Andrea Heuston | Clients to Avoid, Clients to Embrace

Andrea Heuston, founder and CEO of Artitudes Design, has a motto:

Be the so-called dumbest person in the room.

It’s a philosophy that has guided her since during her firm’s startup phase and up to present-day. We unpack exactly what that means and how it guides your hiring.

A willingness to make some radical changes and try to focus on a niche market has also made Artitudes Design more successful than ever in recent years.

We talk about that transformation, as well as…

• The 5+ pros that everybody’s business need
• 3 reasons why to be an entrepreneur that inform your success
• How to build an engaged team that drives success – salary isn’t the solution
• Why you should embrace failure (if you take this next step)
• And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in This Episode: www.artitudesdesign.com

Episode Transcript:

Doug Hall: Well, welcome everybody for the Go for Growth podcast. I’m your host Doug Hall, and today I have the honor of having Andrea Heuston, the founder and CEO of Artitudes Design in the greater Seattle area, actually in Issaquah specifically, but in the Seattle metro and Andrea is the brains and the drive and the vision behind this fantastic woman-owned business and I’m very glad to have Andrea. Andrea, welcome.

Andrea Heuston: Thanks, Doug, it’s great to be here.

Doug Hall: Good. So I think people got the idea that design is somewhere in there because it’s part of your name, but tell us a little bit about what goes on at Artitudes. What do you focus on and your background, how’d you get started in this? And remember the whole angle here is go for growth. So I know your story is all about growth and that’s what I want to bring out.

Andrea Heuston: Great. Well, let me tell you a little bit about what we do here. We are a full service design firm that focuses heavily on presentation and video design. Anything on stage behind a speaker, be it a one on one presentation or a one on 50,000. We really work to help get messages across to audiences and anything that you want the audience to do. So we’re really good at translating marketing messages to technical or technical messages to marketing. We help the speakers with speaking coaching. We write the content. We hire, sometimes we have to hire talent, like booking baristas, things like that. And then, we really help the presentation with the visuals behind the speaker, so that’s really what we focus on doing. That wasn’t always what we did. No, go ahead.

Doug Hall: You’re literally now designing an experience for an audience and doing the design work with the speaker and everything around him or her?

Andrea Heuston: Yes. Yes we are, and we do it very well. We’ve been doing this for years now, so we really honed at the tip of our spear about 10 years ago. Before that, we were a full service design firm focusing on anything and everything that came our way, but we realized in order to grow and stay relevant we needed to be in a niche market, so we took what we do really, really well, which is presentation design and video, motion graphics, and focused on that and it’s been a game changer for us.

Doug Hall: Awesome. Tell me how you got started.

Andrea Heuston: Oh, goodness. So I’m not young, but I started in the graphic design industry in the late ’80s and I worked at this energy management firm. It was an engineering firm, focusing on energy management systems for places like Bonneville Power and Old Dominion Electric Company, places like that. The big rooms full of computers that helped run energy for people and for businesses and they hired me as a technical illustrator.

It was an internship. It was a summer internship in fact, at 20 hours a week and I started working there before they were even computers on our desks. We did all the design by hand. We set type by hand. It was a fascinating job.

Now, I was a senior in high school, but I was almost done with high school because I had lived in Europe and taken a lot of college classes, so I only have one class left at the high school that year and when my internship was over they said, “We want you to stay. Could you stay, even if it’s 20 to 25 hours a week?

So, I said yes. So, I took my one class at a high school in the morning and then I went to work and then I took evening classes at the local community college. And from about 1988 to 1995, I worked my way up in that company to become the creative services manager. At one point I had seven designers working on my team and then in about 1995, early ’95, the company I worked for was purchased by a French company, another French energy company, and they called me in one day and they said, “We need you to lay off your entire team.” So I laid off my entire team, went to work the next day they called me in and laid me off.

Two days later, I get a phone call. This was back in the times of, you know, the only email we had was the vast VMS system. I got a phone call and they said, “Hey, we made a mistake. We have an entire brand we have to roll out with this new company that purchased us. We need you to come back and bring one of your employees with you.” So I said, “Ah, let me consider that. I’ll call you back.” I hung up and that afternoon I drove myself to Olympia and got a business license for Artitudes Layout and Design. And I called them. I said, “Sure, I’ll come back, but you’ll be paying everything for me now.”

So that was how Artitudes started.

Doug Hall: I love it.

Andrea Heuston: And what was interesting was they were my biggest client for a long time, but then a lot of people at that energy management firm, when they lost their jobs, they went to this software company that was pretty little in Redmond at the time called Microsoft and my phone started ringing off the hook.

So for the first 10 years of Artitude’s life shall we say, I was a sole proprietor, but I became freelancer hiring other freelancers and I got in trouble with the IRS because I had one particular contractor work for me that was wanted for child support in two states and he listed me as his employer, despite the fact that he was 1099 and I could prove it, I had to go to battle.

So I hired a lawyer, I had all my books in line and everything. We went to battle and we won the case. We ended up paying a pretty hefty fine, because I was a contractor hiring contractors and it was that wishy-washy area in the mid-’90s, late ’90s where they were looking at contractors and saying, “Hey, you should be an employee.” So my lawyer said to me the way to avoid this is to incorporate the company. So in 2005, I incorporated and became Artitudes Design and started hiring employees. So here we are now.

Doug Hall: Awesome. So, there are numerous growth lessons in there and part of it was by bumping your shins and causing some bruises and maybe some blood there.

Andrea Heuston: That’s how I learn lessons, Doug.

Doug Hall: I know. And, and one of the purposes of this podcast is for people to learn through the school of hard knocks of other people and we can share. So thank you for sharing that about contractors and staying on the correct side of the law. That’s a really big deal. That’s a really big deal.

Andrea Heuston: It is, but my next lesson was a hard one, too. My very first employee I hired ended up embezzling money from me, with my bookkeeper who had been the maid of honor in my wedding.

Doug Hall: Oh. So they were in cahoots with each other?

Andrea Heuston: They were. That was a mess I had to clean up as well. So I learned my lessons the hard way. People can tell me things, but I have to learn them myself, apparently.

Doug Hall: I hear it. Well, that’s a sure way of learning. Painful and expensive, right?

Andrea Heuston: Yes, exactly.

Doug Hall: So your business creation originally was in response to this rehiring offer. Was there, and have you figured out over the years, sort of the underlying why of why you own a business, why you ended up starting a business and why you keep running your own business?

Andrea Heuston: Those are actually three different questions with three different answers, but why I started the business at the time is because I never wanted anyone to be in control of my destiny again other than me. So I was firm in the fact that I wanted to run a company or at least own my own entity, so nobody could ever fire me or lay me off again.

Doug Hall: Okay. That’s why number one.

Andrea Heuston: That was why number one. Why number two, I continued to do so because my husband and I wanted to have a family and I decided in order to be a business person because I was the breadwinner at the time, but in order to be a businessperson and a mom, I needed to have a flexible enough job where I could run a family and have a business at the same time and Artitudes was small enough at the time that I could. We quickly outgrew that, but at the time, and we dealt with five years of infertility treatments in order to get to the point where we could have a family, so it really helped support my lifestyle at the time. And now-

Doug Hall: Got it.

Andrea Heuston: I run the Artitudes Design I would say primarily honestly our for profit work funds our nonprofit work. We love to give back to the community. We love what we do and we love working with clients who appreciate us and really creating beauty for somebody and we say we sell peace of mind so somebody can be super nervous and scared about what they’re doing and we help them feel confident and that’s what we really do well, but by doing that and doing it for some of the clients we do that for, it enables us to give back to the community as well. Very strong philanthropic bent here.

Doug Hall: Awesome. So that’s your third why.

Andrea Heuston: That is.

Doug Hall: I love it. Now, you’ve opened the door then to the next question, which is really what is your ideal client look like, when you’re looking for the next one, are there two paths of for profit and nonprofit. So, tell us what those look like.

Andrea Heuston: So our ideal client, now I’m going to tell you we have a few ideal client profiles. It’s just something we develop for ourselves and for our clients. We do ideal audience profiles for them, but for ourselves, when we work a lot in the enterprise. We do a lot of work with big companies. We start at the C-suite and work our way down, so we try to work side by side with people who A, appreciate what we’re doing and see value in the creativity that we have.

B, they need the support. They need somebody to come alongside them as a partner and say, “Hey, we can help you win this deal. We can help you communicate with this audience. We can help you rise to the top,” and that’s what we do very well. So, we look for clients who value what we do and who also let us be creative.

It’s a lot harder to work with clients who say, you know, I want you to do this, this, this, and this. I don’t need other designers and I don’t need my clients to be designers. What I need is somebody who sees the value in what we do and lets us take it from there. So that’s first.

I would say with all my ideal client profiles though, they all need to be able to pay us. That’s the other thing. We don’t like the clients who don’t pay us and we do have that problem. That’s an obstacle to growth I will talk about later.

Second, we work with small businesses. So, our second ideal client profile around is small businesses, clients who are doing venture capitalist pitches, clients who are looking for funding of some sort or clients who are looking to do a sales pitch to a consumer. So, we’ll work with them and these are a lot of times what I call the boardroom presentations, where they have to convince somebody of something in a small amount of time, in a small space. And those are a lot of fun, too. Sometimes those are more exciting. They’re higher stakes, but people are really invested in them because they’re hungrier.

And then our third ideal client really falls in the philanthropy area. We work a lot with, how should I say, so we work a lot with kids and also people who need the help, like we have an arm that works with homeless addicts in Seattle, so we work with the Matt Talbot Center down there. We work with a lot of nonprofits that support children, either children in crisis in the foster care system, abused children or children who just need a leg up and a better start in life.

Doug Hall: And these are sort of charitable nonprofits, mostly?

Andrea Heuston: Always, always. Yeah. We love giving back.

Doug Hall: That’s excellent that you’re doing that. You’ve done a great job of identifying your three kinds of ideal clients. What have been the growth challenges towards getting what you want in those three client areas, growing your business?

Andrea Heuston: Oh, there’s always challenges. We’ve weathered a lot of storms here. A lot of my challenges have been personal, frankly, and I’ll tell you a little bit about this because they’ve made me be the stronger person that I am and I think I’m a better leader because of it.

The first challenge, I spoke about a little bit with all the infertility treatments, but the second one was the biggest. In 2008, June 1st 2008, I went into a coma and I was in a coma for three weeks. I had a surgery that went wrong and they went in to fix it and I aspirated on the operating table and I got something called ARDS, which is acute respiratory distress syndrome and it turns your lungs down and at the time it was a 70 percent fatality rate, so they put me into a medical coma, because I was dying.

They prepared my husband for my death three times. I had four blood transfusions. It was crazy. They thought I could be brain dead. They did not know how much oxygen I had lost on the operating table and when I had aspirated. And what that did for my company and my leadership, that’s where I’m going with that is I woke up from that coma. Now, the very first thing I said to my husband is, “Do you have my cell phone?” And I think he started crying. Like, what is wrong with you? And he said, I didn’t know if you were going to be brain dead or not, and he knew I wasn’t when I asked for my cell phone. So that was good.

Doug Hall: Clearly, yes. You were ready to work.

Andrea Heuston: I was ready to go back to work because I was so used to working and back then I was working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and June and July are our busiest, biggest times of the year.

So I woke up at the end of June, still in the hospital and realized there was absolutely no way I was going back to work. Physically, it was impossible. For the first month after my coma, I was in a wheelchair. For the next month and a half, I used a walker. I could stay awake no longer than about four hours a day for the first three, four months. I didn’t even start back to work until January of the next year. And even then, it was just part time.

But what happened to my business, we didn’t fail. I wasn’t here and we didn’t fail, because I had put the right people in the right position and they ran the company.

Now, granted, we didn’t make a lot of money that year. I think we made like 1% or less, but we were still standing. Now, before I was ill, I ran the business. Meaning, I touched every client. At least 90 percent of the jobs in the house, I knew exactly what was going on, what stage they were in, who they were being worked on by, and what our final result was supposed to be. I came back to the company and realized I didn’t have to do that.

I became the director of culture. I became the strategic lead. I got to do things that really helped with my strengths, where I was able to add value to the company and I guess not be the blockage that you sometimes become when it’s all going through you.

So, that was my first real big challenge and I think the company honestly is better because I was ill. Now, my husband would argue with that statement, but I would say it’s been a blessing because I learned some lessons I would not have learned any other way.

Doug Hall: So you ended up with an employee-driven company by accident.

Andrea Heuston: Yes. By accident. And it’s been such a blessing.

Doug Hall: Right, and I agree with you because I drive clients to have that vision of you want an employee-driven company. You don’t want to be owner-driven.

Andrea Heuston: Right, exactly.

Doug Hall: And you, unfortunately through bad circumstances you ended up there, but you ended up in a better place.

Andrea Heuston: I did. I believe and I say when I keynote, I talk about employee engagement a lot and when I came out about that, I say happy employees make for happy clients.

If you do not have employees who are engaged fully see the value in the work you do and actually enjoy themselves? They’re not going to make for happy clients.

And I think that’s really important because a lot of CEOs go, oh, bottom line, bottom line, bottom line, and frankly we’d probably be more profitable if I looked at that all the time, but I also look at employee happiness and I look at things we can do to make sure that my employees are engaged and it does translate to the projects they work on and the clients keep coming back.

Doug Hall: That’s awesome. So, think about what you’re doing with your managers in your business in the areas of leadership and management. What are sort of the number one or two or three tools, you know, if you’ve got one or three, it doesn’t really matter, but what are your go-to tools as leaders and managers that you perpetuate the culture that you want?

Andrea Heuston: I would honestly say it’s their ability to do their jobs without too much oversight because it translates down the line as well. We’re a pretty flat organization and my goal is to hire intelligent people who can do their jobs well and even do them better than we think they can and maybe do them better than the other person who did it before and what I want to do is free those people to do that.

I don’t want to sit there and have somebody under my thumb. I don’t like micromanagement. I don’t like my managers to be micromanagers because it’s an ineffective strategy. If you can hire the good people, tell them what to do, show them how to do it and let them go? You’re going to get a lot higher quality work out of people and higher engagement. That is the one major tool that we use is the ability to let people think for themselves.

Doug Hall: Love it.

Andrea Heuston: We also fail fast, I would say. That’s the second one.

Doug Hall: Fail fast.

Andrea Heuston: If you have an idea, bring it, fail fast, bring it to the table. If you fail, no harm, no foul, we’ll move on and do something else. What did you learn? Let’s go for it.

Doug Hall: But failing slow is a bad thing.

Andrea Heuston: I think failing slow is a very bad thing because it depletes the company. It’s like sucking the blood out of them.

I would say one of our primary core values here at Artitudes is people first, and that translates to employee first. It also translates to serving our world. So we really try to put people rather than process and rather than profit at the forefront of every decision we make and that’s been amazingly good for business.

Doug Hall: Awesome. So if you think about the next level for our Artitudes, what does that look like? Do you have a vision that you’re working towards?

Andrea Heuston: I always have a vision I’m working towards. I actually revamp my vision every January, so I’m in the process of starting that again, which I really enjoy doing.

But I like to look three, five, 10 years out to see where we’re going to be and a lot of what I’m looking at this year in particular is technology and the way it has changed and how we have to change with it or we’ll no longer be a viable company.

So about four years ago, five years ago maybe, we started a real tiny practice in the area of motion graphics and video and now it’s over half our business. It’s 50 percent of our business. And so what we are doing now is looking at what’s next in technology so that we can grab a hold of it early enough to hold on to the tail of the kite to make sure we soar ever higher as we go. That’s my primary objective, as far as taking initiative.

Doug Hall: Cool. Let’s wrap things up with sort of the crowning question. Of all the things we’ve touched on and anything that might be running around in your mind, if you could give one piece of advice folks out there that are in their growth path. We’re all growing, but maybe they’re a little younger in their growth. What’s the number one piece of advice you’d share with them?

Andrea Heuston: Oh, I’m going to give you two though even though you told me one.

Doug Hall: Okay, you can have a bonus.

Andrea Heuston: The first one is dust yourself off. Fail and dust yourself off. Learn a lesson and move on. Do not beat yourself up because whatever failure you have or whatever lesson you need to learn is for a reason, and it can only make you stronger if you build upon it. That’s my life philosophy, I think.

The fact is, and this is what I tell people when I do interviews and when I do panels for business owners and people who are growing, is gather your tribe, the people who know things way better than you do. You need professionals. You need a coach. You need a peer group. You desperately need an accountant, a lawyer, and a banker. Those are the ones that I always say, those five.

But there’s other ones you need, too. Just basically you need people who know things that you don’t know. Be the dumbest person in the room. Always be the dumbest person in the room if you can, because then you’re always learning.

Doug Hall: Well, you’re still the owner and founder and getting smart people to help you is wonderful, right?

Andrea Heuston: It is.

Doug Hall: Great. Well listen, that’s all the time we have for today. You’ve been wonderful. Thank you, Andrea, founder, CEO of Artitudes Design. What can I say but thank you?

Appreciate it.

Andrea Heuston: Yeah. Thanks, Doug. That was a lot of fun. I hope it’s of value to your listeners.

Doug Hall: It will be. Thanks very much and have a merry Christmas.

Andrea Heuston: All right, thanks, you too.