Carl's experiences with starting, running and closing down nGen Works have come up a lot in our episodes. A listener mentioned we never get the full story of how nGen started, grew and eventually ended. So let’s do this! Here is part one: The Origin Story.
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Carl: Gene. How have you been, this is a rare Wednesday recording, even though everybody's watching on Friday because we just got back from DPM summit and I got sucked into the vortex of DPM summit. We haven't really gotten to connect. How are you?
Gene: I'm good. Good.
Carl: Yeah. I don't really, I don't really care about-,
Gene: Yeah, it's a rhetorical question.
Carl: I'm kidding. I'm interested. How are you?
Gene: I'm not going to tell you now.
Carl: Gene.
Gene: I'm good. I'm good. It's Wednesday.
Carl: Are we doing this? You have coffee, I don't have coffee. Because I just came from the dentist. But you know, they did give me a damn Snickers bar.
Gene: What?
Carl: Happy Halloween. I'm like, is this a trick. It wasn't a trick. Gene we are getting more and more people emailing us. Isn't that cool?
Gene: That's incredible.
Carl: Yeah, a lot of them just say please stop. But we did have one that came in from Hans Bordo. Hans has been a member for a long time, has come to a couple of camps and been at owner summits and all this kind of stuff. And he sent something and you mentioned it when we were talking, a lot of people don't know the nGen story.
Gene: Right.
Carl: He gets referenced right here. Here's what Han said, "Hope all's really well, really enjoying the Bureau of digital podcast. Want to drop a topic request in the suggestion box" and anybody listening, you can do this as well. We would appreciate it because quite frankly, we just never know what we're going to talk about; "Your experiences with nGen come up a lot in intriguing ways, but we never get the full three act story from the tidbits that are dropped, I know it's a good one I'd love to hear all about" and then he lists a series of questions. So I just want to say thanks to Hans because, Lord knows, I love talking about myself.
Gene: God.
Carl: And now it's framed in a way where somebody else is asking.
Gene: Thanks a lot Hans.
Carl: I got to make Gene ask the question.
Gene: Just wait till I meet you Hans.
Carl: He's kind of big.
Gene: That's fine. I don't care. Well, here's the thing though. Hans, if you would have been a real long time listener, you would've tuned into a show we had called biz crap.
Carl: Gene, are you-,
Gene: Carl constantly talked about himself.
Carl: You don't even know my name. You call me Kyle.
Gene: They don't know your name. Either.
Carl: Kyle is a member in good standing, Gene Crawford.
Gene: Good.
Carl: You backed down.
Gene: Well, let's talk about it, man. Let's go through the thing. And if it takes more than one episode, I'm down with it.
Carl: He thinks it's going to be an episode out of each act beginning, middle and end.
Gene: Sorry to break it to you Hans.
Carl: We'd love to hear the same about Gene's adventures as well.
Gene: It's a simple story.
Carl: It's a simple story. And he thinks that's going to be a six epic... This is going to take forever.
Gene: Good job Kyle.
Carl: Six episode package. That's going to win a potty award, which I thought, even when I read it, I thought it was like potty award. Like people listen to this on the John.
Gene: Now, you have been known to win the potty award. Well let's back up, man.
Carl: I didn't have toilet paper, I needed your help that time.
Gene: Why did you... Start at the beginning man. Start with, because you were doing some stuff before you started nGen. So start way back at the beginning. What was your first industry job?
Carl: Well, so the industry didn't exist.
Gene: Well, yes, but I mean you first started working at a marketing company.
Carl: An advertising shop. Yes. I left Florida, it's so weird because I feel like everybody knows this, but to your point, there are a lot of new people.
Gene: There are.
Carl: It's one of those, those stories. I was a theater major, I was at UF, it was number one party school that year. I like to think I helped push it over the edge, there. We had a lot of fun. But I realized coming out of school, that theater was not going to be like a lucrative career. And it wasn't that I had achieved a certain status of living. I just didn't want to be broke. So I ended up in an advertising agency. All the theater training came in really handy because I was great at biz dev. I was great with clients because I was good at improv. And because I had learned how to basically memorize scripts and play off of them and stuff lot.
Gene: I've seen a lot of like sales coaches and stuff suggest improv.
Carl: They're all doing it now. Like that's a thing that started about five years ago. I think Dan Pink, he had a book To Sell is Human. I think it might have been, but it started talking about improv and then you've got like Jesse, who's got improv effect. Like there's a lot of great coaches out there and companies that are training. I mean how Jesse's working with Netflix, training their executive staff, how to be more vocal in an acceptable way, like how to speak so people can hear you. I obviously have not done this training I'm words with good. Yes. So I ended up in advertising and I wanted to be a writer, but I wasn't great. End up pretty much part of the executive team by the time I'm like 24.
Gene: Right.
Carl: But mainly because clients liked me and I would sit with the advertising team, I would sit with the art directors, I would sit with the writers and I'd say, "why are you doing it this way? What are you doing?" And then I would go and basically share that back with the client. And I could get approvals really fast. Like I would, because I would lead with strategy. But then you get to the late nineties and the internet starts to happen. Now before that even, you have Macromedia coming out with director. You have Macromedia coming out with these other things, because computers are getting more powerful. And so we started doing that. And then I remember I went to Gary Melanie who owned the company and I said, "Look, this internet thing is a new medium. This is the late nineties. I think about this all the time. I'm like, we really need to offer this as a service". And they're like, "well, we don't know anything about it". And I said, "it can't be that hard".
Carl: So there was a guy in town who was a great with tec, get him on. And then, but it gets to this point in 2002. So I had been, I started working there, God, I guess I started working there in 1990 and I was there; or 1989, actually I started there; and then get in and start doing stuff and start working on web stuff and landed a project with a company that got ended up acquired by Comcast, which was just the simplest of websites. It was basically a programming guide, but it was more of a, I mean it was manually updated. It wasn't any kind of database driven thing.
Gene: Well, yeah, nothing was done.
Carl: The artists were like, I don't know what to do. I said, just do simple icons just to represent whatever the content type is. And we'll just put out to the side and do this stuff.
Carl: And we went up against this company in New York called Avalanche. So Continental Cable Vision was the company.
Gene: Yeah. I remember Avalanche.
Carl: And Avalanche was this huge flash shop. And so we charged Continental, something like outrageous like $10,000 to put together this website with the programming guy. Meanwhile, Avalanche is building this [sound 00:09:37] and they're going crazy building this, all this animation, all this kind of stuff. And I remember that our client Mark, he all my ask, all my ask, oops, all my past clients, I call Mark now. But this guy's name really was Mark. And he basically, he called me like three weeks after we delivered the project. We didn't know about the other company. We didn't know that this was like a "we're going to hire two and see what happens" and read me the riot act about how we had ripped them off about how, what we did was crap about what Avalanche did was just amazing. And that you sat there and you were just entertain while you were figuring everything out and all this kind of stuff.
Carl: And then about a month later, he called and he apologized and asked for the source files because they tested it. And our stuff was so simple that people just looked at it and they got down and they were to accomplish things. They didn't know what to do when the Avalanche basically exploded. When their site exploded on their computer, they had no idea where to click or what to do and things kept moving and they were getting distracted and it took forever. So, that was kind of the beginning. And then Kelly Goto, who has go-to media and has the first book, really, Web Redesign Workflow That Works. We were at a Thunder Lizard conference. I told her that story. She said, can I put that story in my book?
Carl: And I was like, yes. And so then I start getting pulled into this web world. And then I get married in 2000 we got a kid on the way, right. In two-, not right away. Well, kind of right away. I got pregnant on honeymoon. But then it's like, "okay, I don't want to work here anymore" at the place I was at because I just wasn't happy with the way it was going. And I had been asked to take over, it was about a 40 person shop. And I just, I had watched the owner of that company miss her kids growing up. And if I was there Wednesday at 5:00 AM, if I came in and she was going to be there, if it was Sunday at 2:00 PM, she was going to be there. And I just, we were fighting all the time. I was really disgruntled. And then my wife Kat, I had just put in a a hundred hour week, do the math.
Carl: I put in a hundred hour week to save jobs because we were going to have a layoff and we needed this one seafood restaurant chain. And I put in all this time, I did on the street interviews with people leaving the restaurant. I did all this kind of stuff to package this video, to show them that we could promote whatever they wanted. But the problem was the product and so went in and pitched that if they don't fix the product, we can't, nobody's going to promote it and save you.
Carl: So we end up winning that. We go to the restaurant, which really was marginal and Kat looks across the table at me. And she goes, "Hey, I don't like you anymore". And I'm like, "What?" And she's, you can't realize she's like nine months pregnant. And she's like, "I love you. I do love you. But you just, you're just so angry all the time. And you're frustrated and you create these business models as a catharsis and you put them on the shelf. You need to pull one down and you need to start your own company. You need to leave the agency and start your own company".
Carl: I never knew I could, until she told me that I had the ability to leave that job because I loved that job. I loved the people. I loved what I did. I just got frustrated when I got up high enough to see how the money was used. That became a super frustrating thing for me, because we were having a layoff, but a lot of people were overcompensated. I was one of them. I gave some money back. It doesn't make me a hero. It just meant I wanted to protect where we were. And at 20, I guess I would've, at that time, I would've been in my early thirties. I was okay.
Gene: Right.
Carl: Anyway, yeah. I go back, I tell Melanie, who was my boss. I said, "Hey, I figured out the whole thing while we're fighting all the time. And I think I got it figured out how we don't have to do that". And she goes, "Amazing. Let's go talk right now". And so we're sitting in my office, corner office, overlooking the city, just beautiful. And she said, "What is it?" I said, "I won't work here anymore". And she goes, "Okay, you want to work from home? Yes, we can figure that out". And I was like, "No, when I get a check, you won't sign it. It's not from you. I'm going to figure out my own thing". And she looked at me and she said, "I am so happy for you, but I'm also about to lose my shit. So you should probably just leave right now". And as I was walking out, she stood up and I was like, is she going to hit me? Was she just gave me this hug. She just gave me this hug. And I walked out and I started nGen Works.
Carl: I had three friends. And one of the things I wanted to do was they each had great skills. One was amazing designer. One was an amazing breaker. Like could just could break a site.
Gene: Oh, I got you.
Carl: Could figure out what weren't working. And then the other was a flash guy. And he was also amazing at solving problems. Like when things weren't looking right, working right, whatever. So gave 14 weeks notice, which was one week for each year I was there and was not allowed to say I was leaving until two weeks were left because they were trying to figure out how to handle it, which made it look like I just bailed.
Gene: Right.
Carl: And so that was painful. So then we decided on nGen and it was me and Bruce and Verick and Stockton. And we were all going to be compensated equally, which we did. It was not a lot of money.
Carl: That was a big drop from that corner office down to doing your own thing. And I think the biggest thing that happened was I had lunch with Melanie, maybe like three or four months later. nGen, we came out the gate pretty hot. We landed-, I signed a voluntary non-competition agreement. What do you call those things? Non-compete a voluntary non-compete that I would not take any of their clients. We got a call from Chase. Chase had not been a client of theirs, but they had pursued them. And I think that caused some rub, but they contacted us and we came out of the gate with Chase as our first client. That was crazy. We were building basically flash stuff for their trade show boots. But we got to say, we built stuff for Chase and that got us going. But even then we never had that much money because we didn't how to price anything.
Gene: Well, back up a little bit. If you're comfortable talking about it. Because I think there's something there. So you did a voluntary non-compete and then you wound up working with this company that your old company had pursued. So how did that go down? I mean-
Carl: So first of all, the volunteering non-compete sounds like I was doing a good thing. I was cocky, I actually was acting, it was ego saying, "You know what? I don't need your clients".
Gene: Right.
Carl: Because things had gotten a little tense, during those 14 weeks. If you're ever leaving a long term job, I do not recommend you give more than four weeks. It's just not going to be good for anybody. So then I want to say it was Verick, who also had been at the agency and was leave being voluntarily for another reason, he was going to go back to animation school. Because he was amazing animator.
Gene: You were both at the same place.
Carl: We left the same place when we both left at the same time. He was, I would've been upset with us too.
Gene: That's why I'm bringing it up because I mean-
Carl: He was the most talented designer they had.
Gene: Right, right, right.
Carl: I was the head, for the most part, I was the head of account service and media.
Gene: That was a big-
Carl: Of the internet. Okay. Wait. So it's like that red of threat. Wait, so I'm the dick? So we left.
Gene: It's important. It's important to get that point across because we are the Bureau. So we want to look at it from both perspectives.
Carl: For sure. And I mean, and this happens. Like you get people and this is part of... People talk about all the time that they don't have a way for their best people to advance. There's no upward mobility.
Gene: Right.
Carl: Even if you're a flat organization, your long term people need things to feel like they're progressing. It's about making advancement in your own life. So this was one of those things that when I got to a point that they asked me if I wanted to be president of the company and I realized I didn't. There was nowhere to go. And it was-, part of that was, it was always going to be their company. I was going to be running somebody else's thing. And I wanted to take what I had learned and do something new.
Carl: That's why I always did those business plans and put them up on the shelf. "This would work". And that was my catharsis to get all of the negativity out. But yes. So to that point we left Verick and I left at the same time. And we also did this thing I think was also probably just really cocky where we said it, if you sign an agreement now we'll help with all your stuff for a hundred bucks an hour. If you call us later, it's going to be 250. And they called us later. So it was like all of these things were, I had just, I'd given them 14 years of my life and they were 14 of the best years, 14 of the formative years, I would not be here with the Bureau right now. If I had not been there with Melanie and Gary, they taught me just everything.
Carl: But so we get out and you know, it might have even been Stockton, I think who had connection at Chase because it wasn't going in the same door. It was a different department, but it was John Carr. I'll never forget this. John was this great guy. And he just contacted us and said, Hey, I got this much money. We need this thing. Do you all want to do it? And I didn't know how to price anything really. I didn't know what it was going to take for us to do it. All I knew was we didn't have production costs. So I thought it was all gravy. I really came out of the gate slow. I didn't really know what I was doing.
Carl: But yes. So we ended up with Chase. We would end up-, we'd do anything. Like I think everybody knows this. Like we would do video editing. Anything anybody told us they had a dollar and a need. We were pretty much going to say yes. And I think that first year we had had 38 clients. Like some sort of crazy number. I'm trying to think it fit on the back of a t-shirt we had where we did the client's names and the dates like they were tour dates. But yeah, that was crazy. And-
Gene: So you'd say it went pretty well.
Carl: I wouldn't change it.
Gene: It went pretty well out the gate. I mean, if you open up with a client like Chase. That's probably a very similar story to a lot of people that, where they built this company around this client, like sort of out of the gate.
Carl: Yeah. I think so it kind of defines who you are really quickly. Now. I'll also say this during those 14 weeks where, I had given the 14 weeks before I was going to leave, we did some campaigns for nGen. And I think the one that was the most notorious, because I couldn't say I was leaving because I had promised not to, we did this like teaser campaign where we would call people. We knew in the industry and ask if they had heard of nGen Works because we heard that they were some new interactive shop that was coming to town. And we were trying to figure out who they were, because we didn't know if we'd want to work with them or not.
Gene: Right.
Carl: So I'm making like three or four of these phone calls a week. The other guys are doing some stuff too. And people would say, "Well, where are they?" I said, "I don't know. I heard they're in North Carolina, but they're coming to Jacksonville. And evidently they're really good at animation and they're good at all this kind of stuff". And then one day I got a call from somebody asking me if I had heard of nGen Works.
Carl: And I was like, "Yeah, I have, I think they're in North Carolina. Right?","Yeah. That's what I'm hearing, but I can't find anything on them. And then they're coming here". To this day there are people who think that in Jacksonville, that nGen was originally in North Carolina came here and we just made it up.
Gene: That's funny.
Carl: But that gave us, I think a quick launch in terms of getting the work, but we didn't really know how to price the work. We didn't really know what things were going to take. And we came from advertising, so we were a fixed bid mindset, without the media to compensate.
Gene: Right. So were you the first employee, or were you, and Verick the first employees or were you all sort of the same?
Carl: All four of us started at the same time. We had time equity and money equity. So we basically, we would all leave at the same time for the most part every day, start for the most part the same time every day and split the money four ways. Which wasn't great because they were all in their twenties. I was in my thirties, they were all single. I had a kid, I had a second kid by the time we ended up starting. So it really was stretching me thin. I also had a lot of savings. So I just, I didn't even watch it wind down because I was having so much fun. But then we did get into this point where I was started living on credit cards because as busy as we were, we weren't pricing it. And I didn't have any business background, again, theater major.
Carl: Like I took an accounting class because you had to, but it's like, none of that made sense. We had a lot of people who wanted, we got the reputation for kind of being like the bad boys of design. Not for, I mean, well, yeah we did, we drank a lot, but it was more that we would just tell clients know all the time we'd fire clients. It was like you really had to go the path that we laid out if we were going to see this to the end. And, and the thing about it was there was so much work in those early days of the web. We started in 2003, June 2nd, 2003. Everybody was lined up. We once had barbecue chain we were working with that was throughout the Southeast and their competitor came to us and said, we want to work with you as well.
Carl: And in advertising, you don't work with two people in the same space. But in software you do. And so it's this weird thing because agencies, web shops started either from advertising agencies or from software developers. Like that's where it comes in software development. We bill weekly, advertising, we bill milestones. So it's like, this is how all this stuff starts. But what we told them was if you can wait, we will be done with your biggest competitor site in three weeks, but you need to give us a deposit now. And then once we're done working with them, we can work with you. And they say, well, why do you have to wait? I said, because if we have a great idea, we don't want to decide who gets it.
Gene: Right.
Carl: And you'll be able to see what we did for them. And we are not going to replicate anything we did for them, for you. We will draw the line and we will start fresh. And it worked and we had multiple real estate companies, multiple steak places, barbecue places. All that stuff really worked. And we were really big and faith based, which still cracks me up.
Gene: Interesting. So what, just following some of his stuff here. What would you think was your best advantage early on?
Carl: So we had, first of all, we didn't have a boss. We had a list of rules that we had to follow. And if you broke three of the rules in 12 months, you were gone. That was kind of it. So we had this really clear understanding as a team that, for example, if you expose the company to a liability that was a strike; if you didn't keep a commitment to a team member that was a strike; if you missed a deliverable without renegotiating, that was a strike. Three strikes. You're out. It was also known as the driver's license rule. So we had that and somebody fell to it in the first three months. But the thing, that I would say was big, but also we didn't really have a business plan, but we did have like, we would make rules.
Gene: Big in what way? Big. It was big. In what way?
Carl: What do you mean?
Gene: You just said that you think that the three strike rule in your out was big.
Carl: I think it was big in that it kept us in line.
Gene: Got you.
Carl: We all knew it was expected. We all approved them. Nobody said these are the rules. Like I crafted most of them, but then they looked at them. I was kind of the business owner, Verick was the product owner, Bruce was the quality owner and Stockton was the guy who could make magic, but he could do the animation. He could do all those things. So, but everybody got a voice in what we were going to do and how it was going to work. But then I think the other part was we came from a service oriented company where a lot of the people who were starting up web shops were just people who knew how to build websites. And so they would take a deposit and disappear because really it was a 50, 50 world back then you get a 50% deposit, the 50% upon completion and just try to eat as little as you can in between.
Gene: Right.
Carl: Because it's going to stretch out. But the thing I think that helped us was in our rules for clients, the first one was we'll always answer the phone and the second one was, we'll always keep our word, and the third one was, we'll always be nice. Now we would tell them no, but we wouldn't be jerks about it. We would say, "I appreciate you want to do that. That's a bad idea. We're not going to do that". So anyway.
Carl: I think because we set up these predefined rules that we were going to follow. We never questioned what to do. Like we had it..., I would even say we had core values, although I never heard that phrase before the Bureau. I never knew about core values or mission and vision. We had a mantra which was serious fun. We were going to be serious about everything we did, but if we weren't having fun, we weren't going to do it. That was a great thing. And I remember getting interviewed by the newspaper pretty early on, like we were maybe two or three months out of the gate and the newspaper needed a digital partner. They needed somebody to help with that stuff. They were asking about cost. And I said, just give us a few stories get us in there. Because I was always thinking, the more awareness we can create, the better off we're going to be.
Gene: You're not wrong.
Carl: And then I think the biggest thing that came out of that was basically just sharing that there are right ways in wrong ways to treat clients. That was something that one of the articles was around in the business section. And basically I just said the client's not always right, but they're always important. And that's the line you have to walk. Are you going to let them hurt themselves? Because they're about to create something that's not going to be usable. That doesn't make any sense. And little things like that, that we would get dropped in the paper would lead a bunch of locals to us.
Gene: Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. There's a fine line between just doing what they ask because they're going to pay for it versus actually giving them some honest feedback and being that true consultant.
Carl: Well, that's it. And the web was so new. I remember there was this guy, Mike Morgan, who ran a shop called Morgan & Partners. And he was like a cigar smoking..., he should have been a private detective in the twenties. Remember he came up to me at an award show and he goes, "You know, Carl, I envy you. I envy you because you can make magic. We put stuff on paper. We put it onto, nobody cares. You make magic, make sure...," and then he goes, "make sure you're pricing appropriately".
Gene: He's not wrong.
Carl: And that day I went, "Oh shit, we need to double our price. It's not that we're overworked. It's that we're not billing properly". And that was like two years in.
Gene: You're like, yeah baby. Yeah. Well we are at 30 minutes. Let's take a break and come back for part two.
Carl: I like it. And again, I want to thank Hans for this and Gene, thank you for being amicable to it. Now that I'm able to use my big words.
Gene: I don't even know that word.
Carl: Thanks for saying, okay.
Gene: All right.
Carl: I appreciate it.
Gene: Let's come back.
Carl: Gene. Well, I'm going to say something and I need you to say it back. Okay. I love you.
Gene: Oh, I love you too, man.
Carl: Aw, thanks man.
Gene: I was going to ask if you had a hot take for this first part of your story.
Carl: You know what, that's a great question. I would say my hot take for this first part of the story is, if you were listening to this and you're thinking about heading out and starting your own thing, if you've been somewhere else for a while, and then you're going to start up. Number one, don't take yourself too seriously, realize you're going to be fine. It's not make or break. Everything's not going to sink your company. And the other thing I would say is don't try not to create the place you left, take the things that were good, the things that you learned that was a valuable education and there's no reason not to do that type of documentation or that type of process or that type of whatever. It's something that is ingrained in you. And if you try not to do it, you're going to hurt yourself and your team and your company.
Gene: That's some great advice, man. And I like your quote about the client is not always right, but they're always important. That's a good one. That's a good one to take too.
Carl: There you go. Look at all this value. Thanks to Hans.
Gene: All right, man.
Carl: See ya.
