SHORTS 13 | Balancing Business As A Solopreneur with Erik Cox of Wise Ape

Welcome to the Loco Shorts Podcast from Loco Think Tank. In this podcast series, Loco Business Developer Rory Shah will help unfold bite-sized business learnings through the crazy experiences the business owners face along their small business journey. Listen in and listen up because these short business stories may just have the secret ingredient to taking your business to its next level of success. So, I'm Rory Shah, I'm with team Loco and today I'm really excited to talk to our own local Eric Cox who is the owner of Wise 8 which is a marketing and design agency in Fort Collins and he's been there as the owner for over four years so I'm excited to dig into the experience of how we started this business and some key lessons he's learned along the way. Eric, welcome, tell us more about yourself. Oh, thank you, good to be on. Yeah, I guess I'll start with saying I actually grew up in Fort Collins, some of those rare locals but a lot of us tend to come back and so grew up here with the issue early on I worked for the designer Bob Coombs that a lot of locals might remember he's so on town and has kind of turned into a really great sign artist. After CSU I went back to design school again at an LA and then from LA I met Chicago for about three or four years doing some kind of high-end annual report design and then from that I moved out to the Bay Area where I really kind of wanted to be at the time to partner with another design named John Bielinburg and we had a small strategy design firm out in San Francisco where we worked with a lot of everything from startup clients to Fortune 500 clients and that lasted about 10 years and after that after about the 10 year mark we really decided my wife and I it was time to come back to Fort Collins where we both grew up we had young daughters and family here and so I had the opportunity to come back and work with a national marketing firm in Fort Collins called Weirstone which I did for I think three or four years and then they actually had a round of layoffs which was sounded horrible at the time but it ended up kind of being a blessing in disguise because it wasn't the best fit for me as far as the size of the agency I love everybody there great people but I was used to being a little more nimble and working more directly with clients which I didn't have the opportunity to do there so once I kind of got pushed out of the nest I said well let's do this on my own and started working the network and started Wise 8 and have ended up with a handful of really great local clients that I call friends and and well it's come good. That's fantastic. Tell me more about Wise 8 the name of your company Wise 8. Yeah it comes from the idea of the Wise part is just my experience and then the eight part is the idea of intuition to where I believe in research and big kind of research but I also believe in intuition and sometimes you just got to go with your gut on decisions and so that's kind of how I came to the idea of the Wise 8 combined both experience and intuition. That's fantastic. It's a fun play I imagine it's a good conversation starter with new clients and new friends. Yeah and I tend to use a picture of a monkey almost like logo which is actually kind of intentional because using a face is something that people's humans brains can't ignore because it kind of gets right to your pre-moral cortex you try to decipher what this face is in front of you so I think it has a nice kind of undeniable impact so people to see this kind of monkey staring at you which I use on a lot of my materials. Yeah that's fun I remember looking on your website notes is foam right there. So it sounds like you had a decent amount of team and corporate experience over 10 years so were you nervous and you decided to start your own business or what was that thought process like? Yeah it's always nervous kind of going off on your own knowing that I still had a lot of responsibilities at home but I at least had enough experience on the Bay Area where I seen I think I know the mechanics of running the business so it really just came into finding clients and that remarkably didn't take very long which was nice for me and I you know it's mostly just me on projects if I need to I can bring in a freelancer or two but the good part of that is it doesn't take a whole lot to keep me busy and I tend to do all the work a lot of experiences on us don't like to do production I kind of like doing it every now and then just a part of doing the work for me and I enjoy that so you know I said easy to kind of get out and get busy being just on my own so that was handy and you know Fort Collins is a nice local town and I have enough connections where I got lucky and it worked. Made a few phone calls reconnected with some old contacts and said hey look we're good. Yeah I mean for better for worse most of my clients come from referral and so and they stick with me for a really long time so I think I probably have the same four clients I started with four years ago and so I typically have four or five clients on retainer where I just every month I do everything that they need done and then I end up with other projects coming on top of it that so far have I've been able to manage I mean there may be you know a couple of weekends where I've had to come in to make up time but it's all good work so I don't mind and it's fun so. Would you describe more of the type of work that you do? Yeah so one of my clients for example is Nick Satayan in town and he's at a scale where I can kind of do everything he needs done so you know here's a fairly simple website so I put up his website it's a skeleton now because of COVID so don't go look at it but here's a website and that it looks better but yeah it will look better in like two months and we redo it all and we come out of this change but it's fun because I get to do this website and then I get to he partners with Amy Alcorn to do a lot of the social work but I do all the artwork for the social post and I do a lot of the kind of it's not really writing but headline stuff just because I tend to have a vibe on Nick's brand going up where I kind of put out some kind of irreverent post that he does so I do all the social stuff then it works all the way into the menus and the table tops and so that's kind of the core kind of everything he needs I can do for him and then we actually end up saying a lot of times even talking about business issues and you know how we're housed in a price stuff and I'm almost business strategy for the restaurant as well. Yeah absolutely I mean it's always nice to have people to bounce the ideas off of and of course that's what we do at local just bringing 12 business owners from different types of background and experience together to ask those questions like how how do you do this what how do you handle it like what should I do so it's like to get that other perspective yeah and you know I work pretty much by myself so to be able to get out and meet with people like that is super helpful right right right well that makes me think of you know what are your biggest challenges that you go through being a one-man show I guess if anything it's just juggling the client's needs because I tend to turn stuff around pretty quickly so just keeping up the pace to where it usually happens where not everybody's busy all at once and so you know that's probably the biggest challenge is just making sure that I have enough bandwidth to where I can deliver quickly as quickly as I like to for my clients yep that one sounds really familiar wanting to do it all yeah not having enough arms and fun yeah so what's what's next well actually before we talked about future how was 2020 for you you not going to it wasn't that bad one of my other clients is the forecones art museum and they dropped off right away understandably so that that freed up some time and then all my other clients Nick had to go a little quiet but everybody else kind of stuck with me for the most part I had another one just recently kind of turned down their workload but they'll come back probably I think next month so it wasn't like I've heard other people run into thank God you know I say it's just me so it doesn't take that much to keep me busy mm-hmm well and some people in some industries were thriving which it seems crazy and distant for some people so they still needed design work and marketing and some concepts to be out there yeah the bike shops were going bonkers you know Nick Nick the restaurant that was the worst one just to see because you know yeah he's a friend and and I know everybody at the restaurant so to see the demise of the restaurant was just horrible and and I know a lot of his all the other restaurants in town as well so to see all those guys go through what they went through which is been awful and and it looks like you know again kind of knock on wood if they've made it this far they're going to make it out of it we lost we lost a few restaurants but um yeah this Nick said he'll be stronger now because of it mm-hmm yeah that's a good point if they've made it this far it seems like you know the end is hopefully near I don't know if that's appropriate to say but it feels hopeful I'm you know I'm very thankful for spring so it's the new season of life and hopefully that will keep businesses hopeful as well well and it seems like four columns is doing really well on the vaccinations and so I keep on watching that list because just for all the businesses in general I think once we get past kind of the six-year-olds getting vaccinated I think everybody is going to feel more comfortable shopping and going out and eating than and spending money again I hope it seems like that's a month away that's what I'm hoping I know I'm hopeful my fingers across so you were kind of on the front lines maybe through the lens of your clients maybe the question I want to ask is did you have to do in pivoting on behalf of your clients as they adapted to you know COVID challenges or did you personally and professionally in your business have to adapt to change any uh products or services yeah well yes everybody went on to like I'd use the stuff of the fox and crow so she am it she's really great you know over there and she immediately changed her whole web site to be able to do online ordering so she had a whole new platform we had to put in place and she also brought a lot of her in shop offering online so that was the big pivot for her so she almost became an online shop within two weeks it was amazing so I helped her with that you know Nick it was more uh just kind of turning everything down and getting his ordering systems kind of up to uh up and running and then another client I work with is my sister Nets and you know she's a real uh kind of traditional brick and mortar shop and she doesn't really want to do online so with with her we we were trying to we did some playing around with doing some online offers but more than anything it was just trying to bear down and get through it with her and how did that turn out is she kind of on that she's doing well she's doing well yeah I mean a lot some of the other yarn shops tried to do zoom classes and I think it worked out okay it's not really her thing it's she's very hands on so um she's she's doing great you know she I think you can put a lot of effort into building an online shop really fast but you know there's a back a downside to that was you know inventory and shipping and man you know all that oh yeah yeah hairball of stuff which she she knew that she counted on being able to get through the covid pandemic to on the other side of it to where she didn't start that process because it wasn't a business she wants to be in long term so right it did they worked out so they're excuse me I'm knowing you've been in business for over four years now um looking back at those four years what do you feel most proud of um I guess just that it's it's been that I've been able to enjoy and have a good time at I'm proud that I've got really great clients that are of friends and and that I haven't had to take any work just to take work I guess is what I'm most proud of I would say that that's pretty significant and to to love your client yeah add friends I think that's big and to enjoy what you do and it sounds like you you like we have a decent balance of work and play yeah it's tough when when it gets slow I never relax quite enough to take advantage of it uh to you know because I'm always thinking oh god I got to start seeing who who's out there and who needs help but um yeah I like to you know have fun and be able to go visit like clients and you know it's nice to go to go in the back door and kind of know everybody our first name basis and and it's it's not about doing we're doing work but also just kind of hanging out doing work which is really fun yeah I think that's kind of the sweet spot right uh what do you do to stay sharp um knowing the design world is pretty dynamic um new technology new trends uh how do you stay up on all of them it's it's been hard for me actually that you say that um when I was out in the Bay Area it was easy because there was such a network of designers and and stuff going on and um all there was always something kind of to stay engaged for columns I've been having a a harder time finding those uh more design specific outlets um there is a design group that kind of started oh a year or two ago and I'm sure COVID kind of put a mail in that one but um because there's there's great people in the design community I think it's but I think in for columns what happens is that if anybody has free time rather than going out socializing they go out and ride their bike so there's not this kind of social sheen like I had when I was in Chicago or the Bay Area because there's people have more of a life out here I think it's kind of what it might be if what it's what I'm guessing I don't know because they had a couple of design get-togethers which are really fun but um they never quite got a lot of momentum out of it that is uh interesting and probably very accurate yeah yeah and I guess yeah I mean if it's a nice day it's like I only let on my bike you know that it's fun to take beers with people but kind of let's go on my bike too guys see that the the hierarchy of work columns needs biking or beer while beer is probably first then biking in the park right something like that uh yeah yeah I I feel that I go business owners and if you want to be all good at everything that you do but you have to you obviously wearing something hats with administrative and financial and business development and marketing and then also you're just doing the actual work that you're supposed to do and work with clients so I think it can be overwhelming sometimes for a lot of business owners to to want to stay sharp in their their skills or grow or you can just have camaraderie with what you're saying like hey can we just talk about this a little bit and sometimes it does feel a little bit lonely yeah yeah I mean but it's nice on the business side now that the online tools are so accessible so yeah the accounting stuff like I can actually do that pretty much and you know that that stuff is is fairly turnkey nowadays which helps a lot with being able to keep up with the work because it wasn't like that you know obviously 10 years ago yeah a little more manual so let's go back to that question I stopped myself earlier um so what it looking forward what are your next milestones and achievements you're hoping for yourself and why Zave yeah well I guess I'm just I'm trying to stay on the same trajectory of maybe getting better clients and maybe reach out a little more broadly across the part range a little bit more um you know I have a lot of friends and boulder but boulder is is very insular and I'm not gonna try to go into boulder but just getting out more um and it is those kind of connections even just amongst other kind of agencies and stuff um that's that's something that I look forward to doing and it there seems to be plenty of clients and for Collins so I don't have this huge desire to start trying to approach from other you know loved ones or long months or anywhere um but if there's good good people and good businesses it's not that far so I guess you know as I look forward it's more you know wanting to get just more fun clients and I kind of get I go back and forth whether I want to grow my business and you know I just I do everything I can to not have any employees because I've had that before and it just the responsibility gets it just it changes everything and so I like being nimble by myself at this point but I guess if the opportunity has got to the point where they were so it it would be having you know a lot of really great opportunities I didn't want to pass up who would be the thing that would trigger me to bring somebody in rather than kind of turning things away so maybe maybe bring on a person that your growth kind of headed in that direction maybe yeah it seems like such a big thing now but you have to bring somebody in which it was at a way in California I had five employees and it was great but it just you end up doing more managing and the dynamics of everything I don't know it's it's right now it seems like it's more fun to just kind of be able to not feel guilty if I leave early to go ride my bike yeah put on your out of office so do you think one day you'll try to sell the business or do you have a ideal exit strategy I don't think I could ever sell it because what I do is kind of based on me you know my clients are paying for my time and my skills so it seems like unless you have a really large agency nowadays the days of selling those agencies are kind of over yeah I have other friends in Chicago and stuff who did amazingly well selling their agencies but that's when there's kind of 20-30 people with an established client base that you can actually step out and that shift can keep going where for me yeah I just don't do that happening so you know I'm just going to keep doing this as long as I can and and I guess you know my retirement will be slowly you know peeling away clients as they leave and just not take it on new clients probably yeah and as long as you're passionate about it and still get it hang out with your your clients and have peace on beers yeah I can't imagine not working yeah that makes it fun my last question for you Eric would be do you maybe maybe I'll ask two more questions do you have any advice for a business owner who maybe have who are about to start their own business they're they're highly skilled in one area and they're they're not feeling like they know what to do next or does any yeah any general advice for people about to start a business I think it comes into the connections in the networking you know it seems like it it is those networks and especially getting together with people outside of your typical business is great because you know I enjoy hanging out with designers and I get you know good information from designers but I get better advice in some ways of system more interesting conversation to be with people who are outside of the design industry that just bring in that outside perspective so yeah there's there's so many people that are eager to help out there that you know for new new business people they should just not be timid to reach out and you know I love when people you know I know what it's like to get laid off and so whenever I get her you know some of your reach now it's I mean it's like absolutely I'll meet with you and have coffee I mean why not and I think there's a lot of people that you know appreciate that and know that and you know I'm sure there will be some people that will say no and you just move on but you know when you start in the business it's just all about networking connections and asking a lot of questions right yeah especially when you're in that first phase just trying to get your name out there I think that's the best way to do it and to show your face and personality it's a big deal especially in Fort Collins oh yeah yeah yeah well there's just so many silly little things like you know what do you do for your accounting you know what the application do you mean and it's like you know it's an easy answer to get if you ask people and I'd rather much further have a referral from somebody that's talked to you then to just you know do the online Google you know search and rating thing I better talk to somebody who's used that stuff and can refer it oh yeah oh yeah I'm the same way just tell me what's good yeah exactly yeah so Eric now my my true last question do you have a crazy business story or experience in your professional time that would be fun for our business owner audience oh boy um yes I do so back when I was in San Francisco it was the dot com craze the first one and we were working with a lot of these kind of young soon to be multi-millionaires and we happen to have two clients that were both on the wealthiest under 40 list one of them was right below Michael Jordan and the other one was like right above Michael Jordan and we were having a meeting with these guys and they're all they before the meeting started the two big guys with all their people and their entourage they were literally teasing each other about who was going to get their Ferrari first and saying how oh they talk to you know Hugo down at the dealership and and yours your Ferrari still on the boat and mine's coming in in a month and duh duh duh you know it was crazy times and that kind of money and excess was everywhere for a year and and it was kind of right when I first moved to San Francisco so I didn't really know any different and as we all know how that ended it just can crashing down but it was fun to be a part of it and to see it you know and to and to see all these you know people finagling over stock options and then you know all of a sudden and teasing each other about their Ferrari's it's just you know just it was not I imagine that hasn't happened since you're going to have a little bit now yeah but there was a time there when it was not not reality that is interesting that's uh yeah that's the next level uh networks or fears of ensuing yeah well oh well and then one of the other guys in the room when he was they're all talking about what they're going to do with all their money another guy he he was going to invest in a marching band he want that's how he was going to spend his millions was he was going to sponsor and have a professional marching band did you follow up on this guy I still see him on LinkedIn he's still I mean he's he's still has been fairly successful you know they're I mean the guys nobody only the top guys kept all their money but everybody in that in that whole network still did quite well hmm well that indeed has a very abstract kind of crazy story so things for sure well okay Eric this has been awesome it's been nice to get to know you and learn more about your business and your journey to having wise ape and helping and serving the Fort Collins community with your your marketing design work so thank you for your time I appreciate you sharing your story with us yeah you bet if any of the listeners want to reach out and ask me questions I'm I'm usually found on the internet yes what's the best place for them to reach you um just air talks at wise ape.com and there's a hyphen between the wise and the ape or just google wise ape and there's a link to my to an email there that will get to me perfect and if you're listening you should definitely check out his website he's got some awesome work on there so go get inspired and uh we'll we'll talk to you next thank you for listening to today's episode of the local experience podcast this is Kurt bear founder of the local think tank and host of the local experience and I'm here with Rory Sharr local business developer and host of the local shorts episodes we hope you heard some new ideas and business perspectives in this episode our mission and all that we do including this podcast is to share collaborative business ideas and solutions that uplift the business community subscribe and follow us where you listen to podcasts to get new episodes as they are released curious about local you can learn more about us at localthinktank.com where you'll find more information about our chapters business resources and events for business owners and key leaders if you're looking for perspective accountability and encouragement along your business journey why not apply for a chapter near you today why not why not why not we'll catch you next time on the in-depth local experience podcast with me Kurt and with me Rory for bite-sized business lessons in the local shorts bye bye