A: <\/strong>I like trying to figure out why things don\u2019t work. And so when I founded Carbon Design, I founded it because of two things that don\u2019t work right.\u00a0 The original idea for it was backward in terms of starting a business. I focused on the people and not the clients.<\/p>\nWhile I was working, I saw this next generation, the millennials, come in, and I came to the realization that their work styles are very different. And not in a bad way.<\/p>\n
For example, I was doing a big rebranding project for a client. We just finished one phase and I was looking for the creative director and he was gone. We\u2019re going to the next phase, and he was down backpacking through South America. And bells started going off in my head.<\/p>\n
Q: <\/strong>Like that sounded pretty cool?<\/p>\nA: <\/strong>Yeah, I thought about the experiences I had when I was in management consulting. We would lose people when they became most productive. When they got five, six, seven years of experience under their belts, they would get married, and then have a family, and then we would lose really talented associates. They would try to come and work part-time, but they never felt like they could balance work life. They\u2019re always feeling either like they were disappointing the client or disappointing themselves as a mother or father or whatever it is.<\/p>\nSo the founding of Carbon Design was built around the idea that people really need a different way to work. They need to put their lives first and get that straightened out, then the work will come, and it\u2019ll be really good. If you don\u2019t have your life right, the work is going to suffer. And that\u2019s the foundation of the company.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re on demand. We\u2019re remote. We\u2019re all freelance contractors. And you make your own time. You do work where you want. All we care about is your deliverables. Good quality work on time, it\u2019s all we care about. So I started the company backwards with that. I figured if I get a good core base of people, then we\u2019ll get clients and we\u2019ll do really great work and we\u2019ll retain them and get referred.<\/p>\n
So the first question was really why aren\u2019t people engaged in work anymore? If you looked at the Gallup poll before COVID, work engagement has never been above 32% in 20 years. I wanted to know if we can find a way to get people engaged again.<\/p>\n
Q: <\/strong>That\u2019s the first thing that didn\u2019t work. What\u2019s the second?<\/p>\nA: <\/strong>The second question relates to B2B marketing. There\u2019s been all this investment in technology in data and insights, but performance hasn\u2019t improved. Why? Why are we not improving performance? That got us on another journey, and we developed some proprietary, performance-based marketing tools. They allow us to understand people as individuals and to look at the softer side of sales and marketing. Because, if our job as marketers is to get somebody to take action, we have to understand their motivations and beliefs.<\/p>\nSo we do a lot of psychographics. We use AI personality profiling tools. We know preferences in terms of content. We know preferences in terms of visualization. We\u2019re starting to take in the people component, not just the title or a role. You add that in, you start to get better performance.<\/p>\n
Q: <\/strong>What are you looking forward to in terms of marketing?<\/p>\nA: <\/strong>I\u2019m glad you asked. We\u2019re on our third version of an AI tool. And this one, I think, is really exciting and fun. We have built an AI tool called Cassidy. It\u2019s a business development assistant and a project manager assistant.<\/p>\nThe nice thing about this tool versus some other tools is that other tools are always prompt-driven. And the output was only as good as your prompting, and who has time to figure out what the right prompts are?<\/p>\n
With Cassidy, you feed it knowledge. It sits on top of our Google Suite, on top of the knowledge and extracting the knowledge out of our drives. And it also reads our website, it picks up our tonality, our brand voice. So for me, what\u2019s very exciting is that we are a business that operates with no overhead.<\/p>\n
The way our organization is built, we\u2019re very flat. We can scale up quickly and scale down, and we don\u2019t have any overhead. What we try to do is we price efficiently, and we try to get most of the fees that we collect to our freelancers. So we have a model that means you make a lot of money working for us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now we have an assistant to aid people coming to work with us. We plug them into our G Suite, and they know where to find this proposal or this project, We\u2019re super excited about it.<\/p>\n
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