Russ Perry - How Design Pickle Built And Scaled A DFY Design Agency

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey.

Hello, Joseph.

Hi there.

How you doing today?

I'm doing swell. You?

I'm pretty good. Pretty good.

Good. Top of the morning. We're doing this intro earlier than normal.

Yeah, this is one of those rare intros that we're recording immediately after we did the interview.

It's probably a good habit to get in, huh? One of those systemized things when our brains are still.

Exactly.

Yeah. You know. Ready for another coffee, though?

I haven't even had a coffee yet.

Geez.

Lager?

Yeah, I literally. It's 11am as we record this and I'm still zero coffees in.

That's okay. I'm not judging you a little bit, but it's all good.

You're just a coffee snob.

That's true.

All right. Today I think this conversation hit home well and in many points.

Oh, yeah, dude. So talking to this guest was pretty effortless. Like he just kind of felt like he was one of us. Like, you know, we'd known him forever. So I love conversations like that where they're just so down to earth and fun to chat with and there's some humor and silliness and we goof around with each other and we talk about some serious stuff and, you know, it runs the gamut of sort of. What's the word? I was gonna say the gamut of emotions. But I don't think we really got that emotional.

I mean, it could for some maybe. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. We had Russ Perry on the show today. We have him on the show today of Design Pickle. He's the CEO of Design Pickle and also the author of the Sober Entreprene.

That's a book he released out of his own story. We'll touch on that in here. I definitely recommend grabbing that one. It also has a podcast with his wife, which is really cool. It's called Good to be Home and just talks about. It's kind of like more of a couple's approach with the entrepreneur angle as well, which is super rad.

Yeah. So Design Pickle, it's the world's most successful flat rate graphic design service. He's actually scaled his companies from two employees to 230 employees. So it's a pretty dang big company. And it does over 10 million in annual recurring revenue now.

And he has what, two offers?

Two offers.

Two offers, two offers.

He's the in and out burger of designers.

Right. What's the Secret menu, though.

Yeah, he might have a secret menu.

I like to get my chopped chilies on my design.

We'll save that for interview number two. We'll ask him about the secret menu.

Sounds good.

Ask him if I can get design pickle animal style.

Ooh, I like it.

So Russ also mentors creative entrepreneurs to level up their lives through the Creative Syndicate. He co hosts the Good to Be Home podcast, which you already said. With his wife Mika, and he's the author of the Sober Entrepreneur.

Damn right. So, yeah, Russ is the man. And we actually did a little video on this one, so he needed some references visually. Check that out if you can find it. Maybe it's in show notes, maybe it's not. I don't know.

Most of the time. We actually do a lot more video recordings these days with our podcast. We don't really do a lot with the videos. We should really start putting those out there a little bit more so people can see us, talk to people instead of hear us talk to people.

We should probably create that system. We just haven't created a system. If there's no system in the business, it does not get done consistently at least maybe once, which I think it's happened, like, once or twice.

We should talk to Shayna.

That's probably.

We mentioned on the show a couple of times.

Shayna. And probably talk to Russ as well, to dial in all the branding and graphics. Yes. Damn power duo right there. All right. So, yeah, this show is amazing. We go all over the place, all the way from strategic creativity. That's something that Russ is pushing hard now, but More so in 2020, he was saying. So just like SEO, traffic generation, copywriting, branding, branding, a little bit is creativity, but it's all creativity. But having this focus of strategic creativity for your company and your brand, how to cultivate that. Yeah. And how to really extend that so you can shine through your business can stand out and not be kind of the run of the mill. Not gonna say total copycat, but, you know, like a templatized creative business. There's a lot of them out there because of all them apps and templates and whatnot.

Yeah.

So, yeah, he talks about that.

A lot of good stuff in there. Lot of good stuff.

I thought you were gonna say more. Usually you're the one rattling all this stuff off.

We just got done talking about how I have not had my coffee yet, Joe.

That's right. My brain is fired. And we also get into his sober entrepreneur story. It was actually six years to the day. Day of this recording, recording this on October 22, that he stopped drinking. And he tells about his story. He had some big downs, but, you know, came up from it all. And that's where that sober entrepreneur book was. That's where it came from. And he talks about that journey and how that really affected his. Not only his life, his personal life, his family, but his business just fricking skyrocketed. And we all have some kind of addiction, and it's not all about alcohol. So, you know, when you hear that it's not just alcohol or drugs or whatever, even though his story was alcohol, it can relate to so many things. I talk about my dad in this one and like, it could be depression, you know, addicted to just a negative emotions or whatever. Some. Anything that you don't feel like serves you in your life that could be a negative thing. It's probably good to address that and flip the coin because that's huge. We'll be chatting about more of that probably in a future therapy session, either before this one goes live or after. I don't know where it falls. Yeah, it doesn't really matter.

It would have happened by now. You've already heard it.

You've already heard it.

Cool.

So if you heard that one, I don't even know what we said yet.

Yeah, we haven't recorded yet, but it's already come out.

That's so weird. So, yeah, Russ is the man. And we talked about the story of Design Pickle as well. Going from this typical agency thing, you know, like when he was doing agency work and then he transitioned into what the Design Pickle service looks like now the company and how systemized and a lot of cool stuff you can pick from this. And you know, our buddy Chris Martinez even fricking modeled his whole business. His dude agency, which he's been on our show. He modeled it from Russ and Design Pickle.

Yep. And we'll get into all of that in the show. Lots of cool stuff. And also we did take notes on this one.

Oh, you remembered that even though you did not have your coffee.

I didn't have my coffee, but I do remember that. I specifically remember sitting there with a pen and paper taking notes on this one.

Yeah, well, Matt personally takes notes on everything. No, he's. He's a liar. He's not giving sue and Kate and.

Probably some other folks and Jacob and our whole team over there.

Yeah, we kind of are.

I don't give any of them credit. I just say I do it all myself.

Geez. All right, guys. So you Know who the cool guy is over here.

So, yeah, we did take notes. As always. There's going to be a lot of great notes here, and it's wide ranging, so I feel like there's something for everyone here.

38470, comp. Yes. So text the word computer 4, 7, 0.

So get out that phone. Make sure you're not driving, doing Anything dangerous. Type 38470 into the recipient box and then type in comp C O M P into the message. And you're gonna get this note and these notes and some other ones for free. They're free.

Or you can do it the old fashioned way. Go to hustleandflowchart.com comp, get the notes there, and we'll send those to you. And we're not talking, like the show notes. The show notes are what's available on the website that talks about the bio and what we talk about on the show and links that we mention. No, this is like Cliff's notes of this episode. These are any sort of tactics or tools or resources or anything that we talked about on the show. You're getting the Cliffs Notes version of the show, so you're going to want that. It's going to be a nice little companion to this episode. So hustleandflowchart.com comp or text the word C O M P. 238-4700-38470, comp.

384-70-384-7,0. Go get him.

All right, that's enough jingling. Let's go talk to Russ Perry.

Jingle yourself. Geez. Get out of here. Hey, Russ. Welcome to the show, man.

Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.

Of course. Yeah. We have some. We were just chatting. We have some mutual friends. A bunch of mutual friends. Sheena. Aj.

Right.

Sheena. She actually just texted me, like, minutes before this recording started because she found out that she has her first company copycat. And she was like, she was venting about it, like, what do you do when someone copies your site? I was like, well, as long as they're not violating trademarks, you just, welcome to the game.

Yeah.

That means she's doing something, right.

Exactly.

She was awesome with her repurposed house, and she's just a total badass. I think she mentioned you in her episode as well. With us.

That's what we do. We just help promote each other.

Collaboration is what it's all about, man. You know, it's.

That's awesome. Sweet.

And we were talking about AJ Roberts, how you beat his ass in A weightlifting contest.

He was, like, pretty a weak guy. And I came out of the gates really surprising him on the deadlift. So make sure he knows that too.

We'll send him this video for sure. We'll appreciate it. So beyond all that good news, let's talk about. You talk about Design Pickles, your baby, but you're doing all tons of other cool stuff, too. Podcast books. Yeah, let's take little people back and chat about your story. And it'll go throughout this whole episode, I'm sure.

Too cool, guys. Yeah. So I basically failed running an agency. That's why Design Pickle exists. I was out of college and kind of the inspiration, like the decision to become an entrepreneur was because I found out I was going to be a dad at the age of 22. And it was an unplanned daughter. And just texting with her this morning, too. She's now a freshman in high school, and so 14. And really the situation was super chill. But I was never married and I didn't have a lot of time to spend with her. So work and requesting time off and all of these things were this huge inconvenience. When I was working, I was actually at Apple Computer or Apple Inc. And. And I was like, well, you know what I should do? I should quit this super cush job and just try to start my own business. That's like the logical plan. Perfect. So I could have more time off. What I didn't realize was that I also would have a lot less money, a lot more stress, and all sorts of other problems. But that ride lasted about eight and a half years and unceremoniously closed the agency. I wish I had a podcast like your guys back then because we had no process, we had no flowcharts, we had nothing. No automation, everything.

It's all an illusion, Russ.

It was like I was a magician and every trick was a new trick. Like, I never. I never did the same one twice. So clearly that's not a good business strategy. And we shut it down. I did have a business partner towards the end. I picked up a friend and a really smart guy at Argentina and his wife, and we were doing some collaborations. They were doing a lot of the design in Argentina. I was running accounts. So when we closed it, I didn't really think about that experience and started consulting, started trying to figure out how I was going to make money. I was unemployed. I was almost 30. Like, it was pretty stressful time.

With a kid.

Yeah, with a kid. And actually I'd been married again. I had Another kid, there was plans for a third even though that wasn't on the table yet. And so consulting led me to this. The problem that we now solve at Design Pickle was like, shit, it's really hard to find a reliable designer that just can get going and isn't going to be a big hassle. So I found some people put a process together for my own needs and you know how stories usually go like had aha moment that maybe I could sell this system and this process to others. And now that was almost five years ago where wow. Doing pretty well and growing pretty fast.

Yeah.

Now can you talk a little bit about like the model behind Design Pickle? Because it's quite a bit different from most traditional designer agencies, right? Yeah.

The way I like to say it is you basically lease a designer for every day you have a designer that shows up. It's a flat rate. So we have a $400 a month plan and then a thousand dollar a month plan. Of course like the actual pricing is like 399 or 995 of course. Because I think that gets us one more percent of conversion.

Yeah, it's prudent of course.

But yeah, so the difference is just the experience, the higher price plan. You have a designer in Slack that you can chat with like real time. But we employ team members from around the world. We're in five different countries. Philippines, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Indonesia. And so that cost arbitrage allows us to have a really competitive rate for our clients and a really kick ass salary for our designers. So it's like this win win for it. So yeah, you sign up, you get a subscription, your designer works on your stuff every day for about an hour or two. So sometimes that's enough to get your job done that day, other times you're going to need to work on it for a few days. And that's the model. Like there's really not a lot of complexity. We have our own custom software, our own platform. We've really invested heavily in tech. So you can like use Zapier to connect our stuff into like your own project management tools. And we're trying to really differentiate in the market of marketplaces, which usually is what a lot of people go to when they're trying to find a design resource that isn't just hiring somebody. So we're trying to be more of like you have a designer on you team but not having that like huge hurdle of payroll and managing them, onboarding.

And all this stuff that comes into it.

And what happens when that designer hear hears your podcast and wants to start their own business and then quits unexpectedly.

There you go.

Which has happened to so many of our clients.

Happened here.

No, really, they're like, we don't need you guys anymore. We're canceling. We just hired a designer. And then like two months later, they come back like, yo, yeah, they quit or they didn't show up to work anymore.

Yep, yeah, that's happened. Or yeah, we've had. I won't name any names, but definitely, you know, like, we have note takers and our note takers are amazing. But, you know, we definitely have had team members, you know, get some of the drink, the Kool Aid, I guess, you know, listening to all these episodes and hey, rightly so, if they're an entrepreneur, hats off to them. Go do it. Just give us a heads up.

It's actually one of our audio editors who tuned into every single episode that we ever recorded. And one of our episodes we had was somebody who trained Vas on your business's behalf, and he listened to that episode and went, I'm making way too little money for what I'm doing. And then left.

We're like, okay, you weren't a good fit. Obviously, for the long term, at least.

It comes with the territory. I've had team members for sure team members have resigned and to do their own thing. And it's kind of the best. I think that's like the best possible scenario when they're branching out to do. Try. Try their own thing. But then, like, secretly I'm like, I hope it fails. You should be here.

Now with the Design Pickle business model. I feel like anybody who is thinking about starting a similar business model, the fear would be that, well, I'm going to get a client that's just going to be hammering me with design requests all the time. And then it's just going to be overwhelming and I'm going to have too many clients that are taking up too much of my time. But I'm assuming because the business is still going that that doesn't seem to be the case.

No. And we have very easy ways for you to buy more. So the hurdle you run into with anyone doesn't matter if it's our model or not. In any service business, one of the largest contributing factors or constraining factors is speed. Like, how fast can I get done what I need to get done? And what I noticed early on was that for the price and the speed, it was a pretty good balance. When people do need things faster, that they say have 10 requests in their queue and they're on request number two. Well then, yeah, it is something that they can either be patient or they can sign up for more accounts. And when they sign up for more accounts, then of course we apply more design resources to them and things get done faster. So it ends up being something that is very manageable. And it comes down a lot to communication too. You just got to be super straight with people like, hey, you're not hiring someone full time. And because of that, if you need more than this, either pay more or just chill out.

Go find your own designer.

Right? Yeah. You go back to the normal way of finding things. And now we have. And I think this is what's so cool about today's marketplace. Like there's companies like Mine for copywriting, there's companies like Mine for video, there's companies like Mine. Like, we were like kind of the pioneer. Like, there's even blog posts like need the design Pickle of dot dot dot.

So it's cool because you could kind of assemble this team. But at the end of the day, like we have so many clients who have full time designers on staff too. So it just depends on the actual need of what you're doing and making sure you're assembling the right toolkit for your business.

That's right. Yeah. And that's. We actually know we have a buddy, Chris Martinez, who.

Oh, Chris.

Yeah, you know him. Sweet.

I do know him. Chris's business exists because of Design Pickle.

Damn right it does.

Well, the way he described it to us when we was first starting it up was the Design Pickle of Funnel Building.

That's right, yeah. An agent. Yeah. And he's down in T.J. tijuana doing that stuff. Mexico. And we've seen the staff. He is over like 30 people or something. But it's using your model and it's amazing. I think Sheena Weisinger is kind of similar. Yeah. And we're talking.

I'm sort of like the vampire dad of all of these businesses that I infected them with an idea. They've now turned to the subscription platforms.

That's awesome. Who is the ideal client for Design Pickle? Because I imagine there's some people that just need like, you know, some one off work and then they're not going to really keep coming back and then you're going to have other people that just, you know, they've got stuff for you every week. It's.

So this is a really tough challenge actually. And for your listeners, I Think one of the things anyone always goes through at any stage of their business or multiple stages of their business is define your customer avatar. Who's your ideal Persona? And it's. And so we actually really struggled with this for years because we were trying to be very standard or traditional in identifying our target audience by largely like demographic or age or industry. Is it studio gyms, which is a great fit? Is it online marketers? Is it agencies? They're all great fits. And so we would try this, and there wasn't a congruency around it. And plus, we didn't have the capacity or bandwidth to go deep in any of those areas. What we found was it really came down to the business maturity of our clients. So we could literally be in any industry. We've had companies that clown training school, we've had a custom condom design company that designs the wrappers with your logo on it. If that's your way of marketing, you.

Might need to connect them with us because we actually talked about how the next time we go to a conference, we want to get little condoms printed up with the Hustle and Flowchart logo on it. Just as, like, get people talking.

That's our business card, you know, something weird like that.

But then we realized that when a bunch of male entrepreneurs go to a conference and then come home with packs of condoms, it may not look great for the wives, but.

Exactly, exactly. So, you know, at the end of the day, what it came down to is, it came down to, is the business mature enough to have an ongoing marketing system and do they have someone who's dedicated to running that? So the startup CEO, founder, who's still one man doing everything, don't get me wrong, still love them as a client, but they're going to not be as great of a client as, like, that one guy who just hired their first marketing person, or that they have someone on their team that's responsible for it. So that still leaves a huge, wide open net. But the data that showed us was those are the clients who stick around the longest. They love the service, they get repeated value.

And then we. So when we do our advertising, we're really trying to find those more mature businesses.

I like that approach because I think everybody struggles with exactly what you just said, the whole avatar thing. Either they just ignore the whole thing and accept everyone, which we did that way, way, way long time ago in agency days. And that's where it got us to hate the agency days and transition away. But recently, it's very similar to what you said. It's usually there's a team involved, there's momentum, sometimes there's qualifiers in terms of revenue or for us download numbers for podcasts when we're helping folks with that. But the team is usually the biggest part. It's the one man show. Things are where, you know, the consistency lacks a little bit.

Yeah. And also the. Just the enjoyment, I think, like, that's another thing we really, you know, one of our core values, which I'm a huge proponent of, core values is friendly. And we love to work with friendly clients. And.

What we love the most is when people sign up for a service and they're like, oh my God, this is such a breath of fresh air. Thank you so much. Like, I've had so many hassles with this and the one man show, like his life's on or her life is like kind of on fire all the time. So there's not a lot of gratitude or there's less gratitude. And ultimately I just don't feel like they can use our service as much as someone who's fully dedicated to.

Exactly. Yeah. So they're not going to get the value that you want to give them and they really want, but their energy is just splintered all over the place. So even if they were grateful, they're just like, ah, thanks. All right, bye. Next email. Exactly. Not cool.

And you build a relationship with your designer. I mean, that's a huge thing. If anyone wants to get better designs and creativity, actually give a shit about your designer, talk to them and connect with them and ask them how they're doing. Doesn't matter if it's ours or someone else's. That automatically gives you better creativity.

Hell yeah.

If you don't have the time for that or you don't care, then it's gonna suffer. You're gonna see it in the work.

Sure.

And I imagine over time too, you're having to give them less and less instructions because they just kind of start to get a better and better sense of what you're looking for.

Absolutely. You build that relationship.

Yeah, I love that. No, that's really cool, man. So let's. I know you were talking about creativity is a huge piece in obviously a design business, but your approach is slightly different because you take a. We were talking about, it's like SEO and all these processes people talk about. But then you think of creativity and it's like this kind of a fluffier concept, not maybe as practical or step by step. I want to hear your approach to creativity and how you apply that to your business in a strategic way?

Well, I'll start with just sharing. And the hypothetical is we consume every single day copious amounts of creative inputs, whether it is going to be visual, like seeing something the website, emails, branding, packaging, audio, like music, video, whatever it might be. And so it's this interesting theory. It's not this theory, but it's more like this interesting concept that I've been really batting around where creativity is by and far in every single input we have in our life. Like from entertainment to education to practical functionality, product design and things we use. And yet when you ask a business owner where their strategic priorities are for growing their business, rarely will you see creativity on the list. Yeah, and it just is like this crazy gap that I'm trying to understand currently that why isn't this at the top of the list? Like SEO, like lead generation, like web traffic, like I want to be creative because anyone can copy a website, anyone could copy a blog post. But the true creativity inside of a business, whether it's visual or other, that's like uniquely inspired by the people inside of that business. Very hard to really capture that essence.

And so I don't necessarily have some five step formula to be more creative or here's how you do your SEO hack, blah blah, blah, blah. But it's more of like a challenge. And, and I think nowadays it's as easy as ever to onboard and get access to creatives on all fronts. We listed a ton of resources already like the companies and like mine and others. But the flip, the switch that I hope to see, and I'm going to really be advocating this into 2020, is creativity needs to be a utility inside of your business. It has to be a must. It has to be like the Internet bill or whatever things you're investing in, because that's the only way you're going to differentiate when you have 100 competitors saying the exact same thing or trying to do or sell or whatever it is that's clouding the marketplace.

That makes perfect sense because more and more we're all hearing about these tools or templates or whatever these apps are. And that's a creative outlet for a lot of folks because they don't have, maybe they don't put the attention into an actual creative person or maybe themselves equality in their business to think a little clearer about the brand they want to put out to the world.

Right.

And yeah, you start to see on social media it's like, okay, well all the Canva templates, I've seen that template before. I'VE seen that message before. All they did is just plug in a quote and call it a day.

Yeah.

And I know we're guilty a little bit of that too.

Guys. We can help you out with that.

We want help.

So here's. Here's the tidal wave that's coming that people need to be aware of. My daughter's 14 and she is consuming creative content every single day on her phone, on platforms like Snapchat and TikTok and all of these things. She expects to be entertained. She expects to be surprised. She expects to have some emotion to somebody, whether it's a YouTube star or an Instagram person. And so this brand loyalty is being fostered prior to this generation becoming consumers when they get jobs and do all of this. And so if you're not thinking about how you're going to create that connection, which is the easiest way is through creativity. You're going to be hosed in the next five to 10 years because there's going to be hungry consumers that want to feel something with your brand and they want to feel connected because that's what they've grown up with in terms of their media and tech consumption. And if you're just the guy doing the canva thing and posting the email and outsourcing this and you don't actually give a shit, well, it's going to shine through. And people are not going to at all want to be connected to whatever it is you're doing.

Yeah. Now, what are some of the ways that, let's say the CEO of a company can help cultivate more creativity in a company? Are there any sort of things or practices you do to make that happen?

Be weird or be funny.

Nice.

Those are.

Those are my two top tips.

It's so easy.

Pee weird. Now here's an example. 2015, I'm two months into design Pickle. I'm broke. I don't have any money for any marketing activities. I don't under. I don't know what paid advertising is really, because my agency, we didn't do paid ads. We just did design prior. So infusionsoft. I don't know if they're even still in business. Maybe they are. I don't know.

They rebranded. Yeah.

Keep.

There it is.

Yep.

Clip.

They're here locally in Arizona now. No offense, infusionsoft. I know guys there, they're working hard to try to not lose all their investors money. It's true. So they have their conference and I find out like a month in advance. Of course everything's sold out. All the booths are sold out and I eventually negotiate that I can hand out pickles at the conference, but I can't hand out pickles willy nilly. I gotta only hand out pickles in the lunch area, which is this, this maybe 50 foot by 40 foot tiled area in the main hall. So I, the example I give, it's, it's like, you know, the invisible dog collar that you can't like if the dog goes too far over the invisible line, it'll shocker. I literally, I was like afraid to cross the tile threshold.

Can't go past this last mark.

Okay, I'm gonna hand out some pickles. It's in our brand name. But I'm not just going to hand out pickles. I'm going to dress up as the pickle and I'm going to get a cart and I'm going to brand it. I'm going to wear cartoon hands and I'm going to make a fool of myself. To this day, we still get signups from that marketing activation. Russ, I saw you four years ago to FusionSoft and I just haven't had the chance. But now we're signing up for Design Pickle. Why does that work? Creativity. But it's fun, it's weird, and it connects with people because those are the emotional triggers that build trust. When you're willing to put yourself out there and be silly. When you're willing to be smart enough to have some humor that connects with folks, you trust somebody. It's just automatic behavioral science that connects. And so back to your original question. What can the CEO do? He either does this or find some people on his team who's willing to do it. Because a lot of times CEOs are not the right fit or they try and it's like miserable.

They're trying too hard. It doesn't feel natural.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But that's it. I mean, and it doesn't have to be overly complex. And I think you hit it on the head where it doesn't. You don't want to overdo it because then it becomes, you know, just comes ineffective because you're now almost avoiding people avoid it and then they don't want to connect with your brand.

Well, at some point you got to kind of put on that boss hat and you still got to have the respect of your employees. And if you kind of go too far in one direction, you might lose some of that, I would imagine.

Oh yeah. And with any creativity, like we've seen this with the podcast, I mean, this what you're saying extends in all different mediums and in ways you're communicating with your folks is. Yeah, a lot of folks will say, hey, when they meet us at a conference or whatever. You guys are the same as you are in the podcast or as you are in person. You just don't give a shit. You're just cool dudes. You're being you, but you're having a great time in the process, and you're learning, teaching, whatever. And I'm like, that's. But it took us a while to get there, and it was kind of like a mental shift we had to do is like, okay, stop trying to be this. Whatever we're trying to be at the time. And just.

Yes. This actually leads me to a third thing then.

Perfect.

So creativity. Be weird, be funny, and be authentic.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, that, to me, is the money one. Authenticity is because I've had the same comments, too, when I meet people, and I've given the same comments to people. Like, I went to who did Gary Vaynerchuk's 4D a Day, where you spend a day, and he's in there and it's like, wow. Like, I've seen him speak, but he's the same all the time.

So when you have that air of authenticity, that then is the. That's the master move for building trust. I could talk about deep stuff. I can talk about fun stuff, I can talk about whatever, but you know that I'm being real and authentic.

Yeah.

And that goes for corporate brands, too. How does your corporate brand. What are you saying? As a company that's real and authentic?

I like that. Was that a struggle for you before, like, getting started with it, or was it just something you haven't thought about, like, in your previous agency and all that stuff?

Oh, dude, I was the worst at this for, like, almost 10 years. I invested heavily in personal development. I invested heavily in coaches, mastermind groups. That's actually how I met A.J. roberts. And so I had to peel back so many layers of fear and uncertainty to find the authentic core of who I am today. But it was a process. And I realized in hindsight that that was the best gift I could ever give myself. Because when you're able to.

Reconfigure yourself and challenge yourself and be like, like, I always give the example. I was the guy who's too nervous to send food back at a restaurant. Like, if the order was wrong, I was like, I don't. I don't want to bother them.

Kind of the nice guy a little bit.

I'LL eat the teriyaki chicken sandwich. Even though I ordered a burger. It's fine.

Oh, man.

Yeah. And you know, now it's like, where the fuck's my burger? Get my burger. Throw that on the ground. I'm not even giving this back. No.

Yeah, but like, but that took a lot of work. And so, so I think if someone. The biggest blocked authenticity is. Is the fear of what other people think or the fear of failure or the imposter syndrome is something else that comes up a lot. And look, if that's some. If a listener right now has that in their life, you gotta figure you gotta hire or invest in yourself in coaching, Mastermind consulting, personal development. There's tons of stuff out there and it works. And once you get through it, then you really unlock the next level for whatever your path is.

Dude, it's so true. And that's Matt and I do the same exact thing. I've hired numerous people. But just consistent practices of trying to figure out what's the core inner being of ourselves. Not only what do we want, but how do we want to show up in the world and bring more people like us towards. Like you, for instance. This is just a fun conversation.

We.

We're jiving and that's what we try to achieve for every single episode on here. Not always, you know, achievable. That's cool.

Yeah. I feel like with. With, with our business and I think this is probably goes for most businesses, the biggest strides in business have come from working on our mindset and the mental stuff and the philosophies behind the business more so than any specific tactic. I mean, we like to get into tactics and processes and stuff on the show. But at the end of the day, the stuff that really makes the biggest impact has always been the, you know, the inner work more so than the outer work.

Right. I mean, look at the bookshelf. I mean we're on video. I know there's probably an audio only, but there's a bookshelf behind you guys. Every answer for the tactics is on those shelves.

That's right.

Period. Like there's no shortage of abilities to just find the tactics. And frankly, there's always going to be someone who's better than you at the tactics. There's always someone who's better than you. But you can be elite in any space if you're the most authentic, if you're the most real, because that's what people are going to buy. We have some competitors that got a much later start in our industry that have cooler software that I think they got some investments that we never had and we don't care because they've even come after our clients and try to take them. Because we are the realest, the hardest working, the most caring brand out there. And that's something you cannot get in a book. It has to start with you individually. And if you can be that inside your organization, then you can build organizations that reflect that as well.

I like it. That's just a lot of the folks, like you were saying earlier. Yeah, you can model someone or even copy someone's website, branding funnel, whatever it might be, but that's not truly you. And it's going to shine, it's going to show through at some point. And for whoever they're copying or whatever, if it's you or whoever's business or podcast and it's like, fine, good luck with that. If it fits. If it's you, sweet. But start with you, not someone else.

Yeah. So design Pickle, you've got over $10 million in annual recurring revenue. I'm curious if there was any sort of pivotal point, like any sort of moment in the business where you were like, okay, this is where things really turned around for us.

Well, I think that insinuates that things are going in the wrong direction at some point.

Well, I mean.

Maybe people listening can't see it on video, but maybe it was kind of like an upward trajectory. Was there anywhere where the trajectory kind of accelerated?

Yeah, Well, I think a lot of it came down to.

Us figuring out paid advertising. That was a big, like just doing it, like spending money on it. And, and then for us was a relentless commitment to the quality of the service. So that was always something that I, like, cared about. But I just gotta say, the first few years it was a bit rough. Like, if there's anyone listening who has a client in 2015 and 16, I welcome you back. Because that was like the Wild west days of what we were.

But really, yeah, like, I think it was getting the confidence back to talking about certainty. Confidence, the confidence of really investing in paid advertising, being clear about our value proposition.

Not getting dissuade when we had cancellations or people leaving because we are not a sticky service like an accounting software or like a CRM where you're really going to invest a lot of time in and just continuing every single month to be focusing on incremental improvements.

But I had to do a ton of learning. And so for me, the personal development stuff was a big deal because I had more certainty inside of My company. But then I also took Facebook advertising courses, I've taken copywriting courses, I've been HubSpot certified. We don't use HubSpot anymore. But.

I've walked the walk of everyone inside of my organization. And that to me, I think it's like a lot of little things that came together. Probably wasn't until year three though, that I was not fearing it all falling apart every day. Every day I was like, okay, is this month going to continue? We hit our max threshold, which is crazy to think about because there's like hundreds of millions of possible clients for us, of course, in the world.

But yeah, it took a long time to get past that fear of it all falling apart. And there's been lots of transitions over the last five years, but those are some of the big ones that I think, to answer your question, got us into that next tier of growth.

How about like you said, consistency and you only have what like two offerings on your pricing? Has it always been that way and has it been tough to like stay the path when you have these times where you feel like it's just gonna fall apart this first three years, like totally. How'd you say that?

Like, when we first started, there was actually three tiers of our service that were totally fictitious. We basically just had like I read on some SaaS blog, you need to three plans to choose. So made three plans that there was really no difference between them other than price point.

But yeah, it's been tough. We get requests all the time for video, we get requests all the time for copywriting. We get tons of requests for a lot of things. This year though, we are actually in the active beta for fresh design. Pickle Fresh. It's the product and it's a two pronged service where we actually are allowing high end custom illustrations now, which we never had before. So it's more of an expansion of scope than it is a new thing. Like then we're actually launching a stock asset library, like a subscription stock site at the end of the year. Fresh stock. That is going to be really awesome, totally curated and creative. This is not going to be just any joke and submit an image and some clip art artwork. It's like totally, totally high end so that we're finally in rounding out our fifth year business, finally tiptoeing into expansion. But not even like crazy. It's very still in the core of what we do. That has been.

A challenge for me every single month to not go off the rails with shiny object syndrome.

Oh, I hear that man.

And how I've hacked it is I removed myself from a lot of decision making.

Now like, like what, what are some examples?

Okay, last this year we had our first conference, PickleCon. And our next one we're doing next year. I'm like not involved at all. Like they're, they're changing a ton of stuff and they're just like, sorry Russ, you're just, we're just gonna tell you to speak and to show up.

And I thought they were saying you don't get a speaking spot this year.

I still get a speaking spot.

Obviously. Like our trade show and event strategy we do in person marketing, I'm totally out of loop on that. So I think this comes down to the phase of growth where you actually have a team you trust and trusting them to make the right decisions, trusting them to guide the company based off our core values, based off our vision, based off our purpose and that. You know, I love my team and they're amazing. But as the founder, you always, you know, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about stuff. I, I've been super jet lagged the last two days. I got back from Europe and I've been waking up at 2am every day and it's like, like, like I've already, I've already been working for like eight hours right now.

And you're in what, Scottsdale, Right?

Yeah, it's, it's 10:00am I've already been working for eight hours.

So.

So anyway, so like that's hard to let go. But to me this is the sign of a mature CEO. Like I just finished Bob Iger's audiobook on the CEO of Walt Disney Company and like learning from him on what it means to be a CEO. It's trusting your team, building the team, allowing your team to do it. And that to me is the, that's going to be the secret of us as we head to 100 million over the next.

Yeah.

What does your day to day look like when you come into the office? I know it's probably varies quite a bit every day. But what are kind of like the core things that you focus on with your time.

So you know, when I'm not starting at 2am My day usually begins at 5 and I hit some meditation and journaling in the morning. We have a gym at our office, so I head into the morning. I have a contract, a verbal contract with my wife. Cause I have three daughters that I'm nighttime dad, she's, she's morning mom. So I head straight to the office between 6 and 6:30. I train for an hour, shower here and then plan my day like my schedule. And I have, I know we're on audio, but I have these sheets that I create every day that are kind of like my daily agenda and action items. I'm creating my own by the way. I'm going to be publishing my own soon.

Yeah, I like it.

And then it's every day's, you know, different. Mondays are meetings, updates with the team, Tuesdays are more creation days, Wednesdays and Fridays are meetings days. But the morning ramp up of meditation, journaling, working out, fueling myself with a whole food plant based smoothie, things like that, those are the keys to success for the rest of the day. After I get into the office about 9 o', clock, every day is pretty different.

Okay, so yeah, you get in around nine, that's when you actually get moving there. But all that time beforehand is you time.

Yeah, I've had about four hours of prep for the day.

That's so cool. Now I'm not up at 5, but definitely a couple hours before work. That's exactly what I'm doing as well. And I think it makes all the difference.

And then coming home, I get home around 6 then my mission is I often don't even bring my stuff home because I'll be back the next morning so early. But I just plug into the kids, I do bedtime routines, bath time, teeth, books, homework, all of that.

And then you know, 8:30, everyone's kind of wound down. And then if there's a little study or reading or catch up, I'll take care of it before I hit sack around 9:30 or 10.

Sweet.

Dude, I love it. Yeah, I mean I feel like the morning, you know, it sets the tone for the whole day. So you get, once you get that piece dialed in, it really creates the proper momentum for the rest of the day. I mean really the reason I was asking is because you know, quite honestly Joe and I, as our business expands, it's been growing quite a bit. We're probably in the largest growth phase we've ever had just in the last three or four months. And we're finding out that a lot of the stuff that we handle on the day to day basis, sending emails, messing with Facebook ads, writing copy, we're having to force ourselves to get out of it. We don't have the bandwidth to do it ourselves. So we're in that process right now in our business of trying to figure out how to back ourselves out of more and more things. So thank you for sharing that because I like seeing what other CEOs are doing to sort of pull themselves out of the day to day doing of all the little micro tasks that need to happen.

I was just going to say, as a little experience share for you is anytime you're hiring or expanding, I always create a clear like, what are the jobs for this next role? Prior to beginning any interview, prior to beginning to think about who the person is going to be and what this prevents happening is it prevents you from the buddy hire, which is what I say, where it's like, oh, we need somebody, who are we going to hire? Oh, I got a buddy. Let's just bring him on. We could trust him, let's do it. And they might be cool and they might be someone who does a fine job, but they may not be the best for the roles that you have identified. And so we actually changed this this year to get super clear on the roles and job prior to thinking about the person. And it's been, we've had the best hires of our entire company's career this year because of focusing in on that.

Yeah, I love that our approach to hiring was we literally hired somebody else to do the hiring for us. So we have an operations manager. So she keeps us out of the mix and she literally, we tell her what position we need and she goes and does the hiring for us and does all the interviewing. So like we keep our personal feelings and emotions around the person out of it.

Totally. Right, right.

It's so cool. I want to talk about switching gears, but not really, but six years ago and they had a big pivotal, a pivotal change in your life. So let's chat about that, man.

Yeah, well, actually the day we're recording here is my six year sober anniversary. So. So I quit drinking six years ago. And talk about actually coming back to your earlier question, what really set the trajectory? It was not being so drunk all the time.

That'll do it.

But went through a really tough time with my wife. Almost lost my marriage. I had an affair. It was this really hard place. There was a lot of reasons why it happened. I obviously take full responsibility for it all and thankfully got through it. However, I realized that there was a huge anchor in my life and it was this addiction. It was a sedation habit of alcohol. And so I've worked really hard to push through that, which after the first year or two, it wasn't as hard as it was anymore. And then in 2017 I committed to writing a book about my journey and teaching other entrepreneurs on how they can break free from their addictions. And my macro theme of the book is that, look, I had alcohol, but we are all born addicts, especially if we start businesses. We have to be addicted to this belief that we're going to create this business and do it better and sometimes take huge risks like quitting Apple and stock options and all of these things to chase down this vision. But those addictions, while can serve us, can also harm us. And we could be addicted to our business. We could be addicted to a toxic relationship. Drugs, pornography, alcohol, all painkillers, the list goes on and on. And so this book really challenges people to identify, take inventory of their life, of where these addictions exist, and then how you can break free from them. Because once you break free, then it's game on. Yeah. And so it's been a great journey. Just this morning I got a random message from someone who, you know, I get them every week that got the book Sober Entrepreneur and just totally changed the trajectory of their life. So it's this passion project of mine. In fact, if you guys know any good marketers that want to help, like me promote the book, then like I need help on it because I don't want to distract my team.

Let's at first say what the name of the book is. The Sober Entrepreneur. Yeah, that's one first step. No, I love the mission and your story. Now hearing it from you as well, I want to pick up the book myself.

I'll send you a copy of it.

Thanks, brother. I appreciate that. I feel like maybe it might not be alcohol, might be whatever. Like you said, it could just be a kind of a mental place you get stuck in. And like I'm, you know, you could be. I'm not personally, but like my father, for instance, I'll just say he just passed the other week and it was from suicide and it fucking sucked. But you know, there was a lot of addictive type things that he was. His was mainly guilt from an affair and all multiple. So that can like even not an entrepreneur, I could see where that can go down a very dark spiral in many, many ways for everyone. It doesn't matter what it is you're attaching to.

And one of the things I highlight, and this is one of the reasons why I wrote the book, is like the worst place people get into is a place of isolation, where they feel alone. They feel like I'm the only one. And when I was going through my recovery process, just being able to have a conversation that I had these challenges was so Relieving. So to write the book was to find others that are feeling alone and to give them a story. Look, it's 200 pages. The print is big. I wrote it with a co author that helped me. I wrote like half of it. And I was like, I'm done writing, I need help.

I got my brain emptied on the.

Pages, there's nothing left. So. Yeah, but to give that and then legacy as well, to hand this book to my kids, which I've handed it to my 14 year old. She has not read the whole thing because she's 14.

So an audiobook, maybe she'll like that.

I'm working on the audiobook right now, actually. But that's another thing is to pass this down so that others can learn from my journey. I won't say mistakes, I'll say my journey, including my family and others.

That's cool, man. And that's. Yeah, like back to the addiction idea because I, you know, since my whole father's passing and all that, I'm realizing these different pillars of addiction, even though they might not seem like it, but things like financial awareness and how you use your money and a lot of folks are stuck in debt. I feel like that could be passed down generationally. So there's these key things like that, just good head space and work ethic, even a lot of that stuff. I mean all that stuff we kind of take from our parents and influence. So I love the fact that this is a legacy for you. I know I'm through my own experiences, I'm going to create something like that in its own regard. Yeah, man, it's just super cool. It's home perfect.

And the title, the subtitle of the book, it's the sober entrepreneur. And the subtitle is change your family tree. And this to me is why we're all in this game. Like all your listeners, everyone who touches our stories, our businesses, we're trying to change our lives. And.

Why go through life? I say you're playing the game of life with your difficulty setting on hard mode.

When you have these addictions or sedations and you don't address them. So why not go to the settings, change the settings to maybe not easy, maybe just medium.

And tackle it. You know, if I can help people do that, then so be it.

I love that. I like that analogy. I've never thought of it in that way. But yeah, we all have the, we do have the control to change our lives. And if you're like, we're actively doing this in our business Right now is like, we realized it got a little bit too complicated and during a growth phase with opportunities and whatnot, that's going to drive us insane. So we're choosing to go away from the difficulty and, you know, sliding that sucker down to medium at least a little, you know, right in the middle so we can actually handle and do good work with our energy.

Right.

I love that.

Yeah. Now, does the book speak to, like, pretty much anybody with, like, any sort of addiction or is it very focused on alcohol and getting rid of the alcohol?

Yeah, I mean, that's the term I use throughout the book. But early on in the book, I say, look, if it's not addiction for you, it could be Instagram or, sorry, if it's not alcohol for you, it can be Instagram. It could be a paycheck, it could be a toxic relationship with an in law or whatever. So substitute, you know, your thing as you're reading this book. And I've had a ton of people too, who really don't identify with anything. Like, their life isn't in shambles. They're not in this pit of despair. And like, they read it and they still get a ton out of it too, because it's very practical, it's very real. It's not a bunch of conceptual theory. It's just, here's my story, here's what I did, and get after it. You can do it too.

Well, let's. In your podcast, you co host with your wife. Yeah, the Good to Be Home podcast. I love that too, man, because it wraps everything together.

It's my hack to hang out with her every week.

And then what? The kids are. You got someone else with them.

They're in school, so.

Okay, perfect.

Yeah. So that's the next journey for me. We. We've been doing it over a year. I think we're on episode 75, and we come together to just pull back the curtain on our journey. Talk about things we love, like travel, talk about our story. Our first episode ever is called the Blog Post, and it's about my wife's blog post talking about the affair and exposing that. And so.

There'S no game plan yet to it. Again, if you have any advice on that one, I'd love to hear because.

Yeah, yeah, we're growing. I think we're at about four or five thousand listeners a month. So, like, getting there. But it is a.

It's like a positive podcast, and I think that's something that's really missing a lot. And it's not. Again, it's not a lot of hype. It's not a lot of. We don't rarely do interviews. We do like a handful. So it's really all original content and things we're doing. But I love that. And for me, it's co creation with my wife and back to that legacy play. Our kids are going to have all of these stories and things and to hear about which, man, if I could find one of those from my parents or my grandparents, that would have been just amazing.

How cool would that be? Yeah, there's so many lessons and especially I like the fact that it is just you and your wife and having these conversations. I want to selfishly check it out because my wife and I have talked about doing a podcast together for pretty much the same exact reasons.

Bro, I bet she's going to love it. And then she's going to rope you into it too.

She will. That's all right with me.

60, 70% female audience. So I provide the comedic male commentary.

That's usually how it goes. Our listener ship's probably like that too. Who knows? Awesome, man. Well, where do you see actually that one going? You said that's kind of the bigger play, the podcast itself.

So.

There is an early strategy of, you know, obviously I do speaking, I do training, I do stuff beyond the graphic design creativity role. But I think for now, we really don't have a bigger play other than to improve it. Like, this is not a monetary thing for us right now. My wife has done some courses, she's done some other pieces in there, but we want to just create this incredible content and focus on that for the next year or two more and then have the ancillary run off to the other stuff that we do.

Sweet.

I just don't have the time to be running other businesses inside of Design Pickle as well. But I would like to see that be the number one married couple podcast in the world. Like, to hear the story for entrepreneurial couples. Like, that's the caveat on it. I think there's a ton of podcasts out there that are kind of like shock value. Like married couples who are like, talk about sex and blowjobs all the time. Or like, really hardcore religious ones of, like, marriage therapy. And we just are kind of like, look, we're real. We like to travel. Here's the stuff we do, here's the arguments we get in. Here's the. Here's the weird nuances about what we are. Come along for the ride.

It's real. It's that authenticity. It's Coming through everywhere. I love it, man. What you got, Matt? Dude, we covered everything that we wanted to and more, so this has been super rad.

Yeah.

What's a book? I know you mentioned what. Bob.

Bob Iger.

Iger.

Do you know the name of that book by chance?

Gosh, I don't even know. No, it's just the Bob Iger leadership book that just came out.

Okay, we'll figure it out. We'll link it up in the show notes.

I'm making all my team listen to it or read it because it was such a pivotal book. I really, really recommend it. Nice.

Anything else that you feel like you would just say, just, you gotta read this. Maybe it's a personal development book.

You're not gonna use your new analogy that you've been using on the last few episodes?

Yeah, I'm gonna let that one be. If there's a fire in your house, what's the one book you're gonna grab? Why would you grab a book?

Clearly, it's the Sober entrepreneur. Everyone should go. The one I always come back to just because I love this guy. He's a. He's a blogger, he's a writer. Is Deep Work by Cal Newport. And it's. It's two books ago, so he came out with a newer one called Digital Minimalism this past year. But this book is something I come back to every year, something I'm always trying to work towards. And it's to cut out the distraction, to create better work, to create more clarity in your life. So that's one I always throw out there.

Good one. Yeah. And his Digital Minimalism is great as well. And he's been mentioned already. But A.J. roberts told me to read that one because we were talking about how we just frickin hate all these messages on all these platforms and how they're just like, everyone needs that response right away. Or you think they do, and it's just like, no, you can control that.

Not to mention that's like society's current big addiction problem is all the.

But exactly.

Very good point. Awesome. Russ, where should we have Design Pickle? Of course. Anywhere else you want people to check out.

Yeah, definitely go to design pickle.com if anyone needs a hand creating some stuff. And then my Instagram is not. Not as great as my wife's, but just Russ Perry on there. And I'm rebooting my personal brand too. So that's RussPerry co. But you can still go there. It's just a bit of an old. It's got Everything that we have.

Yeah, your podcast is there, your book, all that stuff there.

Right.

So I'll link it all in the show notes. Russ. Appreciate you, brother.

Thank you, guys. Thank you.

Hey, thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you loved it as much as we loved recording it. Now, before we wrap this up completely, I want to give a quick shout out to our, our supporters of the show. These are some companies that have really helped us and have supported the show, and we just like to give a big thank you to them. And they also are offering some cool free gifts for you as the listener. So, number one supporter, Podcast Magazine. Podcast Magazine, the preeminent publication covering podcasts, podcast culture, and the podcasts that fans love. It's launching in January of 2020. Prior to launch, you could grab a free lifetime subscription over@podcast magazine.com that is a free subscription. A free lifetime subscription to Podcast Magazine, where they are talking about everything. Podcasting, podcast culture. The podcasters you love behind the scenes of podcasts, they're ranking and reviewing podcasts. And guess what? Joe and I are actually going to be regular contributors to Podcast Magazine. So if you want to hear more of our insights around podcasting and the shows that we're listening to and some insider tips about what's going on behind the scenes of our show, we're actually going to be one of the featured experts inside Podcast Magazine. So if you love podcasts, if you're a podcaster, or if you just want to stay on top of what's going on in the growing medium, subscribe now, because you can get a free lifetime subscription until it launches. So make sure you do this early. So once again, go to podcast.

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