Black Lives Matter

THREE SIMPLE WORDS WITH A LOT OF POWER.

Now, we join that powerful chorus in demanding change.

We at Tilted Chair acknowledge the social injustice that has pervaded American society since its inception. We’ll spare the world another lamentation—the pain non-Black people feel at realizing racial injustice is still very much an issue pales in comparison to the pain of living that reality every day. Quite frankly, this moment isn’t about us, or our pain.

In the interest of avoiding “woke washing” or performative allyship, our team chose to act before speaking. The preceding months have been filled with introspection, discussion, education, and brainstorming. Our goal? To arrive at effective and sustainable solutions that we can commit to publicly. Systemic racism won’t be dismantled with just a hashtag and a couple months of activism, but through the diligent efforts of conscientious and well-meaning humans who hold themselves and others accountable.

Our commitments are as follows:

• Financial Support: We’ve made charitable contributions to Campaign Zero, Mapping Police Violence, NAACP, and UNCF. We intend to continue our support, and encourage others to do the same.
• Correcting for Implicit Bias in Hiring: While the current version of Tilted Chair is small, we have bigger aspirations—you can bet Black perspectives are part of those plans. We’re working as a partnership to correct for any implicit biases in our hiring process, and to make proactively reaching out to Black communities like Where are the Black designers? a part of our hiring process going forward.
• Donating Services to Communities in Need: We intend to start our efforts at home in East Austin, investing time and resources in the historically underserved community here. We’re donating services in-kind to local non-profits like LifeWorks to augment the effectiveness of their efforts so they can better serve the those experiencing homelessness in our community, which disproportionately affects POC.
• Marketing Mentorship: Additionally, we’re working to set up a mentorship/apprenticeship program for underserved schools in the area with the goal of expanding access to and interest in this business among minority communities—schools like LBJ, Northeast Austin High School, and Martin Middle School.

This list isn’t exhaustive, nor is it finished. Rather, it represents our long-term commitment to doing our part to address inequities in our community and industry. The time for passivity is over. It’s time for action. If we all decide to take it, together, we can change the world.

-TC

Advice on Hiring Designers

This blog first appeared on Dribbble Courtside.

So you need to hire a designer. Kudos! Whether you’re growing and you need to add staff, or you’re replacing an outgoing team member, you’re about to bring on someone new. This can be one of the most exciting—and anxiety-inducing—parts of running an agency, but it’s worth your time to really carefully consider how to go about conducting the addition.

After nearly a decade of reviewing portfolios, conducting interviews, and hiring designers, we’ve pretty much seen it all. We’ve made good hires and not-so-good hires, and worked hard to develop a process that results in more of the former and less of the latter. Our hiring process isn’t perfect, nor is it finished, but it’s come a long way since the early days, and for where we are in our business life cycle, it works really nicely. Considering both culture and capabilities, our team is stronger now than it’s ever been, a fact that’s largely attributable to our carefully developed approach to hiring. If you’re new to hiring designers, or just wondering what others are doing, we encourage you to learn from our experience—and mistakes—to develop your own hiring methodology. Here are the five most important lessons we’ve learned in nine years of adding legs to Tilted Chair.

#1 Know What You’re Hiring For

Tilted Chair is equal parts ad agency and branding firm. This means the nature of the work we do requires both art directors and designers, two related but ultimately different disciplines. And hiring a designer when what you need is an art director—or the opposite—can create some real issues in agency performance. We’ve made this mistake before, bringing on team members with strong conceptual skills but nascent comprehension of design techniques and principles only to discover the pipeline full of design-heavy projects. In a perfect world, we’d hire only art director/designer hybrids capable of tackling any assignment with aplomb. But such creative unicorns are few-and-far-between, and so you’re left to use your best judgment to match up your upcoming projects with the skillset of your potential candidate.

#2 Scrutinize the Details

In this business, just like any other, time is money. Translation: getting work in and out as efficiently as possible means better profitability, reduced stress on the agency and its staff, and better work output. And nothing slows down workflow like round after round of revisions—both internal and client-facing. Look closely at the work of potential designer candidates. Inspect working files. See how carefully the work is constructed, and see if your candidate sweats the details. A detail-oriented designer is worth their weight in gold because they require less oversight, and eliminate revision rounds. And a sloppy designer can create more work than they actually do.

#3 Screen for Skills and Culture; Hire for Culture

There are tons of talented designers out there. These days, being talented/skilled is the minimum barrier to consideration. But beyond up-leveling your agency’s work, how else will this person change your workplace? Tilted Chair is a boutique agency of 11 people, so if you think about it, the next time we add a team member, that’ll represent a 9% expansion of our staff. That’s a new variable that has the potential to change the cultural and team dynamics by 9%. The implications of this can’t be overstated. To address this, we ask qualitative questions during the interviewing process, including “Name the top 3 most interesting things you’ve seen in the ad industry this week,” “In your opinion, what are the top 3 WORST things agencies do?” and “What is your ideal work environment?” Great company cultures don’t just happen; they’re painstakingly created, and it takes great care to maintain them. Ask questions that will yield answers that can shed light on a candidate’s fitness for YOUR culture.

#4 Have a Plan for Your New Hire

At Tilted Chair, we invest in our people so they can improve their skills, knowledge, and expertise. We include in our employment packages funds dedicated to continuing education, equivalent to 3% of an employee’s annual salary. We also meet quarterly with our employees to review performance, and set goals for the next 90 days. In sum, we spend a great deal of time and money improving and reviewing employee performance. Why? Simply put, great people crave a vision for their careers, and figuring out a way to develop that plan before you make your next hire can make a world of difference in how long you retain them.

#5 Hire Slow, and Fire…Well, You Know

Nothing too surprising here. It takes a good amount of time to figure out exactly what you’re looking for, screen for cultural fit, and scrutinize the details. If one of your candidates has successfully navigated this gauntlet, odds are you’ve found a great fit for your agency. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. When the indicators start rearing their ugly heads—lack of attention-to-detail, regular tardiness, poor attitude, or any other of the myriad issues that can indicate declining performance—it might be time to move on. And sooner rather than later. Things usually don’t get better, and the longer you hang on to a designer who’s no longer a good fit in your firm, the more you risk damaging morale, and driving away your good people. Your A employees may start to resent the presence of your B employees, and toxicity can very easily pervade your team dynamics. It’s never easy to let someone go, but for a truly poor fit, it’s generally the right thing to do, for everyone involved.

Conclusion

If great businesses, as Verne Harnish once said, are built around “the right people doing the right things right,” well then, you need to figure out how to attract the right people. The sooner you can find the right designer, the sooner you can get back to doing the thing you’re probably best at—growing your business. Good luck!

Diversity at Tilted Chair

Diversity: it’s a topic that’s on the minds of business people the world over, advertising agents included. And at Tilted Chair, it’s something we’ve always considered one of our greatest assets. Truth-be-told, as a millennial-led agency, diversity was never something we had to work on—it was always a reality of doing business. Growing up around the turn of the century, it was impossible to ignore that the look of the world has drastically changed, with heterogeneity largely replacing homogeneity as the status quo. We’ve set up our business accordingly, not because we thought we should, but because we’ve never known another way.

Recently, we were invited by UT’s Diversity in Advertising & Public Relations group to speak about this very topic. In preparing our presentation, we had a chance to reflect on diversity at Tilted Chair—what it really is, what it means to our business, and how it equips us to better serve our clients.

What is diversity?

Before we dive into how we at Tilted Chair classify diversity, some background on this article’s author: I’m a fifth generation Texan/American with a British first name, a Hispanic surname, a mother of German descent, a father of Mexican and Spanish descent, and proficiency in only one language: English. Needless to say, filling out surveys or ethnicity questions before standardized tests was a particularly confusing and anxiety-inducing experience for a melting pot such as myself.

It begs the question: what is diversity? And perhaps more importantly, why does it matter? For Tilted Chair, diversity comprises mixing people of differing identities, as described by any number of factors: background, country-of-origin, race, ethnicity, experience, gender, sexual orientation, even alma mater (Hook ’em!). Anything that goes into making these people who they are. Simply put, diversity is about perspective.

What is the value of diversity?

As we’ve observed, diverse perspectives help us serve our clients better in myriad ways.

Diversity enriches the solution pool.
When working on a marketing problem, we rely on team as well as individual brainstorming. And having a diverse and eclectic mix of perspectives enriches the potential solutions, both in number and quality. Solutions from a diverse group tend to be more interesting, more surprising, and more compelling.

Diversity prevents ignorance of our audience.
America is changing, becoming more diverse than at any other time in history. Having those diverse perspectives represented within our own agency prevents us from going to market with communications that might come off as ignorant or inauthentic. We’ve got a built-in authenticity filter right here under our own roof.

Diversity validates our human truths.
One of the first things you learn in ad school is to sell benefits rather than features, and that at the heart of any great product lies a human truth. That’s the thing you build your campaign around, and project to the world. Generating these human truths from such diverse perspectives validates that they are in fact true, across a broad spectrum of otherwise dissimilar people.

Diversity reinforces similarities rather than differences.
As it pertains to our team, we might be very different, but it’s the things we have in common that create such a tight-knit culture. A love for memes, pho, breakfast tacos, and Star Wars/Game of Thrones/Making a Murderer form the bonds that make Tilted Chair what it is: a kick-ass place to work where super smart, diverse people collaborate with the common mission of Making Brands More Human™.

In that endeavor, we’re one.

Hahaha, what a story! | A review and reflection on The Disaster Artist

Years ago when we first started Tilted Chair, deep down the rabbit hole in the comments of a reddit post, I clicked a YouTube link proclaiming to be a clip from a movie called The Room. I say “proclaiming” because in that moment I wasn’t sure what I was watching. On top of a bed of serious music, a most-peculiar looking man with long dark hair enters a flower shop that inexplicably contains a dog sitting on the counter. What follows are a series of lines that overlap so strangely that any first-time viewer is bound to click replay, just to confirm what they watched was actually the movie’s intention and not a software bug with YouTube. My wonder quickly turned to laughter. The scene seems to take itself 100% seriously, and it’s so “bad” (quotes intentional; more on that later) it’s hilarious.

Walking into the office the next day, I excitedly loaded up a compilation clip from the movie and showed my partners (this being nearly 8 years ago—there were only 4 of us in the entire company). As they tried to process what they just watched, I provided what little color I could find about the movie:

• The peculiar-looking Actor is named Tommy Wiseau, and he’s also the director, writer, and financier of the movie
• The movie was already old being released in 2003, but it had gained a cult-following
• The movie cost an estimated 6 million dollars, and that all came out of Wiseau’s pocket
• No, we don’t know where his 6 million dollars came from
• Yes, it was supposed to be serious, but Wiseau had more recently called it a “dark comedy”

What followed was a group viewing of the full film, and years of injecting quotes from The Room into our conversations (using Wiseau’s European accent of course). They were always good for a laugh and in a Seinfeldiean sort of way, there just always seemed to be a quote that could fit any conversation.

Eight years later, I have just watched James Franco’s movie about the movie called The Disaster Artist. Considering my journey over the last eight years with Tilted Chair, it was only fitting that next to me sat my friend and business partner, Jamie. I think I can safely say we were closest fans of The Room, and it only seemed fitting that we watch this together.

I’ll just start off and say it: The Disaster Artist was amazing and is sure to go down as one of my favorite movies ever. If you’ve seen The Room, you might go into the movie with the same mindset as me: Tommy Wiseau somehow acquired more money than sense, and made a movie so bad it’s funny. But what followed for the next hour and forty-three minutes was a story of friendship and ambition that I think nearly everyone can relate to. In the movie, Greg (played by Dave Franco) is so impressed with Tommy Wiseau’s (expertly played by James Franco) lack of fear in an improv class, that he strikes up a conversation asking for help with his acting. The two quickly become friends and move out to LA together to try and make it as actors. After commiserating with each other on the endless rejection they were experiencing, Greg wishes they could just make their own movie, a thought that Wiseau thinks is a great idea and something they should do.

That movie of course is what becomes The Room, and while The Disaster Artist is a hilarious comedy throughout, it gives the audience a view into Wiseau’s mind that isn’t easily seen by simply watching his movie or seeing his often-strange interviews on YouTube. It’s easy to focus on Tommy’s eccentric character traits, but The Disaster Artist truly paints the picture of someone who will stop at nothing to follow his dream. No one willing to cast you in THEIR movie? OK, make one. No Script? Write one. Lead actor? Be one. The movie’s climax is the debut screening of The Room which includes the actors from the movie and a surprisingly full audience. While Wiseau believes he’s presenting something serious, the audience and actors move through a range of emotions from disbelief to laughter.

It’s easy to laugh at Wiseau. He made a movie so bad that it’s good. But is it really bad? I think any director or actor would consider their career a success if they made or acted in a movie that sold out for YEARS after its release. And how many movies are viewed over and over again like The Room? Lastly, how many people have movies made about them, especially while they’re still alive? Wiseau has a lot to be proud of and from what I can see today, he is. I think it was only fitting that I finished this movie next to my friend and business partner, Jamie. We too followed our dream, and I’m sure we created a few disasters along the way. But over time, I think we’ve created some things that are pretty good as well.

The Disaster Artist: A movie so good it’s good, about a movie so bad it’s good, that makes you respect art that is good regardless of the journey it took to get there.