Chris Do reveals his biggest mistakes, failures & regrets, plus shares how you too can overcome these adversities. We then dive into how to get paid more as a creative, how to move into brand strategy & sell it, Chris’s strategic branding process, the powers & pitfalls of the labels we put on ourselves and the quest for success.

Chris Do is an Emmy award-winning designer, director, CEO and Chief Strategist of Blind and the founder of The Futur—an online education platform with the mission of teaching 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love.

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Show Notes

• The Futur – Business & Design Education
• Blind Agency
• The Futur on YouTube
• Chris Do on Instagram
• The Coaching Habit – Michael Bungay Stanier

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Show Transcript

Jacob Cass:
Hello and welcome to episode 13. We are incredibly excited to have Chris Do on the show with us. If you don’t know who he is, he is an Emmy award winning designer, director, CEO, and chief strategist of Blind. And the co-founder, or the founder, sorry, of The Futur. It’s an online education platform with a mission of teaching one billion people how to make a living doing whatever. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris Do:
Thanks for having me, Jacob.

Jacob Cass:
Today, we’re going to be talking about mistakes you’ve made and the lessons you’ve learned with a positive-

Chris Do:
Oh.

Jacob Cass:
Yeah.

Matt Davies:
We just like to go there, Chris.

Jacob Cass:
We just like to go there.

Chris Do:
I guess you do.

Matt Davies:
Make it awkward. Why not? Welcome to the show.

Chris Do:
Give me a softball right at the beginning, okay.

What Does Success Mean To You?

Jacob Cass:
Yeah, so we’re going to talk about mistakes with a positive spin on it obviously, with how you’ve learned from your mistakes. Let’s start at the top. What does success mean to you?

Chris Do:
Success to me means the ability to have the freedom to choose to do what it is that I want to do, when I want to do it. I think finally, after 20 plus years of working in the industry, I think I’m starting to get really close to what success means.

Jacob Cass:
Brilliant. What is a mistake to you then?

What is a mistake to you?

Chris Do:
A mistake is a necessary part of learning, of growing, and finding new things. I have a hard time looking back on my life and trying to identify what was a mistake, because I think it was all necessary. The story I like to share with a lot of people in terms of thinking about mistakes is that scene between Brandon Stark and I think Theon Greyjoy. At the end of this giant arch in The Game of Thrones, Theon is just full of remorse. He’s come to his moment. He apologized to Brandon for what he has done, and what he has put his family through.

Chris Do:
I think this is the spoiler alert, guys. I won’t say anything. Brandon, having been wronged by Theon says to him, “It’s okay.” He doesn’t even want to let him finish. It’s like, “If you hadn’t done what you did, we wouldn’t be here. I would not be here at this moment in time.” All these things are necessary for us. I think creative people have to get really comfortable with this idea of making a mistake or falling short of their own expectations, because it really is the biggest killer of progress and of growth.

Jacob Cass:
Totally. I think another point, another perspective, is regret with perspective. Looking in the past like, I wish I had done this sooner or earlier, or done it in a different way. I know in the past we’ve chatted. You said one of your biggest regrets was not starting The Futur earlier. Why is that?

What are your biggest regrets?

Chris Do:
I do have a few regrets. One of the things, I want to share a little personal experience. I think when I was like 10 or 11 years old, I had $20 in my pocket. $20 back then was a lot of money. It was after the Lunar New Year. It’s when parents and your aunts and uncles give you money. I lost the $20 bill. I asked my mom, “Mom, have you seen this money?” She’s like, “No.” “What about dad?” She’s like, “No.” I said, “Well, somebody took it.” Obviously it couldn’t be my fault. Somebody took the money. She looked at me, and she said something in her wisdom. She said, “Do you think somebody in this house would want to steal money from you?”

Chris Do:
Then I just had to resign to the fact that the money is gone. No amount of crying about it, and I did, and no amount of accusing anybody. It’s gone, it’s gone. You just have to deal with it. At that point in time, I made a promise to myself. Live your life without regret. If something bad happens to you, learn from it. I developed habits of where I put my money and where I put my keys and my phone, so I never lose stuff. I very rarely lose stuff that I can’t find within an hour’s worth of looking. When you ask me about regret, now I have to force myself to look at my life through the context of, what would somebody else consider regret? I have two regrets really.

Chris Do:
The first regret is, I worked at an ad agency for about four to five months. They offered me an incredible job with all the perks you can imagine. I turned it down. I quit. That’s one of the regrets I had because I was 20 something years old. Had I worked in the agency in which they offered me the job, maybe my life would be very different today. Especially after watching the series Mad Man. It’s like, I wonder if I could’ve been something small and something really big. I don’t know. The second regret, I guess, is not starting The Futur earlier. I waited until 2014 to start to make content. I feel like what most people in my community feel, which is I’m not ready. Why am I doing this? Everybody is going to attack me. People are going to judge my intentions and they’re going to judge my work. They’re going to judge so much about me. I have a lot to give up and not a whole lot to gain. Once I started doing it, I realized most of those fears were unfounded.

Jacob Cass:
You said a key word there, being attacked. When you do get exposure, you get a bit of hate. That’s just part of growing. I know you made some comments and people have not resonated the way you thought. You’ve really confronted these, and made podcasts and episodes out of it. What’s your point of view on standing up against these challenges?

How can you handle these adversities?

Chris Do:
You can become famous, I think, and you can become quite popular without people totally hating on you. But there’s a very rare space for those kinds of people. They tend to be loved by all universally. That’s okay if that’s the person you want to be. But as soon as you have an opinion, it means that some people are going to agree with you and some people are going to disagree with you. If that’s the case, then you just have to prepare for that. I don’t think freedom, true freedom, is you sitting there second guessing everything that you believe in and say. Of course, you want to be really intentional. You want to be thoughtful in what you say. But if this is what you truly believe in your heart and that’s your intention, to help people and not to hurt people, I think you’re going to be okay to put your truth out there and let the chips fall where they fall.

Jacob Cass:
Wow, okay. Let’s talk about your aspirations that got you where you are today. Because I know you talk about coaches and everything on your platform. I think everyone needs a coach. What are some people that really elevated you to where you are today?

Who have been your mentors or coaches?

Chris Do:
There have been so many people who were probably not classically labeled as teachers or coaches or mentors to me. It starts with my dad, my older brother, my mom. My entire family essentially. Each one of them saw something in me, opened a door, and encouraged me to go somewhere. But even talking about in terms of the realm of professional coach, my first and influential coach is a guy named Keir McLaren. He’s been on our show. I worked with him for over 10 years, where I met with him once a week every single week for an hour and a half to two hours without fail. That’s where I really started to learn about business, about communication, about management. But more importantly, how to be a good human, to be a good leader. Those are really important.

Matt Davies:
Chris, can I ask you a quick question?

Chris Do:
Of course.

Where does your inner drive come from?

Matt Davies:
If I was to say, where does your inner drive come from? You’ve mentioned two regrets. I wonder actually if you had taken that job at the ad agency, maybe that would’ve wrecked you. Maybe the Chris Do we see today helping a billion people would not exist. Maybe he would’ve been stuck there in a corner office somewhere, and be really dull and boring. No one would ever think about Chris Do. But the Chris Do we see before us is someone who turned that down, went his own way, and didn’t start The Futur until relatively recently. Maybe that’s given you an impetus, a drive, an energy, which perhaps wouldn’t have existed if those two things didn’t happen. Where does that drive come from, do you think?

Chris Do:
I think the drive comes from being poor. I’m just going to be really honest with you. My drive to do what I do is because we came to America from Vietnam in 1975, escaping communism, and landing here with nothing. Having lost everything. Our culture, our country, our money. Everything that we had was gone. It vaporized in the course of about 24 hours, having to flee the country. My parents were here. They don’t understand the customs or the culture. They don’t really speak the language well, so we grew up poor. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were poor.

Chris Do:
We went to secondhand shops. We lived because of the generosity of other people, of the country and the support systems that were in place. Whenever I would desire something, I would ask my mom. You go to the toy store and the general rule is you can look at everything. You can’t ask for anything. You just go home with hopes and dreams. I would spend a lot of time fantasizing about all of these things that I saw in magazines and comic books. They have ads targeted towards kids. I wanted the X-ray vision glasses. I wanted to be like the strong man on the beach, and not the nerd who gets the sand kicked in his face. I wanted all those things. The way to that was through money. I hustled as a kid. I had many different businesses that failed. Everything from catching crayfish to washing cars, selling popsicles to kids that were younger than me. Selling candy, ninja stars. Everything that I could think of.

Chris Do:
This is what drove me, that I saw money as a means towards freedom. That’s what’s pushed me. That pushed me very far, because that’s why I started Blind. I wanted to have this freedom, and I wanted to use that freedom to surround myself with super creative human beings, to create what I would have… my ideal office space. A place where I would’ve wanted to go to work, if I were to go to work for someone else. That went for a really long time. It came into clarity this one day, because I was talking to my financial planner. I asked him, his name is John, I said, “John, you’ve got to just tell me. How much longer do I need to work so I can retire?”

Chris Do:
He goes, “Okay, let me look into your books.” Then shortly, he’s like, “Well, given what I know about you and Jesse, you have everything squared away, and the amount of money that you spend, you could’ve retired years ago.” I looked at my wife and I’m like, “Honey, you kept telling me five more years.” She would just keep extending that. That was a never ending five more years. She’s like, “Give me five more years.” Because for her, financial security was really important. She didn’t want to worry about, oh my God. We’re going to run out of money. In that moment, I had to come to this realization that I don’t need to work anymore. If I work, what is it for? What’s the point? What’s the purpose of this?

Chris Do:
This is when I started to think about, why do I get up every single day and go to an office if the money isn’t the motivation? I need to find something deeper, something bigger. Something that’s going to be more meaningful. People call this your genius work, the work that matters. That’s what I needed to find, and I found it in The Futur.

Jacob Cass:
You talked about some failures in the beginning as an early entrepreneur.

Chris Do:
Yeah.

What are your biggest professional failures?

Jacob Cass:
But what is your biggest professional failure, and what have you learned from that?

Chris Do:
I think the biggest professional failure is probably in the early days when we lost all of our clients. When I say all, it’s like I didn’t have many to begin with. When you lose one, it feels like all. The two biggest clients we had at that time were E! Entertainment Television and Sebastian International. Sebastian International is a billion dollar company. Healthcare, wellness, hair products, things like that.

Chris Do:
One we did a website for. The other we did animated motion graphics for. Both within about two and a half months of each other decided that they were going to stop working with us for different reasons. For E! Entertainment Television, it was because they wanted to save money. It was fair because they were spending probably too much money with us. Every single month, they were spending in excess of $20,000 with us making animated promos. If you look at that, it’s like, that’s probably better if they brought it in house. That made sense. They hired somebody.

Chris Do:
Then with Sebastian, they had a changing of marketing directors. Of course, the new broom comes in, sweeps out the old, which we’re the old. He’s the new broom or she’s the new broom. We got swept out. In that case, we had our major revenue sources just vaporize. We’re still a very young company at this point in time. I had to tell my staff of four people that I have no more work, that money is running out. Since the money was running out, I encouraged them all to go get work. That was hard for us. It was really hard. We went from a team of five people, four people plus myself, to a team of one.

Chris Do:
Luckily, one of the people who was working for me at that time, and now my wife said, “Look, I don’t need to make money. As long as I have some place to live and eat, I’m good. If you can cover that, I’m going to stick it out with you for as long as I can.” Slowly but surely, we rebuilt. I’ve learned from that lesson.

Matt Davies:
That’s absolutely brilliant. I think the agency model, as typically it used to be, I ran an agency. And I totally sympathize with that. It’s such a precarious model. You’re so reliant on the client. The power really is all in the client’s hands. As you say, if you help them become more successful, at some point they’re going to think, “We could in house this and completely control it to our end, and understand all the layers. Then we can basically cut your cost down.” You were in a precarious situation there. Likewise also, as you say, they can move away at any time. What are your thoughts in terms of the agency model? What would you now put in place or have done differently to make that not happen?

What are your views on the agency model?

Chris Do:
I don’t know if you can make it not happen. It happens to small companies, it happens to really big companies. If you look at the biggest version of what we do, I think are large multinational advertising agencies. They lose their clients too. There was a relationship that Rubin Postaer and Associates had with Honda for over 30 years, working with Honda and doing advertising for Honda. Then one day, they just woke up and decided to sever ties and split the account apart, and give some of the business to a whole different agency. Coca Cola did the same thing. It goes on and on and on. The reason being is people take each other for granted. The client takes the agency for granted, and the agency takes the client for granted. They both tell each other a very different story.

Chris Do:
One says, “Why aren’t they grateful for all this work? They should be doing more for us.” The other one says, “Why aren’t they grateful to us? They should be giving more to us.” Really, they just look at it like that. That’s one of the early lessons that I learned, to be appreciative of our clients. But relationships should evolve. You should evolve with them and sometimes beyond them. You should prepare for one day that they will leave. It’s not marriage, and even marriages don’t last forever. You have to prepare for that. You have to keep growing. If initially you did logo design for them and now they need an identity system, you evolve into that. Beyond the identity system, they need to copyright it. They need a website. They need all these other things. You keep evolving. Then to a point, you start to do brand strategy and you do consulting, which to me is at the highest end of it. Then you can sell the creative services if you want to. But if you don’t evolve, you eventually get swapped out.

Value Creation & Evolving As a Creative

Matt Davies:
You’ve got to generate value, haven’t you? You’ve got to create value in what you’re offering to people. That’s why we get paid ultimately, because there’s some value in what we’re doing. I guess you’ve got to continually evolve that, and keep thinking, and keep that energy going into that. That’s why I think it’s really interesting what you’ve done with The Futur. Because obviously you’ve evolved, haven’t you? In terms of what you offer and how you go out there and put yourself out there. Tell us about that evolution, because you’ve gone from designer into strategy into now teacher. How has that worked?

Chris Do:
My life has this complex tapestry of things that I’m interested in and not always getting perfect alignment out of. Prior to doing The Futur, a lot of people don’t know this. I taught at private art schools for over 15 years. I taught at an art center and I taught at Otis College of Design. I gave my life, sweat, and blood to these things when I was there. While running a pretty high profile motion design company back in the day. It wasn’t until I was able to find where all these things overlapped that I came into my full power in knowing who I was, and being able to express myself fully. That’s what The Futur has done for me.

Chris Do:
Now, the idea of teaching isn’t new to me. But the idea of teaching to essentially, a piece of glass, we call it the soulless one-eyed creature. That’s just the camera. It gives you nothing back. It gives you no energy. It gives you no response. It’s literally or metaphorically like talking to a wall. Talking to a wall gives you nothing back. But if you’re used to and learn how to speak to a piece of glass, I guess you’ll do better than others. We had to learn those skills. Learning how to speak in ways that are unscripted. You have to learn how to be in the moment and speak to people, not at them. Have a conversation with people. That’s a really critical skill that I had to develop. And I had to just get comfortable with being in front of camera talent versus behind camera talent, which is what I have done for the last 20 years.

Jacob Cass:
What you said about teaching for 15 years, people don’t realize this. You’ve gone into that role. You just seem so natural on The Futur, even though you just came from what people believe is the agency world. To pivot to that, it’s important to consider the background. I’m glad you touched on that. I want to talk about the transition or the evolution, because the reason we started this podcast, Matt and I, was because I’ve been transitioning from design to strategy. Matt is a strategist, and we talk about that. You mentioned your evolution to consultant starting from a logo designer.

Chris Do:
Right.

How to Move from Order Taker to Consultant

Jacob Cass:
It’s a very common thread on The Futur. It’s very popular, and watching Melinda Livsey and people like that evolve. There’s a few questions. What advice can you give to people that actually want to get to this consultant level, to stop being an order taker? Any mistakes you’ve made along the way in that realm of things?

Chris Do:
Yeah. I forget who says this, but everything that got you here won’t get you there. All these skills that you learned in school and in practice were finding something, caring about the beauty and the craftsmanship, attention to detail. It’s just exactly the right point size with the right letter spaces. It’s so good. The finishes and the printing and the quality is just immaculate. No other right minded designer is going to critique you on that. But what happens is you become very myopic to the thing that matters to the client. They actually don’t really care that much about art. As much as they might say, they really don’t, and that’s evidence.

Chris Do:
If you just look around the world at how much bad design there is, I’m not talking about graphic design. I’m talking about architecture or urban design, fashion. People aren’t as particular as we’d like them to be. The reason why we want them to be is because it fits into our narrative that if people care more about the way things look, we are going to be more valuable. But ultimately, people want something very different. They want to grow. They want to grow in all ways. Personally, professionally, spiritually, physically. Everything, they want to grow. Who is going to be the person to help them get there? If I want to get really jacked, if I want to get super ripped, I want to hire a personal trainer. The best personal trainer who fits with my style of learning is going to get my money.

Chris Do:
If you think about a business, what do businesses care about? Yeah, they care about the aesthetics. But they might care about the way that the food is served, or the menu, how it’s presented. Or how people have a total complete dining experience from beginning to end. They might care about getting more customers or a different type of customer. They might care about getting the word out, so that they can launch a prepackaged meal plan or something like that.

Chris Do on Logo Design

Chris Do:
Well, where do you fit into any of that? Because the only problem you’re looking for is an aesthetic problem. What you keep thinking is the most important is actually not so important. We see this happen over and over, and long after I’m gone, the debate will continue. Oh, I hate that logo. Can you believe that’s the logo they came up with? That logo sucks. Let me tell you how to design a better logo, you stupid monkeys. Oh, the logo is the end all be all. It’s the ambassador for your brand. It’s your reputation. It’s the tip of the spear. Get over it, people. Just get over it. It’s not. Have a horrible company, an amoral company that just screws people over with child labor, sells inferior products to hurt people. What’s the best logo going to do for them? That. That is not okay. That’s just zero.

Matt Davies:
That is awesome. I 100% agree with that. You can have the best logo design in the world and not make a penny, and not solve a problem. You’re right. Sometimes Jacob, would you agree that we’re too into it? We’re too into the design and fluffy stuff. When the business people, they want to solve big business problems. That’s what brand strategy can begin to do.

Brand Strategy

Jacob Cass:
I’m glad we’re going down that brand strategy route, because a lot of us, designers, start with doing design and logos and brand identity. I guess the next rung up the latter is strategy. Do you want to talk about brand strategy and the value of that?

Chris Do:
Yeah. I have to be very careful here, so let’s get into this. I’m not telling you that I own the definition to brand strategy, or that I’m the end all be all to everything about brand strategy. I am not, but I am pretty critical about people using this term very loosely. People are like, “I’m a brand strategist.” First of all, you don’t even know what branding is. You make logos. Stop calling yourself a branding expert because you’re not. You’re just not. It’s okay to be a person who gives and who creates amazing forms. I respect that. You can just put together a circle and a square that I just… that’s so good. We need people like that. We really do. To me, a brand strategist does one thing in particular. They solve a goal. They have a plan on how to go from here to there. I’m not talking about going from red to darker red. I’m talking about a plan on how to get a client in front of a customer.

Chris Do:
How do you do that? How do you do that in a way that is authentic? How do you help them find a new tribe that’s going to fall in love with them? The role of the brand strategist is in a way, as my friend Yo Santosa talks about it, they’re a matchmaker. We’re made to fall in love with each other.

Chris Do:
We know that you’re not right for everybody, and everybody is not right for you. It requires a process of asking questions, of listening, of drawing insights and making connections that the client may have known instinctively, but just never communicated or agreed to as a group. You as a brand strategist come in there and ask the questions. You let the answers lead you to the solution. You don’t lead the witness and say, “It must always be premium. It must always be upscale because it doesn’t need to be.”

The Brand Strategy Process

Jacob Cass:
What is your process, and how have you developed that over time?

Chris Do:
Okay, I’m relatively new to branding, brand strategy, relative to my career arch. Most of my time has been spent making commercials, moving things around on a screen to tell somebody else a story. All this stuff that was done before that point in time had been fairly opaque to me. That there was a marketing directive with an objective. A strategy was formed. A messaging, a copy was written, and a script was sold to a client. That’s usually where we took over. It wasn’t until my friend Hosier [Cabayeur 00:24:03] came into my… re-entered into my life. This was in 2013, 2014 I think.

Chris Do:
I asked him a very simple question, which was, “My websites suck. There must be a better way. I know for as long as I’ve been doing motion design, you’ve been building websites. Teach me.” He goes, “I will show you.” He showed me a process, basically design thinking and user experience design that just blew my mind apart. It literally changed my life and everything. It transformed our company. It took us into totally different directions because when I started to learn it, I started to realize the multitude of things that he applied his thinking towards. Understanding who the customer are. What their wants, needs, pain points, challenges. Who they aspire to become. The change that they want to achieve in their life.

Chris Do:
Once you understand it through the lens of the customer, the end user, oh man. The creativity just flowed. It was amazing. Then learning how to capture some of those insights and translating it into a visual system, a menu design or the website. Or even writing copy for a landing page. It changed everything. I immediately took that and started to apply it to what we were doing with our clients. It just so happened too, around this time, we were moving away from doing agency work. Which we were just the post-production production arm of an agency. We started doing client direct work.

Chris Do:
I had this vision in my head that from this point forward, we’re going to act like the agency that we used to work for. We’re not going to be the end of the creative process. We’re going to be the beginning, middle, and the end. It required a little bit of time to ramp up from zero to where we were. It took about a year to convince my first client to hire us for strategy work. Prior to that, they hired us for design work. We would do that, and I had to prove it. I had to prove it to them that this was valuable, that this was necessary, and that it would make an impact on their business. It took about a year to be able to get my first paid brand strategy consulting gig that led us also to do design work.

Jacob Cass:
Okay, awesome. You already led into my next question. How do you sell strategy?

How do you sell strategy?

Chris Do:
Yeah. How do you sell strategy? It is tough. If you are not known for something, there’s always this bridge. You’ve got to go from where you are to where you want to be, to build a bridge. If you’re a strategist, you strategize yourself. Not always easy to do. Sometimes it’s actually very challenging. What we have to do is we have to pivot. Every client that came to us knew us for something other than brand strategy, that’s for sure. They’d most likely call us because of our deep body of work in motion graphics. They wanted a video ultimately from us. What we’d have to do is begin the conversation something like this. I would say to them, “I’m so thrilled, Mr. and Mrs. Client, that you’re talking to us right now. I know you want this thing. If that’s what you want me to make, I’m going to be happy to take your money.

Chris Do:
I’m going to do this for you. But recently, I’ve embarked on this journey of doing brand strategy for my clients. If you have 20 to 30 minutes, I’m going to show you how valuable this might be to you and your company. This meeting is free. Normally I would charge $28,000 for this, but this meeting is freely. Do you have 20 or 30 minutes to talk to me about this?” They would actually say what? “Yes.” I’ve anchored up the price. I’ve told them there’s value. I’ve also been very clear at disclosing to them that this is something that’s new to me. I’m not telling them I’ve done this for 10 years. I have not. They agree. In that moment, it’s a make it or break it moment.

Chris Do:
I go straight into the questions. I started asking them about their customers, what their goals are. Why they haven’t been able to achieve their goals. The challenges, the pain points, all that kind of stuff. It helped them to get clarity in those first 30 minutes that they’re sitting there. I can see it, not literally, but the steam. The brain is cooking and things are happening. They’re leaning in. I’ve literally done this before in a room of C level executives in a multi billion dollar company, when I looked at a back of a very long conference room table. All the creative people were leaning in like, “Yeah, what’s next?”

Chris Do:
You know you have to fish on the hook. All you have to do is bring it in gently. That’s how you do it. If you truly, truly do brand strategy consulting work, you’re an advisor or a mentor or a coach, you can prove it. You can demonstrate it to somebody. You don’t have to talk to them about some abstract idea. I do this for my clients.

Jacob Cass:
For our listeners, what sort of questions are you asking to get this information out of the clients?

How do you discover the client’s true need?

Chris Do:
Okay, so I’m going to recommend that everybody wants to dive deeper into this to read Michael Bungay Stanier’s book. It’s called The Coaching Habit. He has seven questions, seven questions that you ask that help you to get to this thing. I think he wrote it just as a book on leadership and management. But I actually found the framework actually to be very applicable to lots of things.

Jacob Cass:
I just finished it myself actually.

Chris Do:
Yeah. His first question, I think it’s called the foundational question, I think. I forget what he calls it. It’s, what’s on your mind? Well, what’s on your mind seems like such an innocent, silly little question to ask. But it’s open enough that the person has to sit there and think, why am I meeting with you right now? Because they know who you are or a little bit about why, because they’ve agreed to the meeting. You don’t go and meet with a designer and not think, I must be here to talk about something design related.

Chris Do:
What’s on your mind starts the dialogue. It’s not the end. Your job is to find the right problem to solve. That’s your only job right now. Find the right problem to solve. I love the way he says it in the book because the right problem infers that there are a lot of wrong problems. When somebody comes to you and says, “I need a new website. That’s what’s on my mind. That’s why I’m talking to you, Jacob. I want a new website.” Okay, tell me what else is on your mind. You keep going until you get to, okay, so what’s the real challenge for you in relation to this?

Chris Do:
Then you start to understand they need a website because they want something else to happen. They want to feel that the website reflects how they feel about themselves. I can guarantee you, ask any designer, “Are you happy with the website?” They’re almost always going to say “No.” Because in their mind, they’re better than what they see. Clients are not that different, except they’re not looking at it from a design point of view. They’re looking at it from a usability point of view. A traction, a conversion point of view. They always feel like it could be better.

Chris Do:
Some of them, really discerning clients will say, “The design doesn’t really live up to our standards. I know it can be better. We’re a multi million dollar brand. Can you make us a multi billion dollar brand in the way that we look and talk about ourselves?” I think I can. That’s what design is really good for. You start to excavate underneath all these layers. Because what you’ve seen and what the client knows is the tip of the iceberg. If you’re willing to stay in the pocket and ask enough questions, go out of your comfort zone and stay there, you will find something that’s really important to the client that matters. Because the bigger the problem, the bigger the price tag attached to it. Solve a small problem, get paid very little. You’re looking for the big problems.

Matt Davies:
I think that’s absolutely fantastic. My story is similar to yours, Chris, in regards to workshops and broadening out into strategy. When I ran my agency, I employed this guy. He said to me, “One of the problems that you have sometimes as a designer, and I’m sure we’ve all experienced, is back and forth with clients.”

Chris Do:
Yes.

Matt Davies:
You set your quote. Usually, well the way I used to do it, was hourly rates. You go back and forth, and ultimately the designer gets actually thrown under the bus. Because you spend more time than actually you factored in sometimes. That was a major problem. Anyway, I employed this guy. He said, “Matt, do you know what I want to do on the next project we get? I’ve got this idea of having a kickoff workshop.” I sat into this workshop and it blew my mind, because we got designers in there. We got the client’s team in there. We started going through these questions for free for the client. Like you said, you’ve got to start for free. Suddenly I realized this is the bit that I’ve been missing. Because suddenly you get to understand in depth what these people are going through. They don’t want a new website. They need to grow their company by X percent by X time. That’s the problem.

Matt Davies:
Actually, the website might actually be a small part of the bigger picture. Once you understand the bigger picture, and once you can then apply some thinking, and designers are perfectly faced to apply foresight and thought, and mapping out how you can go from where you are today to the future. Once you’re in that place, you can then become more valuable, like you say. Then you can charge more, which eventually happened to me until I cut off design altogether and just stayed in that uncomfortable dragon pit state, which you talked about there. Which is, you’re right, we’ve got to be uncomfortable. Sometimes we’re too in our ivory towers.

Matt Davies:
I agree with you. Let’s get out there. Let’s get a bit more uncomfortable. Let’s get our hands dirty a little bit with clients so that we can really find the problem and look to solve it. Have you got any other tips in terms of how someone might go from say a design scenario, where they’re just used to executing on a brief, to that point where they’re finding out those nitty gritty questions.

How to Move Into a Brand Strategy Role

Chris Do:
Yeah. The list of things to do, to learn, to experience, to acquire, is going to be quite long. This is why I’m a little sketched out when an 18-year-old kid tells me, “I’m a brand strategist.” Really? Really? You need to learn some business fundamentals. You need to learn how to look at a balance sheet. You need to be able to have intelligent conversations about operations, about cost of goods sold, about what it takes in terms of net profit and gross profit, and gross sales, and how sales teams are doing. What marketing initiatives are return on investment. You can learn these things, you really can. I bet you can learn it probably enough to be functional in three to five business books. If you’re willing to make the commitment, if it takes you a week to read a book between three to say seven weeks of reading, you can probably acquire enough business skills.

Chris Do:
Then you have to really think, how do I connect my creativity to solve these business problems? And to expand your definition of what it means to be a designer. Now, most people will call themselves graphic designers. An identity designer, a communications designer. The label that precedes the word design really matters. It really does, because an interior designer solves what kinds of problems? Interior problems. Layout with interiors, right? If I’m the world’s most amazing menu designer, if I don’t see a menu, I don’t see a problem. This is where I think we have to either drop the word before designer, or we have to change that word. Oftentimes, I would come out and tell people, “I’m not a graphic designer. I’m a culture designer. I’m a business designer.” Depending on who I’m talking to, because that’s what I’m mostly interested in.

Chris Do:
That’s what I’m going to help you solve. Design to me, in some of the books that I’ve read, is just a person’s ability to connect to disparate ideas, to come together in some kind of elegant form. I’m not talking about form in terms of graphics, but just some kind of form that seems to fit. That’s what it is. If you can invent a new and novel solution to a wicked problem, you’re a designer. You’re an accountant, you’re a doctor. You’re an engineer outside the bricklayer. Anybody can be a designer in that sense.

The Power & Pitfalls of Titles & Labels

Jacob Cass:
It just shows how meaningless titles can be. You can just adapt to the client or whoever you are talking to. I know I’ve changed my title many, many times. It doesn’t really matter. It’s about the problem you’re solving for the client.

Chris Do:
I think actually Jacob, titles can actually be very powerful. They work for you or they work against you depending on how you use them. When a title is used to box you into what you can do, you would say, “That’s a pretty powerful title.” If the title gives you a direction to move towards, that can be very uplifting. It can be motivating. It can help you to focus in. Words are very powerful. They’re also very dangerous if used inappropriately. If you and I think about it, if we were to take inventory of all the things that we think about ourselves, our self-talk, I think I was reading this book. 97% of what you say to yourself is negative. If we can learn to speak to ourselves in a different way that’s more positive, optimistic, and future based versus past based, maybe we can start to align ourselves with something that is going to help us get closer to our goals, versus to get us farther away from our goals. Matt, your turn.

Matt Davies:
I just think that’s fantastic. I think you’re right. Language defines reality.

Chris Do:
Yes.

Matt Davies:
It helps us make sense of reality. Choosing our words carefully, even though we all fail miserably sometimes to do so. If we choose our words carefully, that can create the reality as well. It works both ways, I think. Words describe reality, but they also make reality. I was just going to say, Jacob, out of interest, what’s your… I’m happy to also share mine. What’s your current label that you put on yourself?

Jacob Cass:
I call myself a brand designer, because brand is very broad when you’re designing a brand. Also, depending on what platform it is, I can adapt it. I also put strategists in some places as well, so brand design plus strategist. I think what you said about the future state is very important, because the image you put out there is who you’re going to become in the future. You may not be the best brand strategist at the moment, but you have to portray that image to get to that state. I think those were some valid points.

Matt Davies:
Just to of interest, Chris, how do you label yourself if you do it at all?

Chris Do:
Probably educator.

Matt Davies:
Nice, one word.

Chris Do:
Yeah.

Matt Davies:
You beat me hands down. Mine is brand and culture strategy consultant, which is just a massive, long word, long series of words. But it kind of does the trick for the circles that I play in. I love educator. I wish I could get mine down to one word. Maybe I’m going to work on this. I’m going to go away after this and work on my label.

Chris Do:
I’m sure you can, but the reason why we have these titles, since we’re on it, is because there’s an internal dialogue and there’s an external dialogue. I want to be very clear about that too. The internal dialogue matters a lot because it controls and limits how far you can go, or it can open up things for you. The external dialogue is just so that person who is standing in front of you can understand what the hell you do. In your mind, you’re like, “I am the God of design.” Let’s just say that’s what you think of yourself. You might not want to say that externally. Kanye West does that all the time, and he gets into a lot of trouble. But I admire him because actually the filter between what he thinks and what he says is zero.

Chris Do:
He’ll just say it. “I’m the greatest since Picasso.” Or, “I’m the Steve Jobs of culture.” I’m like, “Wow, that’s what he really thinks.” Most of us are like, “I design fashion. I make music.” That’s okay. We have to understand that the person in front of you doesn’t have all this time and energy to invest in trying to figure you out. That’s why we use titles. That’s why we use words that are familiar to them. That’s totally okay. Jacob, you’re right in that one sense where sometimes they’re meaningless, and sometimes they’re quite meaningful. It just depends.

Jacob Cass:
Yeah. I find myself, if I’m at a party or anything, I’ll say I’m a graphic designer just to end it.

Chris Do:
Right.

Jacob Cass:
You adapt to who you’re talking to. I think we’ve really explored titles a lot. I just wanted to jump into some questions from our users who have submitted if you’re comfortable with that.

Chris Do:
Okay. Yeah, totally.

How do you deal with failure?

Jacob Cass:
This one comes from Jackie Grabinski. He asks, “How do you deal with failure?”

Chris Do:
This is important because I think people have issues with this. They struggle with failure. I think failure is a lot about expectations, and expectations are the root of unhappiness, or of depression and all of the things that are not good in your life right now. Let’s talk about this. When you go and do something, you tell yourself the story that it’s going to be great, that it’s going to achieve. This publisher is going to get me 2000 likes and 400 new fans or whatever it is. When it doesn’t happen, what happens? You tell yourself the story, “You’re a failure. You suck. You’re terrible. Why do you have those big ideas?”

Chris Do:
If we just go into it telling ourselves the story that, “This is an opportunity for me to learn, to get feedback, to find out what works.” Sometimes to find out what doesn’t work, to find out what my audience and community shows up for. Then the internal dialogue that we have will be very different. I don’t try to make too many things with giant expectations. I think one of the big things that we struggle with in our day to day existence is this. We put labels on everything, a positive and a negative label. Sometimes the label that we need to put on is just completely neutral. I know everybody hates this expression. Jerry Seinfeld has a whole bit on this. “I want to kill people who say this.”

Chris Do:
I don’t say it that often, but people say, “It is what it is.” He’s like, “That’s the most meaningless thing ever. You just use the same words over and over again. It is what it is.” What is that? Somebody will get a plate of food. When they go out to a restaurant, they get a plate of food and they look at it like, this was supposed to be bigger. They were supposed to do all these things. You know what? It’s just food. They’re nutrients. You eat it. Sometimes it makes you really happy, and sometimes not as happy as others. But it just is. We work ourselves up into this frenzy state. Now, our relationship with the person next to us is ruined. The dialogue is ruined. The moment is ruined and the drive home is ruined.

Chris Do:
Even just think about what happened with such a little innocent thing as getting food. In life, you’re going to make a logo. The dialogue you tell inside yourself is going to largely impact the way you feel about that moment. I like to just stay neutral for as long as I can about most things as possible. When I start to feel those emotions conjure up, I have to take inventory and say, “What am I feeling? Why am I feeling that? Do I want to feel this?” Then I make a decision to go ahead and feel it, or change the course of that feeling right now.

Jacob Cass:
It is what it is.

Chris Do:
Yes, it is.

What mistake do you find yourself still making?

Jacob Cass:
All right. With that summarized, how would you… Right now, what mistake do you find yourself still making? This is from Simon Lagoa. I hope I said that right.

Chris Do:
The mistake I keep making, and I’ve shared this before, is I get exited about too many things. I’m going to be honest with you guys. I have a stack of papers here telling me what I’m supposed to be doing. I foolishly choose to overlook all of them and say, “I’m just in this moment. I want to do this thing.” To me, that’s freedom. Even though I’m my own boss, I’m like, “God, who wrote this note? Oh yeah, I did. I don’t want to listen to you.” I’m having that fight right there. I think the mistake that I keep making is, what is the most important thing that gets me closer to my goals today? If it doesn’t get me closer to my goals, maybe I don’t need to do it right now.

Jacob Cass:
How much persistence did it take you to get from where you were to where you are today?

Chris Do:
Where’s where you were? It depends on where you set the initial point to the point that I’m at. I know where I’m at today. When you say where you were, are you talking about the junior high kid who was afraid to talk to girls, and just hating my life, and talking identity issues?

Jacob Cass:
Don’t go there. Let’s not go there.

Chris Do:
Yeah, that’s pretty far back. Where are we talking about?

Jacob Cass:
Let’s say after your agency life, when you started The Futur.

Chris Do:
Okay.

Jacob Cass:
Because that’s really where your big thing is, your big hairy, audacious goal. I can’t even imagine your to do list. You’ve already just mentioned it. Your persistence to, I guess, to keep doing it. What keeps you going? I know we touched on this earlier.

The Driver of Success

Chris Do:
Yeah, what keeps me going is this. I have set up a very big goal that I’m not sure anybody can achieve in their lifetime. It is possible, but it’s going to be some ginormous effort to be able to get there. That is very clearly defined in my mind. If I’m done, then the world of education the way it looks like today is unrecognizable to some kids in the future, where high quality, best in class education is available to anybody that wants it at a price at which they can afford it. So that we don’t have to have this class war where the smartest, AKA the richest kids get access to the best teachers and the best tools. I think we need to level the playing field. A lot is going to have to change in order for that to happen. This is my Everest, and it’s pretty high.

Matt Davies:
I love that. I know you’ve set this goal of one billion.

Chris Do:
Yes.

Matt Davies:
Talk to us about that. Did you just weigh a cup one morning and go, “That’s the thing?” Did you spend time with your team? How did you come to that number? What made that a thing?

Chris Do:
That’s very good. It’s not a thing that we sat around and did focus groups and trying to figure out, what the heck are we trying to do? I think a lot of times, I have ideas. My team isn’t able to figure out what the heck I’m thinking. Actually, duh. They can’t read minds, and my mind changes quite often. It was coming out of, Chris, what do you want, man? What do you want?

Chris Do:
We would fight about this all the time. Sometimes we need to make money. Sometimes we need to make more courses or grow our YouTube channel, whatever. I said, “You know what? At the end of the day, I didn’t walk away from agency work making a lot of money to worry about trying to make more money. I want to make a difference. I want to make an impact on the world.” Then I knew when I needed to form this idea in my mind was a million. That’s too little. We can do that. Some might even argue that’s already been done. Since there’s not a number between a million and a billion, it’s just the next goal up on the latter. It’s just a billion, let’s go there. I think that’s one in eight people on planet earth, so that’s a pretty big goal.

Chris Do:
Remember, early on when Apple first launched its iPhone, Steve Jobs said he’d like to sell 100 million phones, 100 million. I’m like, “Dude, you a crazy. Steve Jobs, you are crazy.” They’ve already passed one billion phones sold. They can do it with tech. Maybe we can do it with education, I don’t know.

Matt Davies:
How are you tracking it?

Chris Do:
How am I tracking it? That’s a very good question. In my mind, the math is a little bit fuzzy. I’ll tell you why. It’s because if I teach 10 teachers who teach 10 people who teach 10 people, I’m going to say if you trace all of these back and you do the genealogy of ideas, it will then funnel back to us. I’m going to consider that the billion, but that didn’t make enough people happy. They’re like, “Chris, we need to make this accountable and measurable and all that.” I’m like, “Okay, fine.”

Chris Do:
Somebody in our group said, “Hey, make a counter on your own page so that people can claim a number. Now we’ll know officially.” I think that number is past 10,000, and we just got it going, so we’ll see. Every day, that number goes up a little bit. When we make these big pushes, we’ll see the number jump and grow. That makes me happy too.

Matt Davies:
I think that’s absolutely fantastic. For the listeners that don’t really know and have been living under some sort of rock, The Futur, you go on and you can buy courses. You can buy training, as you say, at accessible prices. It’s interesting that you mention education generally. I’m really excited about that. Traditionally, my understanding of The Futur is it’s very designed, design led. Is there an ambition to branch out at some stage to wider education, or are you going to stick in this space for a while?

Chris Do:
I think we need to stay in a certain lane. The reason why is because this is where our domain expertise lives. We’re going to teach business skills, communication, mindset, and design related skills. We’re going to stay in here until we start to figure out, this is how people want to learn. This is how you deliver it to them. Because once we figure that out, we can either open source it and say, “Look, here’s the blueprint. Everybody that’s an educator who wants to do this, either do it for yourself, join us in our revolution. Help us make content following a very specific framework, a formula or a structure if you will. Because we’ve found this to be the most effective in terms of teaching.” We’re still kind of inventing it. I don’t want to go too broad before I go deep. You know that.

Chris Do:
We’ve got to focus our energy. The law of concentration says focus your energy on something. Get that part right. Because you’ll know when this works when design schools are put out of business because of what we do. Then we can expand it out.

Matt Davies:
I love that. Beware, design schools.

How do you choose what content goes on your personal brand or The Futur?

Jacob Cass:
How do you choose what content goes on your personal brand or The Futur then?

Chris Do:
Very good question. Are you talking about on Instagram?

Jacob Cass:
Yeah, that’s the first thing that came to mind.

Chris Do:
Okay. The Futur’s Instagram account was created once we started the company. But my personal Instagram account has been around a little bit longer than The Futur’s. I felt like I needed a place to share what I was thinking. When we were running blind, it felt strange. If I post something as blind, is it me? Is it the company? Did we all vote on this? I think it was kind of weird for me to be speaking on behalf of everybody.

Chris Do:
What happens? You wind up creating the most vanilla, bland content ever. If you look at most brand websites and their Instagram, social media accounts, it’s really dull content. It really is, because it has to be very safe. It tends to focus mostly on the work that they’ve done or thanking their clients. “Great job, congratulations.” That kind of stuff. I just started writing as myself. Then we launched the future. I was like, “What do we do here?” Because for now, the future was just mostly me and a couple of volunteers, until it became a company.

Chris Do:
Today, the way that we manage it is we have Elle, who writes the content for The Futur. What she does is she scrapes the content that we make in terms of podcasts, and videos, and my social feed. Then she figures out the brand’s voice. She’s very objective about it, which I love. It can be as inclusive of all the different creators and writers that we have on our team. Whereas my personal account, I say and do whatever it is that I want. Now, it used to be less of a problem when I had a smaller following.

Chris Do:
Now that I have a bigger following, this is a strange thing that happens. You guys know this. People feel like they have ownership over you. It’s a strange thing that I’m going through. “Chris, you wouldn’t say that.” Well, no, I would say that because I did say it. Nobody else is saying it. “That’s inconsistent with who you are.” Dude, it’s not. I promise you, because it’s me. How could you say that?

Chris Do:
Don’t tell me who I am and who I’m not. I a who I am. It’s like, “You need to say something, Chris.” It’s like no, you guys can say what you want. You have your own voice. I’ve been battling this in this last week. Who am I? What do I want to say? I just found that, you know what? I’ve got to live my truth. At the end of the day, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do, but I’m not going to change who I am because it makes you uncomfortable. If it’s something you don’t want to follow anymore, I totally understand. But here’s the thing. My personal account, I’m not selling anything. I’m just trying to teach you how to win. If you say you’re so pissed off at me you don’t want to follow me, who are you really hurting? I’ll give it to whoever else wants to show up. It’s like, I gave you the answers to the test. No, screw you. I hate you. I don’t want the answers. Fine, go work through it yourself. That’s totally okay by me. That’s my philosophy on that.

Matt Davies:
I love that. Don’t give up. Don’t give up, Chris. We need you. We love your insights.

Chris Do:
I appreciate it.

Matt Davies:
I’ve learned loads from you over the years. In fact, you know those Instagram carousel things?

Chris Do:
Yes.

Matt Davies:
I learned that off of you. That was totally your post on that. That’s just one small insight, listeners. If you want to learn big stuff as well, you follow Chris. Hopefully you’ll get a couple more followers off that.

Chris Do:
Matt, I appreciate you saying that. If you don’t want to follow me, that’s okay too. So many people think your value in life is how popular you are. Let’s get over it. I wasn’t popular in school when I was growing up. I was definitely not popular in high school, so hey, let’s just say I have a lot of years of practice not being popular. Look, I’m still all right. I’m still here. It’s fine.

Matt Davies:
You’re all right. I would say although it’s all right with you, Chris, if people don’t follow you, it’s not all right with me and Jacob.

Chris Do:
I appreciate that. Put them in a headlock, will you?

Matt Davies:
Jacob, have we got anymore for Chris while we’ve got him?

Rags to Riches

Jacob Cass:
I think that’s a great way to end it actually, because it’s a real rags to riches story. It shows you how persistence and actually serving people can really grow your brand, and elevate who you are as a person. I think that will be a great note to end on. Thank you so much, Chris, for joining us on the show. It was a pleasure having you. Thank you for everything you do at The Futur. Anything else you wanted to say, Matt?

Matt Davies:
I just wanted to say although you had those two regrets that you shared, I’m so pleased you didn’t take that job. I’m really pleased that you started The Futur when you did, because I think personally both those events that you mentioned have become a catalyst for who you are today. We all respect and really appreciate all the effort that you put into educating and lifting design brands, mindset, creativity, up in the world. We need that. Thanks so much, Chris. Thanks for your time today. We really appreciate you coming on.

Chris Do:
It was my absolute pleasure. My parting words is, it is what it is.