Podcast

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (00:33.378)
Actually, by the time I realized that I wanted to perhaps pursue college, which I didn't get a chance to.

I was already staring at the prospect of number one, getting close to graduation in high school without the grades that I needed. I didn't really seriously consider the prospect of going to college until I was in my junior year, is when I started to actually seriously consider it, which made me wish I didn't goof off for the first two years of high school.

Kevin Mooney (01:25.101)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:32.152)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:33.474)
You know, as an artist, you know, I would just spend most of my time drawing and I was late to school every single day. I lived across the street.

Kevin Mooney (01:41.978)
Hahaha

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:45.836)
Yeah, it was pretty bad. That was I was the guy who was late to everything at one time in my life. Now it's the it's quite the opposite for the most part. And that's something I learned from my wife, actually, her family. But yeah, it's once I realized that, like, you know what this college thing might might make some sense for me. I was like, I was really ambitious about it. I was actually

Kevin Mooney (01:47.512)
That's great.

Kevin Mooney (01:54.776)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:00.876)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (02:15.555)
planning on doing two years at a UC or actually, excuse me, two years at a community college in order to get to a UC, do a four year UC and then go to Caltech for astrophysics or something. I was really interested in that at the time. I still am. And I love talking about those types of things actually. But then you realize, oh, you have to be good at math and stuff. Oh, God.

Kevin Mooney (02:29.816)
Whoa.

Kevin Mooney (02:44.982)
Hahaha

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (02:47.019)
Really? Yeah. I should have probably paid more attention. And I wasn't too bad at math. It's just that math is one of those things that's kind of cumulative. if I, since I was goofing off and I didn't really pay attention, I got stuck at a point where I just kind of got lost and I wasn't able to catch up. oops, that was my mistake at that time. But.

Kevin Mooney (02:48.813)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:58.872)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (03:11.491)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (03:13.601)
You know, opportunities that you learn from, that you miss and you learn from. And I didn't have the grades anyways to be able, because I hadn't been prepped or set up for that. in hindsight, there's a part of me that's kind of glad that I didn't take the traditional route, because the traditional route typically gets you the traditional results.

Kevin Mooney (03:40.738)
Sure, yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (03:43.134)
And there's a lot about the education system that I'm not super thrilled about, especially with the collegiate type of academic system, which is for another conversation. But yeah, there's a certain level of grit that I was required to cultivate and to demonstrate in just hustle, learn how to hustle, learn how to sell.

Kevin Mooney (04:07.246)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (04:12.297)
learn how to, you know what's interesting is there's a phrase that people use all the time that I really don't like. It accurately describes what's happening. I don't like the phrase. I'll let you know the substitute phrase that I do like instead of it. But it's the phrase, fake it till you make it.

Kevin Mooney (04:37.646)
Hmm

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (04:39.883)
I really don't like that phrase, but I get what it's trying to be communicated is there's an element of faking it that is dishonest and disingenuous that I actually quite despise. That's not how I do business. But the term fake it till you make it is actually very closely related to

Kevin Mooney (04:57.197)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (05:07.315)
term in psychology that is just essentially role-playing where you create a character that has traits that you may want to cultivate in the future that mean you may not have now or you may have them but they're at an exaggerated level maybe at a higher level that you do want and then you

because it's a character, then you begin to play that part, you embody that character. And it's a psychological phenomenon, obviously, that a lot of people participate in. And what it allows you to do is it allows you to have the freedom to play in this new character, in this new role. And it's essentially a way of removing the limits that you have on yourself. And...

being able to open yourself up to these new possibilities by embodying this new character. And what that allows, it allows you to borrow some of those traits because you're not encumbered by the limits of, know, the limits in your own mind. know, of you, that person that you are, instead, you know, you're borrowing the limits of this fictitious, you know,

Kevin Mooney (06:22.648)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (06:33.731)
person or this future person. the term fake it till you make it I think is quite an annoying phrase but when it's really what's being communicated if this is what's communicated because some people actually do just fake it which is kind of annoying but if it's a role-playing situation where they're saying you know I wish I was more outgoing.

you know, and so I'm going to create this persona that's more outgoing so that I can, you know, free myself from these shackles in my mind. I find that to be quite a different thing. I find that to be not something having to do with deception and, you know, disingenuity, but more about opening up possibilities and being able to

achieve things or become something more than you are at this time. So that's something that I had to learn how to do. And I had to, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (07:39.136)
It's, it's kind of, it's kind of no wonder that you landed in brand because, and I, I'm not trying to just shift right into a brand conversation with you, but that is exactly what brand is. And it is really funny that there is a nuance in what you said, right? The, the fake it till you make it idea, the imposters that are out there and, then this idea of brand, which is still

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (07:51.757)
Do it, do it.

Kevin Mooney (08:09.102)
kind of the same thing, but you're putting on a front, you're building a character, a personality, and you're trying to embody that and live that. That is quite simply brand in a very like a ethereal way. So it's no wonder that you landed in this space.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (08:25.655)
Well, it started to make sense to me, you know, as you pursue different things, you start to kind of, I mean, it's essentially the design thinking without trying to do design thinking, You diverge and then you start to converge. initially I had very few career prospects because I didn't go to school. didn't have, I didn't really grow up with my dad guiding me.

the family, you know, because he left the family. And so broken home, kind of abusive situations. And so I didn't really have someone to kind of show me like this is the path. Even though he had gone through that path, he was a college graduate and kind of a white collar worker for some of the time. So I had to just kind of figure it out. And part of part of that that

journey that struggle of figuring things out required me to just try things out. You know, I didn't have a lot of connections with people because I didn't have any money. We're not a wealthy family. And so not having money, not having connections, like it's, it's, it's, you know, they always say it's not what you know, it's who you know. I didn't know anything and I didn't know anyone. So, so it's, it was like, and it's, it's funny. There's part of me that laughs about it, just like that.

Kevin Mooney (09:47.96)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (09:55.438)
But part of me, it gets pretty sad about it because one of the things that if you've never been in a situation where you're at zero from a scale to one to 10, getting from like a four to like a six is not super hard because you have resources to work with. And so you can invest or have some of your resources at whatever four that you have.

There's something to work with to get you to five and six and beyond. But when you're at zero,

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (10:32.099)
There's nothing to work with. It's actually incredibly difficult to get from zero to one. And so 99 % of all your effort is spent just trying to get out of zero. Because when you have zero times whatever, it's still zero. And so that actually is one of the reasons why I have been experiencing burnout.

Kevin Mooney (10:50.552)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (10:55.224)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (11:01.889)
late because I spent the last 30 years digging myself out of zero to try to get to one. yeah, and I think unless one's been there, and there's books written about it, and in fact, think there's one, Peter Thiel wrote one that I think is called From Zero to One, if I'm not mistaken.

Kevin Mooney (11:10.67)
It's kind of crazy, yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (11:31.812)
And it makes it really difficult to move forward. And so I found myself in that situation. I found myself in a situation here, because we're in the United States, here in the United States, being in poverty, not knowing anybody, not having any family guidance that was reliable, not having any financial resources to work with, not having any...

Kevin Mooney (11:37.154)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (12:01.165)
connections to be able to at least go to and say, help me out. So it was just like, you know what it was? This will help the young ones out there who are listening. I was essentially Minecraft. You start your game and it's just you and you're just sitting there and you don't even know how to punch a tree yet.

Kevin Mooney (12:22.381)
Right.

Kevin Mooney (12:26.318)
Hahaha.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (12:26.965)
You know, it's like, and that was me. It took me like years to figure out how to punch the tree. Yeah, I like watching people and they're just starting to do that. But maybe it's because I can relate to it. then once they start to, it's, you know, it accelerates quite quickly because then you start to piece things together and things start to make sense. And that's part of what you were mentioning earlier. That's how I fell into the brand.

Kevin Mooney (12:36.877)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (12:57.149)
is as I kind of started to piece things together over the years, know, working odd jobs. My first job, I was a butcher. My first job. I was there for maybe two or three weeks and I got fired. And I'm happy to say that it wasn't because of something that I did. It was actually because there was, well, wasn't 18 yet.

So I ended up graduating high school at 17. And so I was not 18 yet. I had to work to take care of my mom and my younger brothers. So I had to be the head of household and the provider, which is another thing that kind of didn't help with my school process. I had to work to provide for a family right away. And when...

Oh, geez, I'm losing my train of thought. So we were talking about, the work. So I got fired because I was still 17. And apparently at the time, I didn't know this because the guy who got me into the company to work either didn't know or didn't care that they had an 18 year requirement. And so I was about to turn 18. I forget within two or three months. But some other guy at a different

location was also under 18 and he cut his finger off on a bone saw. so they found that created like legal problems for them. And so as soon as they figured out that I wasn't, I didn't know, right? I just, I just, I just wanted a job. Yeah. But they, had, and I was pretty upset about that, but actually I look back at it now and I'm like, well, that was the right choice for them is, you know, kick this new guy out.

Kevin Mooney (14:32.416)
Whoa.

Kevin Mooney (14:42.136)
Yeah, get out of here.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (14:54.163)
and to save themselves all this legal trouble. Funny that I would sympathize with them and not with myself, I mean, looking at the bigger picture, And so, you know, I had a lot of odd jobs. I was a bag boy. I worked at like a computer shop helping some guy like take care computers. I was just kind of the helper. didn't really know a whole lot about computers, but you know, that's how you learn, right? You just kind of get in there and start doing stuff.

Kevin Mooney (15:05.357)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (15:23.523)
I was like the secretary. I did a bunch of stuff and you know, I did construction building brick walls digging ditches and stuff like that, which is which is actually how I hurt my back. So I have a permanently damaged lower back disc issues. So yeah, you know, I was young and I'm like, you know, put on a belt or bend with your knees or bend with your legs. That's just that's for suckers, you know, and yeah.

Kevin Mooney (15:38.126)
Classic, classic lower back stuff.

Kevin Mooney (15:50.603)
Yeah, uh-huh.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (15:53.197)
Yeah. Take notes, And so eventually you start to realize like, yeah, this this kind of sucks. You know, this, this sucks because you're working really hard. You know, I, I grew up with ducktails, know, Scrooge McDuck always saying, you know, work smarter, not harder. And I'm over here, you know, literally breaking my back. I'm trying to just figure this thing out. And, and I'm thinking, okay.

Kevin Mooney (15:55.276)
Man, yeah, I've been there too. Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (16:22.786)
You know, I've always had like an artistic kind of sway. You know, I always loved to draw. Not that I was that great at it. I just, really liked it. And I had some ability just to be perfectly frank. I can be objective enough to compare myself with others to be able to know what level I'm at. And so I said, maybe I should try to, you know, do something with that.

And eventually I went to a design studio that was not too far from where I lived. And I just started kind of bugging them to get me some work. And they told me to go away. They're like, we don't need anybody. They were nice about it, but they're like, we don't need anyone, so just leave.

Kevin Mooney (17:09.154)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (17:18.338)
And I said, okay, so I left but I would it wasn't too far from my house. I would stop by here and there and and I was you know, I wanted to see if that was a career path that made sense for me that was I didn't have any previous work doing that I didn't have any experience doing any kind of design So again, I look back and I'm like, well, yeah, I mean I did make sense that they wouldn't want some Young punk who I was nice but

I didn't really have anything to offer. Eventually, because I was persistent, eventually they kind of liked me and they kind of said, okay, you have like a nice attitude and you know, so, you know, I guess maybe we can just use you to kind of push papers around and help us with some administrative stuff or whatever. And I'm like, well, that's cool, but I'd really like to learn that design to see if, you know, I want to see if that's a path that I can get into.

Kevin Mooney (17:50.734)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (18:17.985)
And they're like, okay, well, if that works well, we teach you a little bit about some of the basic stuff. I think that was, geez, I don't even want to think about what version of Photoshop and Illustrator was back then. Speaking of Minecraft, right, everything super pixelated on an old Mac, not the flat ones like before that. And yeah, so eventually I just kind of started to learn a few basic things and...

Kevin Mooney (18:26.776)
Ha

Kevin Mooney (18:33.006)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (18:39.245)
Right.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (18:47.073)
things started to click a little bit like, okay, you know, like there is something I can do with my natural ability, even though it's not required, for example, for design necessarily to draw, but it does help. It does help to be able to do that. And, and it helps if you can do it at a better level than I was. I wasn't that good at it. And, and that was essentially my, my first.

Venturing into designing that that design studio gave me my first job I was there for about two years or so and And then I went into business with the owner

Kevin Mooney (19:31.79)
So you went straight from struggling to go from zero to one to having some sort of job internship at a design studio to partnering with that owner in the same business or another business? Whoa.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (19:49.155)
in the same business and I was still trying to go from zero to one because at that time I was recently married. so, you know, which again, you know, think carefully about these things, especially when you're at zero, trying to get to one, probably not a good idea, you know, hindsight is 20-20. But, well, I'm still married, same person, so it's been 20 years, so it's worked out. But it takes work, right?

But yeah, it was a strange journey. think maybe not a common journey. But he let me know why, too. He saw that I had, you know, ability in design. I picked it up fairly quickly. He also, I had a different perspective than he did, which he appreciated. In other words, he was like the bad cop.

and I was like the good cop. His personality was very, the owner was very, he was a nice dude, but he was very direct. mean, he was the kind of person who's like, look, we need to get things done, we don't mess around. And he wasn't afraid to tell you how things were and what was wrong with you. I wasn't like that. I was very people pleaser.

Kevin Mooney (21:11.416)
Hahaha!

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (21:17.389)
you know, whatever you say, you know, let me know what you want me to do. I was an order taker, essentially.

Kevin Mooney (21:24.398)
Do you think that, do you think that order taker mentality kind of came from that idea that I'm trying to get from zero to one and eventually to four or five, six type of a zone? So you're like, Hey, I just, I need to please, I need to do what you ask. Like I'm not willing to take the risk just yet. You know, is that kind of where it comes from?

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (21:34.676)
100%.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (21:46.188)
Yes, yeah, that's a big part of it. It's one of those things that it's not talked about a whole lot in common parlance. It's actually something I discussed just very recently with Jose Caballero of the system, who started the future. It's this whole kind of remnant of like

Hispanic kind of domination of this subservience. you know, I'm not a big fan of victim kind of mentality, but there is an unfortunate reality of that being a large part of what's happening in the Hispanic culture. You can tell in simple things like the language. Like, for example, if I was to say, hey, Kevin, can you do something for me?

You know, kind of a common response would be like, like, yeah, what, you know, like, like, what do you want from me or what can I do for you? You know, like it's kind of a helpful type of response, right? Which is kind of normal in, in, Spanish, right? I'm Mexican. I look Indian and, and, know, but Mexican, the response is typically like, you know, which is command me.

Kevin Mooney (23:13.902)
Hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (23:14.721)
That's a typical response. And part of it is this kind of hierarchical, traditional way of seeing both authority figures and parental figures, obviously Spanish has more words that you use to show respect versus words that are just more just

common place that you would use with your friends. Other cultures that are like that are Japanese where you don't address someone in a particular way because it's too informal. There's a formal way of saying it. And so there's a lot of this like dominator dominated language that comes from the history of the culture. And so some of that

Kevin Mooney (23:54.552)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (24:12.311)
does influence how we approach things.

Kevin Mooney (24:15.182)
Yeah, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't really think about that. I mean, I was kind of thinking more about maybe the internal factors that, that like we put on ourselves to, you know, we are here. I have a similar story. You know, I wasn't in super poverty, but you know, yeah, no, I promise I won't make this too long. Um, but it's like, you know, I, I

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (24:33.319)
I'm sorry, we're talking about me right now. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.

Kevin Mooney (24:44.288)
In my opinion, I started at zero as well and the reality is probably a bit different, but I can say that there weren't really external pressures put on me, right? The external stuff was kind of like, Hey, you can go do whatever you want, Kev, but there was this internal thing. I don't know anybody. I don't have any money. I just got to find all these odd jobs, right? I did construction. I worked in the mill.

I had a paper route when I was 10 years old, you know, all those types of things. So there's this internal pressure on me or this internal sort of influence, but I didn't think about that cultural part of it that you're talking about that that is that's baked into the DNA that that you. Right, you just start that way. You start life that way. That is that's really interesting. I never thought about that.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (25:32.151)
Yeah, it's as soon as you start, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (25:42.882)
Yeah, it's obviously there are the internal struggles as well, but the external ones are the ones that are, like you said, baked in. As soon as I spawn into the Minecraft world, it's baked into what you learn. then comes the internal struggles. The internal struggles were, well, I don't have a degree and people who do this kind of work, people who do design work for the most part have, I mean, at the

at the bare minimum, an associate's degree from some kind of college, normally a bachelor's degree from a university or an art school. And I had neither of those things. And in fact, not even the one before that, which is like even go to college. I did go for one semester, then I dropped out.

And I dropped out because I was doing things in Illustrator that the instructor didn't know how I did. I'm like, well, then what am I doing here? Yeah. So I'm like, I just dropped out. And so the internal struggles were exactly that. It's like, okay, I don't know anyone. I don't really have a ton of vision for the future because I'm just trying to survive day to day. So I didn't have...

Kevin Mooney (26:46.107)
boy.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (27:09.695)
a way to visualize myself doing better. It's almost like it was a luxury that I didn't have at that time. there's ways to get around that, which eventually I started to learn how to overcome those types of obstacles. And then comes the beloved imposter syndrome.

Right. which also says like, Hey, you know what? Not only am I not experienced enough, I'm not, I'm really not as good as I think I am. You know, I kind of don't want other people to see my work because now what if it's not that good, you know, the whole Marty McFly situation, right. What if they reject me and, I get, I'm not good. can't take that kind of rejection. and so all that stuff holds you back. It, it, it.

Kevin Mooney (27:40.216)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (27:59.086)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (28:09.933)
creates a barrier, like you said, it exists in your own mind that keeps you back. The external barrier's a little bit different because those are also barriers that sometimes exist in your mind, but sometimes they exist in the minds of other people, I'm trying tie you back to Brand, right? It exists in the minds of others. But it exists in society and culture in general as well. And so they're a little bit harder to control because they're outside of yourself.

Kevin Mooney (28:24.312)
Sure.

Bread.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (28:39.043)
and your mind, but still doable once you start to understand what's happening. And so, yeah, that was a struggle, but it did help to know that...

that this seasoned business owner who had been in business for decades saw something in me that maybe I didn't see in myself. And I think that was an important factor because

It helps to change one's perspective when you start to realize. Obviously, we all realize that we don't know everything. But do we really think that? Do we really know that? To understand that he saw something that I didn't see, it was kind of an eye-opening situation where I started to really realize, you know what? That's just something that happens, right?

Kevin Mooney (29:24.792)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (29:46.774)
When it comes to possibilities, something that I'm very aware of now is that a lot of people see things as not doable or not possible. And it's like, well, I get it now. I get it that you don't think it's doable for you. You can't see it's And not you, Kevin, but just the royal, the royal you, right? The royal you.

Kevin Mooney (30:04.386)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (30:08.462)
It's probably me too.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (30:13.495)
But that's how I saw it. was like, so it's the other person who can't imagine themselves making this possible. But that may not have anything to do with me. It may, but it may not. So just because they don't have the vision or the confidence or the ability to be able to imagine something new and different and get it done.

I get that they can't, but that may not mean at all that I can't do it either. And so eventually I started to learn things like that. And so we went into business together. We actually started a real estate advertising publication that's still around today. It's been 20 years. And so it's been very successful. We built that together and it survived the real estate crash here in the United States.

Kevin Mooney (31:05.07)
Cool.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (31:12.675)
2008, which was a major feat because, you know, anyone who knew who was in and around real estate, you know, had to make some some major adjustments, essentially, you know, they went out of business. And so so we survived that. And but eventually in time, I went my own my own way to, you know, start a design studio. But I learned

Kevin Mooney (31:17.976)
Brutal time.

Kevin Mooney (31:29.644)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (31:42.34)
how to be a little bit more of the bad cop. He was the bad cop, I was the good cop. I had to learn how to be more direct. I had to learn how to not be such a people pleaser and how to not allow people to waste my time and how to say what I wanted. Part of the whole subservience scarcity mentality is

you're always trying to maneuver and kind of diplomatically find ways to say things. And that's fine to a certain degree in certain circumstances. But sometimes you just have to say, look, this is what I need you to do. This is what I need. It has to be really clear.

Kevin Mooney (32:28.034)
Yeah. Do you think that, well, I don't know how to ask the question exactly, but do you think you had to learn that or you wanted to learn that and you wanted to be maybe more like the other, your other partner? Cause you saw maybe success in that or whatever it may be.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (32:45.859)
Yeah.

I think it was both. I think I saw that I had to learn it in order to get to a different place. Because I did see that there was a ceiling that I was hitting, particularly in my design skill. Even at that point, early in my design career, I started to see that I had hit a ceiling already within about two years. And I didn't know what that ceiling was, but I knew that it

I felt like it was a problem with me, right? But it felt like it wasn't just a problem that was internal to myself. In other words, it wasn't just a skill problem. Sometimes it is just a skill problem, right? It's just some people are just not as skilled and they need to improve their skill. Something told me that there was more to it. And I said, okay, I don't know what this is.

So I got to figure it out, right? And at that time, I even had the suspicion that I may even have a slight delusion of grandeur in thinking that it wasn't just my own problem, that it was some other external factor that was creating the problem, right? Because how can it be me? I can't be the problem. But I had the suspicion. Within a short amount of time, I realized exactly what the problem was.

and you're probably going to appreciate this. The problem was there was no strategy.

Kevin Mooney (34:21.612)
I can't wait to hear it.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (34:27.951)
So, yeah, so I had learned how to do kind of design, but in the way that a lot of self-taught untrained designers kind of learn is that you just kind of, you're pretty making, right? You're learning how to use a tool and you're learning how to apply it, you know, in, you know, for different types of industries and different types of businesses or whatever. But really you're just making things pretty. It's not.

Kevin Mooney (34:28.192)
interesting.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (34:54.881)
design in the sense where it's I mean the definition of design is to like compose things for a specific purpose to accomplish a specific purpose well there was no purpose besides besides making things look pretty and so I started to to get the the suspicion that that was the problem you know it's not me it's you right it was it wasn't me

Kevin Mooney (35:21.292)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (35:23.107)
And in fact, it was me, but it was something that I just wasn't I wasn't that aware of at the time that you needed something to guide the design, you know, because again, it's When someone is starting in design, it's kind of like what's a kind of art, right? in fact a lot of the clients That I would see They would say I just gave you the art file Right. Do you do you have the artwork?

Kevin Mooney (35:41.602)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (35:50.734)
Hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (35:53.452)
And so, well, naturally, you know, who am I to tell them that they're crazy? that it's not art, it's design and that it's not the same thing. And so, you know, you just get used to the fact that it's just art, right? And what's art? Well, art is me creating this thing that, that, you know, and, and, and by the way, don't try to change it. Don't try to tell me to change anything. It's my art. Right? How, how dare you. And so.

Kevin Mooney (36:19.148)
I still have that problem, but it did you.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (36:23.871)
You know, I started to realize the difference is that, know, art and design are not the same thing. They can be at times, but they're not inherently the same thing. And in other words, you can use artwork to serve the function of design, and you can use design to the function of artwork if it's designed that way, but they're not interchangeable.

Kevin Mooney (36:52.27)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (36:52.771)
and they can be conflated. yeah, so essentially I said, okay, so there's something that's, this was a tough part. Actually, one of the earlier interactions I had with both Jose Caballero and Chris Doe was on LinkedIn on this exact topic. I was coming to a realization that there was something that I needed to learn. I didn't know what it was.

And so I was on this self-learning journey. You know, I'm an autodidact. I teach myself, you know, partially by necessity, right, because I didn't go to university, but also partially because experts have proven to not be very expert at what they do many times. And so, and even when they are, it's always good to think for yourself and to not let other people do your thinking for you, right?

Kevin Mooney (37:45.304)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (37:50.103)
because then you start to go down very dangerous roads.

Kevin Mooney (37:54.158)
It's like the current AI, well, LLM path right now, right? Like everyone's using it to think for them. And I think even Chris Do said this recently where he said like, no, no, you need to figure out how to have those things do the work for you and think for yourself.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (38:00.706)
Yes.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (38:13.663)
Yes, especially when LLMs and chatty sometimes doesn't give you the references to where they're getting the info from because a third of the time it's actually just making up info that doesn't really exist and that's problematic. So the conversation was, in fact,

Kevin Mooney (38:23.639)
Right.

Kevin Mooney (38:34.581)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (38:41.399)
The conversation was about an episode that they were going to make for the future, which at that time was called The School. the conversation, I have to be careful when I say this because this episode is actually removed from, yes, yes. And the reason why is because there was somewhat of a criticism about the...

Kevin Mooney (38:59.182)
I think we talked about this at one point in time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (39:09.463)
the value and the trajectory of a formalized education, are they really doing as good a job as we think they are? And because of certain considerations, that topic had to be carefully considered. And this was more of an open criticism as to whether it was really kind of worth the price. And I shared my journey with Jose and with Chris on

LinkedIn and we were chatting back and forth about the fact that One of the things that I did was you have to figure out first How to how to know what it is that you don't know that you need to know?

Kevin Mooney (39:52.686)
The unknown unknowns.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (39:55.073)
The unknown unknowns, exactly. And so that's the first thing is like, how do I figure that part out? And, you know, with time and with effort, you realize, you have to find things that are related and, you know, just pay attention to, to how they're, they're connecting certain things. And you start to realize where the gaps are. it's just, it's like a puzzle essentially.

It's a puzzle. have some of the pieces. You know you're missing some pieces. You're not sure which pieces, but if you look really carefully, you can start to tell, look, this is an edge piece that's missing. Right? I may not know exactly what it is, but I'm getting indications as to what this may be. And based on the content of this puzzle,

I don't know exactly what's there, but I'm, I'm, I'm given prompts to start to kind of understand what may be there. And, at least now you have a lead, right? It's like a detective story, right? You have a lead now where you can actually go down a path. And if it turns out that it's not what you need, well, then hopefully you have a lead that kind of says, okay, well now I have option two, two, because option one didn't, didn't pan out. Now I can go to option two and see if that makes any sense. And then, my gosh, yeah, option two, that's the piece I was missing.

And so by doing that, by essentially, you know, playing a detective, I was able to realize what were the unknown unknowns and the big one was strategy. There was, there was no strategy in my design and I started to get really, excited and, and, and passionate about the, the prospect of inserting strategy into my design. The next hurdle was obviously, well,

Kevin Mooney (41:25.486)
Crazy.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (41:44.771)
how do you learn strategy to then insert strategy? Now I will have to call some people out, unfortunately, because there are designers now that are graphic designers and they're not strategists. But they're trying to call themselves strategists because they say, design is strategic and all this stuff and it's, no, that's baloney.

Kevin Mooney (41:47.938)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (42:13.655)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (42:14.879)
That's not how, there's actually more of a formal process, which I had to learn. And it's not just because I had to learn it that I say that, you you have to do it this way. There's business reasons for it. And so having owned a business at that point and seeing what it was like to have to run it in the background and have to wear, you know, a bunch of hats to.

to both work on the design and work on the production and hire for that type of work and understand the considerations that a business owner has to think about. No, being a graphic designer does not make you a strategist for sure. And so those of you who are doing that, shame, shame, shame, shame, knock it off. That's short round, right? I think he does that in Goonies, right?

Kevin Mooney (43:01.422)
for sure.

Kevin Mooney (43:07.704)
Shame on you.

Kevin Mooney (43:14.552)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (43:15.011)
and so, so getting into strategy, had to, I had to learn strategy. I didn't exactly know how to do that because as far as I was aware, there was no core yet. And for those of you who are not familiar with core, let me remove, let me remove that rock that you've been living under. so we can let you know, it core is a, is a, a strategic.

Kevin Mooney (43:34.604)
Also, shame on you.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (43:45.075)
framework that was developed by Jose Caballero and Barrett Morse. And it's very popular now and for a long time that's the way that Christos was doing strategy as well.

The interesting thing was I actually never learned core until fairly recently. I took a course, a university course at the Wharton School, which I went to the extreme. was like, I went to like my local community college. I took an art course. I took a design course. I dropped out of both because I was like,

you know, I, the design course I was, I was doing things that the instructor couldn't do. the art course was just a cool art course. but it's a local community college, right? It's nothing very elite about it. so as, as, you know, being the way I am and, and, and someone who's self-taught, I'm like, well, what, what's the, what's the, what's the highest school I can try to get into to take these courses? You know, I don't want to learn.

this like half-baked approach, I want to get into the best ones I can get into to try to learn that. You know, by the way.

Kevin Mooney (45:10.018)
Did you have to have prerequisites like completed at a local college to get in?

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (45:16.979)
Not, no, not really. It was a little bit of a different situation. I actually sort of manufactured my way into it. yeah, I, I, I don't want to say I'm like a Tim Ferriss or anything, but, but there, there was, this was at the earlier days of like Coursera and, you Coursera is, they have a lot of open source courses, but they also have courses that you have to pay for it, right. In order to get like certifications and that type of thing.

Kevin Mooney (45:25.07)
Hell yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (45:47.063)
which I think now you can actually get like your full degrees and all that. At that time though, I had gotten in contact with someone at Coursera and they were doing like studies on students and we got to talking and they got to know a little bit about my background, which was somewhat unique. And so I got invited to

Newport Beach in California where they were having a Partners Conference that was just just the universities. There was no public no public and I was invited to go be a part of the conference essentially as a guinea pig. They wanted to ask me questions, you know, they put me in a white gown and they studied me. I'm kidding. No, it took samples of my blood. I'm kidding.

Kevin Mooney (46:38.806)
Hahaha!

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (46:44.225)
But, yeah, was essentially, you know, we did interviews, we had conversations. I talked with a lot of the university professors. I met people from the Wharton School at UPenn. And so it helped for me to become a little bit more familiar with some of the people there and what they were doing. I thought it was super exciting because to me it was becoming obvious that that was gonna be a good

business and educational plan for universities to be able to start to open up their courses to a wider audience, right? That it was more profitable and more beneficial to have a wider audience who's paying less per person, but now you basically have 10 times people, essentially. So they were able to scale it in a different way. so thankfully I was able to...

Kevin Mooney (47:34.648)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (47:45.229)
have access to a marketing course from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kevin Mooney (47:51.918)
So did they offer you that course from that experience in Newport and talking with them?

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (47:57.295)
yeah, I, I had to pay for it as well because, because there's, certain courses that you can take and you can just kind of audit them and you don't get a complete, you don't get like the complete course. but I wanted to have something to show for it at the end. And so, I ended up, you know, paying for, an actual certificate, from, from the, from the school. And so I have it somewhere.

Kevin Mooney (48:01.998)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (48:28.21)
And actually I have it here. no, I it here. I was moving stuff.

Kevin Mooney (48:29.024)
it around.

Kevin Mooney (48:35.608)
Look at you.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (48:36.588)
Gordon school. And, yeah. And so, I mean, that's, it's an Ivy league school. So it's, and actually, one is the top marketing school in the world consistently. And so, the whole point of, of me bringing that up is because as someone self-taught who suffers from imposter syndrome, who's always questioned my value, who was always, literally told by my father that I.

Kevin Mooney (48:39.054)
Pretty freaking cool, man.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (49:05.6)
was worthless and I wasn't going to amount to anything. This was kind of like, what's the way people describe it? I don't like to use profanity, but this was like the middle finger to say, hey, you know what? That's not cool. And so I went to the most elite place that I can get access to. And I learned both strategic planning and brand strategy.

Kevin Mooney (49:21.731)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (49:34.601)
as part of that marketing course. And the really interesting thing about that was that the brand strategy module of the course, once I finished that, and then I got to talking with Jose and Chris, actually, I talked to, didn't know Jose at the time. I was talking to Chris Do at the time. And he, I think he had just learned core from Jose. And

we had met at a, I think at an AIGA conference or something like that. And so we got to talking and so we exchanged numbers and we were talking about the shift in design, kind of design being commoditized, know, in a giant influx of, you know, new people from, because of globalization and the potential problem with

Kevin Mooney (50:19.97)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (50:31.902)
more access to tools like Photoshop. Cause at that time, Photoshop wasn't like a monthly $20 a month type of thing. At that time it was still, you had to pay whatever 1500 bucks for the whole, for the whole suite. Yeah. So it was still, it was a high barrier to entry into, into design. We were already playing with the idea that, you know what, seems like the, like things are shifting towards.

Kevin Mooney (50:38.221)
Right.

Kevin Mooney (50:42.092)
Right, get the CD and put it in and.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (51:00.258)
the floodgates of globalization, allowing a global designers to flood the market, drive prices down. And then that means that companies like Adobe would have to cater to them because that's where the profits going to be at. Lower, lower per person price for their product. know, a thousand X access to which would create profits. Yes.

Kevin Mooney (51:25.646)
Right. Same thing that the school did, right? Let's open this thing up to a wider audience. Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (51:31.363)
Yes, exactly. With a different value proposition, unfortunately. In other words, the school seems like it's a net positive and with Adobe it seems like it's a net negative because, well, here's my next prediction. It seems to me like in the coming years the plan is Adobe is eventually going to replace designers with their own AI.

Kevin Mooney (51:45.208)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (51:58.328)
Hmm. It's interesting.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (51:59.937)
That's my prediction for what's going to happen in the next few years. so seeing all this happen, we were having this conversation over 10 years ago. And then we started talking about strategy. And then we started talking about, know, he was telling me about core and I'm like, my gosh, that's exactly why I wanted to learn strategy. Right? I don't know what this core thing is that you're talking about, but I just learned this strategic framework that's essentially

brand strategy that kind of functions in this way. And Chris is like, that's, that's core. Yeah. And I got super excited because I knew what it was doing already for me and my design work. It basically took, it took me to, to the next level in, my, both my design work and in my, business. And I thought at that time that.

Kevin Mooney (52:35.81)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (53:00.448)
designers need to know what this is about. Seeing that design was gonna get watered down, prices were gonna start to go down, I said, designers need to know this. This is what's going to help them to kind of get through some of this problem of the commoditization of design. And so we both agreed that that was what made sense and...

Kevin Mooney (53:19.416)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (53:27.862)
It's obviously that's something that conversation that he was having with Jose as well to kind of help others to have access to that, to those tools and to that framework. And it wasn't until, geez, many, many years later that I actually met Jose. And so, but at that time that was kind of the journey that I was on is how to not just elevate my design.

for my own benefit, right? So I can charge more. No, it was actually, I felt like I couldn't serve the customer as well.

Kevin Mooney (54:03.256)
So interesting. I wanna share something, and it's a story, and it's gonna be a little bit loopy, but it ties back into this. Maybe it's not necessarily a question, it's more of like recapping this thing. To some of you guys, the OG godfathers of strategy in the world.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (54:05.313)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (54:31.48)
The idea behind strategy was to help fight against the commoditization of design. Is that fair to say?

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (54:46.743)
Well.

I think some would say that. I wouldn't say that.

Kevin Mooney (54:53.198)
Okay. And then the second part of that is that then, then if that is not necessarily the answer, but it's a portion of it. The other part of it is to tie design to business outcomes.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (55:07.518)
Okay, so you're right in both counts, but I'll tell you why I said I didn't agree with that at beginning. I think that that's the main objective. I think it kind of fighting the commoditization design, I think that's just like a secondary benefit. I think the most important part was how can I provide the most value to the customer that makes the most sense for the customer and...

The way that makes the most sense is the design has to be directly and intimately tied with an understanding of the user, their audience, their needs, their desires, and the business objectives in order for the business objectives to be accomplished. And a result of that is that you're also kind of getting ahead of this commoditization of design because, you know,

Kevin Mooney (55:51.907)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (56:05.09)
the industry was shifting towards that happening. But for me, that was the secondary motivation. The primary motivation was my design is plateaued. I don't know why. I feel like I can't help my customers enough. And this is the thing that's going to allow me to have a business conversation with my customers.

Kevin Mooney (56:33.539)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (56:33.61)
And so I, so I'm no longer going to be just the designer, right? Because now I've been trained to have a conversation about how their business objectives tie in directly with what their customers need, right? How to be able to analyze whether it makes sense or not, how to problem solve if things don't match up, how to either make it match up or how to

change things so that it makes sense and then how to then execute that so that it communicates the right thing, you know, in the right place at the right time and all the branding aspects of it. So as a result of that, that would also insulate from the watering down the commoditization of design. But it was mainly how does the customer really get the

Kevin Mooney (57:10.232)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (57:25.133)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (57:32.248)
Cause it has to be something that, that helps the, the, the, business in its bottom line and their, their ultimate goals. Because someone who's, who's just working on the design side, it's all about the design of the visuals, right? Is it, is it look nice? Is it typography well-kerned? Is the spacing, know, it's a pixel in the right place. That's fine and dandy, but if it doesn't serve the ultimate business goals, then none of that matters.

Kevin Mooney (57:40.684)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (58:00.6)
Right. Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (58:01.987)
It has to serve that primarily. And so that was always my primary motivation. Uh, at least once I realized it. Right. Before I realized it, it was like, Oh, why do I suck? Why does my design hit like a plateau? I thought I was like better than this. And now my dad was right. I'm not worth anything. And no, that type of thing. once you, but once they, once I got a higher perspective, um, again, having.

Kevin Mooney (58:09.612)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (58:22.062)
Interesting, yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (58:28.811)
just jumped into owning a business and partnering with my business partner and seeing, you know, that there's different considerations. It's not all about the design. Sorry, designers. It's not, it's not. Design is important. Design is super important. Design is crucial. It's vital to the life of a business. But without the business, there's no design. So it has to be the business first. And then I would

Kevin Mooney (58:39.853)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (58:52.674)
For sure.

Kevin Mooney (58:56.12)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (58:58.655)
really, implore business owners to take design more seriously. think, I think it may be, because of ignorance or because of whatever nonsense on social media that design has been seen as more of a commodity as something that is just kind of, you know, this, this pretty thing, but no, it's the reason why these types of things are taught at

Kevin Mooney (59:06.349)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (59:28.373)
elite universities, right? In fact, again, Wharton is the top university in the world for marketing, is because it's vital to your business, right? Design is vital to your business. Building brand properly is vital to your business. Doing brand strategy is vital to your business. If you don't do that, you will not have a leadership position in your industry. your business will not survive over the longterm. You won't be able to.

survive shifts in the market, like what happened with COVID. these things only happen when businesses are carefully designed. And I mean, design, not in the visual sense, but when you design your business to succeed and part of, part of doing that is to have a good strategy for your brand and then being able to execute that, you know, in the appropriate way through whatever senses, need to be.

Not just visual, but that's a whole other conversation.

Kevin Mooney (01:00:29.048)
Sure. Well, you know, when I came into...

the design industry, the creative industry, the agency industry. I was learning about all of this and I was figuring it out. And it was right around the time that Core was coming out and the school was around. And I remember when I saw it the first time.

This is gonna sound terrible, but I have to say it. I didn't look at core the way you just described. To be fair, I do now, but at first, I looked at it like this. Here's a framework that I can now use against the client when they bitch about my designs. I can turn around and say, you said,

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:00:58.595)
you

Kevin Mooney (01:01:24.674)
this, this, this, and this. Now, instead of saying, I don't like that shade of blue, tell me why changing this shade of blue affects these factors over here. And so it's a very selfish way of going about it. And sometimes it was effective, but in the early days of the agency, could not, I mean, I never could handle

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:01:36.333)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:01:52.43)
criticism about the design super well, even if I didn't do the designs, right? When I first came on the agency, I wasn't doing the designs. My partner was, and it was just the two of us. So I was more in the account zone, right? But also running some forms of strategy and discovery, whatever it is that we were working on. And I was also the person delivering the creative. So when they would have objections,

In the early days, I didn't know what to say. And then I found the framework and I'm like, my gosh, now I got to use this against the client and tell them that their feedback is not appropriate feedback saying, I don't like that blue is not helping us on the design side or the strategy side. Well, my wife is actually a graphic designer and she said that you should be doing this. Right. And so for me, it was.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:02:40.781)
Wait, wait, but my wife really, she really likes blue.

Kevin Mooney (01:02:51.832)
this light bulb moment of now I can tie these two things together. And then over time it was more like, no, this is actually how you tie it to outcomes of the objectives that the business has. it's, don't know if you, if you've ever felt that subconsciously or if that was any reason or anything, but for me, that was the number one benefit to any sort of strategy.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:03:11.073)
No, no, of course.

Kevin Mooney (01:03:20.364)
was no, no, you don't get to lie to me now and try to say that you just don't like it. You now have to root it in the things that you said. Like we spent 10 hours on strategy together. Huge.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:03:22.435)
Hahaha

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:03:31.075)
What's a major factor? It's a major factor to have someone say, you know what, I, even if you're getting paid by the hour for, to do all kinds of changes that they want. It is very annoying for you to have to work on something for 10, 12 hours. And then for someone to say, you know what, I just, don't feel it. doesn't pop. You know, I just, let me see another one. Let me see another version. You know,

Kevin Mooney (01:03:53.048)
Right. Right.

Kevin Mooney (01:03:58.237)
Mm-hmm. And you're like, version of what? What version?

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:04:01.059)
Yes, like, like as a designer, a designer should say like, Oh, you're to pay me another 10 hours. That's fantastic. What would you like me to do? But, but because it's my art, see, again, this is why understanding the distinction between art and design is important because it's my art. How dare you say that my 10 hours of art is not good enough. And so, you know, I'm now I'm mad. And so it's, it's kind of a choice as to how we.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:08.664)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:04:30.691)
We look at it, we can either look at it as, it's like I can drive a car and like use it to go to the grocery store or I can drive a car and use it to mow down people on the street. Right? I mean, I don't play GTA, but I'm, that's, I know that's part of what the game is like, right? Maybe not going to the grocery store, but maybe going to the liquor store or whatever. Um, so it's, it's kind of a choice. Like, do I want to use this tool as a, in a, in a, a. Protagonistic way or in an antagonistic way.

Kevin Mooney (01:04:44.994)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:05:00.451)
But you know what, they're not necessarily that different from each other because I wouldn't even call what you were doing an antagonistic way of looking at it necessarily because it's for the benefit of the customer. Because the customer most of the time doesn't know what they're doing. They don't know how to change the design.

And so when the customer wants to change the design, they're just guessing. They're just hoping, crossing their fingers that somehow their contribution will matter. And for the most part, it actually screws things up.

Kevin Mooney (01:05:43.234)
And I also think that they feel obligated to provide feedback, right? They feel like when it's time, when they're the presentation time comes, they have to say something. They have to contribute. They've, they must provide some sort of feedback. And I think in their minds, they're like, sure. There's the cases where they're like, I hate it and I need you to go back to the drawing boards. Right. But.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:05:48.877)
Well yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:06:12.408)
But throw that aside. Let's say we're circling around some great concepts and great ideas, some great logos, campaigns, whatever. They just feel like they have to say something. And it's like, I actually don't need you to say anything. I need you to acknowledge that this piece is in line with our, our company values. It speaks directly to the customer.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:06:37.911)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:06:41.302)
And it achieves the goal of spreading awareness or whatever that thing is not. don't like the word choice that you use, the font choice, the colors, the photo, whatever that thing is. and I've done that a lot in my onboarding phone calls where I kind of talk to the point of contact in this way of like, here's what appropriate feedback looks like. And

I, I sometimes I get blank faces. Sometimes I get, that makes perfect sense. Not a problem. But then six months down the road, they kind of forget about that. And they're like, well, why isn't this a carousel? And you're like, no, we're back in that zone again. Like you forgot, we've been working together. It's been going so smooth. And now, now you have to do that. And, and I don't know this, this part of the conversation isn't about trying to change client behavior.

It's, it's just acknowledging that it's a very natural thing to, want to submit that feedback. And it's very natural on our side as designers or strategists or agency owners, whatever, to be kind of offended and be like, no, don't do that. So it's a very natural thing, but like, I love that framework of core and strategy and, whatever you want to call it that just

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:07:58.403)
Well, look.

Kevin Mooney (01:08:08.62)
you can always kind of point back to and just lean back on and you just say, tell me how that gets the point across to these customers based on what you've told me in the beginning of our relationship.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:08:19.65)
Well, that's its purpose. Its purpose is to do that. And that's why I was going to say, I'm going to push back a little bit. And you're saying it's not about changing customer, the client behavior. No, it is about that. It is about that in the same way that the client is trying to change their audience behavior and trying to have them purchase their product or service. So it is about that. think I'm not afraid to say that and to let them know, hey, look,

There is feedback that's useful and there's feedback that's not useful. The feedback that's useful is the feedback that sticks with the objectives, that fulfills the objectives. If it doesn't fulfill the objectives, it's essentially, my own feedback is irrelevant. Your feedback is also not relevant, right? Everything needs to feedback to the business objectives. That's the whole purpose of that. And so this whole idea of strategy being this like antagonistic tool,

Kevin Mooney (01:08:56.814)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:09:08.376)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:09:19.298)
for selfish reasons. Again, it's not that selfish to say, Mr. Client, Mrs. Client, I don't want you to hurt yourself. So I'm not going to allow you to do that because that is harming you. So we're going to go in this direction that instead of harming you, brings you benefit and value. Like for me, I'm like, that's if they see that as antagonistic, well, that's a problem with their perspective that

Kevin Mooney (01:09:27.81)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:09:48.001)
you know, maybe you can try to work with or try to get around. But it absolutely can be used as a bludgeon against the client. But I think it depends on how, you know, once the expletives start flying and things, then maybe that's a bludgeon to the client. Otherwise, it's really just, I mean, it's literally a child parent relationship. know, the child wants to eat candy.

Kevin Mooney (01:09:57.07)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:02.702)
Sure, sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:14.2)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:10:17.026)
for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And they're going to say, yeah, but why can't I eat candy for breakfast? And then you're going to say, Junior, it's important to keep your teeth in a healthy state. And well, why can't I have Snickers for lunch? Well, so it's like, yes, there's a part of it that you can kind of explain.

But then, yeah, I'm Hispanic, right? But then that's when the bell comes out and you're like, I'm just, I'm joking. I'm joking. But, but you see what I'm saying is I don't see it as a negative thing to tell a customer, you know, what you're trying to, to, to suggest may not function in the way that you think it's or it's not going to help. There's, there's ways of saying it diplomatically where

Kevin Mooney (01:10:48.124)
Hahaha

Kevin Mooney (01:10:52.334)
Duh.

Kevin Mooney (01:11:09.964)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:11:13.43)
You know, you're not upsetting the customer. but I feel it's an obligation of a strategist and a designer to not sell crap to the customer, you know, and to not let them, ruin because they don't know what they're doing. If they did, then why would they need you? That's, that's the bottom line. It's the bottom line.

Kevin Mooney (01:11:25.378)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:11:32.064)
Right, they wouldn't. They wouldn't hire it out. Right. And I've talked about this a lot in previous episodes. Like I've said it a couple of different ways. Like you should in terms of marketing, because as we know, defining marketing, it is everything internal and external and brand kind of lives in marketing until it doesn't, until it breaks out. You know,

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:11:53.962)
Until it breaks out,

Kevin Mooney (01:12:00.44)
shit, where was I going with that? I think the idea was that...

If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be hiring you as an external source. Here's what I was getting at. You should hire somebody to think for you, right? That's the idea. They should be thinking about these problems and doing, so you should know that you don't know what you're doing in that department. Find the people that are good at it. Find people who you like.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:12:09.121)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:12:35.778)
their work in the world and then you should pay them to have fun with it. Right. They're still going to go through the process because at this point everybody is doing some form of core or brand strategy that they purchased on creative market. Doesn't really matter. They're all pretty similar. Some are a little bit more generic. Some are a little bit more detailed. Doesn't matter. Point is if everyone is using the exact same tools,

You should find the people that are thinkers and have fun with it. That's kind of the two requirements in my brain. And just let them do what they do.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:13:15.116)
But Kevin, how is you sitting there thinking? I'm not paying you to sit there and think, am I?

Kevin Mooney (01:13:20.909)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:13:24.588)
Yeah, well, but but that's what I'm saying is you should be. You should pay me the amount of money that I would like to get paid to to think. And it just so happens that I am one of those types of people who who thinks for a very long time, right? Like it could be could be a month and and then bang something useful comes out and now it's time to knock out the design part of it or the the application, the execution of the item.

But that's what you should be paying for. And I think that the majority of the world or the majority of businesses kind of do it opposite, right? They think of you like, sorry, I'll let you finish in a second. They think of it like Blair Enns talks about it in his book. You're a vendor or you're an expert. And a vendor is gonna produce things for you and an expert is gonna think through it. They're gonna tie these things to outcomes.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:14:03.767)
Well, let me...

Yeah, yeah, go for it, go for it.

Kevin Mooney (01:14:22.764)
time to problems that you're having, we're going to try to fix those and Bob and we even shift and you know, there's plenty of vendors out there in the world. I happen to want to live in the expert side, whether I am or not. I that's where I live. So I want to think about it and then have fun doing it because then there's an actual purpose for me to, to, grow your audience, sell your product, make you more money, whatever that

that thing is, but if I'm not having fun, I'm kind of on the verge of stopping that relationship, right? As soon as the fun goes away for me after doing this for 10 to 15 years, when the fun stops, I'm on my way out. That's not, that's not just a word to the wise or, um, you know, any future client, it's, it's just the reality of, the business. Cause with

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:15:08.952)
you

Kevin Mooney (01:15:21.038)
Without that fun, burnout starts to happen. And that goes back to going back to level zero and trying to work out of that. Nobody wants to be in that zone. So sorry, I cut you off. Go ahead and continue.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:15:30.989)
Yeah. No, no, I was cutting you off. So I appreciate you not letting me cut you off. But I was going to disagree with you in... G.C., now I'm losing my train of thought.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:36.622)
You

Kevin Mooney (01:15:45.23)
That's cause I went on a fricking rant there.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:15:51.97)
Yeah, I don't remember, but it'll come to me. It'll come just to, okay. you were talking about having fun and okay. And okay. I remember now. Yes. Why should I pay you to think? The problem here is that business owners, if you think of all the interactions that they have in their business,

Kevin Mooney (01:15:53.902)
Shit.

Kevin Mooney (01:16:04.174)
thinking.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:16:21.335)
They rarely have to interact with creatives. The mindset for what it takes to run a business, to keep the wheels greased up and rolling, to keep the machine maintained. Obviously I'm being metaphorical, right? The business machine, right? To keep all the people, to manage all the people in their workforce, to have to manage the logistics, to pay all the bills, to get all that done.

very very little creativity in any of that. All that is structure management. There's no creativity in that type of stuff for the most part. The interactions with creatives is it's a very rare part of the life of a business and it's hard for if you just think of personality styles right which you may know something about.

Kevin Mooney (01:16:54.296)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:17:18.958)
May know one or two things.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:17:22.379)
I mean, the creatives were rare. We're not a large part of the population. We're a minority, right, in our own sense in the population. business owners are their own minority, right? But we're the minority in that minority. And so the interactions that they have are not like the other interactions that they have with other people. And I think that's where a lot of business owners

Kevin Mooney (01:17:35.896)
For sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:17:39.79)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:17:50.84)
They don't either understand or maybe they just kind of don't care because they're not really thinking about changing the way they do things, right? But that's, it's kind of a silly way to think like that because that's like having two children who are completely different and then wanting to treat them both the same because it's just administratively easier for me. That's called bad parenting. And so to do that with a creative is called bad clienting, right? That's a bad client.

Kevin Mooney (01:18:18.99)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:18:20.099)
Creatives are different. They think differently, they act differently, they're motivated differently, they work in different ways, they get inspiration in ways that most people have no idea how that works. It's a completely different interaction. so for, know, and this is a word of caution for the business owners. Don't get in the way of the creatives, right?

Kevin Mooney (01:18:46.19)
I like that advice.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:18:48.107)
Well, and I say it carefully, I say this as someone who's owned a traditional business, right? That wasn't necessarily, I mean, it was advertising, but it was, the business that I had at the beginning was an advertising publication. So it was a publication. There was some design included, but it was more sales and distribution, right? It wasn't so much design, right?

Creatives have a different way that they function. They don't function like the rest of society. so interrupting their flow is going to ruin the very creativity that you want them to bring to the table. So does that mean that you have to let them roam free and do whatever they want? No, that's not what that means, right? Because a business has to have certain business parameters, right?

Kevin Mooney (01:19:33.262)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:19:44.558)
There are certain budgets that you want to keep things within and there are certain timeframes that you need to meet, right? There's deadlines that have to be met. That's all. That should be plainly understood by the creative because you communicated that clearly to them, right? Usually in a creative brief, which if you don't know how to do a creative brief, we can talk about that later.

But other than that, you need to let the creatives do their creative work. They don't think the way you do, Mr. Business Owner. They're not motivated by the same things. And when you saw their work and said, well, that's amazing. I want something really cool like that, that's because you weren't involved in that process. And so it requires their ability

Kevin Mooney (01:20:13.742)
Mhm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:20:35.735)
to sit and think, to gather inspiration, however they gather inspiration, within normal boundaries. And that's how you will get the results that you want to get. It's not by saying, hey, copy what the next guy did. It's not by saying, hey, you know what? I need you to take all my suggestions and they veto all of your creative ideas.

There is a compromise, but it's again I think we talked about in a podcast episode that we did together a business owner doesn't need to know design and marketing and they don't have to know all the details about that They only know to know need to know a few fundamentals Well, one of those fundamentals that they need to know is that you need to let creators do what they do You need to let them be creative because most organizations Don't know anything about creativity at all. They call things creative that are not creative

Kevin Mooney (01:21:24.578)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:21:34.94)
And so they want to creatives like they do everyone else, right? They put them in a cubicle. They want them to act in certain ways. They want them to dress in uniform like everyone else. That does not work. All that stuff bleeds creativity dry. And so it's just a word of caution for business owners to allow the people that they're paying to actually get their job done. So you don't want to sabotage them. You want them to be empowered to do what they do.

Kevin Mooney (01:22:02.678)
Yeah. And I think the, the caveat to that is that thing that I was kind of talking about alluding to in the beginning was that you should not just seek out the top person on Google who has the most reviews to do that. You should spend the time looking at things in the world that you like and you respect and

Maybe do some of that deep research. Who, who did that work? Who produced that? And I think I said this maybe on the show that we did. It's like, sure. You may not be able to afford widening Kennedy because you like Nike's stuff that they put out there, but that is, that is the path. It's not just this cursory search and find the first top few places in your local area and

Be like, I just need this off my plate. Go. The reason I say this is because

Perhaps those people that you find aren't as detailed and thorough as we're talking about right now. My strategy is different from your strategy. The outputs from our strategy sessions are gonna be slightly different. So you have to like your style or my style. And it's not even a style thing. It's really evaluating, are these people...

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:23:26.655)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Kevin Mooney (01:23:36.844)
not only doing what they say, but is that smart? Right? I've seen all this hype about, this was maybe a few years ago, this hype about creating a brand story. And so people go out and buy this exercise that it treats it like it's a movie script. Okay, who's the hero? Who's the villain? What's the journey they go on? You put all the inputs in, bam, here's your brand story. That doesn't make any fucking sense to me. That is just cookie cutter nonsense. And so,

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:23:55.139)
Mm.

Kevin Mooney (01:24:05.888)
If you find the strategist and that is the thing that they do, are you, are you happy with that output just because you got a thing or did you really do thinking the thinking process and discovery for yourself to find those folks? And I'm just, maybe I'm dancing around the real thing to say, but all creatives are not built the same. They are, they are all not as talented as each other and you have to have.

some discernment with who that person is. And that's not saying that I'm better than anybody else in the local environment. I'm just saying that I'm gonna spend the time, the thought process, the detail, I'm gonna go through it I'm gonna tie it together. Other people, maybe not, maybe not.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:24:54.295)
Yeah, it's kind of funny that because this touches on a really sensitive topic. know, as what do they call me now? Person of color. Is that what they're calling people like me now? And I'm saying that, you know, in a tongue in cheek way, because I've experienced this discrimination, right? And I get pulled over and things like that when I'm not speeding. I actually drive very slow. My wife complains.

Kevin Mooney (01:25:07.352)
You know what? I don't know.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:25:26.635)
The point that I'm getting to is that we need to be more discriminatory. And I don't say that in the racial way, right? I'm talking about the word, right? The word discriminatory refers to having a preference of one thing over another, right? And excluding things like race and other factors like that. We're talking about like design and work. It shouldn't be a surprise and it shouldn't be controversial

for all of us to realize and to discuss the fact that people are at different levels. You know, a designer who's 10 years old, I mean, he might be freakishly talented, right? Like a, know, like a DaVinci or something who at 10 years old is just like a freak and is like making masterpieces. It's extremely, extremely rare, but possible, right? If you're able to find, you know, that person,

Kevin Mooney (01:26:21.464)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:26:25.667)
you know, make sure that you're able to work with them because of labor laws and things like that. But, know, besides the fact of that, you know, if you're able to work with someone like that, then you, you, you, you've essentially discriminated, from the rest of the people who don't have work as good. Right. So that, so that kind of discrimination is a good thing. Right. just like I discriminate walking on the concrete sidewalk and I discriminate against walking over dog poop. Right.

Kevin Mooney (01:26:45.848)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:26:54.775)
That's an act of discrimination. That's, I think, a positive act of discrimination because I don't like dog poop and I'd rather not walk on it. And so I think anyone who doesn't see it that way may need to reevaluate how they're thinking about things. But going back to design, everyone's at different levels. Typically, younger designers are not going to be as talented or obviously as experienced as designers who are.

Kevin Mooney (01:27:09.486)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:27:23.573)
are more seasoned. But there are rare cases in which they have a freakish talent. And that's good if you could find that. But in this case, we need to not be super sensitive about using the word discrimination. In some instances, discrimination is a bad thing. But we all discriminate every single day in 1,000 different ways. And discrimination when it comes to design and saying, I choose this person over this person,

Kevin Mooney (01:27:41.838)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:27:47.534)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:27:52.12)
That's an act of discrimination. It's okay. It's an act of discrimination that's socially acceptable. You're not going to get canceled for discriminating because you chose one designer over another designer. So it's okay. But everyone's at different levels. The part of the problem though, is that many business owners don't know what good design looks like. And so...

Kevin Mooney (01:28:18.296)
I was thinking that the entire time. That's absolutely it.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:28:20.027)
So I'm encouraging discrimination. I'm encouraging discrimination, but they don't even, this is kind of humorous. Even if they want to be discriminatory, they don't even know how to be because having good taste in design and having an eye for that is a different conversation. And so here's, here's what I suggest to business owners. Most business owners don't have an eye for design. They're not creatives.

Kevin Mooney (01:28:30.446)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:28:50.915)
They'll equally choose bad design, just like they'll choose good design. Okay. Which means that for your business, you might be choosing bad design and not know it. Right. Why? Because you're the designer that you're choosing may tell you that it's good design because he's good at selling you crap. So what you need to do is you need to be able to have deeper conversations with people who can help you to discern what is.

good design that's going to help your business. And for the most part, that's going to be people who are little bit more seasoned, right? And even if they're not as seasoned, having an understanding of are they surrounding themselves with good design? Are they familiar with, you know, art history? You know, a lot of these things have been taken, you know, even art classes. Again, this is someone from someone who's an autodidact, self-taught. But some of this stuff is important. You don't just

Kevin Mooney (01:29:22.542)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:29:50.574)
you know, pop up out of a vacuum and no good design, right? Now, I will walk myself back on that. There are cases in which people intuitively know what good design is and can't explain how they know, right? And that does happen, right? Because we see beautiful design in nature, right? And we're literally born into that Minecraft world of beautiful design.

Kevin Mooney (01:29:55.352)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:30:19.903)
And some people are just able to grasp that without being able to articulate that. Right? That's okay. Right? But it helps when you have someone who can guide you on that path because most business people don't have any idea what they're doing when it comes to that. And so get the help, you know, don't play the guessing game and just try out 50 different people. No, just, you know, do a little bit of homework. Try to...

Kevin Mooney (01:30:35.672)
Sure.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:30:49.517)
find someone who's a little bit more understanding about that topic, a little bit educated. Let them guide you. It requires building trust and all that stuff. It takes work.

Kevin Mooney (01:30:56.109)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:31:00.642)
Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think that, you know, the, people that work with me, they, they're pretty much already sold on me by the time we get going. And I hope that's not an arrogant thing. And I hope that businesses out there who hear this don't say, well, screw that guy. He's, he's an asshole. the reality is that

those people already have an intuitive sense of what design websites, copywriting campaigns look like. Those are all things that I do. So when they see the work, they're like, cool. This seems like the right guy to work with. you know, the other folks who go with other people in this town, they're like, they've got 92 five stars and...

that I've seen that website before. I, I'm going to go with these guys. They're trusted to me. Right. So people who, well, in my opinion, it's terrible, but

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:32:04.695)
Yeah. Which is dangerous. It's very dangerous. Very deep. Cause like you said, yeah, well yeah. Cause they can hack the system. That's the part that a lot of business owners don't realize is that design doesn't work in the same way that other things that they're familiar with work. A crappy designer can and very often does hack the system by paying to be on the top spot when they actually are really bad. Why do they keep getting work? Well, because they paid enough money to get to the top.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:19.886)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:30.712)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:34.883)
Right.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:32:35.031)
Right? And how do they get that money? Well, that's just a thousand ways someone can get the money to do that. Well, if they're that bad, then how do they get the money? Yeah, because people deal drugs and things like that and they sell money, right? This happens. And so it's understanding that just because you can't use the factors that you judge other things to determine things like design and art.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:45.614)
For sure.

Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:33:02.275)
It's not a one to one, doesn't work the same. So just a caution.

Kevin Mooney (01:33:02.318)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:33:06.348)
You know, and in, and in terms of hacking too, it doesn't even have to just be paid for that spot. There's a sacrifice that comes with what's right and what Google wants to see. Right? So if we're just narrowing this down to SEO and Google and things like that, in order to rank from a search engine perspective, you have to write words.

that are search terms that people are searching for for your product or your service. So you can just pack your website full of keywords, start to rank to the top of the page really quickly. And the reason that this is important is that they're gonna take that same philosophy when it comes to client work. So let's just say it's a website.

they're going to do an SEO version of your website. Well, let's just say that somebody ran strategy and you learned that the problems, the target audience, they're not really searching Google for your product or your services. Well, why are we taking an SEO perspective on this type of a problem? In fact, we already know that we're going to have some marketing budget and we're going to pay for some traffic.

Why are we fucking around with this SEO stuff? And I'm not here to say that SEO is bad. I'm just saying that people know how to use SEO and they can do that to get to the top of the listing. To be completely fair, I do it for my website. I rank relatively high, but that's because I have to put certain words on there. So I have those words, but I have had to figure out where can I hide those words on the page so it doesn't mess with my design.

And unfortunately it boxes you into this, the standard. This is what a website is. There's a navigation, there's a hero, and then that hero says a word. And then the next section says this, you're super boxed in. So you don't have the freedom, the very creative artsy type websites. They don't have any of that junk. and while they look pretty, they probably don't rank anywhere on Google. Right? So there's this.

Kevin Mooney (01:35:31.234)
There's this balance that you have to take. And, I guess I'm just saying that, yeah, there are hacks to, get to that place. So rather, I'm also not saying that you should dig seven pages deep on Google to find your agency. I I'm just kind of like illustrating these ideas that you do have to put a little bit of thought into this. You do have to observe what is happening in the world and you do have to kind of seek out the people who made those things.

that you see in the world. If that just so happens to be the the the agency that kind of did the hacky thing to get up and you like their work, then great fine. That's OK. You're allowed. You're allowed to do that, but I just encourage folks to kind of dig a little bit deeper. Think a little bit more deeply about it and and the first phone call you have with that agency doesn't necessarily have to be a. A crazy.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:36:01.186)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:36:11.405)
Yes, stick with them.

Kevin Mooney (01:36:30.144)
sales meeting or a big fit check, right? It can just be, Hey, I am super new to this space. I want to know about you. I want you to tell me how you work with clients. Sure. Certainly what you charge. mean, this, this is how a sales call should go anyways. but I guess the pressure isn't always on just that one interaction and then, I can't do it. You know, it just doesn't have to be that way.

But yeah, it's interesting the approaches that people take and on both the client side and the agency side, right? Like what are we trying to do to hack the system and to get it to a point where I could get my designs across and you can get more sales, right? It's just balance.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:37:09.303)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:37:19.597)
Well, it's interesting that one of the things that you mentioned that I want to piggyback off of is, like you mentioned things like SEO, part of the problem as well with the, and again, and I'm calling problem the fact that a customer won't get as much value as they think that they're going to get, or they may be sabotaging themselves by approaching things in a certain way. That's the problem.

because sometimes they're not updating their operating system. Again, because it has to do with things that are in the creative realm, which they rarely have interactions with and don't really know how it functions. In fact, have probably almost zero idea how any of the creativity stuff works. So they're thinking of like, well, SEO, well, I already have an SEO guy who does this thing or whatever. And it's like,

Yeah, but this is not like 1995 where SEO served a much larger function and served a different purpose than it does now. You know, I mean, the conversation with SEO now with AI search is going to be completely different from the conversation that people have been having. But guess what? People are going to still try to sell you on the fact that, well, you know, what I've been doing

You know SEO, you know, it's the most effective way to do marketing. Yeah, that's what they said in 1995. I Mean my clock made me a little bit slow, but it's it's not you know It ain't 1995 and so these updates And and understanding where things are moving understanding how culture is shifting You know a lot of times Clients are

Kevin Mooney (01:38:45.198)
Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:39:13.539)
around that stuff, but they're not really paying that much attention. A lot of clients, unless they're fairly young, they don't understand meme culture. They don't understand the gaming culture. They don't understand the shifts in the way that markets are changing when it comes to decentralization. They don't understand the

Kevin Mooney (01:39:24.685)
Now.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:39:43.614)
shift that's happening with, you know, utilizing AI tools, not knowing that you can't own copyrights for a lot of that stuff. There's a lot going on that you really need to have people who, who are invested in these spaces to be able to guide you through the process. it's, and the reason why I say it in that way is because a lot of small businesses typically don't have people who are in charge of that.

You they'll have like, you'll have the business owner, then you'll have like a graphic designer. That's kind of a typical thing. It's like, well, no, you don't, well, they're to be able to do graphic design, but they're not going to be able to do marketing. They're not going to be able to do video very well. They're not going to be able to do AI implementation if that's what you want to do. They're not going to be able to write very good copy, even with the use of AI. The images that they're going to generate from AI can be used by other people. They're not protectable. Sometimes they're.

Kevin Mooney (01:40:22.915)
Right.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:40:43.445)
images that are illegal because they are infringing on the copyright of others. So that means that puts you as a company liable for utilizing those images and paying people to create images that are infringing copyright and are illegal. So it really does require businesses to understand that you need teams, right? You may not be able to afford teams. That's okay.

Kevin Mooney (01:41:11.928)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:41:12.751)
It's okay. This is why I mentioned it. It's okay that you can't afford a team of people, but that's what you need. You need people who are dedicated to be able to make this brand thing work. Right?

Kevin Mooney (01:41:20.29)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:41:27.15)
It's like that idea of the unknown unknowns, right? Like you just kind of need to know that you don't know that you need a team.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:41:36.343)
Yeah, because at least when you know, then you can try to compromise and say, okay, so since I can't have a team of like four people, mean, shoot, I can only get one person, but then I'm gonna spend extra time to get one person who is actually good at a bunch of these things or can get as close as I possibly can afford to that. know, cause that's the reality unfortunately that we're heading towards is that AI is giving people the...

Kevin Mooney (01:42:00.088)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:42:06.187)
idea that you could do more with less. And that's slowly becoming the expectation. But understanding that a business, any business of any size, needs a team to be doing all the brand stuff. Whether you can afford it or not, it's a different conversation. Whether you need it, you really need it. Because businesses that actually really do succeed really well and become

Kevin Mooney (01:42:24.174)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:42:30.081)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:42:35.523)
you know, leaders in their industry, uh, and, and are able to stand the test of time. We'll typically always have teams that are focused on that type of thing. mean, that's when do get the best work done? What's when you're focused, right? Not when you have, you know, 20 things that you're multitasking, you know, and now we've missed the thing. Oh, we didn't hit the deadline for this trade show. now.

Kevin Mooney (01:42:49.23)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:42:53.87)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:42:59.969)
You know, you didn't bring the brochures? We're at the trade show now. You didn't bring the brochure. What are we going to hand out to people? You know, it becomes a mess.

Kevin Mooney (01:43:09.208)
For sure. Yeah. man, that's a wild one. Yeah. it is man. It's so much and it's so much fun. I love talking about it with you. I loved hearing sort of that the deeper part of your origin story, right? And, and just hearing about some of the hurdles that you you've had in your life, that that whole idea of

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:43:16.235)
A lot to talk about, a lot to talk about.

Kevin Mooney (01:43:37.762)
you know, zero to one is it's the only thing that I can equate it to is the health problems that I've had in the last two years. Right. And there's a great quote. Somebody said it. Don't know where I heard it, but it is a healthy man has many goals and a sick man only has one. It was definitely for show. Yeah. But it's, it's super true. When I was not

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:43:57.578)
I said that. I said that. I'm kidding. No, I'm kidding. I didn't say that.

Kevin Mooney (01:44:06.038)
healthy and I was not feeling good. The only thing that I could focus on was that one thing, like just get back to feeling normal and feeling healthy. And I have to equate that to that sort of zero to one phase of your life, right? Where you're just like, I just got to get to that point. You're not even thinking about being a four, a five or a six.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:44:27.309)
Well, yeah, yeah. it's, it's actually, it's, it's, think it's, it's hard for most people to understand because, without, without getting too far into that conversation, the conversation is literally like, how am going to eat today? It's, it's not, it's not like, how am going to get my next customer? It's not, how am going to make my car payment? It's how am going to get food so that I don't die? Like it's, it's a.

Kevin Mooney (01:44:42.509)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:44:52.546)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:44:56.245)
It's a different level. If you could look at it in the terms of, it might help people visualize it, Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, you're basically stuck at the bottom. And so trying to build relationships, which require you to sacrifice your own things that you like maybe because you want to go hang out with a friend and do what he likes, right? It's like, well, when you can't even get food on the table.

Kevin Mooney (01:45:07.267)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:45:26.903)
I mean, well, I can't go spend time with that dude. I gotta go try to figure out how to feed my family. How am I gonna try to achieve things to self actualize and to be a part of something bigger than myself when I'm literally gonna die in two weeks if I can't feed myself. So it's at a different level that I think a lot of people don't comprehend and it's quite a struggle.

Kevin Mooney (01:45:33.474)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:45:47.36)
Right. Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:45:55.267)
I think that's one of the reasons why the Coursera wanted to really kind get to know how it was affecting me is because it's a larger struggle. It's a literal struggle for everyone likes to say struggle for survival. But a lot of times it's like, well, because I can't pay my Honda Civic, know, it's a 2023 Honda Civic, I'm paying for it on credit, I got to make my payment. It's like, no, no, no, that's not the struggle.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:11.608)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:24.639)
No, it's not.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:46:25.035)
The struggle is I'm going to die. That's the struggle. Like I'm actually going to die. That's the struggle. And if I don't feed myself, my family, we're actually going to perish. And so it's at a different level. so that type of thing drains your resources, your mental and your physical resources a lot more. And so that's one of the things that I'm glad to be able to have people like you who, you know, we can at least talk about this, you know?

Kevin Mooney (01:46:28.483)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:33.581)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:42.264)
Definitely.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:46:54.717)
and share it, you know, because you've had your struggles, especially with your health issues. And that's not fun either because talk about physically draining your, you know, how you feel. mean, that's, it's not, it's not pleasant, but you know, find community, find other people to support. That's one of the other things that we didn't get too far into is when you learn to be self-reliant.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:56.706)
Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:47:24.907)
you literally, well, you become self-reliant and you're like, it can stop you from building relationships, right? Because I need to look out for myself, you know? And so, but that's something that can be detrimental. So if anyone is in a situation where they're like that, you know, I get it, we understand, but it's not helpful to isolate oneself, you know?

Kevin Mooney (01:47:32.099)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:47:35.874)
Yeah, a hundred percent.

Kevin Mooney (01:47:50.35)
Definitely not. Definitely not. No.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:47:52.259)
and, so it's, it's finding community, finding the ability to discuss this, to be able to get, feedback, even, even for the ability of, even if it's not even for your own benefit, but just knowing that you communicating it to others can maybe help someone else that that can bring satisfaction. So.

Kevin Mooney (01:48:09.315)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah, I love that. Well, Bryan, I have a few minutes before I got to go. One thing that I just realized was that we never even introduced you. We just rolled right into the conversation. So I don't know if you want to provide an intro to yourself, say who you are, say what you do, plug your company, whatever. Is that something you want to do?

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:48:27.927)
it's alright.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:48:37.613)
She's talking about delusions of grandeur. I thought everyone already knew who I was. I'm kidding. So my name is Bryan Jimenez and I am a brand strategist and a creative director at Archimedes branding. But even though lately I've been working more on my personal brands, doing more consulting on my own.

Kevin Mooney (01:48:42.878)
Well, that's fair. That's fair. Everybody on the face of the earth knows exactly who you are.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:49:05.187)
probably mostly see my name, Bryan, Risi Menes. And I've worked with businesses of many sizes, both small and large, for the last 20 years. And I started off as a designer. And my screen turned off for some reason. Classic. So I started off as a graphic designer and eventually got to learn brand strategy at an elite

Kevin Mooney (01:49:24.014)
Classic.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:49:34.191)
institution and then I do brand strategy. Right now I do it part-time and just because I'm burned out but I'm working past the burnout and I work with big brands. Hardy Davidson, US Department of Energy, I've done some work for Pepsi, Wacom, right, for those who know that and other companies like that.

And yeah, I've some really cool projects, some pretty big projects. And one of the things that I like to do is to coach creatives to be able to level up their craft, their career, and also their mindset. Because mindset is a big part of being able to be resilient and to be able to do work with bigger companies and do larger

dollar amounts, a lot of it is a mindset issue. know, it's, I worth it? Is this something that, you know, I should be able to charge? Is a client going to think that I'm charging too much? A lot of it is just mindset. know, companies will pay for if they feel like they're getting value. And so, so yeah, that's essentially me. People can.

Kevin Mooney (01:50:34.936)
Yeah, definitely.

Kevin Mooney (01:50:48.942)
Mm-hmm.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:50:58.743)
find me at Archimedes.Agency. That's A-R-C-H-I-M-E-D-E-S.Agency. And I'll probably send you my info, maybe put a link in the description, which by the way, I have to add your link to the description on my podcast. It's, and I'm the host of a podcast, Multiple. I have a podcast called Brand Rehab. I also have another podcast called The Archimedes Effect. It's whole different conversation as to what those are about, but they're about basically

Kevin Mooney (01:51:09.644)
percent.

Yeah, that sounds great. yeah, Bryan's got it. Yeah.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:51:27.457)
brand and breaking through barriers and building your resilience and all that good stuff. A lot of good stuff. All good stuff.

Kevin Mooney (01:51:34.766)
Hell yeah, Bryan. Well, thank you so much for chatting and diving into the origin story. I think that is really cool. I can see, I mean, your path and my path are very similar, right? Even though we come from different backgrounds and it's just an interesting path how we kind of both got into this space and have done odds and ends for jobs and not necessarily fell into this space, but

kind of fell into it and have stuck with it. So I appreciate you being here and thank you so much for your time. You betcha.

Bryan Ruiz Jimenez (01:52:12.887)
Thanks for having me, Kevin. Talk to you soon.

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