The importance of process, making sure we give ourselves time to think, and sailing around Vancouver Island.
Jonny:
You are listening to the Seattle Creative Show. This episode was recorded in the autumn of 2020 with Tim Yeadon of Clyde Golden, located in Lower Queen Anne. We talk about the importance of formal process, having time to think, and sailing around Vancouver Island.
Jonny:
Tell me about Clyde Golden, how you came to the decision of, I want to open my own studio, and just maybe your design history and design background.
Tim:
Let's see, I got out of college about 20 years ago and it appears that I've worked for myself now longer than I worked for anybody else. And I would like to keep it that way. And I got out of school. I was a newspaper reporter for about six years. I didn't know what I was going to do; at a certain point you see the writing on the wall with newspapers. And so I gave marketing a shot as a copywriter, and I really enjoyed it. I just found it fascinating. I have a journalism degree. I was in Seattle, it was 2004, and I just started reading the marketing section of the Seattle Public Library and found it interesting, and just kept reading. To this day, I'm still reading that section. I was a freelance copywriter for about six years, five or six years.
Tim:
The economy fell apart. We had a recession a little before, 2010, and so I went and got a job. It turns out it wasn't the worst in the world. I actually enjoyed the job. I was a copywriter at a little design firm that had just been purchased by an email software company called Responsys. I worked for them for six years as a copywriter, then a copy director, then an ACD, and then at the very end, I was the director of creative services. And I got to learn all the pieces of the business, from being an individual contributor, to managing people and projects, to having an understanding about budgeting and forecasting and going and landing work. You just sort of got this full 360-view of the creative process. I still really enjoy the creative process. We were at Responsys for a number of years, and then Oracle purchased us.
Tim:
The moment Oracle purchases you, you should start thinking about your next steps. They don't do what we do. They purchase software companies and eat the platform, take all the subscribers on, sort of cram them together into these cloud-sort-of formations. They have a thing called the Oracle Marketing Cloud. And really amazing clients, but nobody wants to wake up in the morning and be employee number 150034. That's just not the dream.
Tim:
Labor Day of 2016, in great Oracle fashion, they pick labor day and they did mass layoffs to celebrate labor, of course, which I thought was wonderful and very fitting for working for Oracle. So I had been there six years. So if you get a severance for six years, you've been through an IPO and a sale, you could take that amount of money and make a couple decisions about your life.
Tim:
For me, I just saw a runway and I was like, "Oh, I get to go back out of my own. This is lovely." I had gone and chatted with a couple different agencies, and I remember thinking to myself, "I have the ability to go out and get clients. Why am I asking other people to go work for their clients? Let's put my own team together and let's do this." That was my gut was just like, "Either you're going to do this now you're going to be annoyed with yourself forever." So around that time, I think I had started to read some of The Lean Startup books. One of them was called Four Steps to the Epiphany and it talks about customer development and having a sense of you have a hypothesis of a product or service you could develop. Now it's time to go actually speak to customers and get a sense of what they'd actually purchase and need.
Tim:
So I went out and already, if nobody's hiring you, you've got time on your hands, and so try to figure out people who would hire you, what might they want. Really, I figured out that my job running a creative agency was actually that of like a product or a service model developer. So in interviewing numerous customers, I had a sense of what it is I could do, and then what it is they would need. So my service model has basically ridden that from there on out, which is customer journey messaging. I have a strategy team. We do some consumer research and then for design and messaging across the customer journey, we're fairly channel agnostic. We do most everything post-branding.
Tim:
So we'll interpret a channel on behalf of a customer at a specific moment in the customer journey. An event has occurred, I have an audience and we're on some spot in a channel. It's a fussy fun game, to be honest.
Tim:
When you start a little business--and I think everybody who's started one knows--that in the beginning you have no customers, but the moment comes when you do. And either the thing sort of just lets loose and you go, or I don't know what happens if it doesn't. I guess you have to go get a job. Like that's the only thing that happens, if you fail as an entrepreneur, you have to go get a job. It's not that scary, because you already don't have a job. And so each year the thing has grown, not exponentially, but it doubles every year.
Tim:
We hold onto the clients that we land and we grow the ones that we have. Generally the gig is, you're going to go down there and it's kind of tough right now because we're all at home. Though we actually all talk to each other, maybe even more now. Between myself and clients, we probably have more in common currently to talk to them about than any other time. It's a shared experience in everybody being at home. So however you can connect, do it, aim for it that way. But generally we aim for, go down, learn their business, spot opportunities, solve the riddles, tell their stories. And if you solve a difficult problem for somebody, they're going to give you another one. Whether it's some sort of design piece or messaging or they need interviews done and insights and analysis brought back.
Tim:
Overall, that's the gig and I find it's absurd what we do and it's fascinating and I enjoy it then I wake up in the morning and I do it and we're three and a half years in and I still feel like we're just getting started. I feel like we're just still a baby organization just trying to figure things out. That's a long, rambling answer to a lovely question.
Jonny:
That was a great answer. When you have this runway and you said, "I want to take a risk on myself", was there a turning point when you kind of said, "This is something I can do, or this something that I know that is possible for me."
Tim:
When I was a freelance copywriter and the job was just to pay rent and eat, I went for a number of years and I didn't really have any full time. I didn't go get a job. I discovered that even with all the anxiety and stress, you could still wake up the next morning and figure it out. Knowing that, having that safety sort of in your belly or knowing that you can do that meant when I went and got a job, I always knew that no matter what happened, I could always go back and pay my own rent. There was this sort of a safety there. So coming out on my own this time, I actually have always felt safer as an entrepreneur than I do as an actual employee. And that I have some control over my destiny and I can wake up tomorrow morning and give this another shot. But if you go in somewhere and other decisions have been made in other rooms by other people and they get delivered to you, that's very different.
Jonny:
And that's where the conversation stops. You don't necessarily get to act on it in the same way.
Tim:
You do get paid every two weeks whether you do a good job or not. So it's like not worst deal of all time.
Jonny:
Right!
Tim:
So it's okay. If I had a job, I would do the best I could and be useful to the company. I'd probably figure out something that I enjoy doing and the team would be interesting and the clients would be interesting. But a turning point, every once in a while there's just a break, just another break, you just get a call and all the work that you've put in and all the lunches you've had and coffees that you've had and people you've chatted with, somebody refers somebody to you, and you're like, "Oh, look at this, it's another gig. This looks interesting. Let's see where this goes."
Tim:
I don't know if there was ever a moment. I mean if things are quiet for a while, there are moments that when you're an entrepreneur and the phone just stops ringing and you just sort of have to believe that somebody's going to call you back. If they don't call you back and the police didn't come and take you to jail or something, there's no penalty for any of it. I just make a joke about that. That if the business falls apart, you don't go to jail, you don't go to the hospital, you just have to go find a job. I kind of got over that 15 years ago or so. Last time it was trying to get people to hire Tim, the freelancer. And now we're trying to get people to hire Clyde, the agency and give us more complex things to do, have a team solve bigger riddles. I don't know that there's any more or less safety in any of that per se, but it's interesting. It's what we want to do.
Jonny:
Do you have a specific process or strategy to when you're gathering new clients or is it more organic? You said you were going out to lunches and just talking,
Tim:
I have long lists of people who I have questions for, and I just am curious, what are you working on? How did you get where you're going? In the same way that you're asking me questions, I go out and ask lots of people questions. I just try to go out and ask for advice. I try not to ask anybody for anything. And at the end of a conversation, sometimes I say, "We may have something for your team coming up", or maybe they say, "You should talk to my colleague or whoever." Basically just go out and try to meet as many people as you can. Everybody you've ever worked with, every client you've ever had, everybody they've ever worked with. It goes back to that customer development book that I had read many years ago or a handful of years ago that you just need to go out and if there's an industry or a niche you're interested in, go out and learn it the best you can and meet everybody you can, and good things will come from that.
Tim:
You can't go out and ask anybody for anything. You do have to ask for the sale at a certain point, but that's how I do it. It's endless conversations. And in my Evernote, I have a long list of people who I need to follow back up with. And partly I'm just curious what they're up to. Like, what are you making? People are making interesting things. And so that's fascinating. And why not just go chat with somebody? Don't really spend any money on sponsorships. Don't get any booths at anything. I go to some conferences, but not a lot of advertising per se.
Jonny:
But it's more, more natural conversation.
Tim:
Yeah. You want to work with people who have shared values and you're probably going to find that via people you meet and get along with.
Jonny:
Once you found someone that you're able to have that kind of conversation with--that more natural-occurring relationship with another business--when they turn into a client, do you find it's easier to have a greater participation from that client in the work that you're doing with them?
Tim:
Oh yeah.
Tim:
There's some people you just have naturally a better relationship, a better working relationship. I've had projects go awry in my life. We've all had projects go awry in our life and sometimes two perfectly good people get together, meaning well, and it just doesn't work out. And that's okay. Now that the team is getting a little bit bigger, there's process involved, there's more people involved, and sometimes just through a consistent process on your team side and on the client side, it's not a promise of things being more amazing, but there's much less likelihood that things go awry. When you're very small and there's less process, then it often is just purely relationship based. Can people get along? Now we have an input doc, we have a briefing system, we have an internal team kickoff, a client kickoff, but we have a path that we work through our projects with. If you follow the process, there's a good chance great things will happen.
Jonny:
Well, tell me about your team a little bit. What is the makeup of that small team you put together.
Tim:
So there's only two full-timers. There's myself and account coordinator. And then I have probably half to three-quarter time people who are... I sketched this out earlier. Who are we working with right now? I have a strategist, actually out in west Seattle, two copywriters, both fairly experienced. I have two designers, a design director. I have then a motion designer video editor, who does a lot of post-production. And if we're going to do production itself, I have a DP that I'll hire We have a couple of sound people. There's a hair and makeup person who come in and do a thing. I don't really do a lot of development work, so I have a developer I work with that, if we're going to do a custom WordPress or something like that, he'll come in and set up the CMS and help us out with that.
Tim:
So there's eight. So there's two full time, and then there's about nine of us working on the handful of projects on any given day. The distance between one to three to nine wasn't that great. It's interesting, the more I invent in operations and project management, the bigger the thing gets. And it's not a matter of, the more designers I line up and say, "I have designers." It's a matter of, can you make the consistent process enough for everybody to work in? That's what I come back to over and over and over again. It gives me more time to work on projects to have an operations person helping.
Jonny:
If you were to say your percentage of time spent designing versus kind of managing the business, what would you say that would be?
Tim:
I do a lot of creative direction. So I'm working early in the project, identifying the riddle with the client, and then getting the team going.Actual writing, I don't do a lot of copywriting; a handful of hours a week. If anything, it's just going back and maybe giving something an edit and design direction is very similar in that regard. This is one of those dumb entrepreneur phrases but I try to work on the business more than I work in the business. I try to set up, get the right people, set up, get them the right information, get the project going. I'm a good copywriter and a good creative director, but you want to go find people who are even better than you to go solve your client's problems. My job is to figure out what problems my clients have and put together a team and a system that can solve them.
Tim:
It doesn't matter if I write a headline or I write a video script, it needs to be identified and done. And I get really excited when the team solves something and you hear like, "Oh my God, that was amazing!" I also love it when it's so good, it intimidates me as a creative. They'll make something I'm like, "Dammit, that was so good! I always wanted to make something like that." That's my favorite. It's irritating, but yet you're really proud. It's like this jealous pride that you have of like, "Oh my God, did you make that? That's amazing." You know what that feels like.
Jonny:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tim:
It's so irritating!
Jonny:
I know I helped set you up for that, but that was all you, and I'm proud of that.
Tim:
It's true. It's absolutely true.
Jonny:
How do you set more people up for that kind of creative techniques while still making sure the business is running? Is there a tension there that you're always fighting or do you find it to kind of, one feeds the other?
Tim:
There are moments that I have to pull people back a little bit and say, "Trust the process, follow the process. Don't go off into the woods by yourself, take your team with you." But there's a consistency that has to happen of, do we understand the business decision to be solved? Would we know what that looks like when it is solved? Do I have a process that the team can follow so that they know when they're free to go and they know when input needs to happen? Nothing's more annoying than you just have some creative director riding you the whole way and you can never actually relax and think. There are times that I have to be heard and I want to know that there's a plan and I want to know what the plan is.
Tim:
Let's see a sketch and let's work through this a little bit, but then I'm going to leave you alone. And designer, copywriter, developer are going to go out and create. And when we come back, let's test it against what was the original need. That's the best way I can be useful to people is sometimes just help them figure out what it is we're trying to solve and then get out of their way.
Tim:
Now if they come back and it's completely different than the riddle we're trying to solve, I think that's definitely a conversation. Maybe they discovered something along the way and it needed to be that way, but at least you have a baseline that you can... So, at any given time I have 20 to 30 projects rolling. I can't remember all the major plot lines of everything, but at least I have a rough sense of, "In last week's episode, we talked about this," and now we're back.
Tim:
That's how I think about it sometimes when I'm on Zoom and it's call after call and we're reviewing work. I was like, "Well, what happened last time? Remind me!" And then I have a few things going on on my own and in between I'm reviewing scripts and I'm reviewing a brief and there's some research that we did that I need to read. Something that just occurred to me is sometimes the hardest thing to do is just sort of calm my mind of all the chatter and just focus on how can I be useful right now to the team? Like I just need to be quiet or I need to calm things and we just need to work together on this.
Tim:
I have a handful of 1099 contractors who are not full-time with me. And that means they have other people in their life. Maybe they have their own clients directly, or maybe they're working with an agency or they're working, supporting an in-house team. So I need to be as organized as I can be so that when they do come and work with me, it's a good experience and they'll come back. Retaining them is as important almost as retaining the clients. There's a lot of clients out there, but it's harder to find the best person to work with.
Jonny:
Well, and enabling that person to have information to execute on the thing that you need them to execute on.
Tim:
The average is good. That means we screw things ups sometimes. You need to bring it down from a hundred.
Jonny:
Well, with 20 to 30 projects going, that's a lot of balls to keep juggling. How are you balancing your own contributions to that, your own management of those clients, your own management of the team, your home life? How is that all? How do you not go crazy?
Tim:
Maybe I have! Yeah, it's true. There are times that it gets really.. I keep talking about this process and trying to formalize things and make things as consistent as possible. I've found that investing in the operations side has been hugely helpful in keeping the info rolling to the right person. I mean, I own this business and I have a hard time emotionally separating myself, especially when we're all working from home right now. I built an office in this downstairs bedroom, and a great spot to work, but I'm never physically that far from it. Versus for the last few years, I've had an office down on Market Street in Ballard and that is 1.7 miles from my front door to that front door. That's about what a 35, 40 minute walk. It's about a podcast or three-quarters of a podcast often.
Tim:
That often was a nice separation for me, because I'd walk down there, I'd work all day, I'd walk back and then I could sort of just have this, you're outside and you're just somewhere else doing something else. And that's the break. And right now it's really, I'm finding it really difficult any given day, you have 15 hours of work and you should probably only do nine or 10 of it, if you're healthy. You should do six or eight if you're super healthy. I've had to force myself outside a few times and pull weeds or do other things that are just like, I need to go get my hands dirty a little bit. I have a kayak in the garage that needs to be sanded down and re-varnished, and it would be good if I did that.
Tim:
But balancing things, there are weekends in my life that I have taken the laptop and put it in the drawer and just left it at the office and said, "I'll see you when I see you," and come back a couple days later and get back at it. But on average, it's five days a week and then, I'm a believer in a well-placed Sunday morning. I try not to work on Saturdays, let's put it that way. That's the one day I try not to touch anything,
Jonny:
But to your point of, of walking the almost two miles and having a time of transition between, "I am in a work state of mind and I am in a resting state of mind." That's huge. I am also working in a home studio right now and the transition is, "I should do that. I should do that work right now." Then you walk 10 feet and that was it. That was the 30 seconds of transition.
Tim:
Yeah, it's hard.
Tim:
We did more work those first few weeks. We were here, everybody at home with nothing else to do then I think we've done. We do a lot of work, but it was stressful how much. I think everybody channeled their stress into their laptops and did a pile of work. I remember saying to people, "I don't think we should keep doing this." I think we had a nice cadence going and we should try to get back to that, because it's going to feel healthier. Either we're more efficient now, and therefore, maybe we should be trying to do a little bit less.
Tim:
Or on the other hand, if the economy's going to go sour, I know that I'm going to do everything in my power to keep the thing going. It's been dumb luck the clients that I have, but we're busier than we were a month ago. I'm lucky. I remember 10 years ago when The Great Recession happened, the clients that I had, I was not lucky. So do you make your own luck? I don't know, but that's why they call it luck, I would guess. It's not always up to me, but we're very fortunate right now.
Jonny:
Can you tell me about how you seek out this staff that you have and how you kind of train them to be a part of the Clyde Golden process, and I guess how you met them?
Tim:
Well, when I worked at Responsys for a number of years, we did a lot of interviewing. What I discovered was, whether you have a position open or not, you need to keep interviewing and you need to keep chatting with people. How do I put this? The people you trust the most, if they recommend somebody to you, talk to that person. There's a higher chance that if you and I have shared values and I trust you and you hang with good people, I'm probably going to like your friends, or there's a chance that I'll respect them. Probably similar for if you know another designer or I'm like, "Hey, do you know a developer who can help with whatever?" And you're like, "I know a great guy, or I know a great person who can help out," then I'm going to be game to chat with them.
Tim:
But I'm always, always chatting with designers, developers, copywriters, project managers. It's one of the larger pieces of my job, I would say. Interviewing people and chatting with them, because there are moments that if you have a crew that they're mostly independent contractors, they're going to get a better offer at some point, or they're going to decide to take a full-time job or something, or they'll just get booked. They just get a good gig. And they're like, "I'm going to work on this for the next three months, catch back up with you." You need to be ready in a heartbeat to know that I have a couple other people who I could potentially draw from and be ready to go. And then there are a few things I'm always looking for. I'm looking for people who add energy to situations.
Tim:
Everybody needs direction when they're new. Everybody needs some guidance early on, you have a lot of experience, you're a smart person. You still need some guidance at the beginning, as far as what's the creative process, what's the background on this client? I do use Notion as far as a project management tool. I have a number of onboarding documentation pieces on how to do the time card, where are all the project trackers, what are office codes. I have a little sort of onboarding area. If anything, for the last few years I've just been going through and documenting. Whenever I get questions more than a couple of times, I'll write some piece of documentation and try to add it to the thing, because odds are it means that you're going to be curious too.
Tim:
I'm often just looking for people who are game to do something difficult. They respect their craft and they're willing to do difficult things. That's often a good test of, not everybody's perfectly set up among emotionally to work with a small agency. It's just not everybody's gig. I might not be set up to work with the world's largest organization in the same way. We are who we are. We didn't make ourselves this way. We just are this way. And so if it's not right, it's not right. But it's endless looking for clients, looking for people.
Jonny:
Do you find, as Seattle has grown that that has helped you, that has helped your kind of pool for looking for more clients and looking for more workers?
Tim:
Oh yeah.
Tim:
I just like, there's so much opportunity around here. Just drafting off the wake of some of these massive tech clients. I'm just really lucky to be in Ballard, in this town during this time. I think that there's a lot of places, if we wanted to do this, we would have to work a lot harder to do what we do. And we're really fortunate. I was randomly born into this time, into this place, and just by chance, I enjoy doing this. Not that you can't screw it up pretty easy, but there's a reason why I focus on customer journey, data-driven messaging, cross-channel. And here we are, we're in the middle of that. So how many of these companies have a million email subscribers and our customer journey's got to figure out. There's a reason why after interviewing a lot of people, I focused on this specifically. You land them once, and then you have gigs for a few years. Yeah. So, no we're in a great spot.
Jonny:
Would you ever move your practice to one of the San Juan islands ? If you could, if you could live there.
Tim:
I think that people who work together do better work. I think that if my team and I can meet up two, three days a week and sketch together on a whiteboard shoulder-to-shoulder, I think that that's important. I think you have to show up where your clients are at. You know, you land a client, but then the way in my experience, the way you grow it is you show up and you haunt the halls and you talk to your client, you get introduced to other departments, you move from marketing to a product team, to a talent recruitment team. Design and generally creative services scales across a lot of different disciplines or verticals within a company. And so, no, I don't really think I could do it. I don't think that I would do it. If I was super specialized where they needed me more I needed them. Sure. Maybe I could wake up on Lopez island every morning, but I don't think that's the case. I think I need to show up.
Jonny:
How would you describe your interaction with kind of the greater creative culture of the Northwest? Is it the same of you have to show up and participate if you want to be, if you want to be part of it.
Tim:
Really, I think it's a pretty support group, actually. I went to a lot of Creative Mornings when I first started the business. It's one of the Fridays, each month there'd be a room full of creatives and generally you'd go, and those are the people that you're going to be working with. These are your team, and there'd be an interesting talk. And I found that to be a very warm, interesting group. I've gone to a number of AIGA things. I've gone to General Assembly things. Personally, I tend to go to more things where there's product or client than where there's team, personally. But for many years I went to more things where there was team.
Tim:
If you're looking for mentors or you're looking for voices of reason, there's a lot of people in this town who are more than happy to take some time with you and help you out. "I've got 20 questions." "I got questions about this. Can I ask you?" Or I want to know how you got going and how you got where you're at today." People are going to take time with you in this town. It can be tough to nail them down, but once you have them, just like all of Seattle, they're tough to schedule, but once you have them, they're really pretty decent people, but we like it that way.
Tim:
Yeah. Seattle makes you work for it. I think that's okay.
Jonny:
Do you engage with kind of the creative education universities, or you said General Assembly?
Tim:
SVC. I Was really lucky in that when I was at Responys, they would pay for just about as many SVC classes you could take or maybe they take for one a quarter or so. So I did everything. I tried to study everything that had nothing to do with copywriting that had something to do with marketing, from brief writing, various art direction classes. I've taken just a pile of classes down there. And I find that to be a really nice community. I mean, that's an audible place that hopefully does great in the future. And then I've taken some shorter seminars, like a general assembly and things like that. But that as far as that's what I found to be most useful for me. I'd recommend anybody who can get their company to even split part of an SVC class to give it a shot.
Jonny:
Well, yeah, I was kind of curious where some people say you have to have a formal education and this or that, some people say doesn't matter, but just go do it or learn everything that you can. I don't think there's any one right way. It's all kind of the design history and design theory and creative production of the thing that's in front of you.
Tim:
Some of the best designers I worked with have English degrees. Well, the ability to explain the decisions that you made and why you made them often help a great designer communicate and sell things to clients. I think it's good on your team to have a mix of people with more formal educations, but it's not necessary. It's a joke, but the way you become a copywriter is you look in the mirror and you say, "I am a copywriter." That's how you become a copywriter. There are Miami Ad School and there are various sort of boot camps and things like that. But realistically, you just sort of start doing the gig and you read everything you can and you take classes and you just keep studying, but I don't believe a formal education is vital. I would say that once you're in it, your job is to keep learning and to challenge yourself and find new ways of doing things and be open to what's new. But how you began and how you got here is nobody's business.
Tim:
Can you do the gig today? If I give you something to do, can you do it, is the key. There is the idea that when you're hiring people, even if they haven't specifically done the exact job you need them to do, that's not an indicator of will they be great at it? The person who's done the exact thing before has a better chance of getting up to speed quicker, but the person who hasn't, who has all the skills, there's an as good or better chance that they will outshine that first person. Maybe the person with experience had always been average anyways and was never going to be beyond that. No, some of my favorite designers did not have formal, but some of my favorite designers did.
Jonny:
Where do you see yourself in kind of five to ten years, and are you content with where you're at now, or are you trying to push yourself into something new?
Tim:
I feel like it just got started with this agency and I'm trying to build a team that's willing to do difficult things and solve client problems. So my guess is as fast as, I've been at this now, this one for three and a half years, and it went just like that. My gut is that maybe the next five will feel like twenty. I don't really know. I always know that I can go back and be a freelancer. So that's always in your back pocket, but I go on and give it a shot of putting together--It's such an interesting question to ask, because it's not always up to us. You just keep working on something that you think will scale and be useful to your clients and hopefully you don't grow something that is unwieldy to the point that it's large and it's slow.
Tim:
I think an advantage a small agency has right now is that you can really go in and embed yourself and really learn a client's business. And when you're larger and it becomes more production-based, there's great safety in production, but you don't always get the difficult riddles that you get otherwise. So the goal is, maybe everybody's goal is always to find a happy balance between a couple production accounts that keep the lights on and then the other ones that sort of feed the soul. Size-wise of agency. I don't really care. I'm not particularly worried about that. I think it's just sort of growing this core team is what I'm after. You always want to add another anchor, but you to do it sort of in a way that's sustainable, that can grow. That's what I'm after is, you're just trying to build something that feels solid. I wouldn't specifically mind...I always laugh about this, a big open room. Wouldn't mind a room with a door, but I suppose I could go get some lumber and build one. So it's up to me.
Jonny:
Is there anything that gets you up at 5:00 AM with a smile?
Tim:
More likely to keep me up 'till 5:00 AM. I did look at your question at that and I laughed and I said, "It's probably, so I have a sailboat. It's probably having it all loaded up and knowing I've got about 10 days ahead up in BC with no cell phone." I'd already have it hooked up to the truck and be gone. That would be amazing.
Jonny:
That sounds fantastic.
Tim:
So something in the back country where there are bears.
Jonny:
You have a trailing sail boat, or what size is it?
Tim:
It's an 18 and a half foot sailboat. You row it and you sail it. It doesn't have a motor. In my off time, over the last 10, 15 years have built a handful of boats.
Tim:
And this was one of the more recent boats that I built. This was one that I specifically worked with a friend of mine as a boat designer and I wrote basically a design brief and we collectively put together a design in scantlings, and then I built it out in the garage. It's kind of a one-off. Maybe about four years ago, I took the boat from Ballard up to the north end of Vancouver island and I was out for six weeks or so. I think if you could ask me about my five year goal, it's to build a team sustainable enough that I could disappear for a month on a back country sailboat trip and row 300 miles and sail 300 miles and come on back and everybody's pleased to see me and the clients are happy. Like, wouldn't that be anybody's dream? That said, I'm going to get up every morning and get back to work.
Jonny:
You have that kind of relief to go out and sail and be a part of something that is not necessarily, something that you've built, but on something that you built.
Tim:
You go out there and that sort of inflammation that you carry with you just begins to heal up a bit. My discovery was last time. It takes about three weeks before you're like truly in the boat. There's nothing else from your outside world that's in there, and you're just in the boat working every day. Maybe the five year goal is to build something strong enough that I can go back and be out there for a few minutes and then come on back and get back at it.
Jonny:
That's beautiful. I've been racing a J boat in Puget Sound the last couple years. So different kind of boat, but still based on something that a guy built in the garage.
Tim:
That sounds super fun.
Tim:
I enjoy sailboat racing. I do. I've done that a few times. It's stressful.
Jonny:
It's different.
Tim:
And I suddenly feel like, I don't know anything.
Jonny:
Yeah. Everyone's yelling at you and then waves and then the sail's in the water.
Tim:
Yeah, it's aggravating.
Jonny:
You're six boat lengths behind someone.
Tim:
I get it. I understand it. I've done DuckDodge also a handful of times and you just keep turning left, it's great. It's like NASCAR. Yeah, totally.
Jonny:
Well, excellent. Thank you. This is fantastic. I guess started this body of work when I was working for the AIGA and it never quite came to fruition, so now I'm just doing it for myself, doing it for the community. Hopefully it will grow into something that it can at least support itself. If you know anyone that you think would enjoy these kinds of conversations, I'd love to talk to them. And if you have anything that you want to see as far as a tool on the website itself, let me know. That part is a learning experience for me to build overly engineered websites.
Tim:
I always thought it was cool that Clyde Golden was listed on your directory. It sort of added an air of legitimacy to something that can feel very quiet and lonely.
Jonny:
Well, I don't feel like everyone really knows the breadth of the companies that are in Seattle and you may know some of them, but you never quite know everyone that's out there and there's roughly 200 people on that site, that's not, that's not in-house groups. That's independent businesses.
Tim:
You know, there's others out there even quieter doing their thing. Yeah. There are some profoundly talented people in this town doing things, and I have no idea who they are and if I ever get to leave the basement again, I'd like to meet them. Cool. All right, Johnny, I appreciate...
Jonny:
Wonderful. Thank you.
Tim:
I appreciate the opportunity, I thought this was great fun.
Jonny:
Right on!
Tim:
Bye.
Jonny:
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