Podcast

Kevin Mooney (00:01.163)
did you start thinking about graphic design at that point in time as like a kid?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (00:10.24)
Yeah, so during that time, think freshman year was when we started really getting into into computer games. That's when I started meeting a lot of new friends, making a lot of new friends. I came into the United States when I was 13 years old. So right in the middle of seventh grade and eighth grade. So I landed right in eighth grade. They put me in special English classes because at that point they said that I didn't know English, but

I did, I knew enough to defend myself. But the point in those classes, after I went into high school, I got transferred into regular classes. That's when I started making a lot of new friends. And obviously, you all my friends were all the nerdy kids. We used to call ourselves the Breakfast Club. Because we were like the outcast and nobody talked to us. was like, okay, cool, let's start a club.

And we started playing Starcraft and all the Blizzard games when they were in their heyday. So I think we all had this expectation that we wanted to make video games. Video games was that thing that nobody knew about. was like that secret that nobody was seeing yet. I mean, the game industry was basically nonexistent. was like the games that were out there were

made by real artists that really wanted to kind put something forward. When we went into junior, no, into senior, or senior year, that's when they added the first graphic design class. And all the computers and all these new systems started coming in and all these new classes. So my senior year was when I went into the art classes and I took everything that I could in art.

Because I was like, okay, art is my thing. And as soon as I touched Photoshop, I was like, oh my God, this is my new... And I remember, I loved that class. I loved it. And as soon as I got out of school, I downloaded Photoshop, I installed it on my computer, and I was there another six hours, know, just making just random stuff. But I was like really into the artistic side of it. So...

Kevin Mooney (02:14.15)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:34.316)
I think that's when it finally clicked. And then I found out about graphic design at those career days. And that was like, my God, I want to make video games. And I said, when I went into college, I didn't have a video game making class or any of that. So there was a multimedia class, multimedia diploma. So I went into that. was like, OK, great. But this has

This has video, has photography, 3D rendering, fine arts, graphic design, everything. So was like, okay, cool. I'm going to take that. I went through the entire, the sorry. yeah, the full course. we go.

Kevin Mooney (03:22.707)
course.

Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (03:25.87)
And I just, fell in love with graphic design and everything that it was about. I loved the artistic side of it, the technical, you know, I love, I started really loving like programming and developing, um, with it also like sound design. So I started really say enjoying that side of, um, the, the career. And I just, I just naturally just gravitated towards graphic design rather than like video game. So I just became like the second.

or like the furthest thing. But my final portfolio had about half of it was like concept art. So it was really focused on video games, but I used to love sketching and drawing and painting, a lot of that. So it was graphic design and there was like concept art. Cause I was like, my God, if I don't land in here, I want to be here. If I can't do this and I'll do this. And that's how it all started.

Kevin Mooney (03:57.715)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (04:09.684)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (04:24.403)
Yeah. So, so growing up, you and I are the same age. We did the same things when we were kids, right? From building our own towers and putting lights in them and, and, and kind of nerding out in gaming, coming well, and also trying to hack the system at school. We did that. But so coming from that, that generation was your first edition of Photoshop, a copied version from limewire or

Mauro Medina Susarrey (04:25.229)
Just wanting to make

Mauro Medina Susarrey (04:35.299)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (04:42.05)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (04:54.481)
Naps are bad.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (04:56.494)
Yeah, absolutely. There was a lot of ways. There was a of ways. That's the only way that we could get through. That's how we got through college. nobody paid for Photoshop. And I mean, I think it was like a necessary evil, right? It's like, now it's like I've been paying Adobe for the past 15 years, 20 years. But, you know, back in the day, it's like we were poor. We were like, okay, let's just everything.

Kevin Mooney (05:01.299)
Ha

Kevin Mooney (05:04.925)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (05:09.291)
of course.

Kevin Mooney (05:19.742)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (05:23.507)
For sure.

Well, we also...

Mauro Medina Susarrey (05:26.868)
Download all this kind of stuff

Kevin Mooney (05:31.035)
Right. And we also came from that generation that was trying to figure all this stuff out. It was all brand new to the world. Nobody knew any more than we did. The teachers didn't know, the companies didn't know. And so it was just the wild west, free for all, grab what you can grab and go and make. So when you came over from Mexico and you were in eighth grade, you said you spoke English, but

Mauro Medina Susarrey (05:51.341)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (06:00.221)
It was like enough to pass. What was that experience like? I lived in Germany for a little bit and I moved over there and I didn't have to speak any German because people would speak English. So I'm curious what that experience is like coming over here at that young age being like, whoa, what do I do now?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (06:24.366)
oof, okay. not to rail this into another, another area, right? I'll, I'll be partly blunt. I think in my eighth grade was my first experience with racism. Straight out, like first day. and I had this very vivid experience that happened to me.

Kevin Mooney (06:42.537)
Wow.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (06:52.536)
Cause the first time I went to school, I spoke enough that I could defend myself. I, my ear wasn't as sharp and my vocabulary was still somewhat limited, but it was enough to get through class. If it was enough to have a conversation, I just had to be like, Hey man, can you just slow down? know, speak slowly because I'm learning and some, some were really receptive to it and they were like, okay. Yeah. You know, I can speak slowly for you.

but I have one experience during one of the classes with a teacher separated but into groups. And I remember the teacher put me with another two students and we put the chairs like this in a triangle. And I talked to the kids and I told them, hey, just slow down, I'm new. I speak English for just a little bit. And the two of them looked at each other and they're just like,

And they just moved the chairs like this and they just put me aside. So I just ended up doing the project by myself. But that was like my first like, okay, so this is how it's gonna be. And the second day in school, one of the teachers just went into the office and said, hey, this kid doesn't speak any English. It was like, and they threw me into the ESL class, which was

Kevin Mooney (08:17.223)
Wow.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (08:22.222)
probably one of the worst experiences that I've had in school. Horrible. There were maybe several grades below the rest of the school. So if I was already doing geometry in my first year of junior high school in Mexico, they were doing, you know, basic equations. Like this is a multiplication. It's just like, what the fuck?

Kevin Mooney (08:51.615)
Right.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (08:52.046)
And I was like, the first, my first, my first report was like Cs because I was like, I don't want to do any of this shit. Like I already did it. Why am I doing it? But I was still really young. I got super scared when I started getting Ds and Cs. I like, my God, this is bad. After that, was like A plus everything. And I just went, they gave me certificates, like all kinds of certificates, the presidential certificates. was like, this does

Kevin Mooney (09:00.318)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (09:11.807)
Sure.

Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (09:21.442)
This has no value. This is just a piece of paper because I'm three grades below everybody else and I'm in an English class. I picked up English in like three months, but it was a horrible experience. And in high school, I had to literally pester my teacher because they continued ESL and they were like, no, you're standing in ESL until your senior year.

Kevin Mooney (09:27.518)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (09:36.371)
Wow.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (09:50.786)
They had no plans to move anybody. So I, every single day I was behind the teacher like, when are you going to move me? When are you going to move me? I want to be in regular classes. I want to be in She got sick and tired of me. I was like, okay, fine. I put it in the paper. I do regular classes. Thank you.

Kevin Mooney (10:11.123)
Wow. Do you think that that had a positive or a negative impact for things that you would do in the future?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (10:13.261)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (10:24.962)
That's a good question. It affected me negatively for a long time because they, I felt they made me feel like I was never enough. And I know in English classes and ESL, that tends to be the case. They treat you like you're because you don't speak the language fluidly because you're behind everybody else.

So you're just sort of like on the tail end of the entire system. We're just like, okay, well, they're not, they're just going to be, you know, worker bees and Home Depot or something. Yeah. and I think for me, that was the fire to be like, fuck that. I'm going to, yes. And my dad is a, is a, my dad is, is a programmer. was an electronics engineer. He funded,

Kevin Mooney (11:10.909)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (11:21.982)
a department, an electronics department in the UNAM, which is like the biggest university in Mexico. My dad was highly influential. I so I had that, you know, that in my mind. I was like, I don't want to be just anybody. It's like, I want to be like my dad. So I think being in being in ESL classes and being in that system and you get thrown into this this this grinder.

For me, was like, no, I want to get out of here. I don't want to be in this. And I don't want anybody telling me what I can't do. So I think negatively, it impacted me negatively for a few years. I think definitely with my confidence, several factors, depression came because of it.

But also, you know, I think I just had that fire from the very, very beginning when I was very little and I just, never let up to go like, no, I'm going to do something else.

Kevin Mooney (12:28.497)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it sounds like I know you. Decently well now over a few conversations and the work that you do now is. Well, you probably have always done this level of of work, but I'm saying that where you. Well fair, we all have our learning curves, but I guess what I'm saying is that your work now. Is so so good.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (12:37.346)
you

Mauro Medina Susarrey (12:57.25)
Thank you.

Kevin Mooney (12:57.371)
And I'm not saying that because we're, on this call. was pleasantly shocked when I saw your, your work in the core circle live. It was so thorough and so thoughtful and designed perfectly for every application that I saw. There wasn't one that I'm like, I don't think that works or I would have done it differently. I looked at it it was like, this is flawless work. So.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (13:25.752)
Thank you.

Kevin Mooney (13:27.315)
But I think that comes from some of those hard circumstances that you had up front. I don't wish that on anybody. I wish that you didn't have to deal with that. I think you probably would be even further along in your career had people not held you back in those early days. But maybe that's a great way to kind of introduce yourself to the world and tell them what you do, because I think this show might be slightly different than others.

while we did start kind of in our vulnerable past, what we're going to be talking about today is a lot more about, you know, design and strategy and the work that we do. So yeah, maybe why don't you introduce yourself? This is a first for the show. I've never had anyone introduce themselves.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (14:17.774)
Okay, well, my name is Mauro Medina-Sosarey. I am from Mexico, from Ensenada, Baja California specifically. I am a brand designer and a creative director. Additionally, work for companies. I've worked for companies such as AKQA. I've done projects for Facebook, for Nestle. I've branded large corporations in Los Angeles. I worked in the entertainment industry.

medical tech startups in a very wide variety of different industries. And I worked with people all over the world. So right now, for example, I'm working with a client in Kenya. I worked with people in Portugal, in New York, in LA, in Mexico, and in Sonora. So I've been a little bit of everywhere, as Singapore as well.

Kevin Mooney (15:15.657)
Very cool. Do you ever think back to those early days when those kids turned their chairs and just say, fuck you, look where I'm at now?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (15:26.542)
Actually, I haven't. I think I haven't because I don't give a shit about them. But yeah, I think, you know, if I think back about there's teachers, there's people in my in high school and in my younger years that were like, you're not going to do anything or you're failing class, so you're going to be some bum somewhere, you know.

Kevin Mooney (15:34.431)
Good. Good for you.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (15:56.622)
specifically my English teacher, one of them, she was horrible and she would just put everybody down. If she didn't think you were up to snuff, she would just put you down. yeah, I look at it now like, please. She was just, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (16:10.239)
It's awful.

Kevin Mooney (16:22.815)
Yeah, that's crazy. So, okay, so you're in high school, you're learning all these programs, you're becoming interested in graphic design. What do you do from there?

What happens? How do you get into the workforce? Do you struggle through it? What happens? Do you freelance? Do you get paid in pennies to do a couple of weird things for people? What does it look like?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (16:43.435)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (16:48.686)
I think we all did. I think we all started doing this weird odd jobs. was like, oh, you're the graphic design guy. Can you do me a logo? Yeah, sure. 50 bucks. But yeah, I think as soon as I graduated from college, I made a really good friend. And we paired up and we worked on projects together and we just had a really good chemistry. And as soon as we graduated,

Kevin Mooney (16:50.59)
Yes.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (17:17.806)
My friends said, hey, what if we start a studio? I was like, how do it? Hell yeah, let's start an agency. Not knowing anything about business, nothing about starting a studio. But we started getting jobs because we needed at least some sort of income. So I got a job in some really horrible company, just doing graphic design for a manufacturer.

So it was just really busy work. I would get stuff done, I would watch movies the rest of like seven hours. That's when I fully finished the whole Hollywood catalog. But it was good practice for me to be like, get faster and work in and be so really creative. And during that time, me and my friend started...

putting the studio together and putting the website and coming up with the name. And we did that for about nine years. And then we had a good sort of solid foundation after seven years. We brought in another friend, his name was Keoni. And then he started kind of teaching us a lot about strategy. And that's when my struggles really began because

Before that, before strategy, it was all about being creative and artistic and, you know, very literal with my design work. But as soon as strategy came into the picture and Jose came into the picture, everything changed. And it was unlearning everything that you got taught and relearning it differently. Now you have to think about design with structure, with some way that made sense.

with putting in the forefront communication rather than artistic expression. So it was a big, big hill to climb. But it took me a couple of years and then started to get a little bit better and better at it. And it wasn't after a few years, maybe four or five years, that I started doing strategy myself.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (19:36.82)
And then I started to really understand a lot of the ins and outs of strategy and why it works and how I can tie that into design. During my time in the studio, we worked almost uniquely with startups. So I had a really unique look into the ins and outs of the startup culture, of design, how they would approach design and how we had to...

Kevin Mooney (19:52.691)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (20:04.462)
So bring them back strategy. like, look, let's go back. Let's teach you the fundamentals of your business and then show you how design affects everything else. And it was, this was the very beginning of the startup culture. And we were already sort of teaching strategy during that time and working design through strategy. So it was, it was really interesting. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (20:28.755)
So you're in your 20s around that time when you meet Jose and you meet some of the other folks, Keoni, who is kind of teaching you the strategy. How did they approach you with that? Or maybe the question is...

Mauro Medina Susarrey (20:39.501)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (20:50.685)
What is it like to be told you're doing it all wrong and you need to be doing it this way? You know, like, cause that's kind of, that's kind of the shift, right? And I learned that later in my agency career. I was always thinking about it, but it, it was something like, maybe there's something to this. No one ever came in and said, Hey, you're doing it wrong. So I'm curious what that was like with those guys.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (20:54.734)
Who's this? Hi, I'm Stephen.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (21:15.863)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (21:19.918)
It was tough. It was really tough. I got into a lot of arguments and instantly I never won a single one because I was never thinking strategically. I was still very much emotional. I was still very much immature about the industry and not having the experience of actually working in an industry or in a studio. There was a lot of things that I didn't know.

So Jose had a lot of experience. Keoni learned a lot through Jose and his other experiences that I had outside. So that's when I started to, it was interesting because I started putting them in a box, right? So instead of looking at creativity in this like open world, I was like, no, be creative here, right here in this little box, you know? And this was the reasons why, and here's the tools and go and do it.

Kevin Mooney (22:10.623)
Mm-hmm.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (22:16.086)
And I think it forced me to, one thing is it forced me to remove my ego. So I think it, and it wasn't immediate, right? It was, it took time to kind of pick at it and it'd be like, get rid of that ego, get rid of that, that, that sense that you know best or that you were taught a certain way. And when you start to see that

strategy or another method of another way of thinking works better. That's when you start to like, okay, okay, maybe you're onto something. And then you start really kind of let it, you start to let go. And then you understand that, you know, you need to try different tools and different ways and different and learn different processes. And that makes you a better designer and makes you a better, even a better person, because you start to understand that not every, not the

Kevin Mooney (22:51.636)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (23:12.142)
It's not just the tools that you have. Sometimes you have to remove certain things or make a change in the way that you think or the processes that you have to make something much, much better. And so interestingly enough, I think it's a good little segue because my wife is an architect and she does interior design. And architecture and design are very, very similar in terms of process. But with architecture, you have to think.

so much deeper than design. You have to go through like the type of materials, costs, different, you figure out amounts of materials, you have to figure out the space, know, perspectives, philosophies, like there's a lot that goes into it. And it's really interesting because for me, it's changed, it changed some of the ways that I look at design.

And when I design, now I think about, I try to think way deeper. Like you mentioned earlier, right? Like every single application looked really good and you felt it was like a perfect execution. think when you start learning and seeing how architecture is done and interior design is done, you have to dive really deep and you have to really understand, okay, if I do this color or if I make this logo, is it going to work here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Kevin Mooney (24:14.878)
Ahem.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (24:40.014)
and I think, you know, it just, it's a, it's hugely helpful to learn from other industries and learn from other other processes, to make it better.

Kevin Mooney (24:52.82)
Yeah.

Did you think it was bullshit when you first saw the whole strategy side of things? Or what was the point of contention that you were arguing about?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (25:09.782)
I didn't think it was bullshit. I think the first time I heard it I was like, my god, this is awesome. It was more like, this mind expanding new thing. the difficult part was making that shift. So you can recognize when something is better and when something can give you a better result, but making that shift is very difficult.

Kevin Mooney (25:28.009)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (25:39.406)
So I don't know if there's one thing that I'd say, no, this is bullshit. can't do it like this.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (25:50.062)
I think it was the part of doing the translation from strategy to visual design. was my biggest problem. And funny enough, that is actually my biggest strength now.

Kevin Mooney (26:00.063)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (26:05.021)
Yeah, it's really funny how that that little tiny nuance that you just described is the reason that I'm okay giving away my process to people. If it's on the internet, on the podcast, on a sales call or even to a competitor, they're like, well, what's your process? I will tell you my exact.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (26:19.043)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (26:30.303)
process every single step and every dollar that I charge for every minute, every hour, whatever, because the magic happens in the translation. It's never that process, but that process that we kind of follow now, the core process, whether you follow it to the T or you deviate a little bit like I do, it doesn't matter. It's that translation and

Mauro Medina Susarrey (26:37.772)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (26:41.463)
In fact, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (26:58.983)
I still think that the hardest part in a client relationship is when you run through strategy and everyone agrees and they give thumbs up and they're all smiles and they're all happy. And then you deliver that very first thing, that first mood board, that first concept, that first whatever. And they have that dreaded blank stare on their face. What is this? Why is this so different than what we

Mauro Medina Susarrey (27:14.147)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (27:21.518)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (27:28.019)
we thought we agreed on in strategy, whatever, you know, and I think that's why it's really important if you are a person or a small business or a company looking for creative work, you should evaluate people not from their process, not from the rate that they charge, not what your friend says, it's more about their translation abilities and do I like those translations that they do? Do I like?

that do I like the way that they think? And that's always been a challenge for me in this whole creative process that has been evolving over the last 15 years. When I first saw strategy, I was like, this is great. This is the best thing. I'm going to be able to do my work. I'm going to be able to show the clients, you said this, this is what that looks like.

Here's the audience. This is why we're doing what we're doing. These applications, these sales channels, that's why we're doing it, because you told me it. There's still problems and there's still hiccups along the way. It's never perfect and it's never smooth, but it was an inflection point for me. And you and I have talked about these inflection points. It fundamentally shifted how I think about brand and design and an application.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (28:25.367)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (28:28.974)
Exactly.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (28:46.883)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (28:56.396)
Yeah, no, I have some, I experiences with other designers who have never done strategy, who are just, they're highly creative. And I would.

put together the strategy with the client, would go through every single detail and I would put together the mood boards. And as soon as I handed it to my designers, they gave me something that made no sense or that completely went against. I'm like, we have a meeting tomorrow. You better fix this. And oh my God, yeah. So I totally understand.

Kevin Mooney (29:25.885)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (29:31.411)
Hahaha

Mauro Medina Susarrey (29:41.452)
I think anybody can do strategy, anybody can go through and do all the exercises, but the translation is the toughest part. And the hardest thing is that there is no one way to do it. I think it's really dependent, it's very subjective. And in order to really be able to land it, I think you have to have like an intimate relationship.

with the client and understand where they're coming from, understand their industry for you to be able to really extrapolate what they need. know, instantly wind up doing a lot of coffee shops here in Ensenada and I love coffee, love coffee. So I know very intimately the type of clients, the type of industry, you know.

sort of look and feel and emotional connections that they need to create. And it's a lot of fun when you have that knowledge, it's a lot of fun. It's the same thing in tech, it's the same thing in any industry. think when you're gonna work in a project in an industry that you haven't worked in, you gotta spend some time really researching, really understanding, looking at the clients, looking at videos, looking at all this kind of stuff.

For you to be able to like okay. I can now I can actually design something that makes sense for this

Kevin Mooney (31:05.567)
Yeah, think David Ogilvie says that in one of his books, maybe Confessions or something like that, but he's like, you should be a user or a purchaser of your client's products or services. And if you're not, how do you know how to serve their customers? And I remember when I read that the first time, I was like,

Mauro Medina Susarrey (31:21.997)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (31:35.283)
That's right. I should be doing that. And from there on out, I started using the services of it, whether it was counseling or door and window installation. I had a door and window company as a client. We used them to install our new door in the back. And it was just to be deeply involved in that. And right now, one of my clients is a direct primary care.

So they're kind of like that old school doctor that you think about where they'll come to your house and they'll check up on you if you're sick. You can call them and they'll pick up the phone and it's doctor so and so. And so I've been a patient of this place for five years before I started doing work with them. And right now I'm in the middle of finishing up their website, but we've already gone through strategy and we've already done

Mauro Medina Susarrey (32:17.845)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (32:33.769)
their identity and websites next. And then we move on to some marketing for scale. And I can just say the results from that, it's so much more gratifying and the results are so much better. Like the general public will like that way more. So that's fun.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (32:55.118)
And I love that. love when clients understand strategy, when they type as deep as you do, and they start creating some amazing content. And it's just like, oh my God, it makes me so happy.

Kevin Mooney (33:09.651)
You're doing it. You're doing it. I love it.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (33:12.652)
Yeah, exactly. Because it's like your baby, you it's like you give birth to this identity, this brand, and you just hope that like once they're an adult, they're like, my God, please make the right decisions. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (33:25.137)
Right, right, right. I kept you alive this whole time. Now it's your turn. Time to fly. Spread your wings like go for it. So you're in LA and you you start this with your friends and you're you're young. What is in this is in LA, correct? What is your experience in that first agency? Experience in LA. What does that look like? How are you getting clients?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (33:29.954)
Yes. Yes.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (33:44.045)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (33:54.875)
Is the business profitable? Is it just networking and doing things, bobbing and weaving? What does that look like?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (34:03.406)
A lot of the big clients came through references. Formosa Group, namely, is probably one of the bigger clients that we had. That came through my friend Mike, who was my first partner. Me and him are the ones that got started. He had a friend who was a Houston asset management, believe, in Formosa Group.

and we got the tip from him that for most of the needed branding. Oh, they were going to start looking for a new designer because their old website was awful. And we just said, oh my God, tell them that we're designers and we can make a website. We're just super excited. And when they finally kind of contacted

contacted us, we were so excited and we're like, okay, let's go, let's have a meeting with them. That was, think amongst the first times that we pitched strategy and it was a tough sell. It was really difficult because first they never heard of it. It was still a pretty new concept. And since there were, know, sort of older gentlemen from Hollywood, they were very much like stuck in their ways.

So it took some time to sell them on strategy. We went through strategy and when we finally started doing design, we put a lot of time and care into the concepting and doing all the visual aesthetics and they loved it. But a lot of those clients came in through references.

We did go into like networking events. We tried getting into like the chamber of commerce, you know, like the typical, typical stuff, put, put up a website, but we never really had clear processes of like, client retention or client, at kiss it, kiss cition.

Kevin Mooney (35:58.911)
Mm-hmm.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (36:16.493)
And again, a lot of it was because we were really young. We had no idea what we were doing. Every time that a payment came in, it just got split in three rather than percentages. A little bit goes here, a little bit goes there, and rent for the studio. So it was really messy. I think that if we would have stuck through it, I think we would have learned. And we would have...

Kevin Mooney (36:25.961)
See ya.

Kevin Mooney (36:33.833)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (36:41.198)
made it happen but unfortunately like years later it was creative differences that ended up taking it apart and it was i think it was a majority of like not knowing how to deal with that and not having like clear roles and responsibilities that ultimately decide okay well let's just go our separate ways and yeah

Kevin Mooney (36:49.705)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (37:06.619)
Yeah, I know that really well from my agency experience. When you guys started the agency and you were getting this work.

Kevin Mooney (37:19.583)
What were the offerings? it just design work? And then obviously strategy comes in. you're like, okay, we have a framework now. Did you narrow your offerings from there? Did you kind of start as that jack of all trades? We can do everything. We'll do your social and your website and your branding and all this fun stuff.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (37:40.11)
We were a jack of all trades because because me and Mike's backgrounds were on multimedia design. We never said no to pretty much. We said yes to everything. So I ended up doing a lot of motion graphics, sometimes with photography, sometimes with video. We ended up doing a lot of web design. That was the thing that was really, really the...

Kevin Mooney (37:43.239)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (38:09.838)
really important back then. Again, as an example, like Formosa Group, we started with identity, with strategy, we started, from there was identity, then we did the websites. We ended up doing about nearly 12 different websites for them. And then we did photography of all the different stages and studios, we did video.

I, with a little bit of motion graphics. So we ended up doing everything. whenever a client came in and say, Hey, I need a video for so-and-so. Yeah, we'll do it. We need an interactive website that does this. Okay. Yeah, we'll do it. So, um, I think that was another thing that for me, it was a great experience. Cause I got, I got to try everything and know the ins and outs of every single process. And, know, that reflected today.

Kevin Mooney (38:44.159)
We'll do it.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (39:05.902)
You know, I can, if I have multimedia project, you know, I'll go and I'll get my B-Dragger for my photographer, my animator. I was like, okay, I need this, like this, this, and this, and this. You know, you need to do it in 3D, make sure that it has this, this, this different elements. Don't use this and this material. So I have a lot of knowledge in all the different processes where now I can lead different teams that do just.

different, different, yeah, they just have, you know, artistic expressions and different, parts of the industry. I can understand what they're doing and how they're doing it. And I can give them more concrete feedback. And, know, I just don't think it feels right. said, well, I can look at it from a technical perspective and be like, okay, yeah, let's change that setting, you know, remove this and, you know, or shoot it differently.

Kevin Mooney (39:46.335)
100%.

Kevin Mooney (40:04.851)
Yeah. Yeah, I understand that. Well, when, when I first got started down this path, you know, I was just, I was just a guy who wanted to be in business and this ties into a lot of other things that I have to say, but I don't know if I'll say it all today. Point is that when I got into business, I was like, I don't need anybody else. I can learn this. I can do it. So I became that jack of all trades. I learned graphic design, not formally.

But I learned, I figured out how to use Illustrator and poke at things. And then I learned web design and then I learned web development and.

then whatever else I learned, doesn't really matter what I learned. Point is that that jack of all trades thing is actually kind of fun. When it does come down to do a website and you are the designer on that part of the project, if you know the development side of things, you can either A, design it in a way that the developer knows how to do it, or nowadays with the tools that are so much better like Figma.

You can actually build in the proper padding that you would like in the elements that you want. So now the developer knows the exact. Specs that go into that website. So when I design a website in figma now. I'm doing it. I'm doing this translation between design and development, so I'm I'm building it almost like div tags and the proper padding that I would like, and I'm creating these components so then I can.

reuse them on the website and development. And if you don't have that jack of all trades mentality, you don't really know how that goes unless someone formally teaches you down the line. Here's how website design should look. You should build it with margins and paddings and absolute positionings and Z indexes and all that stuff. But I don't know that I don't know that anybody goes that deep anymore.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (42:10.563)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (42:14.975)
especially with AI, they can probably just make it appear. that's an interesting thing. So you guys were the jack of all trades as the agency. And I'm curious if towards the end of its life, did you guys narrow that down into like a couple of core services or did you stay the jack of all trades?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (42:39.738)
We did start to narrow down a little bit more. I think we started focusing a little bit more on branding and doing identities and web design. Anything else, like animations, we started using other talent. And it was more of the case that we didn't have the time. Like I just, couldn't, because I was the one designing everything, you know, I couldn't be, you know,

Kevin Mooney (42:49.129)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (43:06.954)
seven hours of my day doing animation, then had to jump into identity work, then jump into some editorial project. we just, okay, like stuff that was much more time consuming, we just handed it to someone else, photography, video, all those other parts.

Kevin Mooney (43:26.089)
Yeah, nice. And now where are you at?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (43:30.144)
Now I try to stick mostly to branding. I do web design, but I don't do development. And depending on the website, I'll pull in either an out designer or pulling a developer. So right now, for example, we're doing a website for a university here, U-ABC. And it's a big.

It's a big, big website with lots of people involved and we're doing it very, very slowly. It's very, very time consuming, not only from the politics side, but also from the design side and trying to stick to a lot of the rules already written in the brand, which unfortunately, the rules that were written maybe like 15 years ago. So...

You have to play a little bit of the game like listen. Yes, I'm not using the exact same color, but this is working better because this and this and this and this reason, you know, I'm not using that stuff. Parfee because it's affecting negatively your communication, you know, so yeah, it's a, but in those cases, when I had to do a website of that scale,

I'll definitely make it at a longer timeline. So I have time to do a lot of explanation, a lot of education. But mostly I try to stick to strategy and branding.

Kevin Mooney (45:06.335)
Yeah, and rather than being in LA and having larger clients like Nestle, you're in Ensenada and you're designing, you're doing the same level of work in a small town.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (45:20.856)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (45:23.241)
Talk to me about that. I think I have some things to say about it as well, but I want to know what it's like because actually, what's the population of Ensenada?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (45:34.126)
I think last time we were around 350 by now is probably near 500,000 people. It's small. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (45:46.431)
So yeah, it's funny that you say it's small because the town that I live in is like 120,000.

So it is smaller than LA. So what is the experience like there and that transition from having an agency in LA to being an Ensenada? And there's pricing difference in there as well.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (46:13.038)
Yeah, there's a lot. OK, I can go very deep into this subject and kind of envelope other parts. So I'm going to go back a little bit to my sort of life objectives, And I'm guessing that this is a

Kevin Mooney (46:36.166)
yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (46:40.386)
This might be very similar to many other people's life objectives of wanting to leave something behind, right? Like before I go, I want to leave my footprint somewhere, you know? And that's definitely always been my big prerogative. was like, I want to do something good for people. I want to do something good for my town. There's a lot of issues here as any town in Mexico.

but it's always been like, okay, well, if I ever go back to Mexico, I want to do something that's going to affect, you know, the culture is going to affect the industry is going to affect whatever. so when I came back and I was like, I had all this knowledge that nobody really had here. my idea was like, okay, well, I want to implement, you know, this really great design into.

businesses and studios and all this kind of stuff and it was incredibly difficult because you just hit wall after wall after wall after wall after wall and it's due because the mentality of a small town is very different and it's already is very conservative and they're resistant to change and I think it's also just part of the culture here.

So I found I found it exceedingly difficult and I feel a few creatives I really got along with I Tried to teach them and like hey, let's collaborate in a project. Let's you know, there's maybe bring you into something but I always encountered resistance and a lot a lot of it was because It goes run really high here

graphic design being such a new industry in Mexico. Anybody who was doing graphic design was like, you know, they felt like semi gods, know, I'm just walking around like I'm this big person. I'm like, dude, you're just a designer, man. Just chill out. So I

Kevin Mooney (48:50.367)
Hahaha

Kevin Mooney (48:56.649)
Sir.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (49:01.39)
Needless to say, I didn't get along with a lot of designers here. I think I made enemies fairly quick. In me trying to be like, hey, hey, look at this, man. Look at strategy. And was like, what the fuck? Get out of here. Yeah. And then trying to charge my rates from LA into a small town here in Mexico. I everybody was just looking at me like, why am I going to pay you $1,000?

Kevin Mooney (49:05.022)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (49:13.071)
Yeah. What are you talking about? What the fuck is this?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (49:30.894)
for something, you It was incredibly difficult. So I had to learn to navigate my quotes. So I had to really lower them or really be able to explore different ways that we can get payments through. So for example, if I charged $1,000 for a client, I would like, okay, let's just make payments of $100.

Kevin Mooney (50:00.262)
Mm Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (50:00.302)
And even that was like, Oh my God, dude, you're breaking the bank. was like, dude, it's just a hundred bucks. But you know, it's, but it is difficult here. It's like, there's, you know, people make from 300 to $500 a month. You get it. It's very difficult. And that's not the case for, for, for everything. There's definitely people who make a lot of, a lot more money, but it's either jobs.

Kevin Mooney (50:05.32)
Right, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (50:15.007)
Sure.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (50:29.708)
that they've been there for many, many, many years or their brand new industries or the industries that have been around for a long time. Regardless of like, it's always been the case that they don't want to make the spend in something that they don't understand. And it hasn't been until this last few years that that has started to shift. know, design has become a much bigger thing here in Ensenada. There's been a lot more designers.

Kevin Mooney (50:45.651)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (50:59.394)
that designers are coming out right now. they're, they're finally understanding strategy. They're finally starting to kind of narrow down like their own style. the designers that were coming out when I came back into the United States, they finally mature enough to be like, okay, you know, they're doing now really good work now. see it. was like, okay, these guys are finally getting it. Like, these guys are really better.

And now clients are starting to pay more like the rates in San Diego and LA They're starting to pay a lot more for design because it's finally been understood that design is a key part of your business.

Kevin Mooney (51:48.991)
Sure. I was curious, I was curious really quick about, mean, I don't know how to say this, but it's like.

Growing up in America, you're just...

I mean, there is a privilege at some level and the way that we think about business, the way that we think about money, the way that we think about these wants and needs. And, you know, here in the States, if you want to run a business nowadays, you need design and you need strategy and you need brand, need social media, you need all of these things.

My assumption is that in Mexico, you need to just be open for people to buy things from you as a business, right? You don't necessarily need all of those branding things. it's from what you're telling me is that that is starting to shift a little bit where maybe businesses are more stable and they are looking to differentiate and stand out and get more.

That's just an interesting economic difference between the two areas. And when you have a little bit more room and flexibility from an economic standpoint, what do you spend your money on? Do you spend money on growth or do you spend money on marketing or do you shift it back to design and strategy? Where does it go? And it sounds like design and strategy is happening a little bit more there.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (53:33.838)
Funs. Funs. Good fun.

Kevin Mooney (53:33.995)
what's that? Yes. Yes. Fonts got it. So they want new fonts. That's the thing. Interesting. I mean, that's, that's really cool. That's gotta be a hard shift because in the States, everybody already knows they need it. So the demand for our services is already relatively high. And then you're always going to deal with the people who really know what they're talking about and the people who just need the thing.

Just give me the thing I need to keep going with my business. Do you feel like there's a little bit more heart in Ensenada right now where they do care about that deep connection and maybe the cultural history in their business because it's been around for a while. That's why they like that strategy component.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (54:26.606)
They're starting to. They're definitely starting to. It's still new. But what's happening is there's a lot of people that come from the States or they come from Europe and other places. They learn something new and they bring it into Mexico. And that's always been the case with a lot of people from Mexico have done that.

Kevin Mooney (54:46.591)
Mmm.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (54:54.19)
I think we all have that in common, whereas we want to go and learn and become experts somewhere else and bring it back to our country and really try to better it because we know that it needs it. And what I've seen personally is that happening. So for example, a lot of the coffee shops, lot of breweries, a lot of small businesses, restaurants, they've taken concepts from other places around the world and they, okay, let's build it here.

And let's build it differently. And the older businesses that have been around for the last 50 years that have never changed, they're like, my God, I need to adapt. Yeah, because many of them have already closed. And the ones that are still around, it's just because they still have a lot of those old clients that come in and keep them alive.

Kevin Mooney (55:36.265)
We have to do something.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (55:51.182)
they're being taken over by younger brands. So some of them are adapting. Some of them are now opening up to like, okay, teach me design, teach me strategy, teach me this stuff because I need to survive. And it's interesting.

Kevin Mooney (56:08.327)
That's interesting. I feel like.

Kevin Mooney (56:15.423)
feel like in the US, all the small businesses are trying to adopt what the big businesses are doing. And what you just described is the big businesses are like, shit, if we don't change, all these small businesses are gonna take over. So it's kind of inversed on how it's doing. It feels a little bit more like an organic movement. I like that.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (56:35.501)
I think.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (56:39.163)
I think that's healthy, healthy capitalism.

Kevin Mooney (56:43.847)
Yeah, that's cool.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (56:45.27)
And that's, you know, essentially that's how it is, right? Either you change or, you know, you adapt or you die. And it's interesting seeing it here in a small scale because like, okay, new businesses come in, new ideas, fresh, you know, sort of perspectives. And then the older ones are like, my God, we need to do something about it. Otherwise we're going to die. And some of them, stick to their guns and they just maybe change their image and it works. And other ones.

Kevin Mooney (57:07.241)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (57:14.636)
completely go under. And yeah, I think it's definitely like the inverse from the States, right? Like everybody over there, there's a very, very clear line of like corporations who are incredibly difficult to die and then small businesses that most of them die. So,

Kevin Mooney (57:21.769)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (57:36.669)
Yeah. Even the medium businesses can die overnight. They can die.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (57:41.366)
Yeah. And here it's here is the other way around. It's the smaller ones are taken over. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (57:48.393)
Wow. That's really cool, actually. I like that.

Do you notice any trends in the which industries are moving first in this direction with some new design, with some strategy, with some new application websites, things like that?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (58:12.396)
You know, well, because because it's in Teneda, I think mostly it's the food industry that's really taken off. Like they're really doing something different. And the reason is that a lot of the universities here have a culinary culinary art as a career. And there's a lot of chefs that graduate, a lot of cooks, a lot of so that the

The food industry is huge and it's amazingly good. It's incredibly difficult to lose weight here. It's not just the tacos, it's everything. But you have all these really young kids that are coming out with these different ideas or some of them are pretty well traveled.

Kevin Mooney (58:46.601)
awesome.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (59:06.338)
and they come back and like, I'm gonna do a fusion of this, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna make Chinese food different, I'm gonna... And they do really interesting projects and they really, really beautiful restaurants. And some of them do last a long time, some of them do die, but it's always new ones coming out every year, every year. If you stop going out for three months, all of a sudden there's 10 new restaurants or five new coffee shops.

Kevin Mooney (59:32.905)
Wow.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (59:35.53)
Now there's like matcha bars coming out. It's like, it's all kinds of stuff. the, the, the full industry here is huge.

Kevin Mooney (59:43.027)
Yeah, so food and beverage is kind of the first mover on this and do they actively reach out to you or are you reaching out to them? Are you trying to network your way into like, hey, who's leaving culinary school? Hey, can we work together?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (59:46.51)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (59:59.022)
No, so, know, it's still very much through references. Like I mentioned, because it is a small city, a small town, there's still this idea of businesses going to the older sort of designers, designers that have been around for a long time that had never learned strategy or they don't really understand it as well as somebody younger.

they end up overcharging the small businesses and create a brand that's not really well connected to their audience. So that's something that happens very, very often here. But I have seen a small shift in people really looking for new designers. And I think that's where I've been coming in lately.

where people are starting to see my work because I spent many years always in different coffee shops and making a lot of friends and going to breweries and stuff like that. People recognize me. And the only difference with me is that I never push my services on anybody. So I never go out and the first thing that comes out of my mouth, I'm a graphic designer. Do you need help? One of the coffee shops that I did

a brand for. I spent years going to a coffee shop. They were really good friends. We go to the house, we play Catan, we do all the kind of stuff. it took a long time from them meeting me to me doing their brand. So I think the way that I do things here in Ensenada is that I try to build a relationship before I do anything. And I know sometimes, you know, their brands are like,

to change that, But it's always come naturally where it's like, hey, Mauro, you're a designer, right? Yeah. Can you help me? I like, yeah. Yeah, let's put something together.

Kevin Mooney (01:01:59.188)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:02:11.177)
You're like, I've been waiting for years for this moment. Thank you.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:02:13.518)
Something like that. But I think it's always been the case of like, I never tried to be pushing. I never tried to be like, dude, you need new design. hey man, you need new photography. So I always try to come in with a lot of respect, respect what they have. If they ever, you know, have the need or if I hear over here, know, hey, we need something new. It's like,

You know, do the same. You know, I just kind of poke my head around and I'll do like a quick mention, but I never go out of my way to really be like, hey, you know, here.

Kevin Mooney (01:02:56.029)
Yeah, it's it's interesting. I'm learning some of this as you talk, and I'm also learning it outside of this conversation. When I when I was signed on by this this doctor's office to do this work. I asked for a lot of money and I asked for a long timeline to do it all, but I had known this doctor and I've been a patient of this doctor for.

five years and I had this hesitation to take the work because I didn't want to ruin the relationship that we had. really, I really liked that relationship and I liked that I could literally pick up the phone and call my doctor when I had the accident with my daughter and it was chaos.

and my wife is on a helicopter with the kid flying up to Portland and I'm driving behind them. I'm on the phone with my doctor and I'm talking to this person very personally and I didn't want to ruin that with business. But if you had asked me.

I'll be generous. Four years ago or further back, it was business, baby. It was all work. It was all about the income. was all about, don't get me wrong. I formed the relationship with clients during that time and I really enjoyed that because I like talking. I like going deep with people and understanding them and their past, their desires, their future states, whatever, all that fun stuff. but it was business.

first and in the last couple of years, as I've switched in my career path, as I've matured, as I've gotten older, I'm looking at it more like relationship first and that business part second. And it's very gratifying and it's, I've told this story before. I don't know where I told it, but I told it somewhere. When I,

Kevin Mooney (01:05:07.945)
presented this identity to this client, they cried. And I had never experienced anything like that before. I've always had pushback and I'm kind of going all over the place and weaving around here, but you know, the, the struggle in the agency world was going from the things that we knew in our head and the things that they had told us to that first design concept.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:05:23.778)
Right,

Kevin Mooney (01:05:37.949)
You know, to not having to pay team members to go back through and iterate and have V1 V2 V3 V4 final final V2 V4. You know all of that stuff. I did one mark for this practice. And I did. I didn't even do a mood board and I didn't do concepts. I made the mark and I.

put it in context, you I applied it to a couple of things and I went like this and I showed him, I showed her and her and her assistant cried and I told them just a brief story. didn't create a big PowerPoint presentation or a slide deck. just, as I showed them a couple of pages of the application of it and I told them a quick story, they just were in tears and it was part the connection that

I had made to the mark to them, but it was also this connection that they didn't know how to express from themselves. They were like, this, this hits so close to home and it's everything that we want. We just would have never gotten there without the process that we went through and you, you making that and you understanding us, but that ties back into that relationship. First, I knew that

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:06:39.747)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:07:05.823)
three or four years ago, like, this place would be so much better if it looked like this, because that's who they really are. But if I had approached them in the first year that I was a patient there, it might not have gone this way and gone so smooth. So I really appreciate that and hearing your story and hearing you say that exact same thing, it's like, no, that's the right move.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:07:12.514)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:07:32.364)
Yeah. No, it is. It is. And I've seen it, think, proven several times here in Ensenada, which is Corvus, namely, was one. Corvus and Navi, those two are the same client. Both times that I did the brand, the owners cried. And Corvus was a really very special client.

because that brand started as a memorial for their son. And throughout the entire process, I got to know the owners really, really, really, really well and in a really close way. And their son used to be an artist. He used to draw and sketch and he used to be really good.

And I remember the owner, Samuel, he came in one day with his sketchbooks. And he's like, look, I want you to look at the sketchbooks so you can, you know, kind of be inspired. I started going through and tears started, you know, running down my eyes. And it was because I could see, you know, a lot of frustration, lot of sadness, a lot of things that were in those sketches. And

It was something really, really, really powerful and something that I did not expect. And as I was working in this project, it was really interesting because I felt like I really tapped into something different. When I showed the final project with everything, they absolutely loved it.

Samuel was really teared up and after that brand we decided to do a video to go along with it. So we put together a film and I wrote the film, I directed it, I did everything alongside with my guitarographer and it was never really meant to be like a commercial. From a marketing standpoint it was a failure.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:09:58.446)
But from artistic point, it was this gorgeous piece. Yeah, and it was all about artistic expression, about the brand being at the forefront of creativity. And it was this very abstract piece. Now that I think back into it, I don't look at it as necessarily as a failure from a marketing side.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:01.883)
Masterpiece, yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:10:26.495)
It really was like this standalone piece that did not have to have anything to do with the brand. It was just a way to really honouring, I think, the brand and honouring the message of the brand. And it had nothing to do with marketing. It was just this really beautiful piece. And it was tears all around.

Kevin Mooney (01:10:53.459)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:10:55.914)
It was interesting because we really, know, dove into something that was really unknown. I, ever since I did that brand, I've been trying to recapture that. And I tried to really have a good relationship with my clients and really try to pick at, you know, their thought process, you know, their emotions. So for me, it's whenever I do strategy.

Kevin Mooney (01:11:06.662)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:11:20.974)
I have to have them with the cameras. have to be looking at them. I have to be looking at their reaction. So for me, a lot of the strategy is extrapolated from their visual cues. Like whatever it is that they do is like, okay, I'm going the right way. I'm not going the right way. You know, I'll throw a joke in here and there, or I'll start kind of going into more of a personal side of them to really be able to extract those emotions.

Kevin Mooney (01:11:34.271)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:11:42.761)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:11:50.976)
And sometimes it works, sometimes it's amazing. Sometimes the work that comes out is highly, highly emotional and really close to their hearts. And they're like, my God, this is incredible. You know, this is not just the logo. Like, this is my story. And hearing that is immensely gratifying.

Kevin Mooney (01:12:04.201)
Yes.

It's awesome. It's so good. It's it is the best addiction ever. you know the I've had I've had clients both in my freelance journey and my agency journey. And now whatever I'm doing, whatever I call myself who have liked the identities, they've liked it. They thought it was pretty. They thought it was cool. Whatever. But I've only had one client that I've connected with.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:12:13.325)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:12:36.499)
the way that you're describing it. It's that medical practice and that I don't want to do anything for anybody else unless it's like that because I mean, it just, again, this is, and maybe it's different because maybe it's different because you're in Ensenada and that cultural piece plays into it a little bit more in America, right? Business is business and everyone just wants to

fucking make their gold mine and get out, right? And, people are telling me I do brand strategy now. Okay, I'll do it. I gotta do social now, you know, so they just, people just want their things. But I think that that is.

That is the client that I want now. I want that client who just.

They're like, I have a story to tell. I don't know how to pull it all together. I want to be vulnerable. I want to get naked. I want to pull my pants down, all that stuff and just share everything about it. You know, we've talked about that in the circle. those are the people that I want to work with and I want to partner with. So hearing that story from you is, is awesome. I'm happy you shared it.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:13:41.346)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:13:53.026)
Yeah. think, you know, and that puts me, think, a, well, it makes me think, you know, how the industry is shifting yet again right now. Right. And there's the ones that are, there's some designers and agencies are all about the money. You know, I'm going to charge a hundred thousand. I'm going to make this incredible piece of work.

It's like, okay, that's cool. It looks like everything else, but sure. But now, you know, I think there's a big cultural shift where it's like, no, now it's all about relationships. You know, for a time it was all about conversations in social media. And it was like, it was all built around conversation. And now it's, I think it's much more than just emotions. Now it's about relationships. And you want to have this like close relationship with your client because it's...

Kevin Mooney (01:14:44.925)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:14:50.702)
is what really affects design in a positive way. It's not just pretty images now. It's like, okay, am I really telling their story? Am I really telling, am I really gonna connect? I think the brand needs to feel like a person. needs to feel like when somebody goes into a store, it's just like, oh my God, this guy gets me. This brand gets me.

Kevin Mooney (01:14:54.132)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:12.851)
Yep. Do you have you done a lot of strategy work in the past and realized either very quickly or towards the end of the process that these people have no soul. They don't give a shit about it. They're just going through the motions, all those things.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:15:31.426)
Yeah, I've had those. Yeah. You know where I've encountered that as of late? It's in the tech industry. I feel the tech industry is just dead. It's absolutely startups and tech industries are some of the worst places. Yes, yes, they have no feeling.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:45.225)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:15:54.751)
Soulless Monsters.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:16:01.012)
And they're stale, they're boring, incredibly difficult to brand because you can't get anything out of them. And they end up wanting to just look like a cookie cutter brand, right? Like just like the next person, just like the next person. So it's hard. It's hard to sell them on a new idea. It's hard to sell them. like, dude, just talk about relationships. Let's talk about your experiences. Let's talk about emotions, right?

And tech is it's unbelievably cold. So I think that.

Kevin Mooney (01:16:31.294)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:16:35.485)
Yeah, it is. I've been told by tech people in the past, like, you brand people. You guys are all the same. You just say all these words. You think it's meaningful. They don't think that there's any real strategy and tangible metrics that can come out of brand work.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:16:59.438)
My answer to them has always been five years.

Kevin Mooney (01:17:02.931)
Yeah. See you in five years or, or not.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:17:05.558)
I'll see you in five years. Yeah, exactly. So I was like, okay, cool. You got a few years on runway.

Kevin Mooney (01:17:09.288)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:17:13.725)
And I think that some of them, I think some of them can make it without any brand work. They can just put pretty things up and they can say shit. and I think some of them can make it. And the ones that do make it are the ones that are really good at what they do. And they are listening to their customers and they're providing them the right features and the right tools for them. I think you can, you can make it all the way.

without doing brand stuff if you're doing all those other things right.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:17:48.11)
I think the tech brands that are going to survive are the ones that are going to be helping people. Those tech startups that really understand their culture, that really understand their users, and that they're there because they want to help, not because they want to put out a nice little message and get another $15 million in their pockets.

Kevin Mooney (01:17:56.209)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:18:11.433)
Make money.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:18:17.612)
You know, it's the people who are legitimately, okay, we really want to help our culture, our community, you know, and do that through tech. And that's, those are the ones that I'm like, okay, yeah, I admire this guy. I'm gonna, and I'm going to work with him. But the rest of them, mostly they're just looking for the next, you know, their next grant, their next, you know, injection of income.

Kevin Mooney (01:18:32.18)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:18:42.281)
Yup. A hundred percent. I mean, in our industry, we have a lot of software. We have a lot of tech and one of the biggest hurdles for me in the agency and maybe now, but maybe not so much anymore is CRM project management workflow software. And I've gone through everything under the sun. I've used a sauna.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:18:51.021)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:19:12.019)
I've used Monday, I've used Notion, I don't know what else I've used, Slack, all those things, right? And they're all just weird and disconnected and it's just like patched together. And I use this one software right now, I won't mention the name, but it is the closest thing that I have seen to a one-stop shop for CRM, project management.

communication tool, client dashboard tool. And it's not super expensive, but I pay for it annually and I got it and I spent the time to set it all up. And you realize that they don't know, they don't know the industry that they're serving or they're trying to serve too many industries. Cause I understand that this, this tool can be used for photographers.

animators, web designers and developers, branding agencies, you know, it can be across the board, but they just don't deeply understand their customers enough to know what tools they need. It just like, just scratches the surface where you're like, I kind of need this tool. I kind of want this tool. It's got pretty branding.

but it just doesn't get me there. And you're like, I'm this close to dropping them and going back to fricking Google sheets and just the cheap free things. Cause why do you pay all this money to these places and spend the time to learn the software and build it out? So you have the workflows that work best for you. And then you're just like, they don't have this one tool that I need or

the insight and I'll just say it. One of the things that I'm looking for is on the forms feature. If somebody is going to go through my form and drop off, I want to know where they're being where they're dropping off. I just need some insight and they they're like, no, that's not something that we care about here. It's not on our roadmap. It's never going to be on the roadmap. And you're like,

Kevin Mooney (01:21:30.303)
Why not? Don't you care about me? I'm paying you. I am one of your customers. What are you talking about? You don't want to do that.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:21:37.379)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:21:41.688)
by joining in on the top tier subscription.

Kevin Mooney (01:21:45.979)
Okay. I'm, I'm one, one tier down, but you know, and, they, and they have one of those community forums where you can go on there. I'll tell you another story. And I will blast them on this. Cause this fucking piss me off. But the point is they have a community forum that you can go on there and you can ask questions. You can talk and, I go in there and ask questions and it's just this, this kind of bullshitty answer type stuff.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:21:46.062)
You

Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:22:15.273)
They just kind of kick you down the road. we'll think about that. You know, if you're making a software for branding agencies and graphic designers and photographers, and I'm not, I don't have full control over the way my, my type is displayed on my forms. I'm pissed off. At least give me some CSS controls where I can manipulate it and make it my own. Nope. We're not going to do that. We don't think it's important. Well, guess what? It's very important to me.

to stay on brand as you go through my flow. But here's one of the things that they did. Their forms are quite beautiful. And at the very bottom of it, it would say powered by and their name. And when I first signed up, it was this big, right? Little tiny thing and it was gray. And it was just like.

Opacity was dropped just a little bit, so it was like pretty unnoticeable. One day I open up my form and below my form is a full page advertisement for this company with a big giant banner image. And then the words down below say, if you enjoy this experience, refer a friend and Kevin will get.

25 % kickback or whatever the language was. And I blew my fucking top. And I went on the community forum and I blasted them and I was like, this is so fucked up that you are advertising for your own company on my website. It's like I felt so invaded and.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:23:46.381)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:23:53.39)
you

Kevin Mooney (01:24:08.273)
Like somebody had broken into my house and slept with my wife. It was just dirty. I hated it. And it took, it took me raising a stink in that community for, I don't know, maybe a month before, before they decided to make the change. And then what they did is they took it from a full page ad and they made it a half page ad. And then I just kept bitching and bitching and bitching. And finally it's back to this thing, but now it's in color.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:24:12.95)
Yeah. Yeah.

God, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:24:37.843)
So people will see it. I'm just like, this is not how you do business. This is just tech being tech and sneaky and you have zero heart. You don't give a shit about your customers. And I was so fucking mad.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:24:44.916)
Exactly.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:24:53.1)
Yeah, that's, it's always been the case of like, what's going to make us the next dollar, right? The next big money. So it's, yeah, it's incredibly infuriating. And, you know, I, one of the, think one of the worst offenders is when they, when you go into serve into technical service, technical service help, and you're like, dude, I'm having issues with this, this one thing and you got a robot and I'm just like,

Kevin Mooney (01:24:58.559)
Mm-hmm.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:25:22.862)
God damn it, I'm not going to stay here for 30 minutes waiting for this stupid robot to understand that it doesn't understand anything that I need and I'll just like, I'll spam, talk to human, talk to human, talk to human, talk to human, I'll just spam that shit out of it until a natural person shows up and is like, hey, hi, hi, hi, I'm sorry. I see you're having problems, but like, yeah. All right, now let me explain how you can help me.

Kevin Mooney (01:25:36.798)
Yes.

Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:25:44.537)
Kevin Mooney (01:25:51.6)
Right, let me tell you how you can help me.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:25:53.134)
I do that all the time. And I was just like, spam, just like, talk to human, talk to human until somebody shows up. I like, I refuse to use AI. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:26:01.246)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's, you know, that whole AI thing is, is interesting. You know, you, you feel like by resisting, you feel like you're the person who didn't want to get the internet or the cell phone or something. Right. I feel like, you know, my dad or my grandparents, I'm not putting one of those stupid things in my pocket, you know, but on the S on the same.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:26:28.045)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:26:34.963)
Well, I guess on the other side of the argument, you're like.

I don't want to do it, I have to figure out how to implement it somewhere, somehow. And what is my ethical side of that coin, right? Where do I stop and say, it's not going to do all that stuff for me.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:26:48.098)
There's

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:26:51.747)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:26:55.31)
I think it's a slippery slope. You don't want to be Grandpa Simpson screaming at clouds, right? You don't want to be that guy. But at the same time, you also want to adapt at least at some level. My biggest gripe with AI is the fact that it's...

It's a probability generator. It doesn't understand. It's an incredibly stupid machine. It's just giving you probabilities. It is just an algorithm. That's all it is. ChatGPT algorithm is not going to tell you everything. It's not going to be accurate. So whenever I see somebody using ChatGPT, I grill that shit out of them. And I was like, dude, I don't know what the fuck you're doing. Go read a goddamn article.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:27:51.38)
And, you know, and I, and I do use ChatGPT And I use it sparingly, you know, sometimes I use it for strategy when I'm like, okay, you know what? Take the content from this website, take my strategy, distill the information. Let me take a look at it, correct you where I need to correct you. And then just help me create some copy. And then I had to revise it myself. but that's, that's, you know, I utilize it strictly as a tool just to distill information because that's.

It's good at that. It's not giving me correct information about most anything. But I think it's a matter of...

Kevin Mooney (01:28:22.388)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:28:34.062)
As a matter of ethics, when it comes to AI, think it's understanding where you can use it, how you can use it. My wife, for example, she uses it to do post-production for her renders. Generally, that's because one, we don't have the time to do post-production. Two, it's just, sometimes we just need to get stuff out really quick. And it's like, okay, let's throw it onto Sora. And it's just like, hey, just...

do a basic cleanup, fix the lighting, make it look natural. And it does a good job at it. We start to go in and fix stuff, but it's fair enough. And it's just good enough that we can send it out. think my gripe lines in the people that think that this is the absolute future and they use it for everything. I, I, fortunately, I know some like studios that they're fully into it. Like, and to me it's crazy. It's like, dude,

Kevin Mooney (01:29:15.753)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:29:34.126)
Have you, did you not go to school? Did you not learn anything in the past 15 years? And now you're like fully getting into AI to do everything that you already know how to do. You're not providing any value. You're just recycling, recycling information from somewhere else and remixing it and giving it to your client. I was like, that's not worth what you're charging.

Kevin Mooney (01:29:36.713)
Hahaha

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:30:02.646)
So I think it's really understanding the human side and how to incorporate AI just to make it a little bit better, not to replace it. And that's what's the horrible thing right now is just like, it's got no guardrails right now. I love the cat meme stuff. Like I love that stuff.

Kevin Mooney (01:30:11.454)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:30:25.599)
Yeah, yeah, I love I love the Yeti, you know, videos, right? Drinking beer, jumping out of airplanes. You're like, cool for entertainment value it provides.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:30:32.397)
Bye-bye.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:30:38.098)
Exactly, but then you have the ethical side of it where it's You know, okay, so I just wasted you know, a hundred gallons of fresh water You look at a stupid cat video About you know a fat cat going through the holes. It's like okay. Well if that cost about you know, maybe a hundred trees and God knows how much gallons of water just to create that stupid thing so then

Kevin Mooney (01:31:02.143)
Right.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:31:07.328)
It's a matter of like, do I really want to consume this? Like, yes, it's fun. Yes, it's a nice little dopamine hit, but this is costing us everything. And as the next generation and people don't realize how much this is costing us. It's its turnable to see.

Kevin Mooney (01:31:14.889)
Sure.

Kevin Mooney (01:31:19.005)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:31:27.58)
Yeah.

I'm super interested, Amit Shetty said this to me in our show not too long ago. We were talking about Gen Z and I guess Gen Alpha technically, but more specifically Gen Z and I don't have a ton of experience with Gen Z. And I was curious from his perspective if...

I'm going to tie this into AI. If this was not a question I asked him, but I'm tying it in now, if they are going to be huge users and consumers of AI and the way that he kind of answered the question in that conversation was like, you have to think about this generationally. You know, our parents, they had to work really hard just to survive the next generation.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:32:01.955)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:28.861)
You know, they still had to work hard, but they had some some new things, right? Our generation comes in. Most of the groundwork was already done for us. We just had this new technology to play with, and we've created insane things with it. Their generation already has everything figured out for them. They don't have to do anything. They just open up the phone and it's right there. Whatever they want.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:32:56.056)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:32:57.627)
And the way that he answered after that was like the things that they care about now are way more in line with what we're talking about. They're talking about human connection and they want to be understood and they want to be heard. It's not so much about producing things and building industry and things like that. It's more about that in-person experience.

And so I'm wondering from your perspective, perspective, if you think that they will be users of these, of these tools, or if this is just our generation still being fucking crazy and exploring with technology, is that generation going to go back to some of the older time things where they, they want relationship based stuff. They want to spend time with people. They want to meet with people, or are they just going to consume this AI shit and be, you know,

half of their brain's gonna be gone all day.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:33:59.392)
No, so this is something that I learned from architecture and from interior design and in science right now I've been looking at it in design. But this happens in life. Life is cyclical. Life is absolutely cyclical. It's a circle. It goes back, it goes back, it goes back, it goes back. And every time that it goes back, it's new. And it has its connections to the past.

but it's remixed with new technology, new ideas, new philosophies, Minimalism came back in a big way. Now it's going away. Now it's maximalism. Then it's kind of something else. Then, know, 50s comes back and it's new and it's brand and it's different. Then the 70s come back and it's like, my God, 70s were so amazing. So I think you see that in every aspect of life.

to to brands, to communication. I think generationally, you do see it. When I see, for example, my son, my son is 11 years old. Now he's gonna buy his new iPad. That's interesting. There's different ways of looking at this, right?

It can be controversial to say, know, yeah, I get my kid an iPad. How could you, you know? You know, they're rotting their brains. Yes. But you have to also respect the other side of this is their generation and they are the digital generation. These kids grew up already with a chip of like they take a phone and they understand how to do everything. And

Kevin Mooney (01:35:25.353)
Sure, yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:35:48.318)
So you can't really take that away because it is part of their culture, it's part of their mentality. Yeah, they're wired differently now. But you have to now restrict a lot more. Now you have to set limits. You have to understand what they're capable of doing with that iPad and understand that you can block things until certain

Kevin Mooney (01:35:57.757)
wiring. Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:36:17.802)
stages in their life and so they can understand certain certain themes they can understand certain certain certain technologies or certain things so for example with my son he's had his ipad for about a year like freely and he uses it for for video games but he has no ability to talk to anybody no video chatting no whatsapp no chatting with anybody anywhere

And I know that as soon as he starts to grow up, was like, okay, now you can chat. Now you can do this. Now you can do this other thing. But he needs to get to the mature age. And now, you know, he's a lot more responsible. I think if I would have done this, you know, a few years ago, if he was in the iPad, he wouldn't drop it. He wouldn't be listening to me. Now, you know,

since he started to mature now after nine, 10, you if I tell him, clean your room, he puts the iPad down immediately. And that's what I ask him. So it's never been a case now of like, he's not doing his homework, he's failing, he's doing whatever. No, he does everything he needs to do and his price is tied with his iPad. And as he progresses, he gets more access.

Kevin Mooney (01:37:28.489)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:37:39.005)
Yeah, yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:37:44.47)
So, you know, that's the way that we are handling that. know there's parents that say, not until you're 15, not until you're 18. But my perspective in that is like, well, you're sort of cutting off their tech literacy. And they do need that tech literacy because it is part of the generation. When they grow up and they're in high school or college and they don't know how to use a computer, they're going to be the only one, only one that has no idea how things work.

Kevin Mooney (01:38:10.751)
Yeah, way behind.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:38:15.022)
So it's a balance, right? You don't know exactly where they need to start and where they need to stop, but you have to fill it out.

Kevin Mooney (01:38:27.219)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I do hope, I mean, we do the same stuff and our boys going to be nine this January and.

The stride between eight and nine to nine and 10 is a big, big difference. If he had his iPad full time at eight, which he had more often than maybe I would like, but he still had it, he was just a little shithead, right? You can't get him off the damn thing. And now it's a lot different, even if it's just the TV or something or another, right? It's like, okay, I'll put it down. I'll go brush my teeth and...

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:38:45.24)
Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:38:59.725)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:39:10.537)
Vaughn and I I have to I I was raised by parents who were like no not until you're this you can make your own decisions when you move out right and I don't want to do that with my kids but it's still like in my blood right because that's how I was raised but I guess what I'm saying is that

Kevin Mooney (01:39:34.815)
man, I'm going to tie in a very weird thought and then.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:39:38.274)
We still have to circle back to the original.

Kevin Mooney (01:39:42.193)
Yes, yes. The weird thought is this when I was growing up, even like in my teens and early 20s and like drinking became a thing and you knew the kids in high school who didn't drink because they would go out. I'm sorry who weren't allowed to drink. They would be the ones that went out to parties and got obliterated right and they'd take their clothes off.

And they were just doing all kinds of things. But the kids who, who drank or their parents allowed them or turned it, turned a cheek to it. They were just kind of like, this is a part of what we do. And so that same belief goes into this thing. Like let the kid have the devices because when they are older, they're not going to be like, it's my first time. And they just like, they, you know, they, they have this

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:40:39.063)
And call over.

Kevin Mooney (01:40:39.207)
reaction to it where they don't know what to do. They over consume and then they're not going to their job because they're staring at an iPad. Let them do it when they're 10 fine. You know when they're 18 they're going to be like I've been doing this for 18 or eight years. So it's that type of mentality.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:40:53.102)
It's always, I think it's always about setting the limits with kids, always setting limits. And even as an adult, learning to put yourself, you know, put limits on yourself and other people and your relationships, right? Um, was hugely important, uh, not to go into a whole other thing. think circling back to the original idea of, um, life in source cyclical.

Kevin Mooney (01:41:05.204)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:41:22.862)
interesting thing I actually watched a video about Starbucks and how they're crashing and they they don't know what what to do at this point and but they started exactly where they should have started right we're creating relationships creating you know this communities around coffee and it was great and Starbucks was this amazing brand and

It was for many, many years now it's starting to become more political. It's starting to be, you know, they're union busting. They're doing all these awful things. They're starting to forget their audience just to make a dollar, right? Just to make a little bit more money. I think if it doesn't die, they're going to have to go back.

Kevin Mooney (01:42:07.167)
Mm-hmm.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:42:20.398)
And they're going to have to understand that like, went through the corporate thing, we did the whole thing. Now we need to circle back to like, okay, no, we need to start treating people, right? We need to start treating our workers, right? And, you know, and you see it in different, in different brands. There's brands that have done their sort of refresh and they go back to their original objectives. You know, I think, and that's when, uh, that's when a rebrand is done, right? You know, there's studios.

that look at the brand as a whole and they extract the original strategy, their objectives, how they got started and they're like, let's go back to that. And they do a fantastic job of like redirecting the focus of this giant corporations like dude, it's right there, your answer is right there. Let's just go back to that. And it's really interesting. It's really kind of refreshing to see when good studios do that. I was like, dude, yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:43:01.033)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:43:19.144)
Right.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:43:20.108)
Like, and you know, I think that's nice sort of segue into, I think maybe like the ethics of design and that sense of responsibility. know, I view design as this incredibly important part of life, not just because I do it, but because it is...

so monumentally important in every aspect of business and in really be able to define how to connect with your audience, with your demographics, with your inner soul. think brands are hugely important. think you have to look at it from a design perspective. You have to respect other people around you.

And as designers, we have that ability to look in depth within a brand that has so many connections to their users and their consumers. I read this in a book, Mike Montato. Designers are the gatekeepers of brands and technology and all these different elements. If we let something bad

Kevin Mooney (01:44:38.833)
Yeah, yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:44:46.594)
through, we made that damage. We created that damage, right? And we affected communities in a negative way. Facebook does this all the time. And I think it's up to us designers to be the ones to say no, to be like, no, I'm not working in that. No, I'm not making that decision. like, you know, it's like if...

I'd rather you fire me than me having to work in or get this thing through the door. And I think we wield this gigantic responsibility. I think there's a lot of designers need to understand the amount of power that we have of influence.

Kevin Mooney (01:45:33.545)
So do you think that there's a big ethics problem in the design community?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:45:42.828)
I think there is now.

Kevin Mooney (01:45:45.789)
What do you think that comes from?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:45:51.838)
I think it comes from the conversations we were having earlier about how it's becoming about just making money. The way that, and I'm going to focus on the United States, know, the way the United States is going right now, outside from politics, you're not going to be able to have a decent life unless you're a millionaire. Exactly.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:00.692)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:46:16.519)
It's already like that. That's why we're all hyper focused on making money and will sacrifice our souls, right? Because it takes you have to make a half a million a year just to, you know, take a weekend off or something like that.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:46:23.178)
Exactly.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:46:31.822)
Exactly. it's, you know, unfortunately, you know, I think it's, it's not necessarily a case that people consciously want to make that decision. I think it's, it's for many of them, it's a necessity. They have to look at it as like, what's the next big project? Next project, I'm going to charge 50,000. Next project, going to charge 100,000. Then the quality goes down, you know.

Payments go up, quality goes down because we need to build more because it's not enough money. So I think a lot of the ethics go out the window and not to fault the workers in Facebook. I think they get paid over $100,000 a year to release bad shit into...

the world and Unfortunately, I think many of them have to they turn a blind eye to the stuff that they're I'm gonna touch this really sensitive part, but ice is a perfect example of that you know, I hate that whole thing but They're getting paid absurd an absurd amount of money they get in their debts Relieved and all this kind of stuff and many of them

They just turned a blind eye. They turned off everything and they just become drones. And, you know, people, there's a lot of hate towards them, well-warranted hate. But also I think if you really try to understand where they're coming from, like it sucks. I'm sure that outside of all the races, all those bad people, there's people in there that are just like, just want to do this for three months. I just want to do this for six months. I just want to...

get my stuff paid and get out of here. I've heard there's people in there like that. And it's sad, it's incredibly depressing. And I think, yeah, I think not only design, I think there's just an ethics problem in general. Unfortunately, design is suffering from it, where now AI is being utilized in every possible place, wherever they can.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:48:55.566)
to make the job faster and charge more. So I think it is a big problem.

Kevin Mooney (01:49:02.761)
Yeah, and it's a big problem. I mean, like what you're saying, it's a big problem outside of design, but you notice it because we're in that industry.

I'm going to ask you a question that I don't think you can answer. How do we fix it?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:49:22.136)
Stick into our guns.

There's no other...

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:49:34.254)
Okay, we've had this conversation about resilience, right? I think I consider myself a incredibly resilient person, especially after everything that I've been through. And I've lived on $20 a week, you know, and I have to pay rent and gas and food and living off like dollar menus for years. And

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:50:04.952)
But one thing that has always been constant in my career and in my life is that I never wavered. I think I always stuck to my guns. I always knew that this is the right direction. This is the one direction that I'm staying in. And I have always stayed open to the possibilities, whatever they may be. So always open to learning.

new skill sets, new perspectives, new philosophies, new whatever. And that's always kept me fairly fresh in my perspectives and my work. And just having that ability to just no matter what happens in life, I'm still gonna stick through it rather than, know, follow them. Like, I'm just gonna become a drone in Facebook or whatever. You know, say, okay.

Now I'm sticking to my guns. And it's difficult. Not everybody can do it. Not everybody has that ability. your hands are absolutely tied and you just have to make a bad decision. But as soon as you're done with it, go back to what your intent was. I think it says a lot when you are

Kevin Mooney (01:51:28.681)
Mm-hmm.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:51:32.898)
consistent in your message and in your objectives that someone else is going to pick up on it. And if you can affect someone else positively, someone else is going to be affected by that person that you affected. And hopefully, you know, that becomes, you know, bigger and bigger. I think that's where it's important to speak out and to, you know,

Be more public about the information that you put out and the work that you put out and make sure that it's always you know It's always responsible. It's always ethical. It's always you know, you're explaining why you did it how you did it Because you want to inspire everybody else and hopefully they're gonna fire follow your example and they can stick through to how they're they're moving through life

Kevin Mooney (01:52:19.231)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:52:25.405)
Yeah, and I think that's the part of the question that it wasn't necessarily clear. It was how do we get everybody else to become a little more ethical? But to be fair, maybe the actions that they take are in line with their ethics and being that drone on on meta is part of their their ethical beliefs, right? And so who am I to say that that is the wrong way?

I just happen to believe that I'm more in line with what you're talking about than the other stuff. And it's stuff that I've been bitching about for a very long time. And it circles back to one of our other topics of, you know, design in a small town for years and years and years. I've been beating this strategy thing down my client's throats and

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:53:04.044)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:53:11.096)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:53:22.153)
part of doing that was so that I could help shift the industry towards we need to be more strategic first and upfront and slow down and think about what we're doing. And then all of sudden it was co-opted by all these other people and now they offer strategy and you're like, now you just diluted all the work that I've been working towards because your version of strategy and, this is

I got to say this lightly. It's just my perception of their strategy, right? Maybe I don't like their translation. Maybe I don't think their translation is correct. Maybe I think they're just. Walking through the process and delivering the answers that the client gave them right and so maybe that's. Maybe that's my my problem to deal with, not theirs, but. You can just.

You can just see, hear, touch and feel something.

that is done right and you know that it's done right. And when I saw your work in the circle, I was like, that guy, that guy knows what he's doing. And he did the right steps and he knows the connection and it was deep and it was impactful and I appreciate that. And I've seen other work that have done the exact same strategy and I'm like, there's none of that. I don't see it, I don't feel it, I don't hear it, I can't taste it.

There's zero connection to any of it, but they might have done the same thing that I would have done. It's just maybe the translation part. So I don't know where the default line is, but I do know that I have my preferences.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:55:14.478)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (01:55:15.923)
Let's just say it like, let's distill it down to that little piece.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:55:19.682)
You know, it's always, know, the sign is always in that it's going to end up being highly subjective no matter what, right? This interesting thing that happens here in Soneta, and I've been noticing this, the more projects I do, is that as soon as I finish a project in equals life, five other projects similar to the one that I did come out.

Kevin Mooney (01:55:47.081)
Really?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:55:49.098)
It happened when I did Corpus, it happened when did Navi, it happened when I did Skanda, and it's gonna happen with this Rufian. And there's a trend that happens. And you can see it because here in this small town, the downtown is really small. And it's an interesting phenomenon that I've been seeing. All of a sudden, I finish Navi and there's

And I was cool, like right up the street that has a very similar look and feel. was like, that's interesting. And, you know, and I can feel like, they just copied my ship. but I, makes me happy to, to actually see that because then I realized, okay, I'm making a positive change. Like there's understand that a good image, goes a long way. And I think, and when it comes to strategy.

Kevin Mooney (01:56:26.558)
Wow.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:56:49.182)
and design, again, you know, is highly subjective, but I think it's a matter of like, make it so undeniably better than everything that's out there, that people are going to strive for that. They may or may not, you know, make it better. And if they make it better, amazing. If they don't, that's good. Because they're doing an effort to get there.

Kevin Mooney (01:57:05.096)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (01:57:14.985)
Sure.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:57:16.94)
You know, that's, that's what I like to see. for me, that's, that's big. That's a big part of my drive to always be trying to top myself. I'm like, okay, I need to do something better and better and bigger. and because I want to, I want to take that, I want to have that effect in my community. And I, and I started to see that that's happening and it's like, dude, that's great. And that's, you know, that's exactly what I wanted, you know, since.

Kevin Mooney (01:57:41.747)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:57:46.796)
day one that I came to Internet. That's exactly what I wanted.

Kevin Mooney (01:57:49.811)
Right. You know, what is it? Rising tides raises all. And that's the right idea. Yeah. I unfortunately have some pessimistic views in there and as I'm getting older, I'm trying to do away with those views. But it is true. If everyone's doing it, it's good for everybody. It's good for the businesses, it's good for us, it's good for community, it's good for...

life experiences that we have as we're walking through that community with our friends and our families. So it is a good thing.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:58:25.646)
I shared a story on my personal Instagram and I love the quote. It's I'm not a pessimist, I'm a well-informed optimist. I love that. Yes.

Kevin Mooney (01:58:36.305)
Yes, yes, yes, that is great. I love that.

Yes, that's the new positioning of my pessimism right there.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:58:46.658)
Yes, I'm a well-informed optimist.

Kevin Mooney (01:58:49.275)
I love it. I want to just ask a couple of questions about your process and what strategy looks like. Is it like, I'll just, I'll just say the question. Do you run core as is no deviations from it?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (01:59:15.734)
No, I think I do plenty of deviations. I mean, I have the basic structure, right? I always start with attributes, but I'll make changes depending on the client. Specifically, I make the biggest changes in the client profiles. I try to never do the same because I think...

The equation for defining your clients is enormous. So you have to understand the industry. You have to understand their clients. You have to get that information. And you get a really good piece of it in the attributes exercise. But you still have to get the bigger picture. And depending on the objectives of the business, it's how I craft that specific exercise.

Um, but I always put my own spin in, in, in the work. I think, um, you know, that it's a huge responsibility to, to do strategy. Um, because as you're having these conversations, you're going through defining their culture and defining their voice. Not only do you have to be listening to all the different keywords that they're, that they're, they're telling you, you have to put them into context.

Kevin Mooney (02:00:42.427)
Mm-hmm.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:00:43.51)
You have to contextualize it and then you have to be thinking about the business side of it and be like, okay, this keyword works. This one doesn't, but it can work for this other thing. And sometimes you have to nudge them into a direction that is unknown for them. That you know that it's going to work. That you know that if we do this and we utilize this specific keyword, it's going to affect the rest of them.

Kevin Mooney (02:01:01.779)
Mm-hmm.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:01:12.462)
So there's a bit of push and pull where you have information from the client, but you also have to give them those walls. I'm like, no, no, right here. Right here. Stay in this lane. Because as you're doing this exercise, you're building that brand in your head. The pictures are coming into your mind. It's like, yes, this is going to work. Yes, this is...

Kevin Mooney (02:01:16.584)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:01:27.667)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:01:34.961)
in.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:01:41.036)
Because I need to craft a narrative this way, I need to the attributes this way here. So there is a little bit of nudging. That's why I said, there is a sense of responsibility. Because if you nudge them into something that they totally do not like, then you fuck up the entire thing. And then you're at fault. So that's the ethical part of it. That's a moral part of it. That's a responsible part of doing strategy.

Kevin Mooney (02:01:55.387)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (02:02:00.926)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:02:10.222)
And you can't take sides and you definitely cannot throw your own perspectives into it. You have to be fully...

Kevin Mooney (02:02:22.271)
I it's so hard.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:02:24.872)
It is. It's so difficult. But yeah, I think...

Kevin Mooney (02:02:28.991)
I can think back to one client in particular that, well, here's the hard part about strategy and I'm sure you've experienced it. When you have a client that doesn't really know what you're doing, participating in strategy, they just say words and they don't think about it and they don't dive deep into it and they're not.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:02:48.131)
Yes.

Kevin Mooney (02:02:58.695)
really thinking about the adjective that there should be saying in that attributes exercise. So unfortunately, a lot of times I have omitted the attributes exercise from it in general, and I'll pull adjectives from the narrative as they're talking, and I'll just put it in a bucket over here. And I'll let them just tell me about their target audience groups, and we'll try to break them down and personify them and things like that.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:03:23.31)
interested.

Kevin Mooney (02:03:25.919)
But I can think to one client in particular, they just, they were just wrong on their target audience a hundred percent. And they were like, and this was a startup pre revenue. So they were like, this is our audience. And they named four of them. And I sat there and I just, I tried to like nudge and push them in a direction. And it finally got to this point where I'm like, they're not, they're not.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:03:35.298)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:03:41.225)
f-

Kevin Mooney (02:03:55.177)
they don't understand who their people are, I'm going to have to tell them who their people are. So I had shifted the conversation from them talking to me talking and it, it started across that ethical boundary a little bit, right? And that maybe that responsibility boundary, because I'm sitting here thinking, I'm telling them who their audience is. I'm telling them what their business is. This isn't, I don't know if this is right, but I want to steer them in the right direction. And

It was, it took three or four hours for all of us to finally kind of agree close enough where these groups were and who these people were. And it was just a struggle. And I find that a lot of people fall into that category where they're, haven't really thought of who their people are. And maybe that's my fault because I worked with a lot of startups or, or pre-revenue companies, but even the ones that are established.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:04:32.748)
Yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:04:47.704)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:04:54.387)
They have no idea who their people are. And it's just that, like you said, it is a push and a pull, but gosh, you brush up against this line of me telling them their business.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:05:05.418)
It's difficult. I've dealt with clients like that.

I've never really had to pull this card of like, well, you're the one paying me. But I do a lot of, I do.

I walk them through a strategy before I do strategy. So I go through each category and like culture, let's define what that is and how that is going to affect your business. Let's go through the clients and how we're supposed to define the clients and why this works and why this. So I, usually in the first interview is when I realized these guys are going to be fucking difficult. And I take my time to go through and explain explicitly why.

we need to do it this way. And then I'll show them examples, you know, like, we're going to go from here. This is how these attributes are going to be used in the experience, how they're going to be used in your clients, how they're going to be used in everything else. And some of them, like, they become really receptive to it and like, okay, okay, that's really cool. Yeah. Okay. Let's do it. And yeah, then there's the other ones are just like flat out like, no, just, I just want the logo.

And that's when usually those difficult clients are just like, turn off. All right. Just give me basic, just give me basic keywords. And I'll, and I'll put up a list. You know, I throw a website, a Tesaris websites. Just give me a bunch of a hundred or Shadgy PT. Give me 300. And I'll just like, all right, how about this? How about this? How about this? How about this? How about this? And I, and that way I still do a little bit of nudging.

Kevin Mooney (02:06:35.475)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:06:54.537)
Yeah, sure. That, yeah.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:07:04.162)
but it's a little bit easier for them to digest it. But yeah, in those cases, it's just like, okay, let's just go through the motions. go, okay, get the call you get and make sure that you're happy with it. Yeah, I mean, you're always gonna find clients are just flat out do not understand. Okay.

Kevin Mooney (02:07:06.879)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Mooney (02:07:13.714)
It's hard.

Kevin Mooney (02:07:24.157)
Yeah, it's a tough one. We at the agency, after we had nailed down our version of Core, and it's like a mix of stuff we made up, Core and like brand strategy from the future, we went through this period of trying to figure out where the strategy gets placed. And I don't mean in order of operations, but in the sales process, because strategy is notoriously hard to sell.

And unlike what some people say, you can't just shove that down their throats. So sometimes we'd sell strategies, sometimes we would sell the thing and we would call it discovery. And we would just wrap it up in that first month of the engagement. First month, we're going to spend time on discovery. And then what we would go through was strategy.

And I don't, I can't ever tell which one works best. It's very client dependent. know, a lot of times when we would sell strategy as a standalone thing, people seem to engage a little bit more, but then they were always shocked what would come out the backside of strategy. They couldn't make the leap from that piece to this piece.

when we sold it all as one big giant process, it was maybe the same thing. It was just a very, it's a very hard thing to do. One of my more recent clients, they hated strategy. They just hated it so much. They couldn't agree on their target audience. They couldn't agree on their attributes. They couldn't agree on their goals. And so you just kind of limp along, but

Again, that's where that translation comes in and then I was able to translate it well enough. To we didn't do identity work for them. We went right into mark. We went right into marketing. I was able to translate it well enough so that the marketing actually worked pretty alright, but I think it could have worked. 5 times better if we could all agree on some of those things that went into it. So.

Kevin Mooney (02:09:47.443)
That's where the question stems from in terms of how you run your strategy. And what I just got from that, and sometimes I do forget this, is as you're going through strategy, really take the time to explain what every little thing is inside of just one exercise. Because you do it so many times.

You get to this point where like, all right, we're going to talk about culture customers that, know, and you just kind of go through it. You're thinking, they, they will know what all of this means. But they don't know. No clue. Yeah. well, what do you think we're at? two hours and 10 minutes. How did it go so far?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:10:22.52)
They never do. Never do.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:10:37.166)
Great, I think we can go in another hour. I think we could just break.

Kevin Mooney (02:10:39.983)
Yeah, I think we could. Yeah. Yeah, well, I think what we should do is is have another one of these. I think we should do that. I think it's super fun to talk to you and I love hearing the insights and as I'm a part of. The community a little bit more and there's way more.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:10:53.902)
I know, I know,

Kevin Mooney (02:11:08.157)
Latin American influence in this. There's a lot of really interesting cultural pieces that I haven't thought about. So it's broadening my thinking, talking with you and Jose and Marseille and Felice and Federico, all these people. I'm having some really cool growth personally from these conversations.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:11:35.598)
That's amazing, that's great.

Kevin Mooney (02:11:37.309)
Yeah. Well, what do you say, Mauro?

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:11:42.452)
I say we're done, at least for today. But I don't know, do want me to say?

Kevin Mooney (02:11:44.206)
Hahaha

Kevin Mooney (02:11:51.113)
This is your time to say whatever you want to say. You can give yourself a shout out. You can say something wild and crazy. You can do whatever you want. Once we say our goodbyes, I'd love to just stick around for a couple of minutes afterwards.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:12:04.726)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Honestly, I'm not sure if I, I think I said a lot of really big thoughts that I had, but I think primarily, I think a lot of my philosophy in design and my expertise and everything that I do stems around, think looking at design as this.

unbelievably important aspect of my life and life itself. I have a lot of respect for it. I deeply love this job. And I think it's given me a gigantic sense of purpose and responsibility in understanding how it affects people at emotional level and can also affect, you know, business.

you know, from a financial standpoint, from growth standpoint, from connecting to people, I think that we wield a lot of power. And I think being, I think that being aware of what you are wielding is hugely humbling. And think it gives me at least a sense of responsibility and a sense of

I think just an emotional connection to people. And I wish that, you know, hopefully gain that knowledge and gain that perspective. you know, whatever it is that they do, that it does, really affects possibly, you know, your community and everybody who is around you. And hopefully, you know, you can continue to do stuff that's...

responsible for the world because ultimately we are in a place where we need that. We need that kind of perspective and we need less anger and figure out ways to fix it before it gets, you know, in a place where we don't want it to Yeah, we don't want it to be. So, staying true to what you're doing and look at the optimistic side of it.

Kevin Mooney (02:14:08.339)
Yeah.

Kevin Mooney (02:14:22.655)
Too fucked up.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:14:34.968)
Because,

Kevin Mooney (02:14:35.315)
I love it. I love it. You're doing it, man. You're an inspiration and I appreciate you and I appreciate your time and sharing everything that you've shared, being vulnerable. It's something that I think more people need to do. So thank you so much and I appreciate you.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:14:54.606)
Thank you. Thank you for giving me this platform. I really appreciate it. This is the first time I'm actually speaking on a podcast. I'm nervous, but I loved it. I love this opportunity. I'm eternally thankful for you giving me this platform to speak. I highly enjoyed speaking to you. think...

Kevin Mooney (02:15:03.655)
Wow, very cool.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:15:20.174)
we get along. It's like swimmingly, I think we can talk for hours. But yeah, this was amazing. I love it. I can't wait to do it again. And hopefully.

Kevin Mooney (02:15:29.395)
Right. Well, let's do it again. You're welcome back anytime. Awesome. Thank you, Mario.

Mauro Medina Susarrey (02:15:33.538)
Thank you.

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