Then he and I kind of get into the value of how to use agencies, but to really focus on taking your own personal control in your brand and what does that mean and how to do that? Ray walks the audience through using AI to develop a brand’s creative opportunities. These tools help you identify where to focus and what elements to enhance. Then he explains how they aim for long term sustainability, creating consistent growth in your brand. It’s going to be more valuable than short term revenue growth, and we’re only talking short term versus long term, and we get into it and you’ll understand a little more by listening. Then an argument he and I have been having forever and a day, he sort of wins here and about how to balance creativity with analytics. I’ve known Ray for 15+ years and if not surprising, I’ve always been on the analytic side while he’s on the creative side. So he and I make a little detente as he walks through sort of the value of creating that spark to help you grow your brand, and how to use that to power an analytics driven marketing.
We’ll discuss using your business as a testing ground to refine and innovate your processes to always help you look for new ways to improve, and then just how to analyze your marketing efforts to ensure they’re aligning with your brand and adjust strategies as need be. It’s a lot of fun and it gets very tactical at times, but that’s very helpful. So look, you don’t want to miss Ray’s insights on building a sustainable and effective brand strategy. Enjoy this episode, and happy holidays.
Hey Ray, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m really, really happy. Our conversations always go off into a gazillion directions. So happy to get you here on the show so thank you so much for coming on.
Ray Mendez:
My pleasure, thanks for inviting me. You’re right about our conversations going all over the place so maybe we should be conscious, keeping it focused on what your audience might be interested.
A.J. Lawrence:
Why don’t we start with Masa&Boz now that you’re doing with Hide. Why don’t you share how you see where you are as an entrepreneur now and how your journey has led to where you are now?
Ray Mendez:
I can start at the beginning.
A.J. Lawrence:
Which is always a good place.
Ray Mendez:
At around 16 in India, for some reason, I wanted to be in advertising and was advised to be in New York, which is the mecca of advertising. And I wanted to be a creative. It was pretty unusual for an Indian middle class kid to be wanting to be a creative because most of my peer group wanted to be engineers or doctors back then. That was the path of upward mobility. And there was I with no talent or ability to be a doctor or an engineer, deciding I needed to be creative in advertising. So it was a bit of a journey. I won’t get to how I got to New York to become eventually an art director, going through college and getting portfolios, et cetera, nothing illegal. Then went up the agency ladder as one defines upward mobility from creative director.
Big agencies, worked in New York, Berlin, Amsterdam. Yeah. And learned that. That’s when you mentioned the awards, which actually are. That’s where it came up. I had a revelation that the awards not just are meaningless, but reward the wrong, in my mind, the wrong reasons for why I was doing this, to really get to the core of what businesses are and help them. At the time, sustainability wasn’t a word, but sustainability meant to me long term. How can these businesses last a long time? As we mentioned in one of our conversations, there are ups and downs and ups and downs in the every day, as long as the long trend continues upwards.
And that’s what I like. Whereas the business advertising was at the time and probably still is, look for the high flash and the big leaps and then moved on. And I didn’t like that because I felt it was too temporary. And that’s what was rewarded by these fancy awards. Yes. Made me more money and got me fancier titles and got me better jobs and stuff like that. Got very disillusioned at the time. I was friends with Andy Spade, who was developing Kate Spade with Kate when she was his wife.
A.J. Lawrence:
Everyone in the audience, famous New York personalities. Kate Spade, the shoe and the bag and everything. So famous brand. But Andy Spade was a New York personality. You knew him from everywhere fancy.
Ray Mendez:
Yeah. And he taught me a lot. I was going to quit advertising and he taught me the potential of it. So I stayed awhile as he laughingly apologized to me for keeping me in the business more recently. And then I had my own agency for a while after going through the whole digital transformation and advertising, and realized that even in my own agency, I couldn’t fulfill what my inner dream was. And it was at the time, I think we were around an $18 million or so business when we worked together, A.J.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, when you won one of the top workplaces in New York City, you were a hot independent agency once again. More awards, but yeah, you and I had some conversations about what was possible. You and I did very well as long as we didn’t talk about the work we had to do together. We did really well talking about what we wanted to do when we finished the work we had to do together.
Ray Mendez:
And then met Hide, actually, who introduced me to you, I believe. Correct.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. You knew Hide from before?
Ray Mendez:
Oh, okay. Yes, I did. Correct.
A.J. Lawrence:
He introduced us.
Ray Mendez:
He did introduce me to you and realized that with him, I could do a lot more than the agency world allowed me to because our clients expected us to do certain things. And I realized he would open up our potential to solve an incredible amount of problems way bigger than the ad industry. So started my own consultancy with him, Masa&Boz, named after our grandfathers, Masa, his grandfather, master, and my boss. Mine was Boz. And essentially have used it to consult with founders and CEO’s to solve problems through communications overlapping with technology for lack of a better. And in doing so, we’re able to use our own business as a petri dish. How do we come up with a product to productize our process of branding and marketing that is deeper than the superficial branding and marketing that the world seems to accept it as? So that’s what our new ventures called B blocks, and that’s the journey that’s brought me to today. And the discussion we were having just before we started this call about GPT-3 and Codex, which is world changing in a few months, years, we’ll see.
A.J. Lawrence:
Well, I remember one of our first was an argument because as people trying to build business and stuff, but this was one of the first ones where we just realized we were looking at- because what I love do is look at the whole concept of marketing as a large equation where you just have lots of different variables through it. And you were like, but you’re removing the creativity. And I’m like, no, you’re isolating the creativity. You’re finding out where instead of trying to guess all these things. And I don’t say I’m not going to say I’m more right because of where history. But I do think what we’re seeing is these tools are so amazing and allow so much that creativity like yours, especially when you’re partnered with the right people, like with Hide, all of a sudden you’re allowed to shine or do much more deeper stuff where you were trying to cover everything, whether it was needed or not.
Ray Mendez:
It’s a really interesting way of putting it. It’s true where we came from, where we are coming from, where I’m coming from, our business, anywhere Hide and Brian and I, Brian’s the third partner I haven’t mentioned, is that our premise is that whether you’re in branding and marketing, no one knows their business better than the founder or the CEO or the business itself. The ego of the branding and marketing industry should not exist. It should be about asking the right questions to pull the vision and the strengths, which could be technology or IP out of the founder, the core of the business and articulating it back to them and shaping it in such a way with a roadmap of how they will move forward. And that to me is really deep branding and marketing, not the superficial here’s my logo and here are my colors and here’s my voice. That should be there, but it should be based on much deeper foundation.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, I like how you guys are looking at building this tool. So Ray has mentioned a bit about this tool, but going deeper, the idea is it’s AI conversational tool that will take you deeper into understanding where the opportunity is around your brand and your creative opportunity for your brand, how to go deeper and where to focus and what pieces to pull in. It’s funny because with my day job Insight labs, we focus a lot on analyzing how effective a company’s marketing sales, their growth efforts are, and then putting the effort on where they’re not effective. So you’ve taken it that next step and really dive deeper into the opportunity around the creative. And I think that’s a fascinating move here.
Ray Mendez:
And they’re both linked. What you do in terms of measuring effects is completely linked to what you want to do in the first place. So it’s making it a feedback loop, is the point. Like you’re having a conversation with your users, with your audience, and then that becomes the creative exchange between user and producer, rather than an agency being in the middle. So what our intent is to pull ourselves out of the equation with a tool that allows the producer, which is the business, and the user, to interact in a more seamless manner.
A.J. Lawrence:
I do that because marketing at its purest is just looking at the numbers and understanding. But if you don’t have the spark there to move it, anyone of any, no matter how analytical you are, you realize very quickly that there needs to be something inherently to what the offering is. And if you don’t have that, it’s nothing. And I think jumping back to people in the audience, so we don’t go too much into inside ball here around agencies and stuff. So much of the traditional concept of agency, especially if you’re playing in the game of the holding companies and traditional agencies and trying to be a player in that space from the larger advertising firms and all that, is this idea of time and materials, where these days there’s almost no materials, but it’s how much more time can you add to your billable? And so you’re constantly trying to expand what you do for the client, even if it’s nothing going to add extra value. So what Ray is doing with Hide and his part and his other part is really focusing it much tighter to that which is going to create the most value, which is the opposite of what an agency should be doing. So that’s what’s cool about it. It removes the agency from the equation of what’s good and what’s bad.
Ray Mendez:
That’s well put, because the word agency means giving someone else power. And my belief is that the agency should be the strategic agency, the power should be with the business itself, and agency should be doers based on the strategy of the business. So our product is trying to give back the strategic process to the business itself, and then the tools can just be used based on what the real needs are, like you said, as opposed to just pushing tools to, for the agency business to make more money. It’s pretty ambitious. We’ll see. It’s a hard task we’re taking on. As I was telling an investor, oh, man. Man, this is really hard.
He was like, well, if it wasn’t hard, then you wouldn’t, you’re not doing something well. He was, you’re taking on a big task, and that’s why it should be a good business.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. Oh, wait, it takes work. Hmm. Maybe there’s something there. It’s not fun. Oh, wait. Well, maybe just more from a mindset, because we’ve had discussions in the past about how concept farm grew. You had your partners, some partners were very active, some more sort of a founding partner, the professor, and I’m forgetting his name, had left.
And yet you guys, for a very good time, continued to grow significantly, maybe share some for other entrepreneurs who are thinking about, okay, if I’m building this now and either I’m going to look to sell or whatever, and then down the road, what does ten years, because scarily enough, you and I are approaching about ten years, give or take about from where our first conversations were around all this. How’s your mind set changed for what you want to do now with what you are trying to achieve as an entrepreneur, from being this growing agency and figuring out how to control that monster to now this more personal?
Ray Mendez:
That’s really an interesting question because, and an interesting observation that you’re calling it more personal and that I think allows me to, because I haven’t thought of this before, but really it’s. That question has made me realize that, and I know it’s a cliche, but it’s truly been learning all the time again, learning not just like easily, but learning by making mistakes, going, what was I thinking? Every single time I learned something big, I look backwards going, oh my God, what was I thinking? As in that was the wrong situation I put myself in as opposed to blaming someone else. And then somehow I go back to the day I wanted to be an advertising. What was I thinking? I should have been, I’m glad you did, a biologist. But basically when I was at the concept farm, I wanted to be, but it wasn’t sharp. I knew there was something missing. I wanted to be at the core of a business, not the periphery of a business, meaning my own business and my clients business. I wanted to be at the core making helpful, long term, fundamental decisions, including short term, you know, wins that you would get by selling more instantly and things like that.
But then I hadn’t connected the dots between what truly was needed until after being there around at the concept farm ten years, realizing that if I did try and execute what I wanted to, what I’m doing now over there, it would feel like we were cannibalizing our own business and be pretty destructive to the culture there. So we had to separate for me to do this independently, so personally. Correct. You mentioned personalization. So, yeah, I had to do it with Hide and Brian, who share that vision and that complete need to do this without really having anything to lose. Our consultancy is going to go on anyway, it’s not going to. It’s not. That’s, in fact feeding the consultancy we’re on because we see what works. Then we’re applying it to our theory, our product. So there’s nothing to lose. We won’t be cannibalizing anything. So that’s the journey. I hope that makes sense.
A.J. Lawrence:
No, it does. Because I remember I had sold off the parts of Jar and I had company before Insight Labs, and I was a virtual CMO. And I came to you and we had ongoing discussions for one of my clients. I think they’re chilly sleep now, but, yeah, after all the work we did.
Ray Mendez:
Great. They used to work. We did, by the way.
A.J. Lawrence:
They did, but like in an interest. They took that extra year. They went down some paths, and I won’t touch it because I love the brand. It was just not a good fit. The founder and I, just different kind of mindsets. And I think sometimes from running your own ship to trying to work for other people, sometimes it’s a little fun.
So I think some of that was probably on me. Some. A lot. But in coming to you, I remember we went back and forth because as every small client at the time, they were barely a couple of million a year. And now they’re 1015.
Ray Mendez:
No. So I had a call, this is funny. This is news for you. I guess I didn’t realize that he was in touch with Todd. I talked to him around two months ago and listened to this. He said, ray, we are now a $50 million business. We quadrupled within two years of working with you guys because our mindset changed.
What he said. I asked him when we were working with him, why do you like us so much? Literally, because I’m, like, in the agency world. You don’t have clients going to you, man. You’re doing an amazing job. But he set it up to us. Us when we were working with them.
A.J. Lawrence:
And I go back, the difference, the change of how you guys delivered.
Ray Mendez:
Yes. What he said to me was, you’re not doing it for me. And then showing it to me. And I go, this is great, but how do I apply? He says, now you guys are teaching me how to manage my own brand and manage my own marketing. So you’re putting me on a path so I know what to do. It’s not perfect coming out of the gate, because that’s what an agency would do. They present something so perfect that it would last a little bit, then kind of collapse. Whereas he says, what you’re doing, you’re changing my mindset.
And now I know how to move forward. And he literally said to me, we are now a $50 million business. This is around two months ago. And he goes, you can use my quote. You can quote me on that. So think that you haven’t kept in touch with them. But the work we did for him, man, you can use that.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. This is the fun of even being a temporary. All I had to do was find something that changed them from where they were. But getting to the point, I think for you, I know our back and forth. This wasn’t something that work you did not fit concept for. No, this was. Yeah, this was me buying you a few drinks and apologizing greatly for my inflated ego for maybe some past arguments we had. But what was so brilliant about it? Washington.
It really was the most effective thing, kind of. We took some of Google’s design, Sprint, we took some of your own madness, some analytical structure, and we came up with that process. And then you built the team out of it. I think that’s your willingness to cannibalize and play with something that couldn’t sustain what you were doing at the time, but would open up a whole different, higher value offering, doing it differently. That, to me was fascinating because as good as I think the chili one was, I think the one you did, because. Thank you. You used me then as the consultant, the one you did for the outdoor furniture company, the recycled plastic one. And I don’t know what happened with them.
I have a feeling because of the private equity ownership, there might have been a little bit of fun with it, because it was right at the point where also that fine line between everything we kept coming through and everything they were acknowledging from it was, you have to be online. And yet it was like they kept saying it, like you kept leading them to the water. It was like the funniest thing. Oh, yeah, you’re right that we have to be on. Oh, no, we can’t. We have our dealers. Sorry, everyone listening to the podcast, you’re not seeing me walk away from the camera. Okay, to show this.
Yeah. I may be making gestures that no one’s ever going to see, but it is that. I remember just how deep and how insightful and just how much they were looking at that and going, oh, my God, this is like the argument we need, but we’re not the private. We have to do what we have to do. And it’s like within two years, that whole. I don’t know from them, but I do know Amazon bought an online furniture player. They had their own brand. Within two years, it just retailers.
That whole distribution concept got attacked significantly. But that was so much fun. And what you guys are doing now, even higher. So sorry, everyone. I’ve watched Ray’s work for a lot, and Ray is truly one of these. When you say creatives, I think a lot of people saw the pretty words or the pretty pictures. Ray’s the pretty idea you would put him in with. You got to get him in his suit and then he’ll get you the carousel. You’ll get the carousel concept out of him.
Ray Mendez:
There’s a trend, massive trend in what’s called legacy businesses, which mean essentially businesses that have evolved over a long time where you come up with a product, physical product. This is what I mean by legacy businesses. And you’ve sold it to consumers maybe 60 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago. And then as you continue selling it to consumers, you suddenly start expanding to the extent of selling it through wholesalers. You’ll go through wholesalers who then further out sell it to these big box stores or in massive amounts. So you lose touch with the consumer over time. And your sales team starts treating their work as account management rather than growth. So at some point they plateau.
So they’re just managing accounts and it becomes all about relationships. We check boxes. Okay, I’m going to buy so many of your pieces of furniture and so many sets, etcetera. Well, lo and behold, in the last ten years, as everything is going back to the consumer now, so all these guys, these legacy businesses who are b two B, who are selling directly to businesses, suddenly realize, wait, we can make a ton more money selling directly to the consumer because we can now, however, not just we can, but if we don’t, we screw because you got your Amazon. Who’s going to say, we will sell directly to the consumers and the consumer doesn’t care now. Sorry.
A.J. Lawrence:
And the consumer doesn’t care. They don’t want. Yeah. They just want to be able to buy as quickly, as fast and cheaply as possible.
Ray Mendez:
Exactly. The prime example was during the pandemic. I literally needed outdoor furniture. And I was like, it would have taken twelve weeks. I just looked for the quickest of the highest quality. It was quite simple. That’s all I need. So, yeah, so shifting from a b two B model to a b two C model is actually a different business model.
Everything changes. So that company couldn’t do it as quickly as they wanted to, whereas you have to build that transition slowly, like in very careful chunks, because you can’t change the culture of a company. When you’re selling directly to, let’s say a Walmart and you suddenly want to change and sell directly to a consumer, it’s a completely different culture and operation. So you have to really plan it out.
A.J. Lawrence:
And then we are getting into inside baseball again. But I do think it’s not a question of that they can’t. It’s that it is very difficult. As a lot of businesses found out during COVID Very quickly, a lot of people had to move to direct sales or they weren’t going to have a business. Their business model wasn’t going to last when no one knew the situation. But there was a lot of businesses that did and there were a lot of businesses that did not. But I do think the whole argument, well, we have an internalized culture. We have all this.
This is an interesting piece because a lot of things we’ve had had it on. And I’m someone who has been building my own funds and doing my own research, acquisition entrepreneurs, which, you know, is like baby PE. And there’s all these layers. So you go from like the PE firms to the, to the micro to the. Well, Micro P is actually really small, but there’s all these different variations from self funded acquisitions and all the then having backers and all this. But people who are going out to buy companies to then try and take them to the next level in this, you’re seeing a lot that figuring out a more efficient platform is part of the core piece. And sorry, we’re going off, but I think the whole thing was the, your model was shifting and your model was such that you were basically helping or trying to help other people realize that the models was shifting. Yeah, I was trying to bring that to the point.
And I know what you guys are now doing. I won’t bring up the customer because it’s not my point. With a wireless, with a player in that traditional B two B space and the provider within that space for the use the wireless networks that we have as part of our life, for them to move into a direct piece, it’s really interesting. But since we have so many our entrepreneurs who are looking and we’re reaching, many of us are in these upper six, low seven. And given your background with brand intelligence, not just brand building, but like developing intelligent brands, you were talking about how you were unifying, you were breaking the brand, you were creating a unified brand, but then lived in each of the product groups. And I think this is something you were talking about in a way that was making it livable, if you can walk us through, because so much of our audience, we’ve built businesses, as I like to say, by huff, by puff, by working too much and just forcing. And then all of a sudden, we have companies that maybe are alive and we realize we haven’t paid attention to our branding, our infrastructure, or all this. So maybe if you can walk through a little bit of what you’re doing to make this brand live, and some of the concepts people maybe should think about as they look at their own would be helpful.
Ray Mendez:
I can try and express the story. Let me just clarify that in some manner, what we do is just provide the frameworks for the businesses themselves and we ask them the questions to pull it out of them. So, essentially, when we work with a founder or a CEO and this company, I’m not going to name it, I don’t know what the legalities are or ethical, but I can give you the story. So, 70 years ago, the great grandfather of the current president invented the antenna you used to see, depending on your age, on every home on the planet.
A.J. Lawrence:
I’m old enough to remember those.
Ray Mendez:
Because he wanted to watch Truman’s speech and his kid wanted to watch cartoons, and you could not get one antenna that split the signal into two. And he figured it out. He took a japanese invention called the Yagi antennae and figured out how to use that. And then every single human, every single family on the planet wanted one of those. So that’s in the fifties. Well, that evolved to now, and I’m leaping IoT, so. And the presence of an antenna now is invisible. Like, we have antennas all over the place, but we just don’t see them.
They’re not. They’re in your iPhone or in your phone.
A.J. Lawrence:
My watch. Yeah, correct.
Ray Mendez:
It’s an antenna. So what’s the point of saying we sell antennas when the consumer doesn’t care or doesn’t even know what an antenna is? So what’s that business become? From an antenna business to connectivity to now, IoT and what’s next? So when Covid happened, there was something I missed talking about, that they became very strong in rvs, RV Wi Fi and services. And then they developed a product. They’re developing a product that kind of. You just stick it on top of your rv and you have an app that can control the whole rv. It’s like a smart rv, essentially. Like you can control the temperature as you may need it and want. It’ll tell you when you’re water needs refilling.
It will connect your Wi Fi and switch between different kinds of services. It’ll switch between satellite and it’ll switch into four g, and all these different ways the signal can come in. The intelligence will allow the antennas to collect different ways of connectivity. That’s terrible language, but that’s essentially what’s going on. So that’s the company that, how do you express what their next level of product is? So you just. You’re clear. I get what it is. So we came up with something called we as an I with them, with the founder.
I’m not the founder, but the CEO and the president. We came up with this concept called Smart Wireless Solutions, which you get what it is to some extent, but then a few months later, they started buying companies and selling products that essentially pulled out moisture from the air and for water and pulled out, I love this product, solar power batteries that could store our energy. So essentially, when you’re out there in your rv, you’re off grid. So what is this company now? It’s no longer smart wireless solutions. So they also provide Wi Fi and communication services to firefighters, which is with climate change happening, all these things are becoming pretty severe as an essential services, like with floods and emergency services. So they came up with the concept. We together we did came up with the concept essential technology solutions. That really narrows it.
You know, what this company does, essential technology solutions, and yet it’s so broad that you can expand to any market. So Wi Fi is now an essential service. Tv is now an essential service, which they provide, you know, satellite and different services. And IoT is becoming an essential service. So this really tightens them and gives them a philosophy that whatever they do, it has to work, it has to be reliable.
A.J. Lawrence:
What I think is so interesting, I think as an entrepreneur, I know I need to learn, and I’ve talked with many people in the audience, is that we think of what we do and what you’ve done with their positioning, their thinking is not what they do, but what they provide. That essential, it’s constant. You see it everywhere. Don’t sell what you do, sell what you provide. What do they get from it? And I think that’s such a difficult thing when we live in this world of, I got to deliver x, I have to do y, I have to do this to take our mindset after having built it, to take it and to see a brand that’s been around for so long, and then you’ve just taken that concept and just ask those questions to focus on what are you providing? And it’s not that joy. Oh, you get joy. It’s great. But you took it separate by the questions you asked.
You took it to like, essential. I think as an entrepreneur, I need to give more thought to my companies and my things of, oh, what do we allow to happen? What do we feed, what do we help grow and where do we want people to find their opportunity? I like how you’ve built that up. So much of us don’t do that well enough in our efforts.
Ray Mendez:
And again, AJ, it comes from years of just being obsessed with us. The functioning of a business as it relates to brand and marketing. I could say we are like nerds. We are the scientists of our business. Even though marketing and advertising creativity always seem to be very superficial, I felt like there can be a science to this. There is a marriage of technology and data and story. It cannot be kept separate. That’s where the nerdiness of obsession, of how does one approach this to make it a framework rather than guesswork.
So we came up with two. First, we look at it this way, he and I look at it this way, and Brian, a CEO or a founder, has just got three major purviews. Only three. One is vision, one is the second one is culture, and the third one is revenue. So vision is what do I see the world becoming because of my product? What do I see my company becoming to service the world, to make it in that vision? So that’s vision, and you can articulate that clearly. I want to see people living, working and playing where they want to. That’s essentially the vision of this business I just mentioned. That’s their vision.
That’s what they want to see the world becoming. So the second thing becomes culture, as in, you have to express that not just to yourself, but to your partners and your vendors and your employees. That’s the vision I want. And they have to understand. That’s why when I come to work, oh, that’s what I’m aiming to do every day now. How do I bring it down to my own activity, whether I’m a salesperson or I’m a finance person or I’m an engineer? So if I’m, if I have to do that’s essentially a culture, we operationalize that, okay? To have people live and work and play where they want to. As an engineer, what kind of products do I make? As a salesperson, what kind of language do I use as a designer, what kind of a logo do I design? You see? So it cascades down. That’s the cultural shift.
And then the third one is the revenue that the CEO has to take care of as I’ve got to sell this product, regardless of the long term strategy, I’ve got to sell it right now to be able to feed myself and my team so they can realize the vision. So it’s like a circular thing. So that’s the framework we follow vision, culture and revenue. And then within each of those, we come up with frameworks to help each become operationalized. So that’s loosely how we approach our clients. And we always will say to them and ourselves, we will never know as much as your business as you do. All we can do is pull it out of you, hammer them into frameworks, give the frameworks back to you and you do your job. So that’s where, that’s how we function.
A.J. Lawrence:
So pushing people to really dive into. Okay, you talk about long term version, I always jokingly call it, do you know the f, where you want to go? What? Figure out on the map where you’re going. Then culture is like, how do we enjoy going on this pathway to get there? And then you call it revenue. Just making sure that everything can be paid for. That’s the fun. It’s okay. Can you keep the lights on? Can you keep everyone going? So then little by little, that bottom part goes from this teeny bit. So you go from an inverted pyramid where it’s all dreams and a teeny, teeny bit of revenue, if none infinitely small point, to hopefully a point where, yeah, it’s like Facebook, where the dreams have now become infinitely small, the ruling of the human soul, but the revenue is vast.
All right, sorry, I won’t bash on Facebook. So they kick me off, I’m sorry.
Ray Mendez:
With you, I don’t see the soul there anymore.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah. Did you see the thing with the Wall Street Journal today? A whistleblower, basically out of it, just released internal documents from Facebook and, sorry, we’re going off. But the whole point is, for years, as Facebook has been saying, no, we treat all our users equally. We don’t have the ability to do this. They have an vip group and they’ve had reset. So all the abilities that they say they can’t do. And there’s even writing from which we’ll call it CEO, founder in these things saying, okay, well, I know we can’t do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then going to Congress basically saying, oh, the opposite of research, that we don’t think people are using our platform.
They say public to do bad, and then internally they acknowledge, okay, we see that this and all that. It’s a pretty big whistleblower. Coming out of that, it’s going to be a little bit of fun. All right, sorry, off topic. Actually, let me bring you, because this is cool. From taking people into mindsets to actually think about their business, think about the direction they want to go, the type of cultures they want to create, to go there and then making sure that you have the revenue and the revenue continues to feed that culture and that vision. Long term, I’m going to bang it because I really do like the way you put that. How do you define success? Because this is something where those of us who’ve had ups and downs, I find it very hard.
I look back and I’m like, oh, I’ve done a lot of really cool things. I’ve been successful and I got lucky, but I haven’t had achieve the things I said I was going to do when I was doing them. But with enough hindsight, I’m like, oh, but I still did really pretty well, but not. So how do you define success here?
Ray Mendez:
It’s changed over time, man. Embarrassingly, that’s one of the things. When we first started this conversation and I said, sometimes I look back at what I did going, what the hell was I thinking? Very often it’s based on those definitions of success thinking. I thought that’s what I wanted. So I went there and the things I had to do to get there. I look back and going, why was I even doing that? But I didn’t really want that definition of success. So, for example, being very young, I wanted to have a certain title as a designer. I wanted to be an art director.
That was the definition of success. Then I wanted to be a creative director. Then I wanted to be a group creative director, VP, all that stuff. And I’m like, why was I even thinking like that? That then, of course, salary levels going up, then owning a house, and I’m like, now, for me, the race, yeah, those are all such, they were, okay, good enough, but they didn’t fulfill. It. Didn’t feel like, yes, it was the thing I was looking for, but this is it. It’s ridiculous to, I don’t, I’m not making fun of it. That’s just how I felt like even winning the awards.
I hated winning those awards. It was like, but I’m doing better work. That’s not even being noticed. And this stuff like that has won awards. So all those aspirations began to change. And right now, finally, I’ve reached the stage of like, the money is just to fund what I think is important, which literally, at this stage of my life is kids and family, wife and family. Like, how are they doing?
A.J. Lawrence:
Family welfare for the future. Yeah, because we talked about the trust and.
Ray Mendez:
Yeah, exactly. It’s just to ensure that they’re okay not to be rich. Do they have a sense of well being? Are they eating well? They have a good space to live, are they safe? And then it’s good enough for me. I’m like, great, they’re doing fine. You know, let them figure out the luxuries they may want. And I’m not saying they don’t have luxury. It’s just shifted from these very material things to are they okay? That’s my definition of success now. So it does not mean I don’t have high ambitions as in this business that we’re discussing B blocks, not Masa&Boz.
It’s extremely ambitious, but that’s not based on wanting a certain amount of money. That’s based on me going, can this idea be productized so that millions of entrepreneurs who cannot afford expensive agencies can they just use it? And it becomes so useful for them that they go, I need this thing and it’s so damn cheap and I’m never going to use an agency ever again. That’s the definition of success to me because, and it’s got some degree. I don’t know if it was you or someone who said, laughed and said, oh, revenge is a good motivation. So yeah, I feel like some agencies shouldn’t exist.
A.J. Lawrence:
It’s funny because it took me a while, but I got offered a job right out of grad school and of course I wanted, yeah, you gotta. Here I am, someone who got an MBA because I got offered a scholarship and I wanted to be a coder, but two years free living and chasing women in my early twenties. But I did get a job offer right out of grad school and I do remember hindsight I should have taken that job. But that’s the whole point of your twenties. Everything should be hindsight bad. He just said, remember the people who piss you off? And there was this old Czechoslovakian guy who had fled during world war two. He had escaped a concentration camp and he owned this gas processing company. It was really pretty cool.
He’s just like, remember the people who’ve hurt you and you hate and all that, because those are the people you want every night to remember. And I’m like, dude, I get it, but I don’t want to be that person. But I do think over time it’s more of those who are doing things stupidly or wrong or arrogantly or whatever. Yeah, I want to do things more elegantly or I want to find people who are doing things elegantly. When I have to deal with people who are brute force or self involved or inelegant, catch all phrase there in their business attitude, because it can be a thing of you can create insightful, value added work out of what we do. And so often I do think it’s that either or approach like, you got to give me money or I’m going to give you crap work. And even if you give me money, I’m going to see how much I can get away with. We won’t go into individuals who we believe.
But yeah, revenge, you know, the revenge.
Ray Mendez:
For me is not really personal. It’s more the entire industry I’m looking at because the culture of it seems so anxiety ridden and just based on what you just described, how much can I get without truly delivering as much as I should? And I’m like, and that creates a sense of being feeling fraudulent. So that culture makes one, if one is in it to succeed, you have to be approaching everything you do with that attitude of I’m faking it, rather than no, I’m really doing this. Whereas I don’t think it needs to be that. I think there can be a better way when you really hit the core of things. And in fact, the business of branding and marketing should be about the core, not about faking it. That’s the whole problem with I don’t want to sell anything and lie about it being something worth selling. I would rather help the CEO or the founder or the engineer or everyone in the company improve the product so that it sells itself rather than have to fake it.
So that’s the idea of what we’re doing now. Good marketing should be about innovating your product over time, coming up with better ideas, coming up with better solutions for your customers rather than, and trying to sell something that is not good enough for them. I’ll give you one example. My last assignment in New York was working for the owner at the time of the Empire State Building, and they wanted to rebrand the observatory appropriately so, because there were many other observatories popping up that were taller. But they weren’t the Empire State Building. They had the similar views and fancier elevators and flashy stuff. And the bottom line is we work together to recreate the entire experience of the building conceptually. Mindset, shift it’s not just the observer.
How does one bring together the experience of the tenants with the tourists and reduce the lines so that the Empire State Building no longer is looked at by New York as a tourist trap, but a symbol of New York like it used to be. Like this great. This great symbol of America. So again, the branding concept became the heart of New York, which. How do you communicate? How does the heart of New York communicate? How do you feel when you go there? And it needn’t. It wasn’t supposed to be a tagline as much as just an identity, a promise that we are the heart of New York. And then I’m telling you this whole story to bring up that the product changed to reach its promise to deliver to its customers. And with that kind of thinking, a new product emerged called the.
Because when you’re thinking like that, you’re thinking about innovating your product. So a sub product popped up that I think the owner himself came up with. He said, okay, we’re doing this entire experience. We’re changing it. How do we make more money through this philosophy? And I was like, great. That’s the approach to take. It’s not about just emotional connection. It’s about financial growth.
So he, or I think, was ideo. Someone that we worked with at the time, came up with the idea for a sunrise experience. And with a few more elevator operators and a few more security people, you could have tourists or visitors come in there early in the morning to watch the sunrise for $100. So massive margins, great experience for the customer. And everyone. Everyone’s happy because it led to an innovative subsection of your product. So that’s the kind of approach we like to take. Marketing shouldn’t just be about selling.
It should be about selling, understanding the customer and improving your product, and then selling and understanding your customer and improving your product.
A.J. Lawrence:
Very cool, sir. I like that. I’m gonna have to play around with that for Insight labs. I appreciate you giving me time in your morning since it’s bright and early in yours, and it’s my afternoon here. And today is not sunny in Spain, we actually have rain for the first time in a couple months, so get to do it.
Ray Mendez:
Sounds amazing, man.
A.J. Lawrence:
It is. Sometimes you’re like, when you don’t have rain for a while, you’re like, wow, in a week, I’m gonna be like, oh, God, if it stays.
Ray Mendez:
It’s the other way around here. Oh, we have a couple of sunny days for once.
A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, I know. Well, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I’ll make sure everyone will have the show notes. We’ll have Mazamba mazan bazooka Mozambaz. Actually, I’m going to say it faster and rebrand you quickly B block. I’ll have that in the show notes for everyone to go check out. And you can check out everyone. Actually, what would be really cool, I’ll even do this because this will actually, Ray has the most interesting Instagram feed.
He takes these slices of life images with just no real, just playing around as a photographer. And they’re incredibly quirky when you expend time. So we’re going to include that because I would like to see, I always love it when there’s two, three, just because no one knows that you’re doing it. So it would be cool to come you with a few more followers there.
Ray Mendez:
Let me carry on that a little. I use Instagram as my storage. So I only have 13 followers and I don’t actually want anymore.
A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, then we won’t do that.
Ray Mendez:
All right, I’m curious about what happens. It used to be nice to keep my photos and I photo then all over the place. Then I realized, wait a second, the ones I can ever, I can just stick an Instagram and there it is. So it’s my storage, not my social media.
A.J. Lawrence:
We will be nice.
Ray Mendez:
I have some friends and mostly family. So you’re one of those.
A.J. Lawrence:
I do love the thought process you put into these images because sometimes they’re completely random, but sometimes they’re incredibly well structured. I forget the term framed. So, no, it’d be a lot of fun to see what we can get there. All right, everyone, thank you so much for, yeah, joining us here. And Ray, thank you again. I can’t wait to talk to you soon.
Ray Mendez:
Great. My pleasure. Thanks, man.
A.J. Lawrence:
As always, for me, it’s always great to bring on someone whose company I’ve enjoyed in the past, someone I’ve known for a while, I’ve worked with, as I said, competed with, but more so have respected from the trenches, from just the work we’ve done that I’ve seen him do on his own and work we’ve done together. It’s always great. So if I gush a bit, it’s because Ray has earned it. Ray, as one of the truest creative geniuses I know out there and working with Ray has always been an amazing learning experience for me. I think the way he in the episode today about talking, the type of way of thinking about consistency in your brand across all the different aspects of it, where he talks about making sure that each branch is evocative of the core brand and yet lives within its concept. I know many entrepreneurs this is a difficulty, it’s more of, okay, I have something we put in some logo, we put things and we hope for the best and over time we’ll fill it in. Looking at some of the sprint work he does, utilizing some of the concepts of design sprints from Google and other people, I think it’s well worth it to take a look into this and definitely if you are looking for a brand overhaul to at least talk with Ray and his team over at Masa&Boz. Alright, so look, we’re gonna have some links down below for Ray.
Well worth it to go check it out. Like I said, and I was teasing him, his instagram is a personal expression where he uses it for his own photography. Respect his personality that he’s doing with it. Don’t just follow it because of you listening, but otherwise, look, it’s always been great talking to you. I’m looking forward to bringing Ray back on the show and diving deeper into some of the questions we talked about. Remember some social media down below. Please follow us and talk to us about your brand questions. You can always get more stuff from Ray to answer it because like I said, Ray is one of the best when it comes to actually making your brand live in a way that is right for you as entrepreneur.
So, all right, everyone, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day and I can’t wait to talk to you again. Bye-bye.
