Trevor Hubbard of Butchershop and how to anticipate failure

Trevor Hubbard:

Honestly, I think every failure stems from a lack of clarity. Everything in your life that has gone wrong is because there was a lack of clarity, which to me is an assumption, a surprise, or some notion that you didn't do the work to actually figure out what was the real sort of problems or threats that could happen.

Rob Goodman:

Hi everyone, and welcome to Now What?, the podcast from Wix about how technology is changing everything. I'm your host, Rob Goodman. And in this series, we're talking all about evolution in business, design, development and beyond. In this episode, we're talking to Trevor Hubbard, global CEO and executive creative director for the award-winning creative agency Butchershop. Trevor founded Butchershop 12 years ago and has since grown the agency into a global creative powerhouse with offices in the US, Europe and Mexico. He's also the founder of The Clarity Project, where he helps companies understand the value of clarity in achieving goals, nurturing talent and growing sustainably.

Rob Goodman:

Trevor and I get into it about how the past year has helped Butchershop evolve and find clarity, how moving to a distributed workforce, open new business opportunities for the company, and how he and his team help organizations forecast failures in order to drive success. It's a great conversation with the always forthright Trevor Hubbard on building a new kind of creative agency, shifting as you grow, and developing winning strategies for clients using a thing called pre-mortems. All right, let's start the show.

Rob Goodman:

Trevor, welcome to Now What?, the podcast all about the evolution of business, and in your case, the evolution of the agency world and Butchershop, your agency.

Trevor Hubbard:

Awesome. Good to see you, Rob. This is great.

Rob Goodman:

Great to see you Trevor. So let's dive in and talk a little bit about the past year. COVID-19, all the changes, all the difficulties that came with that. I know that Butchershop actually grew over this past year, which I think is incredible. You also have gone into a completely remote operated and distributed company and team set up, ditched the office. So talk to me a little bit about what's changed for you all over this past year?

Trevor Hubbard:

No, this year by all accounts has just been brutal and filled with uncertainty for a lot of people. And I think you've got to go back in time a little bit where a pandemic doesn't hit and all of a sudden the company's great. You have to be great going into a pandemic. And then it shows, I think, true colors of what the company, which is made up of its crew and its culture and its people and its clients, the resiliency really either shows up and you either turn those uncertainties into opportunities and you're either an optimist or a pessimist or you atrophy or you become a deer in headlights and you don't know what to do.

Trevor Hubbard:

So I think if you go back in time for Butchershop, three years ago, I changed the ownership structure and bought partners out. And it really made us force this function of like what are we? Who are we? And this ethos kind of developed where if we stay on the side of helping people as our ethos, we're always going to be thinking about clarity. We're always going to be thinking about how to be helpful. We're always going to be thinking about where's the most impact and where's the most value.

Trevor Hubbard:

And so leading up to the pandemic in 2019 was almost the hardest year of our entire Butchershop career, at least for mine. We flat-lined, our profits weren't good, we lost a little bit of the culture and the trust because it was in a ownership structure change year and we were trying to figure out what it is that we were going to be to the world and it's really hard to be clear when you're not exactly certain what might come. So one of the things that we did is we changed the entire mindset of our culture to talk about failure and be super comfortable with failure.

Trevor Hubbard:

And we did this in 2018, 20, 19, and we started to have this culture mindset of beating failure. And it was probably the most profound thing that we ever did because most companies, they sit and they talk about what makes us successful. And for us talking about failure really forced the hard conversations. What would make Butchershop as an agency, brand experience agency, what would make us fail? And it was telling. We came up with the methodology of the pre-mortem sort of way to move through this question and put things on the wall where you could come up with defensible strategies around all these things that people were listing out that were potential failures.

Trevor Hubbard:

And so when we put those things into place, it almost seemed like when the pandemic hit in 2020, we knew exactly how to kind of behave and what to do in so far as asking the right questions, right? What would make us fail during this time? And I remember on March 7th when we closed down our office, we had these conversations. And when we talked about beating failure during this time, we came up with our own list. And that list was all around being remote, the culture, the clients, communication, collaboration, all of these things that really stemmed from this ethos of helping each other and helping people. And it made us almost kind of go back to the basics a little bit in how we were approaching the work and what we were doing, and it also showed us that the key ingredients were clarity and this thing called transparency that I think is often hard during these times.

Trevor Hubbard:

And so those are the types of things that earlier in 2020, those are the things that we kind of doubled down on was the clarity and transparency components of that. And I can give you a couple examples if you want of what that meant to us, but that clarity came in the form of us confronting the hard problems and having the conversations and talking about those failures and then doing stuff about it. One of the things that I think was incredibly challenging was just delivering people information. How do you do that? And I committed every evening to sending an email every night about what was going on in the company, what was going on in our business, what was going on with our financials. There isn't a single person at Butchershop that didn't know exactly how much money we were making and where that money was being spent. And those types of things were different for an agency where you have these people that really don't know that, right? That inclusivity allowed people to make what we were doing kind of their own and it gave them some skin in the game.

Trevor Hubbard:

Another thing that we changed during this time was to give people at our company a profit share. So we put up a profit sharing program. We spun up new ways for people to move into a partnership, to create associate partners here at Butchershop. These are the types of things that really matter. We reorged our entire salary function at Butchershop by doing an audit on roles and responsibilities in the context of our industry and what it means to live in San Francisco. We pulled the plug on our office early, which saved us almost a half a million dollars, right?

Trevor Hubbard:

So these are the types of moves that if we didn't look at it from the point of view of failure, we wouldn't know what we were trying to beat. We would just be kind of grabbing at straws. And I think those are the types of things that during this time as an agency, you think the purpose is for us to be creative, but the most creative thing we can do is design this business in a way that has the most value and impact. And that's what I think this last year of 2020 has been.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah, I think that's incredible because at a time of stress, turmoil, both in the world, in business, and in so many people's personal lives, that can often be a tension and a driver towards people going off into their own corners, worrying about themselves, their own... What's going to help them survive and like a more of a scarcity mindset, whereas everything you're describing is what are the ways I can build in communication, in business structure, in the way that we work and collaborate as a team and with our partners that brings us in and together and connected to a central ethos, as you said, and a central mission together? So I think that's incredible.

Rob Goodman:

And I want to just kind of dive into a few things that you brought up. The pre-mortem idea. So a lot of people listening they'll know what a post-mortem is, right? The project went out, it launched, like what happened? What went right? What went wrong? What do we want to do differently? Talk me through the pre-mortem process. And I also love that I know with a lot of agencies, it can be typical to be always focused outward. You're always focused on the client, on servicing the client, on building out. You're doing things for the client that you're not necessarily doing for yourselves as the business and the company. And now what I'm hearing from you is no, we took that approach of being inward first so we could be set up for success and then you actually are operating better as a business, but then you took it further and productized the pre-mortem with The Clarity Project. So I want to get into that, but walk me through the pre-mortem and what that is.

Trevor Hubbard:

I remember being at Nick's Cove up the coast in California with my leadership team. We did a pre-mortem exercise with Post-its on a wall where we asked what would make Butchershop fail? And this was right around the time that the ownership restructuring and buyout was happening. And we got our list of about 20 things and you rank them, the likelihood of those things happening and the impact it would have, negative impacts. And you get a big number and you get a prioritization list. It's amazing. The things on that list, one of the things was there's an Armageddon type event that happens and we can't leave San Francisco or we're stuck in San Francisco. Like that was on the list, right? As a potential failure for our business. We don't diversify the business model and our clients kind of go away or we don't have enough business, right? Well, what do you do? You diversify?

Trevor Hubbard:

So back then it gave us all these hypotheticals that we could think about. And it was so effective that it designed us to be in a place in 2020 where we hit the $10 million mark in revenue, we were nearly 20% net profit, which is where an agency should be, we hired more people outside of San Francisco in different regions than we have ever before, we opened an office in Europe, we started the acquisition process of our first agency of about 50 people in Guadalajara, Mexico, we launched The Clarity Project and built our own application for the pre-mortem, we started Feed the Line, which we raised $175,000 to feed hospital workers through local restaurants serving meals, right? And getting them paid. We launched E2, which is Equity for Equality, which is a way that we can support the Black design talent community by adding 1% to our client contracts where we match it and we get other agencies to do it. We have a $1 million goal in 2021.

Trevor Hubbard:

All of this happened in a pandemic. How? How? It's not supposed to happen. How do you do all these things? Right? And it's not like all of a sudden we're funded by a fairy godmother. This is our own sweat equity, our own dollars, our own time. And the pre-mortem was vital to this process. And it was so successful in helping us design our vision and mission for this business. We said, other people need this. Lack of clarity breeds drama. The number one thing in all organizations is that there's just a lack of clarity, which leads to a lack of accountability, which leads to no alignment, which leads to surprises. Surprises are the root of all evil. This is not an issue of agency. This is an issue of just human beings and being in a business in a company in teams, right?

Trevor Hubbard:

And so it works with each other in our company. It works with our client partners. So if we can stand for clarity and if we can stand for beating failure, we develop our projects and our scopes of work and our engagement through that lens. We're not doing what every company does, which is put a list of four or five things that are our success metrics. Those are valid, I get it, but the list is short. The things that could go wrong, the points of failure are extensive.

Trevor Hubbard:

So we'd rather think about that and rank them, solve the hard problems that are ranking very high on that list. We didn't want to do this with Post-its anymore. So we got out in front of it and made it so that it works in a virtual environment. As Butchershop goes more global, we knew that in Europe, The Clarity Project and beating failure, this mindset shift that's very much like this anti-Silicon Valley, which is ... Silicon Valley's all about experiments, fail fast, fail a thousand times. And that's great, but what if we could limit the amount of failures and turn them actually into these preventions? Things that you're getting out in front of. You're predicting what could happen. So this mindset is something that we started The Clarity Project around.

Trevor Hubbard:

If you go to the clarityproject.com, or joinclarityproject.com, you can see how it's one part mindset, one part facilitation, one part workshop, and one part tech tool. What you're referring to is this Priio app that we developed, which is a virtual pre-mortem, essentially. That does all the automated ranking. Feels very much like a Post-it environment. It's something that we use almost on every project. What we've done is we productized it. It launches in March of 2021, self-serving. We've got a hundred other agencies and consulting companies using it as part of their practice. Some will make it more about risk assessment. Some will use it for scoping projects. Others will use it to build trust with clients. Others will use it internally for their own initiatives. And we've done that predominantly on almost everything. I feel like when you have a room of six to eight people, all talking personally about what they think would make something fail, you right then have now made it more human. You right then have now made that thing we're all trying to manufacture in remote work, collaboration, you've made it happen by just asking the right question.

Trevor Hubbard:

There's a connection that happens when people start to divulge what they think are failures, rather than being quiet. We've been in those meetings where 20% of the room does 80% of the talking. It's all the time. What happens is there's this over-engineering in a pandemic when you try to move to remote to have as many meetings as possible, because you think that's what people need and they want. But if you actually analyze that from perspective, people need heads down time. They need to be left the F alone. They need this idea of produce time. They need to play. They need to plan. When you shove that all into one day, your calendar in COVID looks like it's just stacked with meetings. It's bullshit. So all of these things that I'm kind of alluding to are ... I guess you could sum up Priio the app, from The Clarity Project, as just a way to take the 11 meetings you have in a day and shrink it down to one. Because now everybody's aligned, they know exactly what they're doing, the priorities, and then you can assign it to people. You can make them accountable.

Trevor Hubbard:

At the end of the year, this is what we do. "How many failures did you prevent in the year? How many things were on your pre-mortem lists throughout all the initiatives you did?" Rather than somebody saying, "Well, here's what was successful that I worked on this year." I'd rather have a team looking out to prevent failures than I would people trying to claim success on things. Because everyone will manufacture their own story of that success.

Rob Goodman:

Right. Right.

Trevor Hubbard:

I think that's the compelling thing of, to us, it all stems from asking the right question, what would make us fail? From there, we were able to build a very powerful vision for where we're going now in the future. That's been, I'd say, three and a half years in the making, which made us survive 2020, thrive, have the best year in our entire business life cycle. In 2021, gearing up to be exponentially more impressive than that year.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah. I love the idea of connecting people through this. It's almost shifting the perception around fear and failure. Let's get it out on the table. Let's open up a sore, soft spot that people feel emotional about. Nobody wants to fail. There's a fear there. But that can be connective tissue for people to relate to one another, and kind of open up and rally around, "Okay, how might we prevent this? How might we beat this kind of thing?"

Trevor Hubbard:

And how do you get out of task mode? The issue is that ... I had a conversation with a very, very big company. Which you'd be shocked to know that they were talking to me about, "How do we fix our meeting culture this morning?" Literally, "Am I having this conversation?" It's because their meetings, they've over engineered during the pandemic, where it's just all about tasks, checklists, "Did you do this? Did you do that? Did you do this?" Nobody knows if it's right. Nobody knows if it's the right thing. There's no velocity. They don't see any progress. So how do you change that? Well, you got to focus on the unpopular things. You got to get out of task mode. The only way you can do that is to have this collective thought on what the real priorities are. To me, if you focus on the hard things, which the pre-mortem process can allow you to do in Priio, then you know that the easy stuff will get solved.

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Rob Goodman:

What have you learned about clarity and about getting there? I mean, can you distill it down to a few things? Yeah, because projects I work on, of course there's always a different picture in everyone's head of what the process is going to look like and of what the outcome is going to look like. I work on story boarding, scripting, inspiration, all of that. How do you complete the picture as far in advance as you can, before you even hit record? But talk to me about what you've learned through this clarity project that distills down how you get there.

Trevor Hubbard:

Honestly, I think every failure stems from a lack of clarity. Everything in your life that has gone wrong is because there was a lack of clarity, which to me is an assumption, a surprise, or some notion that you didn't do the work to actually figure out what was the real sort of problems or threats that could happen. The gift of hindsight is a ridiculous notion and we all use it. It's very easy to sit here on our perch and say, "Oh, hindsight is always going to be 2020." But, I can definitely tell you this, if you are a solo person working on your own project, you're usually going to generate this list.

Trevor Hubbard:

The list is going to be a thing of to-dos. What do you have to do first, second, third, fourth? Usually the thing that you're most comfortable with is the thing you're going to tackle first. You're going to realize that some of those other, bigger things are going to rear their ugly head. Or if you get more experienced, you start to tackle the harder things. And sometimes, for people that usually have this mindset already, or they've learned it, this isn't a problem. But for the majority of people, I would say that when you work on something on your own, you're in this task-driven world, and you're trying to check off lists. It's a horrible way of functioning because you're not really moving the needle forward. You're just kind of knocking things around. You're moving sand from pile to pile. That's what happens. I mean, it would be uncanny if I told you how many people live their lives day to day on their browser tabs that are open. They literally use their browser tabs as their to-do list for the day. This happens, and it's crazy. But I get it. I understand why.

Trevor Hubbard:

Now, group dynamics. That, to me, is going to always be the thing. That it doesn't matter how clear you are in what needs to happen, the success is always going to be measured on how clear is everybody else. So how do you do that? Well, if you say, "Everybody good? We kind of know what we're going to do?" You have somebody just talk at people, or like, "Here's what the focus is. Here's the strategy." And it's void of a plan, because the plan maybe looks like milestones and check-ins. But the question is, "How do we get there? What do we know? Who's doing what? Who's accountable?" What if there's a bunch of dependencies that nobody's thinking of and they're not even in that room? Who's responsible for that?

Trevor Hubbard:

So the idea of this is how do you get rapid clarity to maximize value and impact? How do you do that? And how do you do that in an organization, in a team environment? Well, this is really interesting. If you ask that question, "What would make our strategy or what would make this project fail?" You get the group together, the trick is to hear from everyone. Everyone has to put three or four or five things. Whether it's from the perspective of their team, themselves as an individual, personal, what they've known from the past, or what they think others are going to do that might mess up the project or not contribute. You have to do it. The great thing is, is usually the C-suite, or your team leaders or whatever, they're just talking at you. But this allows them to be on the equal playing field as the person that's sitting in that room.

Trevor Hubbard:

What I love about this, Rob, you do this as a team. You rank them, each one. What's the likelihood of it happening? What's the catastrophic impact? Two numbers. One to 10, one to 10. You multiply those numbers, you get a big number. That big number is how you prioritize. The things that are really big are at the top of the list. The things that are really small are down here. What's great is each one of those, you don't leave that meeting until someone's name gets pinned up next to it. It is your responsibility to not let this happen. Does that mean they don't get to build a team around it or have their own work back plan or their check-in? No, of course they can. But the idea is you list, "What do we need to know? What do we need to have? What do we need to do? What are the dependencies? What are questions that we have? What's a potential timeline? What are the risks?" You get to actually have mini projects to bring the entire project forward.

Trevor Hubbard:

If there's people in the room that have nothing on that list that they're accountable for, why are they in that meeting? If you have somebody that has too many things on their plate, they need help. They're under-resourced. So I love just the directional wayfinding of being able to get clarity. Everyone says that clarity is this thing where it's like, "Were the instructions clear?" Like, "Was it Ikea? Can I understand the instructions and how to build something?" But how do you even know if those are the right instructions? So I think that clarity comes from actually understanding where the biggest pitfalls and failures might be. That's how you build the most successful project dynamic. That's how you build the most successful team.

Trevor Hubbard:

That's how you build the most successful agency or the project or the business. Right? And I feel like this just falls by the wayside and I'll put my failure methodology up against anybody else's success methodology any day of the week, six ways to Sunday. And I credit why Butcher Shop is doing so well and why I'm so proud of this company, because that's what I think we've all adopted.

Rob Goodman:

I love that methodology and I love the level playing field by which it's executed. I want to go a level beneath that though, because the scenario that you described I hear needs a lot of trust, it needs a lot of foundational solid ground in the culture. So talk to me a little bit about advice that you might give to leaders out there who maybe need to take a step back and feel that employees and teammates will feel comfortable in that meeting raising their hand, talking openly. How do you start to create that space?

Trevor Hubbard:

It's interesting because a lot of cultures and companies they're just not built. They're hierarchical, they're top-down, they're full of mid-level managers and this is the way the world works, right? It takes guts and it takes somebody that really cares about the wellbeing of others to seek clarity. The problem with this methodology is if somebody is using it to make somebody feel bad and I've seen that happen too. And where you're going with this whole trust factor, I don't believe that you need this foundational trust to do this exercise and come out on the other side stronger. I don't believe you need that because I believe that this is the exercise to get that trust built. That said, I do think that if you're for example, there's complete chaos and there's this lack of clarity and you know it's the manager's problem. And you know it's their fault.

Trevor Hubbard:

And you say, "I'm going to propose this pre-board and we want to do it." And you're bringing the manager or your boss or somebody in to make them feel bad. Or you have a couple of people on the team who you know aren't pulling their weight and you want to make them feel bad in front of your boss or whatever that is, that's not good. The point is you have to kind of bring in an exec sponsor to say this in the name of clarity. I haven't met somebody that says, "I don't want clarity, we don't need that. We don't need that in our organization. We're fine." I haven't met anybody that has been so demonstratively against it because it's one of those things that no matter how great you are as a company, you always need more of it. You always need more clarity.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah. I love all of that. And I'm really curious about how closing down the office, going a hundred percent remote now acquiring this 50 person digital shop in Mexico. How you're thinking now about hiring in a way that you've never thought about it before and how that impacts diversity, equity and inclusion in the way that you're bringing people on board. Talk to me about that shift that you're taking this obviously big challenge, big negative of not being able to go into the office, closing it down, dealing with the transition to remote work and collaboration and communication and saying, "No, we're going to take this as an opportunity to open our arms and bring in the best from everywhere."

Trevor Hubbard:

Well, we boiled it down to was that the company is way bigger than four walls and if that's the thing that holds your company and culture and success together, it was a problem. And so when we looked at what the world was showing us, I have a philosophy that you don't... It's not my philosophy but an adopted philosophy where you don't bash up against a rock, you just flow around it. So this big rock of COVID was sitting there and it was like let's flow around it. What is this showing us, what's around this rock? What we realized is that first of all San Francisco is the most overly inflated place to build your career where you have these companies that have overly inflated valuations paying overly inflated salaries and everybody overly inflating what their actual value and skillset and worth really actually is.

Trevor Hubbard:

Are there a lot of smart people here? Absolutely. But there's this diversity issue. A lot of folks in our field I think there's this statistic where less than like 3% of the Black or Latino community doesn't even understand that there's a design career opportunity until much later in life. This is something I learned in like sixth grade that you can do things like this, right? So there's an issue here with where we can pull talent from. And that is something that we can't solve right now. But what we can do is not be so polarized and have just this selection where you need to be in the Bay Area to be a part of our company. It makes zero sense. And so this forced us to really not have to make it mandatory that any one of our new hires had to be in the Bay Area.

Trevor Hubbard:

And so we hired three people from Southern California in that area, Chicago, New York, it just opened it up, opening our office in Europe completely different. When you combine that with the world's greatest internship, which is our big global emerging talent platform that we created. We have 1500 applicants each year from 70 countries that are every shape, size, creed, religious background, color you could possibly imagine. And it's amazing because you realize that there's this connection we have to ideas and creativity. And so just seeing that inspiration allows us to tap into a different hiring pool. And it forces us to look at our business where it isn't about San Francisco, it's about where else we can go. Acquiring this Mexican digital shop, their leadership is so keen on what we can build together that it just opens up this avenue that I think San Francisco is a crutch.

Trevor Hubbard:

I think it makes us actually think less about inclusion and diversity and equity. We have to get outside of that comfort zone. We have to realize that this decentralization that you're seeing is one of the most wonderful things. We no longer have this big restrictive criteria. We also as a company don't have to pay San Francisco salaries. The world's different, it's an amazing thing. If you have rent that's $5,000 a month in San Francisco and that same apartment is $1,500 a month in Chicago what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that the cost of living is different. So then we had to really focus on occasion building. So we're not going to be in person all the time. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means that we create occasion.

Trevor Hubbard:

So what we're going to do is take all the money we saved, about $600,000 a year on our office space and we're going to put that money towards traveling around the world. And we're going to host after the pandemic these summits every quarter, where our entire company of a hundred people gets to travel. And for three days we get inspired, we learn from each other, we talk about things. We set the course for the next quarter and we get to experience each other in a different way. And I think that when we asked the question, would you rather be in the office every day or travel to Reykjavik, Tokyo, Vienna, Mexico, once every quarter, would you rather do that? And I think that we had I think 90% of the team said I'd rather do that. And what it allows people to do is personally live kind of where they want, where they can afford a home, what they can do, where they can build a life.

Trevor Hubbard:

I'm up here in Lake Tahoe right now. I don't want to be in Moran or San Francisco and it feels normal now. I have people that want to move out of the Bay Area because they want to be near family. Well, now that's fine. We have another employee who wants to move to support her girlfriend as she gets her next degree or whatever and that's back East. But why not? Of course you can do that. So to me culture isn't made in the four walls or the brick and mortar that you have, it's built in different places. And I think if anybody is trying to take this de-centralization remote work culture quotient seriously, you need to create occasions. And those occasions and those models aren't going to be having more meetings like this on a Zoom call or whatever they're different.

Trevor Hubbard:

And you got to think about it differently. And so to us, the theme has just been massive opportunity. Just change the game. Clients are the same. We want to be more global that means we can't make San Francisco the thing that we hang our hat on. I will caveat this and say this though, we are working on a concept called Lab Land and Lab Land is a concept where it is a collaboration space rather than a co-working space. That collaboration space is modeled where you can have 360 technology and be able to have conferences for people that are there and not there and make it feel inclusive.

Trevor Hubbard:

And it's not about going every day. It's about that one day, that half day, those two days in a row where you really do need to come together. And can we put those Lab Lands in unpopular areas because it's not about the commute anymore? And can we scale those? Can we put them in different places? And so to me I'm excited about that concept as we move forward because I think collaboration is key and we have to think differently about it.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah. I'd love that.

Trevor Hubbard:

Just retire the conference room and make it a collaboration place space. If you can do that, when you set your mind free what does that look like?

Rob Goodman:

Yeah. It sounds like a lot of fun and a lot of freedom.

Trevor Hubbard:

Yeah, it brings me back to the idea of standing around a wall with pinups and post-its, and it not being around this table where everyone sits around it and kind of people are on their laptops not really paying attention. It's like how do you make that room come alive? And I love that because we do that and that's what we're missing as an agency. And quite frankly, if you had these in other cities meeting with clients at a Lab Land would be the most amazing thing. And my hypothesis is that more agencies and more creative businesses will get rid of their physical spaces and they'll rely on products like this in the decentralized sort of economy that we're going to be living in, where we are living in.

Rob Goodman:

Absolutely. And you mentioned the World's Greatest Internship and that's a program where people can apply, they're placed at a job anywhere in the world for like six months. Is that right? WGI

Trevor Hubbard:

WGI, World's Greatest Internship is two parts, right? One is the internship experience which this year will be fully remote. And every agency from profit to rice in Vietnam, everybody is onboard with remote because we're all doing it. Gretel, Kodo, everybody. The talent network is really interesting. All these agencies that are our partners the talent is judged. And there's this top tier of every addition that we have to 300 talents that get hosted on this talent network. And it's where other agencies can come and build their internship program with this diverse, unique, global talent. And that's a new innovation that we're playing with and we're actually hiring from this pool as well. And it's an amazing thing and it's open to anybody to apply. But the idea is that these internship experiences are very coveted, they're fully paid.

Trevor Hubbard:

In the pre-COVID era you used to travel two months in each city, two months at each agency, you'd have a partner, six interns were selected. And now what we're doing is we're having the internship experience, but we're also now letting other agencies basically fulfill their internship programs with this talent that's applying. So if you're looking to break in or you're an emerging creative, no matter where you are, this is a great way to seriously launch your career because we're all on the same page of what internships should be. And it shouldn't be you serving the agency, it should be the agency serving you a hundred percent. That's the script that's been flipped with how we're approaching the World's Greatest Internship.

Rob Goodman:

Amazing. And you've done work with incredible clients, Nike, Okta, Tonal, the new digital at-home gym, which I think is awesome, Good Eggs. I want to dive into Feed the Line. It was stood up really quickly to support hospital workers and get them fresh meals from restaurants-

Rob Goodman:

Hospital workers and get them fresh meals from restaurants in the Bay Area. And I love how quickly that you stood that project up and how immediate the impact was in the community. Can you talk me through from inception to standing up the website, getting donations and then delivering meals, how did that project come to life so quickly?

Trevor Hubbard:

Ethos, our ethos. And I'll say it again. It's almost like we came full circle. Our ethos is help people. It's not a moniker. It's not a tagline. It's not a trademark phrase. It's the prerequisite to be a part of Butchershop. That has to be apparent, has to be apparent how you treat others, how you treat yourself, how you help clients, how you treat clients. And how you fight for the integrity of what's right. And to me, the signal was out. And when we had this new hire, her name is Laura Miller. We call her Lo. She's a brand experience strategist that was fairly new to Butchershop, a few weeks in. And her fiance worked at a hospital and said, the hospital workers are having a real hard time getting fed and they kind of brainstorm and had this idea. And she brought it up to Ben, the chief creative officer and myself, at Butchershop and said, "Hey, what if we could get restaurants that are struggling right now to create meals that the community who'd raise funds would pay for and they would deliver those to hospitals, UCF, Stanford, just the Bay Area hospitals."

Trevor Hubbard:

We were like in two seconds, it was like, "Of course we're going to do this. Let's do it." And within a few days, site was up, payment gateway was up, restaurants were contacted, hospital administrators were contacted and we had our own little ecosystem happening. And what started as like a really just kind of unique idea. We're like, oh cool. We raised a few thousand dollars. Within six weeks it was 175K, 10,000 meals, thousands of hospital workers, dozens and dozens and dozens of bay area restaurants all receiving benefits, helping each other. And that was amazing. And it brought our entire company together to not only promote it, build it, manage it, huge logistics in this process of managing this and remaining equitable and fair and doing the right thing.

Trevor Hubbard:

But it was just a testament to our ethos really being put into action and somebody new joining the company, adopting it like that and understanding it. And the good thing is, is we had an exit from this. It was not sustainable for us to manage this. So, Frontline Foods, which was this massive national organization, was able to basically take in partnership some of our restaurants and the hospitals that they already had and fold that into their program that is still continuing today. And they had an amazing celebrity endorsement behind them.

Trevor Hubbard:

So, it was a very natural thing. So, people always ask me, so why aren't you doing it anymore? And it's like, yeah, you're right. I always think about like, we can't drop the ball. We got to pass the torch. So, Feed the Line lives on through Frontline Foods. And it was an amazing thing for us as a company. I call it our mascot. At a time when we could've all been sad for ourselves and what was happening and all that, this focused on everyone else, but us. And it was the thing that we all kind of needed. That's why I love this company. That's why I love what I do, it's because any day we could do something like this and change a bunch of people's lives. And that is fricking rad.

Rob Goodman:

And the Feed the Line project, I know that the site was actually built with Wix. So, how quickly did that happen and how did it come together?

Trevor Hubbard:

When we needed to build this site, we looked at a lot of different things and speed was the most important thing. And we also didn't want to necessarily bombard too many of our technical people with having to build something that we couldn't pretty much figure out from almost a project manager perspective and Wix was a great tool to help us do a lot of those things with a lot of the functionality and just, and a lot of the plugins that allowed things to spin up quite easily with donations and payment gateways and hooking things up to PayPal, et cetera. So, Wix was what we chose as the platform to build the site in like two days. And it was very easy. It was actually a very nice little site and it worked quite well. And we were able to almost admin it without any of our technical team the whole time, which was great.

Trevor Hubbard:

And actually I had a little bit of support, but it just sort of made us move at the speed of life. And it was the right solution for us. But interestingly enough, after we'd raised so much money and help so many hospitals and everything, I was so proud of what we were doing. And every night I sent an email to my entire company. And in that I reached out to Nir at Wix and he was like the head of the company. And I just wanted to say, thank you. And I sent him a recap of what we've been able to do and why we chose Wix. And it was nothing in return, but he got back to me that moment. It was like, I was just about to do an all hands. And I'm going to share this with the entire company, thank you for this and thanks for what you're doing.

Trevor Hubbard:

And it was just an amazing thing. That got forwarded around. And some of the marketing team reached out. I was able to talk with a bunch of other agencies. Now we're in partnership with Wix on the WGI side to do continuing education in digital environments and things like that. So, by just saying thank you for a company building technology like this, to allow things like this to happen. It just turned into a great relationship. And again, here we are talking about the way the world goes round in this crazy creative space we live in. So, very cool.

Rob Goodman:

Last question. What is exciting you right now, just in general? What is fueling you creatively in life during these times? Could be anything. Is it skiing? Is it family? Is it something you're reading?

Trevor Hubbard:

Yeah. It's easy. I don't even need to think about it. It's the endless love of the backcountry. What I love during this pandemic is if you want to be away from people, go ski the backcountry. Whatever your poison is, to me, that is what I'm passionate about, it's what I do. It's what I've been doing. I've been taking calls from the top of peaks and summits. This whole era of what we do. It just changes your perspective, your resiliency, your understanding of seeing the little things. It's incredibly dangerous.

Trevor Hubbard:

And you can mess up and this idea of staying humble and educated and knowledgeable and going with your gut and not trying to be aggressive and staying conservative, but at the same time, knowing where risk is dealing with hardships and adversity, cold weather. Accomplishing something really big and an amazing thing to do. And so to me, that's what I'm passionate about. It literally is what fuels my creativity, because if I don't have the space to think I don't have the space. And so for me, spending four or five hours solo, you get a lot of really interesting thinking done. So, I think that was the most probably inspiring thing. Clarity.

Rob Goodman:

Back to clarity, there it is. Trevor, such a pleasure to talk to you. It's always such a blast to just talk to you. And I think people listening are going to learn so much about Butchershop and you and really amazing practices that I think people can start to bring into their work. So, this was a big joy. Thanks so much.

Trevor Hubbard:

Thanks, Rob.

Rob Goodman:

A great big, thank you to our friend, Trevor Hubbard, for sharing so much of the Butchershop journey and dropping some incredibly helpful advice and insights with us. Some of the moments that really stand out from our conversation are using your creative muscles as a team to brainstorm all the ways that your business, your project, your campaign could fail and then building in systems and workflows to guard against those failures in the process of making your work. It's an extra step and commitment upfront, but one that can save people time, money, and resources in the long run.

Rob Goodman:

Plus you'll get better working relationships from it as well, which is sure to add value, amplifying trust and performance in the work that you're doing together. And as Trevor puts it, every failure comes from a lack of clarity. I love that insight. And I enjoyed hearing how decentralized and remote teams can drive for greater inclusion and diversity by drawing in a wider pool of talent from more places. And how workplace culture isn't defined by a set of principles on a whiteboard. It's about connecting and bringing people together to foster relationships. And especially for remote teams, finding those moments for occasion building to get teams together for IRL collaboration and bonding time in inventive new ways is so critical. You can learn more about Butchershop at butchershop.co and get show notes, a transcript of this episode and links to explore more on our website at wix.com/nowwhat.

Rob Goodman:

Thanks so much for listening. This is Now What by Wix. The podcast about how technology is changing everything. Now What is hosted and produced by me, Rob Goodman, executive producer for content at Wix, audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Muraki. Our executive producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow, Shani More, Omer Shai, and me Rob Goodman. You can discover more about the show and our guests at wix.com/nowwhat. Be sure to subscribe and follow the show for new episodes, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share this show with your friends and colleagues. We'll see you soon.