IAM1374 – Founder and Creative Director Helps Business by Untangling Complexity with Video

William Gadea is the Founder and Creative Director of IdeaRocket, a maker of videos for businesses. Since 2012 IdeaRocket has created videos for more than 20 Fortune 500 companies as well as a number of exciting new startups. His team works in a variety of techniques including 2d animation, 3d animation, whiteboard, and live-action.

• CEO Story: William has been in the Broadway theatres for a long time but never fell in love with it. He wanted to be creative, so he studied animation and blended it with his film school background. Started his career with cartoon animation. Then finally started his own in 2006, making videos for companies to help communicate with their customers and employees.
• Business Service: Communicate complicated messages boiling them down into a story, metaphor, and characters that are easy to understand and remember.
• Secret Sauce: Untangling complexity. Best production quality. Writing the story. A true story experience that can help unravel that problem that is hard to understand.
• CEO Hack: Meditation (Mindfulness practice) before work for 30 minutes to be present and kinder
• CEO Nugget: From Kimberly-Clark: 4 Ways to grow and select the path of least resistance – (1) Sell more things (diversify), (2) more people (more customers), (3)  more money (premium services / raise prices) or (4) often (more repeat business)
• CEO Defined: Servant leadership including yourself. Any business owner focuses on 3 things: (1) Customers, (2) employees, and (3) investors

Website: http://idearocketanimation.com
Facebook: IdeaRocket
Twitter: IdeaRocket321
LinkedIn: @idearocket

Throwback Link: https://iamceo.co/2018/09/03/056-founder-creative-director-helps-business-by-untangling-complexity-with-video

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Transcription

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00:02 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:27 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have William Gadea of Idea Rocket. William, it is awesome to have you on the show.

00:38 – William Gadea

Gresh, it's great being here. Thanks for inviting me.

00:40 – Gresham Harkless

No problem. No problem. And what I wanted to do was read a little bit more about William so you can learn a little bit more about all the awesome things he's doing and has been able to accomplish. So William is the founder and creative director of Idea Rocket, a maker of videos for businesses. Since 2012, Idea Rocket has created videos for more than 20 Fortune 500 companies, as well as a number of exciting new startups. His team works in a variety of techniques, including 2D animation, 3D animation, whiteboard, and live action. William, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:14 – William Gadea

I sure am. And I'm excited about it.

01:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, we're excited to have you on too. And what I wanted to do was just ask you a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start Idea Rocket.

01:24 – William Gadea

Well, it's kind of been a roundabout journey. I grew up overseas. I was born in Peru and lived in Australia. Then my family moved to the Dominican Republic, and I came up here to study film at NYU when I was 17. So I had that moving around when I was a kid. After getting out of college, it was kind of moving around a bit there too. As a young man, I had artistic yearnings and I wrote plays for the Broadway theater for a long time that were a lot of fun and rewarding I never really fell out of love with the theater, but I did fall out of love with having that second job to make ends meet. So I wanted to do something creative with my profession.

So I took some night courses, learned animation, and of course, that kind of bled in with my film school background. So I started a career in children's television. I got a job at MTV Animation. I made a lot of the cartoons that perhaps your kids are still seeing. Cartoons like Kappa Mikey, Speed Racer, The Next Generation, Word World, etc. But there came a time, as it often happens with entrepreneurs, that you kind of get a yearning to build a project, to build something that might last.

And around 2006, YouTube had just started and I was getting a sense that there was something in the air that companies would need this tool to communicate with their customers and their employees. So I started offering my services to businesses and it didn't really start taking off until I found a marketing channel, which was AdWords. And I made my first hire in 2012, changed the name to Idea Rocket. And we've been doing pretty well ever since. As you mentioned in the introduction, we've had a lot of Fortune 500 companies and smaller companies too that work with us. So it's been a fun ride.

03:32 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, it sounds like it, and especially you being able to kind of have that creative yearning as you were speaking and be able to eventually, you know, go through the progression, but end up, you know, creating your business and be able to put that into fruition for yourself, but also for the client. So I wanted to draw down a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more about how you serve those big, huge Fortune 500 companies, but also those new startups that you talked about. Well, I think what we do best is communicate complicated messages. You know, the new technology that's advancing so quickly, needs changes in people's mentality, in culture, in the way we think about things, in the way we understand business models.

And I see this as a real agent of change that can help explain and evangelize change for our clients and their new projects. So that I think is the way I see us and I think the way our clients see us. The real trick, of course, is getting that complicated message that's hard to understand and boiling it down into a story, into metaphors, into characters, into something that can be readily understood and remembered by people when they see it. Yeah, I would definitely say that. And I think it's not pun intended, I guess, there's definitely an art form to be able to kind of quote-unquote translate that, especially for those highly technical clients I imagine that you have, be able to articulate that so that even a lay person might be able to understand it and understand exactly how they help support clients.

05:09 – William Gadea

Yeah, absolutely.

05:10 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be something that you feel kind of differentiates you from other kind of similar companies?

05:20 – William Gadea

Yeah, I think when you go to our site, you see that message, which is untangling complexity. And I think that's really the differentiator, what we can do better than other people. You know, of course, we try to provide the best production quality and the best sound and audio recording, et cetera. But I think probably the important part of that process is the writing. It's boiling it down into a story that can really resonate with people. And what that means is creating a journey, you know, a character with a yearning, a problem, and they discover a solution for the problem, and their life has changed It's actually not that different from what I was doing as a playwright. It's that 3 act structure and I think That is what we try to bring to our clients. A true story experience that can help unravel that problem, that thing that is hard to understand.

06:28 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And especially when people are going through those difficulties to be able to have that connection with, you know, the animation or the whiteboard or live action videos that you guys are creating definitely helps not only the people get the solutions that they need, but also helps out the businesses and organizations that you work with as well. So I think that's pretty awesome. And what I wanted to do with Switchgear is a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And the CEO hack could be an app or a book or it might be a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

07:00 – William Gadea

Yeah, sure. Every morning before I start work, I sit down on a cushion and meditate for 30 minutes. And I think what that does for me, you know, we spend a lot of our time in our head and we're creating stories and we're creating drama. And are we going to get that big job or should I hire this new person? All these questions don't really have anything to do with what is happening right this second.

And I think what happens when you have a mindfulness practice when you have a meditation practice, is that you kind of let those things atrophy a little bit. You let the drama and the stories get a little weaker in your head. And I think that lets you have a better context. I think that lets you be more effective in the world, to be a little kinder to your employees and to your customers and to yourself. And just kind of understand what we're really about, which is flesh and muscle and bone and this very moment. So I would definitely recommend that to anyone. No matter what their religious beliefs are, I don't think it's contrary to a Christian outlook to a Jewish outlook, or to an Islamic outlook on life

08:27 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I mean I would definitely agree with that and you're so right you have so many thoughts going in and out of your head, that sometimes you forget to be present in the actual moment that you're in, and to appreciate, like you said, the bone, the flesh, the essence of who we are as individuals. So to take time, and the fact that you take time every day to do that, I think is a pretty awesome CEO hack that people can incorporate in their lives.

08:47 – William Gadea

Yeah, I hope so. I hope so.

08:49 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget and this CEO nugget might be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice that you might have for entrepreneurs and business owners.

08:58 – William Gadea

Sure. I'm privileged to work with a lot of really smart clients with a lot of new ideas and things. 1 of my clients is a big company called Kimberly Clark. And it's an amazing company, really. If you read a really great business book, good to great, it describes what they did last century when they pulled off this incredible pivot from being this paper company to becoming a diversified consumer products company. And we were making some marketing training videos for them. And they had this little saying that's really an analytical outlook, an analytical framework. There are 4 ways of growing. You can sell more things to more people for more money more often.

And really, when you think about it, there are only 4 ways of growing. Selling more things means diversifying your product offerings. To more people, just find more customers, more customers to buy your products. For more money, that doesn't necessarily… Although it may result in an increase in your price, it can also mean enhancing the quality of your offerings and targeting a more upscale market. More often, just get the requirements going. Have more repeat business. So I think if you're looking to grow your business, it's a useful way of looking at it because, at any point, some of these are going to be blocked.

You're going to say, be getting as much repeat business as you can, or, you know, the cost of acquisition of a customer is too much. I think going through the channel of least resistance is the best way to think about it. And for us personally, you know, we diversified into live action. And sometimes it's not really a very good idea for small businesses to diversify because it scatters them. But for us, it's been great because our sales and marketing arm can sell it as easily as they can any other products. There's so much overlap in terms of the production process, in terms of writing, in terms of sound design, etc. It really made sense for us to diversify into live-action. So I would say that is just a really useful way, a really useful prism to apply to your business as you're thinking about growing.

11:34 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And that makes perfect sense. I think often when, you know, we're thinking about our businesses, our organizations, and how to grow them, we're automatically thinking, well, we need to have more clients. And that's kind of like the only way to do it. But I'm glad that you've been able to outline those 4 ways in which people can grow their business. It doesn't have to necessarily be 1 way. And it helps to kind of expand the mind, so to speak.

11:55 – William Gadea

Yeah, absolutely.

11:56 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. What I wanted to do was ask, which is my favorite question, What is the definition of being a CEO? We're hoping to kind of redefine exactly what that means. So I wanted to ask you, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:07 – William Gadea  

Well, for me, it means servant leadership. Any company rests on 3 different legs of the stool. It's customers, employees, and investors. And I think as CEOs, we are often asked to juggle those different interests and portion resources to those different interests. And it's not an easy thing to do. But I think what we're here to do is to serve them, to serve the employees, to serve the customers, to serve the investors. And since oftentimes, You know, the investor and the employee are you. I think it also means serving yourself and not neglecting that. So for me, it's a matter of serving the people who share the journey of this company.

13:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I think that puts everything in perspective and every action and everything that you're doing as far as from a business standpoint to understand that you're trying to serve the clients that you're working with. And I think that is an incredible definition of what it means to be a CEO. So what I wanted to do, William, was just pass you the mic and I appreciate the time that you took to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and how best people can kind of get a hold of you.

13:23 – William Gadea

Sure. You can reach me at will at idea rocket animation.com. If you have any questions about our services or any ideas or feedback on what I've spoken about. And just a thankful, Gresh, for the opportunity to speak with your audience and to speak with you. I think what you're doing here is really exciting and best of luck to you.

13:47 – Gresham Harkless

Thank you. I truly appreciate that. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

13:52 – William Gadea

Thank you.

13:52 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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