44: Street Artist to Vice-President of Global Design Coca-Cola // The Story of James Sommerville

I was bullied constantly for maybe three years. That chaos that was around you and then bear in mind, you're an introvert, you're a shy kid, so it kind of like you became an easy target. Those challenges of being a young person and having to cope with those have actually served me later in life. So I do thank my parents, my mum and dad, for moving so often because it sharpened a few skill sets that maybe I wouldn't have had.

Welcome to From Rock Bottom to Rockin It. I'm your host, Eric Gilbert Williams, and this is the pod where we explore personal stories of people who hit absolute rock bottom, then got back up, wiped off the dust, kicked failure to the curb, and now they're rocking it like you'd never believe if you didn't hear it. Live right here we cover subjects in business, sports, and life in general. If you like this podcast, please share it. These interviews are intended to inspire, to motivate, to give hope and vision. So please share this episode with someone who needs it. Use your Instagram Account, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Hand signals. Trained pigeon sent smoke signals up in the air. Use Morse code, whatever you like. Just share the love and share this episode. Also, email me anytime. Podcasterrickgilbertwilliams.com Send me questions you would like to have asked of future guests and I will incorporate them. Or just send me some suggestions on how to run a better podcast. Or just say hello, I'd love to hear from you. That's podcasterrickgilbertwilliams.com I know you're going to love today's interview, so let's get started with us here today on From Rock Bottom, the Rockin it is none other than James Somerville himself, now listening to the show today. You people know that I love entrepreneurship. I spend most of my waking hours on some entrepreneurial venture or another. So whenever I bump into a story that's related to From Rock Bottom to Rockin it that has an entrepreneurial twist, I just jump up and say that we gotta get this person on. And that's really what brought us here today. And I'm really excited to have James here with us today. He's going to share his story and I'll give you a little background about him, the context. Some of you are familiar with him and some of you might be hearing it for the first time. So the context here. James was a street artist as a teenager and he applied for a financial grant with His Royal Highness Prince Charles Youth charity in the UK in 1986, and he received a Little bit of seed funding and started a company called Attic. And he started this company from his grandmother's attic, which is, I'm assuming where the name came from, which is really cool. And after 25 years, Addict grew to have offices in Leeds, London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sydney with over 250 staff and rode a whole ton of waves of successes and failures. And going from Attic, James then went to become the vice president of global design. And he's at Coca Cola, the little company you may have heard of called the Coca Cola Company. So big jump. And he's going to tell us his journey about that. And under his leadership, he successfully rebranded some brands you probably have heard of or see every single day. The Coca Cola trademark itself, Diet Coke, Sprite, Fanta, Minutemaid, Fairlife, Fuset, Powerade, Dasani, on and on. There's a lot of things there and I'm going to stop rambling and let James explain it for himself. James, thanks for coming on the show here today. How you doing, man?

This is great. Such a pleasure. I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for asking. And I'm excited to have this conversation.

Yeah, we were talking. You're in Atlanta, I think right now, recording.

Yes. Clearly I'm not a local Atlanta guy, but I am in Atlanta, Georgia. I've been used to the south now for about eight years since we were relocated by Coca Cola Company from the north of England, which was usually gray every day. And so now I'm in the heat of Atlanta, at least in summertime.

When did you make the full move from the UK over to United States?

We moved in the summer of 2013. My wife is actually from Brooklyn, so she'd spent like a decade in the uk. She had like a new Yorkshire accent, I called it. But we eventually came over here and it was as far south as she'd ever been and certainly for me. So we've acclimatized now after eight years. It's great.

And before I forget, you got a book coming up next year called Grab the Mic.

I think Grab the Mic is my journey, but in the detail of coming at it from a perspective of being an introvert. I was an introverted kid and I used to get tagged, oh, he's a nice shy boy, like, and that's fine when you're six, but when you're 13, you feel very self conscious. You want to go on a date, you want to raise your hand in class, you just dare and do it. So you know what I've done through my career, my Journey is always being conscious of that I now see actually as the superpower. I think it's about you need that time to yourself. You need that thinking time. I don't like to be the loudest in the room. It was a struggle early on and maybe I'll unpack a little bit of that. But that's the book. Grab the mic. The story of a confident introvert. As I think of myself today.

Yeah. And you certainly strike me with confidence. And this is perhaps a segue. I mean, when I was a kid, when I was 13. Let's just use the age 13 because you mentioned it first. When I was 13, I was a lot of things. I was shy, I was nervous, I was quiet. I would probably self identify as an introvert. I was possibly a little bit depressed from it all. I found it very difficult to make friends and I would be labeled as the shy, quiet kid, but internally I was the depressed loner. I had very few friends. Like you said, I wouldn't raise my hand in class and it doesn't sound that bad from the outside, but in the moment I can say that it definitely was a contributing factor to why I dropped out of school and why I left home and why I got in a lot of trouble as a kid. I wasn't able to deal and cope with the challenges of being a severe introvert. And obviously here today I don't really project that way. I found a way to be confident in my own way and to learn who I am and to stand on solid grounds from this perspective. And then I go and I'm quiet for the next two hours and I don't speak to anyone and balance it out. But being an introvert was a huge impact on my childhood. And I'm curious to hear a little more about your experience of being an introvert. People listening to the show, some of them are introverts themselves and maybe haven't found their way through. And some people that are not introverts do not understand what it means to be an introvert. Let's unpack that a little bit and dive in.

Yeah, I mean again, I'm the 13, 14, 15 year old. I found a channel because we all have the ability to communicate. We're born with that. And so but my channel of choice became doodling, became on my school books and I got in trouble many times for that. But it was this like release of me kind of almost placing my thoughts out there but using a pen or a pencil. So rather than my mouth. But I think what I started to do was to understand that I'm not the loudest in the room, but I have a pair of ears versus one mouth. So I'll use those and I'll use my eyes. So it started move me to be more curious and observational and connecting dots visually. And ultimately I found later in life that became a real skill set in the profession that I chose. But as a young person, a young adult teenager, I wasn't the kind of spinning bow tie guy. And it's a real struggle and it's something that will always be there. It's just, how do you turn that perceived negative? Because that was the thing when you're young, it seems, oh, he's the shy one, he's the introvert. Therefore, that's assuming he's not as kind of advanced or as kind of strong in many ways as others as extroverts. But it's actually not the case. And it takes you a decade to really fathom that one out. I think it's hard at that age.

I found that as an introvert, bullies found me as an easy target. I had a target on my back because I wouldn't really speak up against them. I was a loner to start with, so any sort of attention was better than no attention. And I became a target for many years from both physical and verbal abuse, from just peers, just being mean kids. Was that something you bumped into or were you fortunate and kind of were able to steer away from that one?

No, I was bullied. I was bullied constantly for maybe three years. And at that age point I would have probably between 11 and 14. And actually I moved school, my parents moved. I'm in my 26th house as an adult. So if I had them all up, we were constantly moving. It felt like in the 70s we were moving every time the rentman came. But actually the bullying stopped because I moved. So could I have grown out of that? Could I have pushed through it? Most likely. But it was. I was a target. My head at the school bathrooms several times. And you bear in mind this is 1977ish. Punk rock was raving. People walk in boys bathrooms, they're piercing their ears, blood's everywhere. If you were to look in their eye accidentally, your head would be down the toilet and there'd be flushing. And so that idea of that chaos that was around you. And then bear in mind you're an introvert, you're a shy kid. So it kind of like you became an easy target for just pranks or deeper and more Meaningful but more bullying target.

So moving for you was a key. You were able to physically relocate. I guess as a kid. I never really moved as a kid, so I'm guessing here, but moving as a kid would probably be perceived as a bad thing because you're going to lose connections you made. It probably disrupts stability. Is that a fair thing to say or am I a bit off track with that?

I mean, the family unit stays the same, so around the dinner table it's the same. But all of a sudden you're on a new street corner at a new school. You've been launched into a pack of wolves in many ways, especially as young teenagers where you have to constantly try and prove yourself. And everybody's got very self aware at that point. And there's a group of guys there and girls. There are a street corner after school. And I learned in later life that became a very useful. I didn't feel at time. We talk now in entrepreneurs and in corporate corporations about the need for change. And change is scary to many people in corporations. But I'm very familiar with that notion of change and making new friends on a street corner. To me that's business development. Today that's me kind of like working a room if I need to do from a networking perspective. So those challenges of being a young person and having to cope with those have actually served me later in life. So I do thank my parents, my mum and dad, for moving so often because it sharpened a few skill sets that maybe I wouldn't have had.

That's wisdom in hindsight, isn't it? It always is that way. Or Mosley. So you said that you would find your expression through doodling and that got you in a lot of trouble in class. And that makes me feel like there's a connection between. Was that a starting point to becoming a street artist? Is that how that all started?

Yeah. So the doodling led to I'm finishing high school academically. It wasn't looking great on paper for me. So my art teacher, Mr. Cooper said, hey James, what about art school? So when you pitch it to your parents, I think it might go to art school. I think the only other one that they had a reaction, more negative reaction. If I'd have said I want to be a rock star. So it was just above rock star. It was like, oh, okay, is that a real job? But I think ultimately my parents were very supportive and taking that notion of doodling to art school and then an art school, trying to sort of make up a little bit to add Some monetary support to my own. We started to hit the streets and turn that doodling into street art in the UK. So we probably did 20 or 30 different towns and cities across the UK over a five year period around about age 18. I mean, after five years of rubbing the concrete and rubbing the stone floor in cities, I literally had no fingerprints. And there's a lot you could do with no fingerprints at 18. But it didn't feel like a viable career at that point. But we chalked up five years and thought we'd maybe go indoors after that. But the doodling led to the street art.

And just help me understand, what do you mean by street art? When I go downtown Las Vegas, I pick up some really cool spray paint stuff. Or when I'm at an art show, there's some really interesting stuff they're just drawing right on, on the sidewalk, sometimes with chalk or maybe graffiti, a spray paint. Like what kind of street art are we talking about?

Chalking. So definitely chalking. So you'd get there at 6am on a Saturday where you're going to get a lot of foot traffic, you'd sketch out. We used to do kids caricatures, Disney, the Smurfs, if we all remember those guys. And mentally we were almost targeting the kids to then ask their parents, hey, let's go look at this. Can I have some money to throw in this guy's tent? So we were subconsciously marketing to the youth, which then followed on later as well. But it was this idea of chalking all day. And of course, north of England, it's going to rain at some point, so you may get halfway through it and then the rain comes down or the police move you on for causing a disturbance. So it was a very kind of like you're either you get a full day or you may get an hour. But chalking was the medium that we used.

I never considered that as a street artist doing chalk work, that rain would literally wipe you out. And that doing that in England of all places, or in the UK of all places, that would be almost your greatest nemesis.

Yeah. And a decade later, when we were more in the agency side, I was walking through and I saw a guy who had a. He'd rolled up a canvas, which was genius. I was like, why were we not doing that? And of course, when the rain came, he'd roll up and stand and then he'd just roll it back out like a mat. So even innovation, as we might call it in the branding or corporations. He was innovating right there. He saw Something that we didn't. And he managed to probably overcome that weather or that policeman kind of situation.

Now I'm a bit of a newer generation, but if I remember correctly, my history in the 70s, 80s, it was a tough time in the UK. It was a tough time in a lot of places, but there was a certain amount of riots and unemployment was skyrocketing, I think. Is that in my history, about right there?

Yeah. Well, the late 70s sort of saw this explosion of punk rock and that young people expressing their kind of discontent for the situation economically and politically. So I was young then, I was like 11. But it spoke to me. What spoke to me then in many ways was the creativity around it, the fashion. I started collecting punk rock flyers, posters, so all hand drawn with Sharpies or black and white photography. So very simple, hand created. But for me it started to speak both creatively in fashion, music and then in the 80s. I think it wasn't our finest hour. I think the high unemployment rates at that point. I'm reaching the end of art school. The idea of starting a business never really came into my head. I think we were kind of like. It was the unemployment situation that allowed myself and my friend Simon to look at each other in the eyes and go, why don't we give this a shot? And then we had to scramble as to find out how to do it. But maybe another blessing in disguise. If the unemployment rate wasn't so high, I could have been working in a bank right now and enjoyed a 30 year career in finance or something. Weird. For me, it was the situation that drove us to be entrepreneurs and maybe a little bit of background as well. My dad was an entrepreneur, so it was probably there somewhere in the DNA. Again, it's amazing how cards are dealt and we seize that opportunity with the Prince's trust.

So I'm curious when you were discovering yourself as an introvert and finding your voice and doing the street art. Some people who get picked on or that have a tough time as a kid end up lashing out and they get angry. And you said a second ago that you didn't have any fingerprints because of the chalk art. So you could have done other things. And I'm assuming that that means that it could have been theft, it could have been breaking enters, it could have whatever. Why did you choose not to go down that road? Was there a mentor or was there a person or was it never a thought that really crossed your mind? I'm just curious because some people do go that way, right? And it's hard to know sometimes what it is that pivotal moment is or how we can prevent it.

Yeah, I love the notion of hustling as being entrepreneurial, finding a deal, finding something that I could buy at this price. My dad in 1977, again, I'm 11, I keep going back to that age. But he'd heard about this craze in the USA called skateboarding. So as an entrepreneur, he hired a 16 wheeler. He went to, of all places, Germany. He came back with 40,000 skateboards, but 5% of them were broken. The wheels had come out, the ball bearings. So I fixed them by hand in my garage and I sold them for five pounds each in the local post office. And for me, that was a real taste of. I just did this. My dad was going to throw them in the dumpster or the skip anyway. So I took what was waste and I kind of spent some time putting all the wheels back together. Solemn. And for me, there was some magical and rewarding about that that was grounded on effort and seeing something and turning something into something else, rather than, I guess, opening a window, climbing through and taking something that's not mine. So I just took. I took what I was seeing through my dad and thought, what could I do in using my skill sets, if you like, in order to have that? Because both of those are about, what's the reward at the end of it? Am I going to fill a bag with swag? Am I going to work and create something, recreate something and then maybe create some revenue at the end of it? Both have a reward. It's just a different path to get there.

I totally resonate with everything you're saying right now. As a kid, I started, I had no experience in business, no sales background, no entrepreneurship in my family really at all. But the hustle, there was something about having an idea, okay, I'm going to go do this and I'm going to go get that. And then just making it happen. Did event production when I was little and I did direct sales and knocking on doors with a chain around my neck and a goatee and a motorcycle jacket. And it was brutal, but it was lessons and it was fun. And for me, it gave me something to focus on. It kept me busy, it kept my hands busy. That old saying about idle hands, as soon as the hands were busy doing something fun and productive that bettered my life, it was like, wow, there's just no more incentive to do anything else but this. And for me, this was entrepreneurship. And it just led to a whole career. Sounds like you had a Similar experience there. So now I'm curious. So you're doing the street art? You're doing it, and then you bumped into the charity. And how did you bump into this Prince of Wales charity? And did you meet and tell me that? Because I was trying to read online if you met Prince Charles in that first encounter or not. So maybe just tell the story here of how you found this charity and where it led to.

Absolutely. So it's spring of 1986. Simon and I had decided to give it a go.

And that was your business partner at.

The time, Simon Needham, and he's out living in California somewhere today. So we made appointments at the high street banks in the uk. It would be National Westminster Bank, Lloyds Bank. These are kind of like the typical banks over there. Every bank manager said, no, firstly, the infrastructure back then was not really there to support startups. There's certainly no venture money. The banks really didn't have a startup kind of portfolio. And actually we'd fallen straight out of art school. We looked like some post punk gothic spiky head. No wonder they said no, quite honestly. And our business plan was on a single sheet of paper and we really didn't have our act together, but we had an idea, but there wasn't the belief there. And then my dad was in, he was talking to a guy over a pint and this guy said, well, I think Prince Charlie started this charity to help unemployed young teenagers to start a company. Why don't you check it out? So he brought the newspaper home with a little clipping and we went on a sort of a rabbit hunt to find that. And we eventually found an office in the north of England. It wasn't His Royal Highness at that point, but we went to see the representative of the Prince's trust. His name was Harry. And he wasn't judging our clothing, he wasn't judging necessarily our background and our look. He was just there to listen to our story. What's our vision? What do we think we could do if we were to be granted £1,000 each? So what would we do with that? And we just said, hey, there's this new thing called Apple Mackie. It's rare to get one in the north of England and the Princes are only in London, but we believe that this could really take off. So that was our first encounter with the Prince's trust. And four days later they called us and said, congratulations, guys, we're going to support you with your seed funding of 2,000 British pounds. And we were off. That was amazing. It felt great. And I often say today, although the Prince of Trust gave us 2000, I think what they really gave us was confidence. And what they give young people today, they've helped a million young people. And they give each and every one of those youngsters confidence that someone believes in them. And so the £2,000 was a check, and we bought our first Apple Mac. Great. But actually what it gave us was a belief that somebody was trusting us and we didn't want to let them down because it felt like such a lot of money. And we're like, okay, we need to make this work now for real.

And did this have a positive effect? Was this like a turning point for your introverted nature? Did this give you that confidence to recognize that even though you're an introvert, you're actually. It's a superpower? Is this kind of where that started, or did that start somewhere else?

I guess it was an early insight into how to pitch. So where we're pitching to the bank manager, fail, okay, we didn't win that pitch. We're going to go pitch to Harry at the Prince's Trust. And then he calls us back and said, it's like almost winning a great account, a great something that we may go and pitch for today in a different sense. So that boost, but it also allowed me to understand, even when we don't win, that is the bank manager. What do we learn from that? How can we come out of that last meeting into the next meeting not making maybe some of those mistakes? We maybe didn't say this. Maybe we shouldn't have said that. So, yes, it was, every step of the way was adding to my personal confidence. Simon, on the other hand, was very confident. He was the opposite of me. And I think that's why we gelled together so well for 25 years. But for me, I was looking at both the successful meetings and the unsuccessful as learning opportunities for my own personal.

That's really cool. I'm glad that you had that balance, too. I didn't have that balance in a partner. I always attracted more people that were like me. And as my career went on, I started to learn more and more about specifically trying to hire and partner with people that are the opposite of me to balance out the equation. It was a tough lesson learned in time. So I'm glad that you got that early. What was next? You got this Apple Mac. And what happened? You started designing right away on it. I mean, Apple's back then were very different from the Macintosh. I'm recording on today what did you do when you got this expensive piece of equipment for the time and for your circumstance?

Yeah. So the £2,000 enabled us to buy the Apple Mac, but we didn't have a printer and we were told that there's not a printer in the north of England that would print from a Mac. So we put our floppy disk.

Wait, I just have to repeat this for my own benefit. There was no way to print on a Macintosh computer back then. That just wasn't a possibility. Is that right?

We could not find a printer outside of London that would print from a Mac. In 1986. The floppies went in the post went down to London to a quote established printer and five days later our prints came back on A4 paper, like letter size paper. And we just couldn't believe what we'd just done with the typography because prior to that it was all traditional cut and paste handcut with a scalpel knife or an artwork boards. This was just like we felt we'd just kind of walked into some like graphic heaven. So we weren't as upset about the five day wait. Within six months printers were there. And we also felt that Mac at the time, not every agency, when I say agency, design shops, advertising, local agencies in the north, would invest. It could have been a Betamax versus a vhs. It could have been the one that failed. So people were slightly hesitant I think because we had that check from the Prince's Trust. We had no fear. We had a gut feeling if it didn't work, it didn't work. So we were almost the first in our local area to make investments. Fast forward two years, everybody's getting into the early max. We were on generation three or four then we were already running faster than some of our perceived larger competitors. So we felt it really projected us forward by taking that calculated but taking that risk. And the sending the floppies to London was just a fun thing at the beginning, soon went away.

That's fascinating to hear that some of the challenges and what you had to do. So what was the first thing you printed? What was the purpose for it? Was it a marketing related flyer and was it for yourselves or was it for a client? What was the first thing that you printed with this Mac?

We just experimented with some typography. So imagine you type your name in. We typed Attic in probably a hundred times different fonts. Wow, look at all the fonts. And then what we started to do was stretch it like to the point where it would look intense, it would look graphically crude today or expand it wait, we can wrap it around a curve. What's going on here? This is unbelievable. We saw it on the screen and then the screen would have been eight bit, very pixeled and. But when the prints came back and you see that Times Roman serif is perfectly smooth going on a curve, stretched. Yeah, I'm sort of going into the weeds of geeking out on typography. But for us, that was the first print. We were just really testing type styles, manipulation of typography and we wanted to believe it and we didn't believe it until the paper came back in the envelope. That was the start of our Apple Mac journey and not, well, Mac today. Of course, we haven't looked back since then.

Your confidence is building up and you're getting this little bit of momentum. You got the money behind your belt, you're ahead of the curve with competition, which is, I'd imagine, a huge confidence boost as well. And then you must have faced this point of, okay, how are we going to get a customer, James, Is that kind of a question that you had to ask yourselves? What are you going to do now? How are you going to make money with this thing?

Yeah, because I think Simon's natural ability is a bit more of an introvert and a very confident young man then. And I wasn't. I think he was our natural sales guy. But they became times in the week or times in the year where I also had to step up, make that call. And we would be in a British phone box with coins, looking through the yellow pages and I'm going through ABC thinking, I'll try this tire company, I'll try this kind of clothes store. And just like, hi, could I speak to the owner, please? And for me, that fear, that ability to be able to start the conversation without almost burning up in feeling, blushing, swallowing uncomfortably, screwing up a line of my introduction. So that for me, even in my early 20s, was that cold. Calling sales was the challenge. Not like today where we could just DM someone in LinkedIn and go, hey, this is what we do. What do you think? It was kind of old school. Telephone calls for me were tough. I felt like I needed to jump in the pool and just do it.

Eric here. I hope you're enjoying the episode today. This is a passion project that I put together. I really wanted to do this. I really want to help people out there. I had so many people reach out to me when I was younger and when I was having a tough time and struggling. I've written a book about it. You can check it out on my website. Please do. But most importantly, reach out to me, give me some feedback. What could I do better with this podcast? What am I doing that I should stop? What am I not doing that I should do? Tell me your experience, give me some tips and suggestions. I really want to design this to suit your needs and all you got to do is send me an email. It's ericericgilbertwilliams.com or use the contact me button that you'll find on my website. Just send me an email. We'll have a phone call or we'll chat online, doesn't really matter. I would love to hear from you and figure out how to make this show even better with your help. So please reach out and don't be shy. And really that's what it comes down to sometimes. I mean, there's always two schools of thought that I bump into a lot and I'm of two minds on it. I mean I dropped out of high school to get into my first venture, knocking on doors, trying to sell, get well established, smart wealthy business owners to say yes to some three quarters of the way street kid in a motorcycle jacket. And it was a tough go and it was a struggle for me as an entrepreneur for, I mean, when isn't it a struggle as an entrepreneur? It probably always is and it probably always will. But specifically from that age of 18 until, let's say 25 when I was really getting the foundation set, it was hard, nose to the ground, pushing, getting rejected on 90 something percent of the occasions, easily 95, 96, 97% knows and somehow making it through to find that yes. And you got to imagine it's one thing to say a stat like I'm talking to people listening here that are hearing a 97% failure stat. It's one thing to hear that stat, but you got to think about it, think about everything that you own on the line, 100% everything. And 97 people in a row from different backgrounds that are well to do, well off, established, Smarter, wiser, older. 97 people in a row. Maybe it's a banker relating to James Story going to a bank who's more credible and authoritative than a bank. They're scary people as a kid, they have the power to say yes or no to your entire dreams. And you get 97 of these people or whatever the number it is for you and they look you in the eye and they say with all the wisdom I have in my infinite wisdom capacity as an adult, I think that your idea is trash. And they look at you. And they say that. And they don't say it in those words, right. But they say it in their energy. And for me, as an introvert, one of the things I was able to hone perhaps as a superpower is to read the energy of the room and to read the energy and the unspoken words of the people around me. And sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes in sales, it's actually a great thing. I can start to learn about how to pivot a little bit. But in rejection, all the words that weren't said come out 10 times stronger than maybe the person meant to say. And so to get said no, to be told no 97 times in a row by smart people, as a kid who's struggling with self confidence, it's a really big deal. And so to people like James that have this tenacity, this almost insanity, to just keep pushing anyways, despite all this is life changing stuff. And to me it's the type of stuff that you can't really teach in school. But on the flip side, had I actually stuck through school and pushed through that as well, maybe I would have learned a ton of things that would have prevented that sort of hardship and that challenge of doing it the hard way, for lack of a better word. And so I'm really of two minds. Where does the benefits of school start and stop and where does the benefits of being a hustler start and stop? And maybe the answer is a blend of both. But James, I'm curious about your perspective. Do you relate to some of what I'm saying there? And what do you think? Where does schooling perhaps curb some of those hard lessons versus these are just lessons you have to learn?

Yeah, I think with all of us, no doubt, listening, potentially the schooling provides that basic foundation of reading, writing, history, just being a good citizen and being able to communicate and branch out into your field. I think once that and you can hustle on the side and you could have the teenager and the paper round, then you're out in the real world. And you're right, those 97 people who are more experienced, more intelligent have been around the block way more times, have more money. And so it's intimidating. But what I started to do was to stop, ask. I've reframed my questions to them in the sense of I didn't want them to say the yes or no because they were so they like to speak because of their experience. My line was, hey, do you mind if I ask you your advice? There's not a person on the Planet almost that wouldn't say sure. Because people like to give advice. People like to be that wise owl. And I'm more experienced than you, so I'm happy to pass on my advice to you, young James. And so for me then, I'm not looking for a yes or a no. I'm actually saying, hey, but we've got this idea. We're thinking of opening an office here or doing that, or maybe buying our eighth Mac. Would you go for. Does it feel like a stretch? So ultimately then you're in a dialogue and then that conversation's flowing. And for me, then the close, I guess if there's a way of framing that out, may actually be in a week, may actually be that afternoon, but it's pacing that out and allowing the individual that I was connecting with just to sort of like be real, authentic and sharing some of their knowledge. We can find knowledge everywhere today, from Wikipedia to LinkedIn and we just need to plug it in. But actually on a human level is still really powerful and I still use that today. I love stories from other people. We may frame it as advice, but inevitably they'll roll into a story and that's a lesson that they can't necessarily teach from a textbook at school. Those are life stories that I think become your further education.

Definitely. And it's a bit of a side subject, but you're touching a little bit on the concept of a salesperson. And for me, when I think about a salesperson, I think about a professional problem solver. Am I able to actually make someone's life better with whatever it is that I'm offering, yes or no. And if I can't, then I go into the realm of sleazy salesperson car salesman that you see, and it's stereotyped on tv. But if I can make someone's life a bit better with whatever it is that I'm selling, then I have to do my best job to help present it and help people understand their benefit. Once the sale's complete, that's where the work really begins. Then we got to really start doing the hard work and delivering on the promise in a real way. That's my little side rant on sales. But I don't know if you have anything to add on that.

Absolutely. And firstly, my dad was a used car salesman, so I knew all, but he also taught me. One afternoon, it's raining north of England. I've given that story, but it's raining every day, so it's 10 minutes to 5 and I'm like, dad, no one's coming to buy anything. I was in his office after school. Can we just go? Can we get back home? I probably need to kick a ball or something. And he said, no. I said, why? He said, because the sign on the door says we close at 5. And for me, that small commitment to a promise. Although he was a used car dealer and salesperson, very strong on sales skills, but again, the foundational skills for me became really important, that if you say you're going to do that, you have to do that and don't sneak away, because actually someone could walk in at five minutes to five and say, I need to buy a car. What have you got? So seeing it through to the end in everything we do, it's a deadline, a project, a commitment is something that those very early lessons that don't feel like lessons that turn out to be huge and memorable for us all, that is so powerful.

That's integrity. And it's tough because I gave the example of it as a stereotype, because when we think about whatever the sleazy salesperson happens to be, there's a lot of different perspectives and contexts and industries. I think it touches on every industry, frankly. And so when I give the car salesman one, it's tough because there are powerful good people that are in the car sales industry that, just like your father, that taught you integrity. And that's a foundation that I think applies to everything in life. So anyways, I had to add that in there. Moving forward into the evolution of this little startup with the first Mac and learning about sales, you're starting to get some clients now. And how do we bridge this gap to going from everything we just talked about to 250 staff offices in multiple cities all over the place? How do we bridge that?

Yeah. So my dad's brother, my uncle, who's called Brian Somerville, and in the 1960s, before I was born, early 60s, 1964 to be precise, he was the press officer for the Beatles, and he brought them to the US and you see February 1964, and he's on stage with them as the US and the world see those old. And for the following four years. So I'm a baby at that point. I don't remember. But when I got to be a teenager, he started to teach me about the brand as well as the band and the marketing side of things and really the international success that any global brand or band would achieve. So we just started thinking, hey, you know, what if we were to do things a little bit differently and jump on a plane Maybe we could sell ourselves in Europe, maybe we could shoot down to Brazil. We were big football fans, maybe we could go to the US and so we created a collection of design books that were pure experimentation in graphic design. So this scrapbook of all things, now we're on 8th generation apples. Photoshop was part of everybody's life, multi led, bigger processing powers. So we were creating these very rich books around 95, 96. Armed with those books we came over to the US that was our first to New York. And so Beatles mentality. How could we almost kind of show up somewhere that look a little quirky, we look a little different, we speak different, we've got a pretty good product. We think maybe we can take a leaf out there. Book. And so that kind of idea of exporting. And I remember going to a conference and it was a Department of Trade and Industry conference in the uk. So that's already feeling very heavy. And the speaker said you have to be export ready. And I thought I am export ready because I have a passport. I'm not sure what else. I need to be kind of filling in forms and kind of red tape all over the world. I'll just go see somebody. And so that's how we went from our kind of humble beginnings in my grandmother's attic bedroom to building some clients in London and then over to New York and then west coast and. And started to sort of build out from there. So little spirit of the Beatles was with us.

I think you landed a good client, right?

No, absolutely. And it's still like that in the uk. If someone from your country, from another country is in our local community, like it's interesting, they're bringing new things. So you always have a better chance of standing out beyond your own market because you have something that they don't have. And we have different stories again. So we felt that that might be. And we're young, so we're on a journey and it felt like also fun as well as growing the business at the same time you got your big break.

When we're doing the hustle game, we're out there trying to make something work. There's a certain amount of skill, luck, however you want to call it, a combination. And I've always resonated with that, saying that the harder I work, the luckier I get. And everyone's going to find their own big break somewhere, some shape, in some context. But if they go home, if you go home, if you're out there listening to this right now and let's say if you're selling cars, if you're selling roofing, if you're selling construction or whatever it is, and you go home before 5pm, you go home before you're supposed to close. You're missing out on whatever happens to be there. And I'm going to suggest that the harder you work, the closer you're going to get to your big break. And it's going to come in some strange, maybe family tie that you didn't expect or some random person saying yes because you just happen to be there at the right time. But the only way to find out is to show up and to give it your all. And this is a great example. James Story is a great example. You work really hard at something from doodling in school, and all of a sudden dueling in school turns into doing national media work for some of the biggest people. That's the way I interpret this story. That seems to be an accurate way to look at it. Would you say?

James we built some great clients. We had a fantastic team. It was one of my first lessons in culture, the importance of a culture. So we're young, dynamic crew at that point, and officers in three or four offices around the world. And each one had approximately 30 members of staff. But occasionally we bring. When we could put people on planes, we brought them all together. And that idea of actually feeling, it's a little cliche, but feeling like a family, feeling like we're in this together, and then using that energy to drive the business forward. So culture, again, is not something that's taught in school. It's not something that's taught maybe as an important thing, as one of the kind of bullet points on the business plan, but it's so important. And those early lessons of discovering our own culture, we didn't write it down and say, hey, we're all going to be this. It just organically and naturally happened. But then we realized the power of that or the power of people, really. Technology's there, we can travel anywhere. We can create and design anything. It's those people skills behind that will ultimately drive each other, drive me, and we drive them as well.

Was it exciting to sell the company or was it painful or was it both? What was that like?

I think the sale of a company is mixed emotions. There's absolutely no doubt about it. It's not something that you experience too often. It's a great opportunity to okay financially. Right. Okay. That's the mortgage loan. Great. So you have that kind of natural sort of outcome on day one. Check one. And then actually after A couple of years or you realize, ah, did I do the right thing here? Is it really something I should have done? Could we have gone another decade? So you sort of. There's it's this kind of excitement, relief, because we've been through several, also several near misses. By that I mean almost bankrupt. Whether it's a crash, some kind of conflict or attack on the world in some way, and we know the story. So as an independent shop, those were very difficult to survive. So there's a sense of relief. There's a sense of like, we now have a cushion around us and the company and all the people that were working for us at that time have a sense of security. But then there's a sense of that excitement balanced with a pinch of regret, a pinch of, did I do the right thing? And is there something else? Because it's no longer your baby. You're not making the decisions anymore, at least for the three or four years I was there afterwards. So that scrappy, entrepreneurial, opportunistic energy that you had at the beginning, all of a sudden it's grown up and we're in a grown up kind of environment. And so you looking for that again, which is. It's a thrill. And it felt like we could nicely draw a line under attic. And if nothing else, I was proud for the prince's trust and proud for my grandmother because we started in my grandmother's attic bedroom, who was no longer with us when we exited. But it was all down to Rosewood was her name, and a small attic bedroom in the north of England.

That's such a cool story. People that are starting out their own businesses right now, we all dream of having that, building it up, that big customer, the great exit, the paying off the mortgage. So you really are embodying the story. What I think is the inspiration of the entrepreneur from so many different angles and also just the hustle and discovering about who you are and discovering just how strong you are and the good life that comes with it. So, James, you have a really powerful story there on building up the foundations of an entrepreneur. I really appreciate you sharing that. And now we get to move into, not better, but I would say perhaps bigger and bigger. Starts to talk perhaps about Coca Cola a little bit. And I'm curious to hear how you draw parallels between being an introvert and how that led you and became a superpower that led you to be a force to be reckoned with in the Coca Cola Company and maybe hear a couple little stories about your time there and what you learned about design and about being maybe the underdog and finding yourself in a position of, for lack of a better word, power. What was it like to be there?

Yeah, you mentioned my book next year titled Grab the Mic, and that's because once, maybe a decade earlier, I was at a conference and you know when the natural Q and A happens at the end and the mics float around and I had a question, I had a brilliant question, but I had a fear. And I didn't take the mic because I wondered that I thought people would be looking. What a silly question. Or I'd go, I'd blush, or so I was always regretting. I'll never forget that conference. So for me, on thinking about my next chapter, I wanted, metaphorically, to grab the mic somewhere. Something that would make me very nervous. I would be completely out of my comfort zone. So, in other words, I didn't just want to start another agency. I kind of knew that gig very well. I wasn't trained to go into another field, so I needed to stay in the design kind of category, if you like. So for me, this stage of being the design leader, such an iconic brand like the Coca Cola company, for me was like, I need to grab the mic. And with fear, with a shaking hand, using that analogy, I just felt like all that conference from 10 years earlier came back to me. And so every time now, I'd be looking for it, because if I can push through that and what's the worst that can happen? So if I can actually kind of grab it and take on and see whether it can add some value to a great brand like Coca Cola, then it was a great question. If I go back to the mic and the. The question was pulled off and the audience liked it. So that was my internal moment to say, you need to do this. And as long as I had family support and everything else was in place, I just thought, this is a great change of direction that would really sharpen something new that I didn't have before.

And how long ago did you start Known Unknown?

So Known Unknown is my new graph in many ways. So I did five years at the Coca Cola Company, 2013-2018, working with some of the best marketeers and brains ever. They've schooled in the best school. So I was humbled to work with that team. But the one thing that with my attic years, we were constantly pitching, constantly in survival mode, presenting to new brands and clients. I must have given a thousand pitches. Then when I was at Coca Cola, we were constantly being pitched too. So I was on the other side of the table, agencies coming in from all over the world looking to get some Coca Cola business. And that was great too. I almost referred to myself as poacher turned gamekeeper. What I was studying there was not just the work, but the model of a creative entity. That's probably not changed for 50 years, but the creative team, you've got the account team, you've got back of house, now you've got the digital team and so on. But these models are there and they've been tried and tested and they work. What I felt was things were changing. So in 2018, I just felt there was a project around. How could I give unknown designers around the world an opportunity to work on known brands? Because normally those guys and girls working in bedrooms or Starbucks at the time on laptops, they're not going to get a shot at a Coke. They're too fat, too down the food chain, so to speak. So for me it was like, but that's great talent. And so in 2018 and 19, I started to. So it was James's Rolodex to start with like 30 of my trusted creatives around the world. And I started to pitch that to a couple of clients, brands, and they were like, James, what does distributed mean? I mean, don't you have a cool office in Brooklyn or London, somewhere hip? And it was like, no, I'm working from home. I'm going to tap into my network, we're going to deliver a great solution for you. And so they scratched their head a bit and because we knew each other, maybe got a couple of breaks and gigs and of course come 2020, that remote question was never put to me again. And now we're up to 5,000. So 5,000 of my Rolodex friends who are some of the best talents in the world in the design field, and what's great about that is we can draw down a team who's available. 10 people, 15 people. Just did a project with 36 people and from all over the world, but quote unknown and working on great brands. So it's a win win because the brands get a cherry picked, handpicked talent on demand. It's a win for the individuals because they're having an opportunity to kind of, you know, flex their creative muscles on brands that maybe they wouldn't have been ordinarily allowed to touch.

What is a life like a day in your shoes look like right now? What's a regular workday look like for you? Maybe? What are we today? How do we know the date Today is it Wednesday? What did you do on Tuesday?

Yes. So my family's flown in for the first time I'm seeing them in two years. So that aside, my work life is a mixture of some client maybe work, some brand work happily. Actually been working with Coca Cola again three years away from Coke and I've just partnered with them again. They've tapped into the known and known community for the new global campaign called Real Magic. So I'm very pleased to be back with some familiar people. But also we launch our known unknown NFT platform marketplace in February. We've launched our crypto coin which is the known unknown design operating system and that abbreviates down as a coin to kudos and in our community of 5,000 if somebody helps somebody else, gives them some advice, think of it as the LinkedIn for designers. If we can help each other then we'll ping them some kudos to as a thank you for helping her for helping him. Our oldest is 85 and our youngest is 18 and they can help each other. For me a day to day is this balance of plotting the next where is the puck at the moment, where's it going but also servicing and delivering if you like the here and now and the now near far. That's the exciting thing of anybody's job and career. Certainly something I've seen through Attic and that ability to change. So again going back moving many times as a kid looking for change now looking for a new street corner and looking for a new community unlike scared at school now it's become a fuel and helps me now as I start to ideate around this new business model.

I had no idea that you were going in a web three direction with known Unknown and I could nerd out with you. I had a whole nother hour rant about because we're taking one of my companies into the Web3 format as well. We're probably launching a dao. We're probably going to do an NFT offering and bring a coin or a token I should say utility token into play with it and I wasn't preparing my brain to talk about all that stuff today. It's fascinating. I have a lot more research to do I think even after our chat today than I did going into it in the early part. Nona known is it three years now? Is that what you said you've been doing it for?

Yeah, I mean I saw loosely modeled out in the end of 2018 but yeah three years in but formally launched our community in June this year. So the first two Years we were a little bit more around survival. Can I persuade any brand to work in this new way? So bootstrap in. And then we launched our community site in June, we launched our coin in September, we launched our NFT marketplace in February. So starting to sort of gain a little bit traction. But three years in our world today, certainly they're like in old attic years, they're like dog years, right? We can multiply them by whatever because things are moving so fast. So who knows, in the next 12 months and three years, good excuse to maybe come back and have a return conversation more.

In this world, as the saying goes, a day in crypto is a year in the regular markets. Just how it is.

Exactly. No. And it's exciting, it's a thrill. It's like you're on a speedboat at the same time. How do we. I don't know. I'm sure there's an animal or an insect out there that can almost slow things down, even though they're moving so fast. So how do you balance those two? So you're not just recklessly doing this or going in that direction, but it's kind of grounded in something really, because.

It really is almost intoxicating. Every time I dive deeper into the web, three worlds. And just even just browsing on a CoinMarketCap and looking at the new projects that popped up, it's an endless series of infinite rabbit holes that I find myself. Next thing I know, it's three in the morning and why am I still awake right now? This has nothing to do with what I need to be doing, but it's fascinating and I can't stop. That's been my experience with the crypto world. If I help bring us back on track here, before I get too off topic, is if you had a chance to rewind time and be face to face with yourself. Imagine when you're sitting there drawing chalk art on the pavement, wondering about what you do with your life. And if you had a moment to go back to that time and speak to yourself and say something for whatever message, you just had a little blip in time to go back and give some advice to yourself back then, what would you say to yourself?

Yeah, I'd be encouraging myself to somehow keep a journal, keep a record. Even the most difficult days, more so, the most difficult days now, I don't mean a diary and kind of like the old kind of school and everything's recorded in our lives now, we push it out on Instagram. But actually the difficult things, the challenges, or maybe you Have a fantastic day. You have to get that down as well, because I think we're telling stories from our past. But I think ultimately some of those more difficult teenage young adult challenges can actually be very educational and can become the fuel to propel as you mature in your field and your expertise. And just kind of remembering, oh, yeah, that was a bad day, but guess what came of that? Actually, I remember now. I did that. I wrote that down and I met him, or she introduced me to her, and then all of a sudden the day changed. So I think we forget some of those things along the way because time just erases certainly my brain, but certainly I think just capturing those professional. I mean, it could be personal, too, but certainly to allow you to look back. And I wish I'd recorded more of that myself.

Every day I have a block of time, just a small block to do journaling, to write. To me, it is my anchor point. And if I didn't have my anchor point, my brain would just go chaos all over the place thinking about this, doing that, off track, out of focus. And yeah, I journal every single day. I just find it interesting. You mentioned that. And it's tough sometimes. It's tough to sit there and journal when there's six meetings on the go and a whole bunch of deadlines and maybe I didn't sleep quite right, and there's other things I want to do sometimes it's tough to prioritize that. But to me, the journaling is the foundation of everything that comes after. Without it, without my anchor, who am I?

And my version of journaling, even today, even on a phone call, even on a zoom call, sometimes better when I have a piece of paper and a pen in, I'm doodling. So I'm doing exactly now what I got in trouble for at school on my English or math book. I was doodling and I was being told off, but that was in a way of expressing. And I'll still find myself drawing the conversation that I'm having on a call, maybe ideating at the same time, because if something comes to my head and I don't want to lose that. But journaling is creative, but a more visual expression of that. I found that the sort of full circle in many ways, from something that I probably had detention for at school to now something that really is.

Thank you, James, for sharing your journey. Everyone who's out there, who's doodling, remember, this can really lead somewhere big. Maybe you're not a doodle, maybe you're an introvert. Remember that to Be an introvert is a hidden superpower and if you're going through a tough time with it, remember that just exactly what James says. There is another day coming. What's going to come of it? What can we make it into? So thanks again, James and do you have any sort of last comments here? We want to share in with people. Where would people find you? Where do you want people to look if they're listening to this and check you out? We'll put a link to it in the show. Notes of the episode here, shoot me.

A DM on Instagram, ames somerville, LinkedIn, the usual places where we're all hanging out, you can find me too. And if I can help someone, fantastic. But just make those connections, follow back and virtually stay in touch with people and hope that some stories, we all love stories. And so I love listening to your stories too. And I hope this has been useful for today's show. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you. Yeah, I really hope it is too. And really people that are listening will be the judge of that because this is really a philanthropically motivated show. I don't make money on this. I pay for all the episodes. We have no sponsors. I do it because I like to. It's a way for me to give back in a way that like when I was a kid, I was listening to these types of shows all the time. I was buying cassette tapes of all sorts of different Napoleon Hill, Robert Kiyosaki stuff, the millionaire next Door, there was Thomas Stanley, there was tons of. And this is how I found a way to take control of my own path and my own journey. And if I'm able to produce some content and help bring powerful stories like yours, James to other people, then I have a lot of fun with it and I love it. So I hope that people listening have a good experience with this and remember to shoot me a message, shoot me a dm, shoot me an email, any feedback, suggestions, I'm all open for it. I'd love to hear from you guys. And until next episode, hope you guys have a great month and keep on rocking it. We will see you next time. Bye bye. And that's it, my friends, for this episode, we will see you next time, please send me an email, say hello, give me some feedback, let me know what you think, give me some tips and suggestions. I'd love to hear from you. Also, please share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, doesn't matter, just get it out there. I really appreciate it and we'll See you next time on. From a rock bottom to rocking it. Have a rocking it.