddies at Bank of America. He had decided he wanted to switch majors and wanted to go into design, and he had finished his four-year degree, and he started all over again. He was like, where should we go? I said, dude, I’m telling you, East Carolina grads. Their work ethic and their eye and sensibility are just very different from even Portfolio Center and SCAD—it’s nothing against those or RISD—good, good programs, nothing against them. But what we saw was the work ethic and the thinking. The proactivity was at a higher level.

Jamey:
The foundation that they provide for you in the very beginning was so important, and they were teaching a design thinking methodology all the way through. It became just a part of how we thought about things as we approached it. A number of my employees have been ECU graduates who would become an intern for me and then I would hire them right out of school. Like you said, Brandon, so talented—just a number of them. The opportunities that they gave us, I think was really good. Dot Satterfield, Jeff McGinnis, all those folks, they were just awesome.

Ben:
The question I was going to ask earlier—it’s funny because it actually made me think that I was going to ask about developing leadership, and I realized I have two people in the room on this podcast that have a graphic design background and now are business leaders. Maybe there’s some secret here that I am just not aware of.

Jamey:
I don’t think so.

Leadership Roots & The Move Toward Entrepreneurship

Ben:
But talk to us a little bit about that evolution. Before we get into your development and the motivation to go and start BOLT and all that, did you have an influence of entrepreneurship or business leadership as a child or growing up? Or how did that come about in your life?

Jamey:
My dad always said that he managed me, that he didn’t raise me. I now would change that to say that people don’t manage people. People lead people. I think my dad helped lead me to some places. I used him as an example of servant leadership, the way that he approached his business—he was a management consultant. The relationships that he developed with his clients were intense and deep that it went beyond the 9 to 5 that he was involved with and led to some really heartfelt relationships over the years. I thought that was a strategic advantage, frankly.

Coming through school, because I transferred the way I did and because I went into a program, I was a little older. I was a year or two older than everybody in my class and also didn’t have a full schedule all the time. I had to do something. I got a job, and I was working—I was actually selling suits at JCPenney. But the interaction, the interpersonal relationships that happened there were immediate. Again, developing relationships. I started closing up at night, those kinds of things. It came natural.

My first job, I actually was hired as an intern by a company that’s a Rubbermaid company now. I interned during the summer and before the summer was over, they offered me a job as assistant manager of creative services department. I said, I’ve got a semester to finish up. They said, it’s okay, let’s bring you on. I took the job because I needed the money and I spent about 9-10 months inside the corporate piece of it, working on their brand, working on trade shows, working on packaging. But I realized really quickly that the corporate environment didn’t suit my eye, and it was maybe at that moment I realized that I either was going to be a founder or I was going to find a studio and I was going to be a leader.

The Founding & Evolution of BOLTGROUP

Ben:
That leads perfectly into one of the questions of, can you share the story of the founding of BOLTGROUP, and then your journey of becoming the CEO?

Jamey:
I had started my business. I hung my shingle out—Concept One—and I was introduced to Monty Montague and Eddie Machen, the founders of which at that time was Machen Montague / Machen Designs. We started working on a couple of projects. A good friend of mine, Dean Drummond, had just started there in business development, and he introduced me. They had some environmental graphic design projects. I started working with them. It just started to become something really natural. Machen Montague started as an industrial design and engineering company. They were doing product development  and taking product development all the way through design for manufacturing. But what was missing was the brand component.

Monty had a background with Joe Sonderman; he had done some branding. There was a nice mesh there, but I felt like that there was a place for me to land and an opportunity for me to help build that into something integrated, where we were thinking about design innovation, brand, and product solutions at the same time.

That was the impetus for how we started; I was like the fourth employee. We were down in South End on Mint Street, built the business up, moved out to Edge Lake Drive out near the airport for a few years. Didn’t like that. We had lost touch with what was, even before South End, came back to South End, and set up shop there. We were there for 25 years and the transition from that was the birth of BOLTGROUP, creating that integrated design innovation firm. I led the brand development strategy design side of the business. Monty led the industrial design and engineering side of the business. We brought on some new partners. Ultimately, we built up the practice that we had.

Then a few years ago, since I was the youngest in the original group, I was also the last one standing. I took over CEO just by default almost. But I think there was a path. There was always a path there.

Ben:
You had mentioned earlier about you hanging up your own shingle, right? And then the interaction with them. During your time there where you’re at the point of, hey, I’ve got my own thing; I’m working with them; I can see there’s something here. Did you have the thought in your mind of, “I’m just going to go do this on my own?” And if you did, what made you decide I’m going to do this with them instead of just go do my own thing?

Jamey:
Gary can probably help with this. I didn’t realize it for a really long time. But when I started, I felt comfortable when I was working with other designers—Patti Ratcliffe, other folks—where I would interact with them felt more comfortable than when I was all by myself. Jump ahead to Gary’s thrive and wither.

Ben:
That’s been mentioned a couple of times on here.

Jamey:
On my thrive side has always been collaboration. On my wither side is working alone. It was really the moment that I hooked up with Monty that I realized that there’s more here; there’s synergy if we can get together. I took the first chance I could to go to work for them as an employee and immediately was leading design programs and building the brand side of the business. Then a few years later became a Principal.

Integrating Product, Brand & Business: Breaking Down Silos

Gary:
I remember because I was a client of BOLTGROUP, and it was shortly after you guys, renamed it to BOLT. Brian Hill was there, and I knew Brian—he was one of the first people I met here when I moved here in ‘94. I loved his design work and that’s how I got to meet you. You did a whole thing for us when I was at First Union for their First Union Direct, which was all their online and telephone banking. It was very differentiating; it was unique. The brand standards allowed for us to go really off the rails in some ways. But it was really fun.

Then when I was president of Axiom Creative Group with Brian Hill as one of my partners, years later, we partnered with you guys on another deal—I was trying to go after Case Knives, if I remember right. But what I thought was very interesting at that time was you had this very unique—you’d created this combination that there weren’t other players at the time that I was at least aware of, not on the East Coast—that had fused that industrial design work and the branding. I remember you guys branded Kobalt Tools.

Jamey:
That’s right.

Gary:
I remember that. The work where they took a—they didn’t have their own line of tools at Lowe’s. It’s funny. Every time I see a work truck go by with Kobalt rack on the back or their tool case that’s in their pickup bed, I’m like, hey, I know those guys that did that. That’s pretty cool. But that was, maybe IDEO was doing that in a big way on the West Coast, but you guys were running against the current in some ways. Talk to us about how taking this concept into the middle market really, and beyond, because you have done work with Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A. You have done some really cool brands in Charlotte, North Carolina, which I love. But talk about what that tension felt like, because not everything was a straight line.

Jamey:
No, not at all. As a matter of fact, that really is what was driving a lot of that is because we, in many cases, we were going product first. We were going into a durable manufacturer through the engineering door or new product development, perhaps. We would have our initial conversations and some of those conversations were like, okay, we’ve got the engineers in here. You don’t have any IDs on staff? That’s okay. We’ve got what we need. Where’s the marketing department? Well, we don’t talk. They should be in this meeting. Because they’re going to help drive what you’re doing.

Conversely, we’d get an opportunity to do a corporate identity program or to do something. Or somebody would call us up and said, we need a new product brand. Okay. We walk in and we’re meeting with the CMO, or we’re meeting with the marketing department. Where’s NPD? Where’s the product development guys? Well, we don’t talk. It was this confluence of things that were driving us towards it needs to be there because it’s two sides of the same coin.

Everything for us, everything emanates from the brand. From purpose—starts with purpose—it goes through vision and mission, developing the foundational principles of your brand, the pillars of your brand. What’s the value propositions? How is that laid out? Then what are these compelling truths around the product itself? Your product may be the most known and remembered and emulated piece of your brand if you’re developing products. But without that synergy with your brand, you can’t have that. We’ve all seen terrific products on the market that died because if there was no connection to the voice of customer, there was no connection to the brand itself.

Conversely, we’ve seen just really kick butt brands that are out there and you bought the product and product was terrible. You bought it once, but you bought it because of the brand. They hadn’t thought about it. They hadn’t just thought it through. Well, we approach design is design. We think about it as a singular approach when we go into a client. We think, how can we move this client from here to here in a meaningful way to solve their business challenges that they’re faced with every day, using all of these things, these assets that they may have, which they don’t use all the time.

Ben:
Do you have any fun examples through the last 20 plus years where you had these warring factions within these companies where you actually got non-speaking entities to talk to each other and collaborate?

Jamey:
There have been a couple of times where it has been merging of the minds. We started out with some product development work for Snapper riding mowers and lawn mowers down in McDonough, Georgia. We originally were working with the engineers, and those guys were really old school. They knew their craft. They were just wonderful at building lawn mowers. We’ve got to bring marketing; we’ve got to bring branding to this. There’s an opportunity here that we’re missing.

At that time, it was all through two-step distribution; there was really no voice of customer. We did the first qualitative and quantitative research ever with them to get folks into the room to understand. Some of what we heard, the engineers were like, what? They were contradicting everything. If you thought about it enough, this all makes sense. We developed a visual brand language for their products and updated their identity, created some iconography. That was where we actually developed a mark, an icon that they ended up not using because of that conflict. It was the right thing to have done; it would have propelled them further. But there was this infighting that kept that from happening. It was a win lose in a situation like that.

The Kobalt story is a good one where we were able to teach a process. This was a product that didn’t exist. Dale Pond was the CMO at the time and he said, I’ve got this hypothesis that if we develop a premium line of tools and we position it right, we can sell it at a premium against Craftsman.

The first thing we had to do was go talk to the market to see if that was even feasible. As we were doing that, we’re bringing the product folks, the merchants, bringing them along as well. This is what a future could look like. We talked to professional mechanics, professional non-mechanics, and weekend warriors mechanics that shop at Lowe’s to understand what they were looking for in a product. We knew we would never sell the first tool to a pro mechanic because they buy from Snap-on, they buy off the truck—they mortgage their house. But what we needed to know from them was what makes a pro tool a pro tool. Then we could transfer that into the MRO market, where a lot of them do buy their own tools, such as the HVAC guys. Then, of course, your DIYers. We needed to understand that. Understanding all of that allowed us to then create an objective opinion about where to go—what name, how we could create the name, what the name needed to be. There was an education process going on internally as well. That was a little bit of trying to culturally blend what then would come after that.

Ben:
To be able to help start a product from an idea. Name it. Be able to defend the name, which is always a challenge, especially in our pharmaceutical, smash-together syllables. Create it to where it’s pretty cool to be able to go in and say, you go into Lowe’s and I remember when.

Jamey:
You see the truck boxes everywhere. Going down the road and you go, okay, that’s all right. It’s like seeing your logo on TV at halftime in the Super Bowl. That’s a rush. It’s always going to be a rush. You see an IZOD commercial and okay, that’s good.

Ben:
You did work with IZOD.

Jamey:
Yeah, we had a long relationship, 20-plus year relationship with Phillips-Van Heusen, which owned the IZOD brand. We actually started working with them soon after they acquired IZOD to help reposition them in the marketplace. We worked on all of their brands; we worked on Van Heusen, Geoffrey Beene. We worked on Timberland. We worked on Calvin Klein. Ultimately, building ourselves up to where we were an agency of record for them. They were in New York; we were in Charlotte. We began to get several other retail fashion companies who we would meet at MAGIC, or we’d meet at Collective who saw our work.

Ultimately, it led to us opening an office in Manhattan, which I ran and managed for about eight years, where we had a dozen clients up there and required a full-time team in New York, but we got to work on some really cool stuff.

I was in Dallas working with another client, and I got a call from Mike Kelly, who was CMO at PVH. He said, did you see the news? I said, no, I’ve been in meetings all day. What’s going on? He said, “We just signed the naming license for IndyCar Racing. It’s going to be IZOD IndyCar Racing.” I said, Mike, that’s awesome. That’s great. He said, “Can you be in New York tomorrow? We’re about to go into a place where we have not been.”

It was really looking at the brand again and understanding how you take a main floor department store brand like IZOD, who, while the primary customer for that brand was a 40-year-old male, it was positioned to a 20-something-year-old with energy and color and technology and those kinds of things. How do you take that from a Belk’s and turn it into open-wheel racing? We did the livery for the cars. We did fire suits. We did helmet design. We did the whole pit experience. All in, I’m not going to say what the period of time, because it was too quick. We were working around the clock because we had to meet the marketing deadline for photo shoots and stuff like that. But it was awesome, because we drew on our talent and our skills of industrial design and understanding, as well as graphic design. We applied that in a three-dimensional form to create just an exciting proposal for them that they kept for five years.

Scaling Through Adversity: Charlotte, Recessions & Reinvention

Gary:
I think it’s cool that when you think of design, Charlotte, North Carolina, wasn’t the first place that you thought of necessarily. I mean, it was not a backwater like Wichita, Kansas, where I came from. But it was always New York. It was Chicago. At one point it was L.A. a little bit, definitely Minneapolis. But then to think, wow, you have been able to do some really amazing things in Charlotte, North Carolina. A lot of times in your own hometown, a prophet is not necessarily welcome in their own hometown because they’re like, well, can it even be that good? Like we become the familiarity breeds contempt. And not hateful contempt. It’s just, well, they can’t be. We’ve seen that with marketing departments that, well, we want to have big budgets, and we want to fly to glamorous places and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Talk to us about some of the trials and tribulations because not everything has been a linear trajectory up. Talk to us about just some of your own times of wondering whether it be through ‘08, ‘09 downturns, the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000, or just your own things. You can go in as deep as you want to, but then I want to hear also about how did you progress forward and not just give up?

Jamey:
Well, you hit it on the nail on the head here: why Charlotte, North Carolina? We started our business when, if you said Charlotte, they thought you were in another state. We didn’t have professional sports yet. We didn’t have all these other things. We chose Charlotte because we’re from around Charlotte or from Charlotte, and we liked what Charlotte was and was going to be. I think is the reason that we were here, but it was a real challenge, especially at first, as we began to scale and tried to scale because we were the best kept secret in town. We had to go outside to find the brands, the manufacturers that wanted to work with us.

You get outside the region and the story changes. It’s no longer, oh, Charlotte, because you’re talking to somebody in Chicago. Now you’re coming from the opposite perspective of bringing in and saying, we live there on purpose. But we have clients all over the country and in Canada; it’s not a problem. We would develop a client base in Chicago, let’s say, with one client. Then we might find a second, and then we would have a third. Now, there was a reason to keep going. There was a reason to do that, so that allowed us to scale.

Meanwhile, there were things that continued to happen. The downturn, the great R killed our New York office. Because we were doing almost entirely retail-oriented work, retail fashion especially. Well, those guys all parked. They literally pulled their marketing budgets. They pulled over to the side. They said, we’re going to weather this storm and see how it goes.

We were fortunate; the office that we had—we were on 23rd between 5th and 6^th—our lease was up. Then Mark Thwaites, who was our creative director in New York, who I had taken from Charlotte up to New York, Mark was at a turning point in his life. He’s originally from England. He wanted to do more international work. He wanted to get into some things. He had just recently gone through a separation. It was like, okay, the stars are aligning in a weird, not fun way, but they’re aligning. Mark, you go do your thing. We’re going to retreat. We’ve got the Charlotte airport. We can operate out of there easily.

Well, Mark goes on to G2, and then from G2, he goes to Future Brand. From Future Brand, he’s now the executive creative director at Monigle. That was the talent I spotted out of SCAD, years and years before.

We came back and immediately pivoted from a lot of the retail work that we had been doing. We had done corporate identity, so we move toward a B2B and started talking more intimately with companies and manufacturers about their brand, about their corporate brand, about the employer brand piece of it. How does that integrate? How’s your culture? How does your culture fit with everything else that’s going on? How does your culture drive your business?

We truly believe culture drives behavior. Behavior drives your brand. Brand drives your business. If you can create that inside an organization, you can create a path to retention. You can create a path to recruiting, and a better environment by taking that approach. We had some days in the wilderness, for sure. But we managed to keep the doors open. We’ve been up and we’ve been down, but we’ve been able to maintain. I think the reason we’ve been able to maintain is because of our own culture. It’s just been important to us.

Ben:
I can always tell when it’s going to be a good episode when I can’t decide which of the 15 questions I want to ask next. I’m going to go off of what Gary was just talking about and piggyback here. Do you think it was a strength or a weakness being in Charlotte, especially at that time? The reason why it comes to my mind, in my industry, in the wealth management industry, you tend to get credibility when you’re coming in from a different place. If everybody’s in New York and Chicago and Minneapolis, you being the firm from the outside coming in could be viewed as “oh, why are you in Charlotte?” or it could be viewed as “you’re an expert coming into town”. I’m curious if you saw one way or another whether that was a strength or a weakness for you?

Jamey:
That was certainly how we positioned ourselves as experts who chose this place and this is where we want to be. This is where we want to raise our kids.

Ben:
Part of your story.

Jamey:
Part of our story was that we’re three hours from Charleston; we’re two hours from Asheville. Who doesn’t want to live here? We could go out to Riverside, California, and we could tell a story about where we live and they’re all drooling and going, “Gosh, that sounds great”. Oh, by the way, we bring world class design with us and we’re confident in what we do. We’re more than happy to go up against anybody you want to go up against; let’s swing the bat.

It could have been a disadvantage, and that’s the little piece of the secret that never gets out that we couldn’t get work with companies right down the street from us. We would see a Future Brand, or we would see somebody come in from Siegel and Gale and do a brand project for a couple of million dollars. We could have done that, and how do we need to fix that part? Or are we going to stay these journeymen and women for the rest of our careers?

There was a turning point where we wanted to have a better meaning to our community and mean more to the community, so we really started looking more inward, of what was around us that we could help and how could we sell that proposition. We’d worked for Harris Teeter for a number of years. We developed Hunter All-Natural Ice Cream. We did Hunter Farms. But those were few and far between.

Ben:
Another piece here that I’m curious about is the catalyst for these companies bringing you in. Because you’ve given us different examples, right? IZOD with, hey, we’re going to go to a place we’ve never been before. With a couple others, it’s we’re actually developing new products and things like that. What have you found to be the consistent catalyst of, you’re the firm that they should be bringing in?

Jamey:
It really comes down to understanding their pain points, where they’re at in their journey. Again, as we talked about in the beginning, we’ve come in different doors, but we’ve tried to position ourselves high enough that we were looking for conversations in the C-suite where we could have them. Listening to a CEO talk about what he’s getting and what he’s not getting from his team can help us formulate an approach of how we might go about it. The fact that we had this integration, everything from research through implementation and launch in our quiver, if we were really good listeners, we could then go back with a more strategic approach to our scope of how we would come in. That’s how we ended up in not just doing medical products although we’ve done a number of them but for a lot of companies that’s all they do. They only design medical products, which is really great for them. For us, the commonality was innovation at these different levels and how we could bring design and innovation into every department of their business.

Design Innovation, The Future & Personal Growth as CEO

Ben:
You mentioned innovation and you’ve mentioned design innovation throughout this entire episode. Talk to us a little bit about that philosophy inside BOLTGROUP of design innovation. What does that mean to you?

Jamey:
It’s taking a design thinking approach from the very beginning when you approach a problem, whether it’s a business problem or whether it’s a product development problem. If you look at it from the vantage point of, how do we shed the existing preconstructs of why we’re where we’re at, and then how can we reframe the pain? It’s a little bit like diagnosing a problem. We look for symptoms and then using our design thinking process, we dig into those symptoms. Typically, we’re digging upstream and we find where the real problem was.

We’ve had clients come to us and say, our retailer just told us that our packaging sucks. We need new packaging. It’s like, yes, that’s true. That may not be your problem. That’s a symptom. Give us an opportunity; give us a way that we can come in and work with your team to unpack some of this to get at what might be the true problem. We may find out it’s just a disconnect in internal communication between the pillars of the brand or the purpose of the brand and what’s actually making it out the door. The in-facing communication is different than the outfacing communication, which then creates, okay, you got a problem. Your messaging is off once it makes it to retail.

We try to come from the inside out and from a strategic perspective, every time we try to sell high, because there’s more value. What we look for is a seat at the table. Where there’s an understanding of what we’re trying to bring, because it can change the way they think. We know that we’re going to work ourselves out of job. Our job is to do a good job—to teach and then move on, and hopefully we’ve left something behind where they can then rinse and repeat and take that to the next level.

Ben:
I love that approach because I’m sitting here as a business owner, and I’m sure a ton of our listeners when they listen to this as leaders of companies, when you said, hey, our packaging sucks. We need new packaging. Your response is, yeah, that’s true, but that may just be a symptom. How many people in every industry is immediately just going to go solve that symptom? We’re going to treat the symptom. We’re not going to find out the underlying problem.

Jamey:
If we do that, which you can, but if we do that, the problem still is there. 18 months from now, two years from now, that same person, that same buyer is going to tell you that your packaging sucks again. It’s really trying to understand what’s going on.

We had a client come to us who was based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It’s a health care therapy, physical occupational speech therapy, Fox Rehabilitation. Tim Fox had started the company—very unique approach, and it’s all geared towards the aging adult 55 and plus. Medicare. He had come up with a formula where he could provide treatment through Medicare Part B versus Medicare Part A. He could extend the amount of treatment.

Let’s say your grandmother slipped and broke her hip. Well, under normal routine, Medicare Part A would provide 4-6 trips to a physical therapist and then they’re done. You don’t need nurse’s care anymore; you need to build a ramp. Well, his philosophy was I’m defying ageism. No ramps. We’re going to get we’re going to get your grandmother back walking to the grocery store.

He came to us wanting a recruiting campaign and where the strength lied was in his therapists as the rock stars of the business. We looked into his brand a little bit. Can we peel the layers back just a little bit? We realized really quickly in order to get the type of therapists that he was looking for—these self-starters, these entrepreneurial-oriented that work their own units, that define themselves by their job—in order to get those folks in, we needed to change his brand because he was focused on the patient instead of the therapist. If his practice grew at the proportional rate of adding therapists, we could exponentially build his business by creating a retention program. We turned the turret on his brand. Instead of looking like grandma’s house, it became very contemporary, very modern. Colors were fresh. Our messaging was fresh. Because we were targeting postgraduate / secondary education therapists coming out of sports medicine, coming out of acute medicine. How do we get them into this practice? Because they’re going to win. They’re going to win bigly. It was like, what do we do? Let’s change this business.

We started working with Tim when he was in 5-6 states, maybe. He’s in 38 states and DC. The largest privately clinician-owned practice of occupational speech therapy, physical therapy.

Ben:
You’ve told us a lot of stories about client collaboration, and I’m really curious, have you had cases where you come in, they may present the symptom, and then you dig deeper and find the actual problem, but it’s not the symptom they came to you with? Have you gotten pushback from these clients that they don’t necessarily want to collaborate? They’re like, no, this is the symptom. I want you to treat the symptom. If you have, which I’m sure you have, then how do you get them to buy into the collaboration and the vision that you bring?

Jamey:
Well, one of the things we try to do with every single project, whether it’s big project, small project, we try to start with a discovery and definition phase. In that discovery definition phase, there’s some research that goes on, whether it’s observational ethnographic research, whether it’s secondary, qualitative, quantitative, even in-depth interviews that we do with a number of people. The reason we do that is to objectify what we’re coming to find out.

If we can create a case study, a business case through that first phase that says, yeah, I know you’re thinking that this is what it is, and we can certainly treat this. But we’re opening this up to let you know that there’s potentially a bigger problem here. We can take it on if you want or you choose not to. What we’re trying to do is mitigate risk. Yet, we’ve had a few clients that said, no, I just need to keep going. It’s like, okay. Typically, those were shorter-lived relationships.

Ben:
Because it doesn’t get to the underlying problem, which you tried telling them in the first place.

Gary:
When I was at your place, because your place was in South End when South End wasn’t even called South End. Anybody in Charlotte knows South End is like; I call it Millennial Village. It’s just exploded and it’s very hip. But it was not necessarily that when you’re at BOLT. Then we were down the street at 1415 South Mint Street with Axiom Creative Group. But you’ve seen a lot of changes and now you’re in NODA area. You’re in Camp North End. Went into a very cool place. But one of the things that I thought was really interesting was you were taking me around, and I love Chick-fil-A just because they have disrupted their industry so dramatically. You shut down one of the days that’s a big selling day, shut it down. You have lines around the building with cars, and they’re speeding through 30 cars while 3 are waiting at the McDonald’s waiting for the shake machine to get the ice cream machine to get refixed or whatever.

But you guys did some packaging work for Chick-fil-A. Very established brand. Their brand standards are, they’re solid. It’s not like, oh, gosh, this is really broken. But you guys went in to Chick-fil-A for, out of Atlanta, and you did some pretty revolutionary stuff in their packaging. Talk a little bit about that.

Jamey:
We’ve been working with Chick-fil-A since probably 2017. What got us in the door, again, was relationship. We had worked with Newell Rubbermaid for a number of years in various brands inside Irwin and Goody and various ones and had developed relationships. Well, Newell has a tendency every few years, they do a big purge, and folks go out into the ethos. Well, several had landed at Chick-fil-A for the Atlanta market and Jason Begin, who heads up packaging and menu, had come in. They were actually working with IDEO on some packaging innovation, and he brought us in. He said no, let’s stop that. Let’s bring these guys in I’ve worked with them before and Shane Hill was also in that set, and it was about understanding the criteria of what we needed to do.

All of the current retail packaging that you see, and you enjoy at Chick-fil-a, we developed. They had some definite business case. They wanted to reduce complexity in back of house for the team member as much as they could. They wanted to reduce the number of SKUs where they could. We wanted to increase sustainability where we could. There was a lot of criteria while maintaining customer delight or guest delight, as they like to say, at a high level. We had to figure out how to do all of that.

We initially treated it like a design innovation project, not like a packaging project. We went after it from the very core. Literally, we developed a core understanding of what’s the minimum volume of product that you sell and how do you put that into a block? Now, how do you multiply that? You’ve got a 1 x 1, you’ve got a 2 x 2, you’ve got a 4 x 4, you’ve got an 8 x 8, 16 x 16. You start to scale that. Now, how do we put product into that? We designed our packaging around a cubic approach, really innovative. Then we were able to, at the same time, reduce number of SKUs.

So, met criteria 1. We’ve reduced as much plastic as we possibly could to paper board. That was number 2. Where we couldn’t reduce plastic, we moved them to a recyclable plastic. That was number 3. Then we’re able to maintain the customer delight by using their brand, which is, as you said, it’s world class in what they’ve done. What are the Easter eggs that we could bring to the party, very subtle that you don’t a lot of times you don’t even get it. But that was how we started that relationship with Chick-fil-A. Then we’ve just moved on to doing some really incredible, innovative things for them for back of house and other areas.

Ben:
I want to talk one more question about design. We’ve gotten really tactical here, which is great. The amount of business leaders listening are going to be able to take so many things from this. But then I want to wrap up with one or two questions on the more Jamey focus. Talk to us about the future of design and branding because innovation is the theme here, right? As you pride yourself on that being a philosophy and a staple in your business, what’s the progression here? How do we keep evolving with design and making sure that we’re staying ahead of the curve?

Jamey:
That’s a great question. It’s one that we’re dealing with right now and have been for a few years of really continuing to educate ourselves as we go through. I spent some time a few years ago at Yale in their school of management, really understanding business of design and thinking about what the future of design is, where it’s going to be impacted. Our designers are growing right now in two directions: they’re growing more into strategy and more into research. They’re becoming more agile, more focused, more of a generality growing that way. They’re also growing the other way, more towards production, more towards engineering. Meanwhile, our engineers are growing more towards design and also growing more towards implementation in terms of design for manufacturing or production or those types of things. It’s an end-to-end product now. It becomes more seamless as time goes on. There will be room for specialization always inside of that. But there’s also going to be, I hope, a big space for those of us who think about it as a singular thing, as design inside an organization.

IBM is a great example. They don’t make computers anymore, but they’re design thinking-driven that they have a design principal in every area of their business. If you think about a company the size of IBM, once a year when you go to sign up to renew your insurance, sign up for your 401k, is that not the most frustrating, taxing thing, the burden of what plan am I going to do? What they found from doing some research is it really bogged down their productivity during that period inside the organization.

Being a design thinking organization, they put their designers to work saying, how can we find what the real problem is, not the symptom, change it. They were able to create a whole employer piece to unpacking your 401k, unpacking the various opportunities you have for insurance and investment and all those kinds of things into a positive thing that you shared with your spouse or significant other. They did it in a way that it felt seamless and felt part of their culture. I was talking to John Iwata, who was a chief brand officer at IBM for quite a while, and it just changed the whole perspective of that time of year. Productivity went back up.

That’s an opportunity, I think for all companies, to think about design in a more holistic way, from every perspective. If we think about the corporate brand, what does that mean? That’s an overarching governance of what your brand is going to be. You think about the employer brand, and that’s the area where you can get in and really develop internal relationships. You can recruit better. You can retain better. You can create culture inside of that.

Then you’ve got the consumer brand piece of it, which is the outfacing piece. If you’ve done your work right inside, the outfacing piece really becomes intelligent conversations with the marketplace. It’s the same message that just goes all the way through your organization. That’s where we go back to how behavior can drive culture. Culture can drive your brand. Your brand can drive your business. We like to operate at the nexus of product, business, and brand. That sweet spot right there in the middle. That’s where we can change companies.

Gary:
Yeah, that’s great.

Ben:
Gary, I’ve got one or two to wrap up with, but do you have any questions you want to jump in on here?

Gary:
No, go for it.

Ben:
There’s so much here of your intentionality around everything, right? You exude it. I’m curious what you do for personal growth. Is it getting around people? Is it networking? Is it things like Vistage and those peer-to-peer groups? Is it reading? What does it look like for you to make sure that you’re continuously growing?

Jamey:
That’s the part I’ve struggled with recently. When you’re leading your team from a strategy perspective and a design perspective, you get your head down. You’re out with your clients. You’re growing that way. You’re constantly immersing yourself into a new culture, into a new opportunity. When you start to pull back, you’re giving up stuff that you really love to do, and it can be really painful. But at the end of the day, you’re doing it for the good of the company, and you’re moving to a different level where you’ve got to take on other responsibilities and find a way.

One of the avenues that I’ve discovered, thanks to Gary in part—we moved our CPA business several years ago. Gary introduced me to Adam, and we moved it over to Adam instantly—it just took an afternoon conversation. I want to work with this guy. Through that, we began to meet other people. We had known Jim Dunn for years at Sandler, and we had sent people through Sandler. I realized where the position that I was in right now, in order for me to work on the business and not in the business, I needed to retrain and elevate my new senior group. Because everybody retired, except for me. I’ve got this new ownership group, and I need to bring them up and I need to entrust them for the next 10-15 years of the business. I needed to reinvent a lot of things, and I needed to unlearn some things as well. Because when you’re a startup and you’re really flat in your organization of how you approach things, you’re a hunter, you’re a skinner, you [need] a lot of process. We’re really good at documenting the design process and what we deliver to our clients. We’re not very good at documenting our own processes.

I was thinking EOS I’ve got to do something get involved with EO and here again it was Adam. He said you known Jim. You guys need to go through leadership for organizational excellence, and it was a big leap for us but we’re in our first year of OE and I’ve seen a unique change already in how we’re thinking about the future of the business. Our priorities have changed in terms of what we’re going to focus on. Where is that? You can create a lifestyle business for yourself. But if I’m thinking about not necessarily a legacy, but if I’m thinking about the future of my folks and how am I going to take care of this group in the future, I’ve got to create a path for them that is obtainable, and they can see it and they can smell it and they can taste it. Those have been the things that I’ve been focusing on.

I’ve been getting out more. I’ve been talking to advisors like Gary and some other folks helping me to become a CEO because that’s not what I went to school for. It’s not what any of us go to school for. Then all of a sudden you realize, okay, I had picked up finances along the way, and I picked up certain things along the way but it’s like all of a sudden now that servant leadership that you had inside of you, you’re leading in a different way. You’re not leading up front. You’re not leading by example as much. You’re more leading from behind. But you’re encouraging, you’re mentoring, you’re coaching a lot more to give the team the will to go forward.

Ben:
Just like all of the stories that you’ve shared so far today of going in and helping other people design because it’s not just product? You’ve also had scenarios of how do I design the entire brand to attract the right people? How do I design things to develop these people? You’re doing the same thing in your company now at the same time. And that’s what it is, right? It’s designing those types of programs and development.

Jamey:
I think it really is, and we’re realizing that. We’re coming to the realization that we literally are designing the future for ourselves. We can paint that picture the way we want to paint it. It’s commitment. It’s doing it with the same amount of empathy, with the same amount of compassion, and being passionate about the job at hand and the future of BOLTGROUP and what it’s going to be.

Ben:
Well, you’ve got a little experience and you’re pretty good at design. This should go pretty smoothly also. Jamey, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been enlightening. It’s been enriching. There are just many adjectives about this. I really appreciate it. Where can we send the listeners that want to either check you out or check the company out?

Jamey:
Well, sure. boltgroup.com. B-O-L-T-G-R-O-U-P.com. Check us out. You can see all of our work. We have a lot of insights. We’ve developed tons of content over  the years. We’d love to talk to you, see what we can do to potentially help. This has just been awesome. We’re right over on North Graham Street; we’re right around the corner.

Gary:
And look them up on LinkedIn, too.