The Corporate History Agency Business - Jason Dressel President of History Factory / e8

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Welcome to the How My Business Works podcast. I am Michael Girdley. I'm your co-host. I'm just very excited to be here today, get to talk with Jason Dressel, who is president of The History Factory and is coming to you from Charlottesville, Virginia, which I'm very excited. Because I love Charlottesville. So Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's a beautiful day here in Charlottesville.

Yeah, it is a beautiful muggy day in San Antonio, so whatever you're going through is much better than, than what we're experiencing. Yeah, so love to, to just start off with a kind of a 1-minute thumbnail sketch from you of your career to date. I know you've been with the History Factory for a long time, but you know, how'd you get to where you are today?

Sure, so I've been with History Factory for 22 years. Joined the company in 1999 after a short, short career, as I like to say. I started, started early. We have a joke. I started as part of the junior scholar program at History Factory, but my background was I originally had pursued a career in history and academia. I had worked at the National Archives. While I was in college and was pursuing a master's degree in history. And while I was doing that, I ended up landing in having some, some jobs in the business world, which is not something that I had ever expected or had anticipated when I was in college and ended up working for a management consulting firm in Washington, D.C. that specialized in providing services to trade associations and professional societies and really enjoyed that work. Ended up working for the head of business development for the firm. And then kind of had this, you know, sort of moment of reckoning on what I was gonna do with my career. 'Cause I, again, thought I was gonna be headed in the direction of teaching. And then fortunately I discovered History Factory. And it's kind of a funny story. Back in the late '90s, those of us who are old enough will remember that there was these things called listservs, which kind of served a purpose, you know, in the pre kind of social media world. And, I was on a listserv doing some prospecting, and an association was asking for a referral to a company that could help them with a history-related matter. And somebody on the listserv said, "Oh, you should contact History Factory. They're wonderful." And of course, that triggered some interest on my part, and I looked up the business and went to the website and had one of those moments that sometimes you have in life where you just feel like, you know, you know what you're gonna do. And reached out to our founder and CEO and got an interview the next day. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Yeah, it's very interesting. So you guys are in, I think, a pretty specific niche. Could you tell us what the business does?

Sure. So History Factory is an agency that specializes in helping companies and brands use their history and heritage as a competitive asset. So we are in the business of essentially helping our clients do a better job of capturing, preserving, accessing, and using their history, their stories, their archives as a way to advance their business goals. We are basically sort of structured around kind of two sides of the house. One side of the house is we build and manage archives for our clients, essentially as an outsourced model. And then the second side of our business is the, is the creative team in terms of the things we produce. And so we do a lot of digital work, a lot of environmental branding and exhibits and museums, filmmaking, publications, as well as more consulting work in the area of things like branding, purpose, culture, values, and those kinds of things.

Got it. And so then you call it an agency, but the, you know, looking at the services that you do, basically, there's a lot of consulting elements of it where you're going in and doing research, right? And so, so why, why the term agency, or is that just fits into the way the universe thinks?

Yeah, I mean, we're, we're structured like a conventional, uh, marketing, uh, communications, uh, PR or advertising agency. So in terms of how we're structured, uh, the— a lot of the things that we're, you know, doing from an operational perspective, you know, a lot of the talent in terms of the people that we attract into the business are are people that have, you know, worked in, in other kinds of agencies. So we're not that, you know, niche, if you will, with respect to how we're structured. I think what we're niche at, in terms of our niche, to your point, is that we are providing this specialized expertise around history, heritage, archives, curation, creativity, and really kind of bringing together sort of the intersection of business strategy and history and providing that explicitly for commercial enterprises and normally, you know, pretty large global commercial enterprises.

Got it. And so what— as you think about how you, you get clients, what is the typical model for that? Are you guys outbound? Is it word of mouth or other agencies referring folks to you, or how do you get customers?

Yeah, it's a combination of all those. Like most professional service firms, referrals are, are terrific. And we definitely appreciate and benefit from a lot of those kinds of relationships. History Factory has been in business now for over 40 years, so we are building on and adding to our own history. And one of the things that's been interesting about that in my 20+ years now with the company is seeing that we're working now with companies that we may have worked with, you know, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago. And in some instances, the company themselves didn't even know that we've worked with them in the past. So that's a, that's an interesting dynamic. We also get a lot of business through thought leadership. There's a number of things that we do in the thought leadership space, including just yesterday we hosted an annual event that we put on called the Anniversary Marketing Summit. So one of the sort of the niche within our niches, I like to say, is that we are the leading agency for helping companies and brands plan and implement their anniversary milestone campaign. So for instance, we worked on NFL's 100th season a couple of years ago. We're working with Southwest on their 50th anniversary this year. And anniversaries drive a lot of opportunity and interest in the kinds of services that we provide for clients. And so we've become experts in the process of, of helping them plan and make the most of what an anniversary milestone is. So those kinds of programs generate a lot of, a lot of, you know, attention from a business development perspective. We also do a fair amount of, you know, outbound outreach, as well, right, as well as a lot of content marketing that drives a lot of inbound opportunities. As a company, our superpower as an organization is really content and storytelling. So we practice a lot of what we preach, in terms of publishing a lot of good original content on our own owned channels, which attracts a lot of inbound activity as well.

Yeah, yeah, super cool. So, so what about this niche is it that makes it so kind of more mainstream agency type work or digital marketing or those types of firms? What makes it about this niche that is different and it gets segregated out? Like, are there things that you guys are doing that are just impossible for your classical type of agency working with a marketing department? Or what What's unique about it?

Yeah, it's a good question, Michael. I think there's a few things. I think one is that just from a philosophical perspective, because of— we weren't founded as an agency. It wasn't like the mindset when our founder Bruce Winrich created the business that he had this sort of agency model in his head. He had clear ideas of what he wanted to do for the kinds of clients he wanted to work with. And his background was really that of a historian, albeit one who had an interest and a passion in business. His family had owned several businesses, so he had sort of grown up in a business family, if you will. And sort of his mindset as a historian was to always sort of look at history through the lens of economics and business and Then that led to him ultimately starting History Factory when he was working at the Smithsonian in 1979. I think part of what differentiates us is that the way we work is really grounded in looking at where a company has been and what their history is, how that has shaped the culture of the organization, shaped obviously what markets it's in, and That really then drives a lot of how we actually do our work. So, you know, not to get into the weeds, but a lot of the work we do in terms of, you know, ideation from a creative perspective, it's all driven from a very sort of organic, authentic place of looking inward into the company. And I think that that emphasis on historical research is just something that's kind of in our DNA that's very different than than a lot of other companies in the marketplace. And then on top of that, you add in the archival dimension. So when we bring a client or a prospect to History Factory and they actually understand that we actually have a facility that actually has historical artifacts, you know, representing, you know, from 35 companies or 40 companies that we're working with, you know, that makes it— that feels very different. You know, there's like, oh, they actually have real product, you know, they have, you know, old film, old photographs. You know, we're actually physically managing these materials on site at our facility. And so that, that expertise and that, that tangibility is quite different.

So how big is the team, both full-time and kind of part-time folks right now?

Yeah, so full-time we have 49 employees. —And we then utilize a number of partners and contractors that, you know, we probably have at any given time, maybe a team of about 70 people. —Wow, okay.

So then let's say like a USAA, who happens to be near and dear to my heart because their headquarters is 3 miles that way from where I'm sitting today in San Antonio. But so like somebody like that, you know, I see photos of where y'all have taken the old artifacts that are from, you know, decades or older and put that into like a lobby-style exhibit. And then I guess there's a whole campaign and strategy that gets built around that. And so as I understand your engagement, first thing you do with a client is go in and spec out and build a strategy. Is that kind of where step one is?

Yeah, we have an overarching philosophy for the company that we call start with the future and work back. And the philosophy of start with the future and work back really started, I think, in our first, 25 years of business, it was really our differentiating philosophy of how we approached helping an organization make their history valuable. The idea that we're really understanding who you are today, what are you doing today to get to the future, and then how can we go back into your past and pull forward the right threads and, and the right stories, and in some cases, you know, reinterpret a story in the context of who you are today and where you're going. As we grew and as we became a little more mature as a professional services firm, we obviously had to put in better methodologies and processes for how we consistently deliver for clients. And Start with the Future and Work Back then became not only kind of the north star for how we approach the work of our clients, but also how we serve our clients. And to your point, it starts typically with a strategic approach of understanding You know, what are they trying to accomplish? How can we then use their history? But also from more of a client service and account management perspective, you know, how do we set that, that structure up for success? One of the things that's, I think, a little bit unique about our business compared to some others, Michael, is that for the most part, most of our clients, when they start working with us, they haven't done a project like this before. And if they have, they normally are coming to the table saying, we did this project like this, but we don't want to do it like that again. And so it's a little different than, you know, if you're hiring a company to do an annual report or to do a rebrand or things that typically, you know, an executive team may have done several times in their career. What's a little bit different about the work that we do is that they typically haven't done it, or if they have done it, they haven't done it the way they want to do it with us. And so there's a really big sort of education process, if you will, will, that really happens with our clients because they don't have the kind of instinctive muscle memory for exactly how to set themselves up to plan and implement these kinds of projects.

Yeah, it's just, I'm reflecting on the fact there's a bank called Frost Bank here, right around the corner. And they have this whole thing that is kind of a half-baked history retrospective that clearly somebody on the internal marketing team did. Yeah. Because it's just, there's just something like the feel of it is just off. And I can see how bringing in an organization like y'all that are specialists in this can come up with something much more authentic. And also, I love this idea of tying the future, which is a code word for, okay, what kind of brand do we want to have today? You, you kind of tell the story of the past in a way that, that fits to that. And, you know, now that I think about what the bank has here, like they just have like some cases with some money sitting in it.

Like, it's not that interesting. It's It's not, it's not, not really driving, driving a core takeaway message there. Yeah, like, oh, you got old stuff, cool. Well, it's pretty neat.

It's like old Spanish money, and back in the day used to put the bank's name on the money. I mean, that's cool, but like, at a certain point, it's like, okay, well, I'll go next door. But yeah, no, I love it. So, you know, with nearly 50 people, these have to be pretty big engagements then, right, where you're working with these brands probably multi-year projects to start to— On year 99, they're like, "Okay, we need to have an entire comprehensive plan for year 100." And you guys are spinning up for that kind of stuff? Yeah.

They tend to be multi-year engagements. We also, particularly because of the archival side of our business, that's a side of the business where those relationships can last for decades. We've got clients that we've worked with since the 1980s in that kind of continual, uh, model. Uh, and of course, you know, from a business perspective, that, that recurring revenue, yeah, is, is good for our business, but it also provides terrific continuity of us really being the stewards of their history, their heritage, their archives. But, you know, we work on all kinds of different projects, but they do tend to be pretty complex. Uh, we just, just yesterday, um, Verizon, uh, which is one of our, our bigger accounts. Just launched the Verizon Story. It's verizonstory.com. And that is basically an online museum that we developed for them. There's also a physical museum that we're working on. We began working on that well before the pandemic. And of course, you know, with the pandemic, there's been some adjustments to how we're going to be bringing that experience to life. But the digital version of that, because of course, when you're working with a company like Verizon, you want to take a mobile-first mindset. Mindset to what you're creating for them. So we've been working with them on a number of sort of interrelated projects, from the digital to the archives to the physical environmental branding spaces. The relationship started with a book that we collaborated with their, their former CEO and chairman on a few years ago. And that's very, that's very representative of the kinds of client relationships and engagements we have. Michael, where there's typically sort of a number of different work streams kind of working off of one another?

Yeah, so this is all, I mean, looking at the client list, it's Sherwin-Williams, Lockheed Martin, Verizon. These are big global 2000 enterprises where you guys really, really focus on. Okay, that totally makes sense. And where there's, you know, it sounds like in the case of Verizon, you have somebody very powerful in the organization for whom history became very important to him. Down to wanting to write a book around it and found a partner in y'all.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the nature of our work tends to garner the interest of the C-suite. So the clients that we tend to be working with are pretty close partnership with the CEO. There's very few client relationships we have where we haven't had some sort of involvement and input and involvement with the CEO. And then the relationship is often kind of managed, if you will, by a chief communications officer, chief marketing officer, typically is sometimes, you know, HR as well. But MarComms is a pretty typical spot for where the relationship is held.

Yeah, well, and this is the, the archiving services are really fascinating. So kind of double-clicking on that. So that's priced as just like an annual maintenance contract with them, annual, annual service fee. Yeah, it seems very sticky.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's different models to it. I mean, we have a few clients where we actually have staff embedded on site at their location. So there's different ways we, we serve our clients in that capacity. Some with essentially a team that is set up on site and it's a multi-year contract and engagement. Uh, we have somewhere it's basically a project, you know, where we come in and do something specific like, uh, an audit or, you know, disaster preparedness plan or acquisition policy work. And then, you know, for many of them, most of these are collections that we built from the ground up. And then we manage them year over year. Basically, it's a maintenance contract with different services associated with that, which includes storage in our facility, access to services by professional certified archivists, technology that we provide as well. So again, it's kind of a classic outsource model. It's a pretty easy value proposition for a lot of these companies when they consider the cost if they were to build out the kind of specialized space that we offer, as well as obviously, you know, in-house overhead as well as, you know, many of them just don't feel sort of equipped to manage and oversee this kind of operation. It's just not sort of in their power swing. But having said that, we also work with a number of clients who actually do have those capabilities. So we have, you know, some some clients where they have a professional staff themselves of historians or archivists, and we're essentially complementing or augmenting those professionals with extra resource.

This is like the coolest business ever. And don't, don't worry, I tell every— I tell everybody that every week when I learn more about it. I'm like, this is awesome.

Like, this is super neat. I mean, it is right now. It might be that way for you for the next hour, but it's been that way for me for 22 years. And, um, I love it. And it's a lot of fun. And one of the things that's really cool about it is that you get to learn about all these different kinds of businesses, right? And so for a business geek like me, and apparently like you in spades, just the opportunity to learn from all these businesses and to— it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. We've definitely experienced some neat stuff.

So how does the business fare in downturn time? So You've been, I think, through 3 downturns on the team there, right? Mid-'90s, 2000s, 2008. Well, and I guess COVID, so 4, maybe? 3.5? How does the business deal with that?

It's interesting. The short answer is different areas of our business can be affected, but by and large, the business itself tends to fare very well during downturns. And one of the reasons why is because during downturns, organizations kind of instinctively turn to history and heritage as a tool of communicating stability, right? And so in many cases, the kinds of engagements we have may, may change a bit, you know, when, when times are great, you know, we may be working on big anniversaries and things are a little more celebratory. But at the end of the day, that's not a huge driver for our business because we're not an event company. So like the roles that we're playing on those kinds of programs isn't having that much of a direct effect. But in, in downturn situations, sometimes our engagements are smaller and sometimes we have to be a little more scrappy and we're working with more clients than, than we might otherwise. But the relevance of what we do during a downturn, if anything, sometimes is actually more relevant than when everyone is feeling like it's, you know, the boom times and they're gonna be here forever.

Yeah, I hear you. All right, and then in terms of competition, are you guys, you're competing with status quo of doing nothing, in-house teams, and then are there other service providers targeting your niche?

Yeah, to your point, inertia is definitely one of our head-to-head competitors. Internal resources can also be a consideration, You know, and again, it's interesting when you're talking about sort of the end of a long economic expansion like we've had, you know, currently, uh, or we had had currently until COVID, you definitely have a situation where, you know, our clients have more employees and, and more staff and, and they have more resources. I think in general too, just with the importance of content and storytelling, I think that's pretty I think the case has been made and the verdict is kind of, kind of done on that one. So companies have absolutely, you know, invested more in having their own publishing infrastructure over the last 10 to 20 years, but they still need that content, you know, they still need, you know, they still need to be able to feed, feed the beast. And again, because our kind of work is a little more specialized and a little more specific to, to that sort of historical research kind of, um, kind of a bent, we still find ourselves doing pretty well. But we also, Michael, we compete against a number of different companies in a number of different industries based on the specific product or service. So we may be competing with a company that provides historical research services for litigation on a specific kind of research project, or we may be competing with a PR firm, you know, on some other kind of, you know, branding campaign or something else, or we'll compete against, you know, creative shops, you know, exhibit shops, publication shops. So we definitely are competing for our clients and share of mind and share of wallet with our clients. But the competition is coming from a lot of different places because under our relatively niche umbrella of what we call heritage management, we actually are doing quite a bit, you know, for a small team, we cover a lot of ground in terms of the kinds of things that we do for our clients. And depending on what those things are, there's quite a few different kinds of companies we may be competing with.

Yeah, makes sense. And then, so it doesn't sound like there's a lot of specialists, but you end up running into all these different competitors. And then the typical, like, we're a service, the typical service provider trap where, you know, digital marketing agencies or marketing agencies are like, yeah, we do that, we do everything. Trap where they're competing with you. So totally, totally makes sense. Well, and so where do you see kind of the trajectory of the company going? What's the future look for, you know, the business itself and then also the category that you're in?

So a few things we're really focused on. Some are more kind of internal dynamics that we're looking at in terms of where we want the business to be. And some of them were obviously, you know, responding to what we see in the marketplace. One thing that we're focused on for our business is, as you noted before, we work with, by and large, sort of Fortune 500 size companies, and companies who tend to have some common denominators or characteristics. They tend to just by the nature of the kinds of companies that, that are sort of attracted to what we do and see the value and want to invest in these kinds of initiatives, we tend to work with companies that are the Best 100 to Work For, industry leaders, really strong cultures, typically smart leaders, smart workforces, most admired brands. And within that, there's industries that we tend to maybe do a little bit better with than others. But one of the things that's happened over the last 20 years is that as the S&P 500 has basically skewed younger because of technology, there's a lot of opportunity for us because most— I mean, there's always exceptions, but by and large, most of our clients are 50 and over. As you look at a lot of these companies that have basically been the major drivers of the economy for the first 20% of our 21st century here, a lot of those are big tech companies. Those companies are just now hitting a spot in their life cycle where they're transitioning to that second or third or fourth generation of leadership. And from our experience, that's when the services we provide become a more acute pain point for them because they no longer feel that, you know, the leadership kind of has direct access to, to that history. And they, you know, start to realize that as they continue to grow and change and as they continue to make that migration away from sort of the you know, the founder's mentality, as it's been called by Bain and Company, that, you know, they've got to connect to that to continue to be able to do what we call grow and change without losing their character. And so we see, we see tech as a, as a really exciting market for us, not necessarily because they're tech, but because they have those sort of cultural and character attributes that tend to be what triggers companies to begin wanting to, to, to do the kinds of services we provide. And to that point, we actually just commissioned a, uh, a market research, uh, study which is going to be coming out in the next few weeks on leadership transitions. And, uh, we surveyed, uh, 150— about, I think it was 150 C-suite executives, including 60 CEOs and founders, to get their perspective on, you know, what success looks like for a leadership transition and the role history should play in that transition. So again, we're aligning some of our thought leadership with where we see the business needing to go. So that's one big one. A second one is archives, you know, the, the nature of archives has been really disrupted by the fact that archives of the last 25 years are, are born digital. You know, that's an ongoing challenge for the field. You know, it's kind of the ultimate example of the enemy of good is perfect. It's created some real challenges for organizations because they can't go back and, and actually obtain digital records that they may have created. And so that's something that we're working on steadily to improve their ability to do that. And I suspect as more things happen and as we continue to progress with, with AI and other and other tools, you know, some of that's going to get a little easier for us. But as I look to the next 10 years, that ability to more comprehensively archive the history of companies in the digital— in this digital era is a top priority.

Super cool. What— and does the— you know, right now you guys are in the DC area and Chicago, it looks like, primarily. Does branching out into tech mean future salespeople on the, on the ground in San Francisco and New York, or, or you think that can be done with kind of the current footprint? You know, I think it'll depend.

Our, uh, we have, uh, our business development director is based in New York, and, uh, we have had, um, resources out on the West Coast as well, so definitely not ruling that out. So we'll see, you know. But, um, yeah, our, our physical footprint is, uh, our offices are in DC, our archives facility is out in Northern Virginia near Dulles Airport, and then we have an office in Chicago in the Wrigley Building, but then we have other people, you know, that are located around, around the country in several different markets, including New York, Denver, and many others.

Yeah, that's great. Well, cool. Well, thanks so much for telling us about this. It's really cool. How, how can listeners learn more, support you? What, what can be good next steps for folks?

Yeah, well, first you can, uh, you can go to our website, uh, historyfactory.com, and you can, uh, check us out there and learn more about what we do and who we work with. We also have, uh, if you email us at info@historyfactory.com, and there on the website as well, you can sign up for a lot of the content that we are, that we're pushing out on a, on a regular basis. One of our most popular pieces of content actually is a weekly newsletter that started as an internal thing that we were doing, and then we started just sharing it publicly. It's called Sarah's Friday Email, and it's basically just a curated list of interesting links that the staff puts together every week that Sarah, one of our curators, puts together. So that's a fun Friday email that, that a lot of people receive. I don't remember what the exact numbers are, but they're well, well into the thousands. We also do a monthly newsletter, History Factory Plugged In, and we also have a podcast which has typically 2 episodes a month, also called History Factory Plugged In. Hosted by yours truly. And I typically, I always have a guest and we talk about interesting topics at the intersection of business and history. So those would be some, some good things to check out. That's great.

Well, thanks for being here today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Michael. I appreciate it.

All right. See you guys next week.