Jumpstart Episode 10: Nicholas Holland
Centresource is an interactive agency based in Nashville, TN. since 2004.
Never start a company in November.
Don’t be clever with your company name. Name it something easy to spell.
Crushing it since 2007/2008.
Read Good to Great
They recognize an important part of their service is to educate clients about usability and analytics.
Are you in a protection mode or are you constantly trying to capture that spirit of innovation?
Inspiration for Centresource comes from Fantasy Interactive, Happy Cog, Zirb.
You’ll leave home without kissing your wife, but you won’t leave home without your phone.
Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Malcom Gladwell inspire Nicholas.
He loves StumbleUpon and Digg, Mashable, TechCrunch and Ars Technica.
Dave plugs Reddit.
Nicholas recommends Chief Happiness Officer.
Centresource practice the ROWE (Results Only Work Environment ) system.
Contact Nicholas on Twitter @nicholasholland.
Nicholas’ 3 tips every entrepreneur needs to know
Always spend your own money, before you pitch to raise money too.
Unless you have a developer and a usability person, don’t go do it. It takes 3 mindsets to get online projects off the ground.
Put it all on the line and make it happen.
Please SUBSCRIBE to the podcast in iTunes, so you’ll get new episodes as they are available.
Jumpstart theme song “DLDN Instrumental (ft. Onlymeith, Mellotroniac)” by: St. Paul from ccMixter.
TRANSCRIPT
Dave: Welcome to Jumpstart. I am your host Dave Delaney. My guest today is Nicholas Holland, CEO of Centre Source. Hey Nick, how are you?
Nick: Hey, what’s going on Dave? Thanks for having me man.
Dave: Yeah, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. Tell us a little bit about Centre Source. What is it that you guys do?
Nick: Thanks man. Centre Source is an interactive agency and that’s a term that’s becoming more popular as of late. But it was something that we were trying to capture because when we first got going the world was really divided up into you are a marketing firm, a PR firm, a web design firm or a programming firm or a customs software firm. And we all know as the liberation of the internet continued and you have a lot of amazing things like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. The question really became who built those types of products when it came down to that beautiful intersection of creating a consumer product the people like mixed with the technical acumen to make sure that it could scale and be functional. And then also have a marketing angle such that people have a way of hearing about it, have a way of ensuring they could tell others about it and that people really got what it was.
So we started off by defining interactive as I already said is that beautiful interaction between marketing, business, and technology. So we’re an interactive agency and really to simply put what we do we say if its web or mobile, we brand it, build it, and boost it. And that really encapsulates how we take our clients projects that are web or mobile related and we basically run the gamut of making sure that they’re successful with them.
Dave: Sounds like a full on interactive agency like you do. You guys do everything.
Nick: Yeah, we do everything but we really do want to make sure that the web and mobile are the masters.
Dave: Right.
Nick: We may be task to do some things like print or have a video, all things to be service to the web or mobile because we feel like it is the dominant channel. It’s the most long-lasting channel. And more importantly, we really feel like the majority of the users and interactions that a lot of organizations will have today will come first from some sort of mobile or web interaction, rest of the channel becomes ancillary. And so there are certain companies that we’re not a good fit for. If you find yourself being a big direct mailer or radio is really your thing, then that’s not somebody that we think we’d probably do a good job for. But for those who feel like the web is a strategic asset, we’ll kill it for it.
Dave: Cool man. How long have you guys been together now? Or how long have Centre Source been around?
Nick: Man, I started off as an entrepreneur. There’s two pieces of advice I always give people. I say the first thing when starting a company is never follow in my footsteps. I started the company in November of 2003 and basically man I spend 3 ½ months trying to figure out why nobody wanted to buy anything from me.
Dave: Yeah.
Nick: The second thing I always tell people, don’t be clever with your name. I remember before I started Centre Source the actual domain name Centre Source ironically I’ve never even thought that I would buy that. I actually wanted the European spelling because I thought that was just so clever.
Dave: Right.
Nick: And the irony is that someone after I bought Centre Source which is C-E-N-T-R-E bought the C-E-N-T-E-R Source and so now I always tell entrepreneurs if someone can’t spell your name trust me I’ve had 7 years of going, “No it’s not a T-E-R, it’s T-R-E. And so that’s two pieces of advice I always give entrepreneur right off the bat. Don’t start in November and name your company something that’s easy to spell.
Dave: Yeah, it’s a good call. That’s a really good call.
Nick: Yeah but we’ve been –
Dave: 2003.
Nick: Basically 2004 we were already an IT firm. I built up for 2 years and ended up selling that to another company in Nashville. And then for about 1 ½ we were really were a high velocity web design firm. Specifically we did nothing but web design and a lot of the websites that we did were in the $2500 to $5000 range. We ran into a couple of situations where we knew the client wasn’t doing what we thought was best for their overall business. But we really weren’t in a position to lend that advice I mean we were just the web design firm. So we played in servitude towards the marketing department, towards the IT department, towards the marketing firm, the PR firm that they’ve hired.
So it was really around basically 2007 – 2008 that we kind of said at the end of the day we even sleep this world that we live and we recognize the times are changing and that people come to us for expert advice because at the end of the day the web and mobile are just tools once again to get business done, to help human interactions that help transactions, etc. And so we said why don’t we step out and be the lead opponent? Why don’t we tell people what we know will work and be okay not working for those who don’t listen to us and really help those that do want to work with us and find success? Man ever since we did that we’ve been crushing it.
Dave: That’s cool. Yeah, it sounds like a good direction to go certainly having that advice to be able to get back to them and then the strategy from there.
Nick: Yeah it’s interesting. Everybody has different books to look at but if you look at Good the Great he talked about what is it that you’re great at? It’s funny we talk about inside the company we talk on [Inaudible – 00:06:06] how we read everything about analytics. We read about usability test, we read about all these little small nuances that we just geek out on and think that it’s amazing how people run these campaigns and have these enormous amounts of success for their companies.
But then we sit down sometimes with entrepreneurs who say, “I can’t wait to – I need a 5-page website with a banner at the top of it.” There’s sometimes even for us such a huge gap between where they start and where we are that we recognize that an important of the service that we provide the clients is just educating them. Because we’ve lost deals where we said that at the end of the day we know that we spent a lot of time educating the person so that they’ll be better off with whichever company they choose.
We laugh, we never say, “Right now at least knock on wood, competition is not really an issue for us as much as market education is.” It’s rarely that we find ourselves struggling to compete against somebody else. What we really find ourselves struggling to compete against is with entrepreneurs who just are still trying to understand this world that they’re stepping into.
Dave: Yeah and I found it difficult with clients in the past. They don’t understand – you can set them up with Twitter and make it look really nice and you can set them up with a great looking blog and all that. But when they don’t commit to using it, using these tools then they sit sort of empty and it’s like, “Ah.”
Nick: We’re talking with the client right now I guess a prospective and the irony is their competition is using social media. They’re finding out that their customers are using social media. Their own internal staff is begging to use social media. What do I do whenever their sea level leadership tells me that they just don’t see the return on investment on it? What do I do in that scenario? And so we laugh and internally because there will be a day when in that particular instance where that person will sit down and find out where their competition has done something to surpass them or a PR nightmare occurs on the social media channels or just at the end of the day the [Inaudible – 00:08:23] that work in the company will overturn the,
Dave: Right.
Nick: The fuel that run it. And at the end of the day that they’re just waiting and I just always wonder. That’s what I love about capitalism in that it’s fascinating that there are people who are willing to learn from their peers and from those around, take risks and really innovate. And then the irony is when companies get to a certain point they move more into a protection mode. We’re always telling customers that like, “Are you in a protection mode where literally you just want to ride your train into the ground? Or B, are you constantly trying to capture that spirit of innovation that got you to where you are man?” So yeah, I agree with you.
Dave: You mentioned Good to Great and actually crushing it as well possibly a Gary V. reference perhaps. Who does inspire you?
Nick: It comes from a lot of different angles. I’ll tell you from kind of a design standpoint. We as a company we really like some other agencies out there, Fantasy Interactive. We like Happy Cog. These are agencies that I would tell you, there’s another one called Serve and these are not people that probably majority of the podcast listeners will give a damn about but what they are doing is they’re really deep diving into this kind of relationship that we make with the screen that’s in front of us. That’s one of the things I’m often fascinated by is that even when we’re interacting with a website, we are having little subtle emotional responses with our phones, etc. I tell people your phone is the most intimate device that you have. You’ll leave home without kissing your wife but you won’t leave home without your phone. And so what creates these things? Those are 3 companies that their blogs are fascinating.
When you get into the business side in terms of just some of the new ways of thinking the paradigm shift, of course you got Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki or one everyone knows Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm’s Point, a lot of people love love reading his stuff but I don’t think a lot of people would even understand why they like reading his stuff. The issue is that there’s so many little psychological things that are awakening and kind of the world at large right now in terms of not understanding why they’re drawn to one thing or they have this particular behavior. I think it’s because if you think about it back in the days, man we just did the same thing. We got up in the morning, we drink our coffee, we went to work, and literally there were only a few times when we really have that kind of spark that something goes, “Man that was awesome.” Or “Wow, that really changes the way I think in this moment in time.” Hell I do that every night with StumbleUpon. I click 4 or 5 stumbles and I’m like, “Man that was awesome. Wow that neat. I never thought about that.”
Dave: Right.
Nick: Market. That happens 5 times a night now whereas in the past that you snap maybe once a month or hell for some people it might take 30 years.
Dave: Yeah.
Nick: So those are just things now that I’m really fascinated by and kind of just these general paradigm shifts of how we act as an entire population. I’m really fascinated by that.
Dave: You mentioned stumble upon, I know that’s not specifically a website but are there websites or blogs that you subscribe to on a regular basis?
Nick: Yeah from just kind of learning about stuff, I’ll tell you a new Digg is passed A right now but I still like Digg. I still like StumbleUpon. They’re typically at the – whereas a lot of people I think will come home and sit and watch TV. I’m actually bad because my wife will be watching TV and I’ll be using Digg or StumbleUpon.
Dave: Right.
Nick: The Fun Stuff. Honestly if any of the people listening right now have never used Create Content, it’s an amazing tool. It literally does help you kind of find some of the most interesting stuff. It does help you kind of find stuff that otherwise even your social stream sometimes won’t show you because birds of the feather flocked together.
Dave: Sure.
Nick: And so then you off with the stuff that your social stream shows or things that you might have already found yourself and you would have necessarily some of the prospects. Create Content will show you things that’s kind of a much larger audience found to be interesting.
Dave: That’s true and especially algorithms and search engines are more configured to send you relevant content. Once again, you do sort of miss out; you may miss things that you wouldn’t normally come across. So yes, StumbleUpon and Digg, and Reddit. Are you a Reddit guy?
Nick: Yeah. It’s funny I’ve actually never played with Reddit that much. I know it’s – I also laugh about this too. I always felt there are usually one or two slots in a person’s mind for a particular type of service so like a test system.
Dave: Yeah.
Nick: Everyone you know has one maybe two tests customs they’re used to using. With content, same thing goes with Micro Blogging or a social network or for me Gadgets is like, one or two slots. And unfortunately Digg and Stumble had filled in those slots before Reddit got there. So I have to literally, everyone is pressuring me to get rid of Digg. But anyways, I tell you I think for me I still like Mashable, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, those are really pertinent to my industry.
Dave: Yeah.
Nick: And those help me really keep up on what some of the online tools are. I’ve read something that’s probably none of your other speakers have talk about but the Chief Happiness Officer, I manage a ton of millennials and there are a lot of theoretical practitioners out there about what does it take to manage a millennial. Well I’m telling you firsthand I’ve manage 26 of them every day and they are different. I mean they are very, very different from older generation even myself. I mean I manage them different than I manage myself. The Chief Happiness Officer was a great blog.
To give you a small quick story, I was really freaking out because people were not coming in to work on time. At the end of the day I heard myself echoing the past of father saying, People they come in to work at 8:00 and they stay until 5:00, that’s the way it is, that’s the way America runs.” And so people were constantly coming in late and I spent more time griping about them coming in late than I did, actually talking about all the good stuff that they did. And so then I enacted this crazy, “You got 30-minute leeway. So work starts at 8:00 but I won’t gripe at you until 8:31. What time do you think everyone showed up? 8:29, 8:29, 8:29 and they showed at 8:35. So here I am griping again.
So literally one of my employees emails me and says, “Did you write this blog?” And I pull it up and lord it literally sounds like this guy wrote exactly what I said. He’s like, “My employees don’t come in on time.” I feel like it’s a sign of disrespect. I feel like its inconvenience and inconveniencing the other staff members. At the end of the day it’s their job, they’re bigger, bigger more important things to focus on. And I’m like, “Yeah, man, yeah.”
And then I read the comments and I’m not embellishing Dave, 47 of the 48 comments called this guy an idiot.
Dave: Really.
Nick: And I’m shock. I’m like, “My God, am I in the twilight zone.” It’s like seeing something read and then 40 people around you call it blue. You’re like, “What?” In the comments they brought up a system called ROWE. They really said, “Man, you should stop focusing on menial things like that and focus on results.” And they brought up the ROWE system. And so one of the things that we’ve done to kind of help manage a law suit is, we were nervous but we implemented the ROWE System and that stands for Results Only Work Environment. So there’s no start time to work, no in time to work. There are no sick days. There are no vacation days. Every job just has a series of metrics that they have to get done. So if you’re a designer on our staff, you got to bill 6 hours a day and you go to meet your timelines that you agreed to. You got to turn in your time sheets. And it’s real basic.
Dave: Yeah.
Nick: And between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., you got to be available at least by phone. And that’s it. So man, little things like that have just gone to huge amounts of, it really contributed hugely to how happy the staff is. We pick up staff members that said, “Until you guys went ROWE I would have never worked here.” So I mean is that man in the case, this more just for your readers to understand that you can read a blog that can have profound impact.
Dave: Yeah, definitely.
Nick: On how you do things.
Dave: And the comments.
Nick: And the comments. I will take that. Comments are better than the blog post.
Dave: Unless it’s YouTube.
Nick: Yeah.
Dave: Then don’t feel the thrills.
Nick: The damn thrills yeah. I’m going say. That something that you guys should have at home.
Dave: That’s great actually. And I was actually just going to get in to asking you for 3 tips but you’ve really given some great tips here. Never start a company in November and not being clever with your name, and then that could certainly stand to be those tips. But if you have any other tips you’d like to add that’d be great.
Nick: Well as I was saying when you ask those are these tips just in kind of general?
Dave: In general. Well I mean for entrepreneurs and it can be for entrepreneurs who are really just starting out or it could be for seasoned people who have not been in the business for a while.
Nick: Yeah one that just comes up all the time is I tell people if you’re building a prototype of anything, so this if you ever had an idea I mean hell Dave you probably heard this 50 times. “Dave, check this idea.”
Dave: Yeah.
Nick: Well what I tell people is if you got an idea and you want to actually build it, here are a couple of things I’d say, “Before you ever ask me for money you better have spent some of your own money in it as well.” So I will also tell entrepreneurs, “Before you go pitch to raise money, just make sure that you recognize that the other person is going to be wondering by how much burn are you putting on the table as well? Are you spending your own money? Have you quit your job, etc.? So always tell entrepreneurs “Don’t tell me you have an idea and then tell me you want to go raise money unless you’re willing to put it all on the line.” That’s one.
The second thing I’d tell other entrepreneurs when they say they want to build some sort of awesome idea I’d say, “Unless you have a developer and,” and this is the critical part that I think a lot of people overlook but, “Unless you have a developer and a usability person, a UX designer, so basically someone who’s going to make it look awesome, work through all the usability details don’t go do it.” Meaning if you got a developer that thinks he can help you build it and you can’t design/do it X yourself, you’re doomed for failure. Developer is going to hate you. Your project is going to fail. You know how it sounds? It’s controversial but I’m telling you right now, it takes 3 mindsets to get any of these like online tools or projects off the ground.
Dave: Yeah that’s great.
Nick: The third piece of advice I often give entrepreneurs is I say that the real way to know that you want to start your own company is that you cannot start your own company. If you have tons of ideas but one just doesn’t wear you out, you don’t think about it in the shower, you’re not doodling on it while you’re lying in bed at night, you’re not boring your spouse to death by talking about it, you’re probably not ready to go do it. Because the burn that it takes to actually get one of these things going is ridiculously complex. And so that’s kind of the third piece I’ll tell you is that this is not a game for the faint hearted. This is a game that you basically have to put on the line to make it happen.
Dave: No, that’s a great tip. Well listen, I want to thank you so much for your time tonight. I really do appreciate it.
Nick: No problem. I really enjoyed it. Again I don’t know what you put up notes for the entrepreneur but if anybody ever needs to get in touch with me man, feel free to post my Twitter, my email, etc., and I’ll definitely help them out.
Dave: Thanks man. I’ll include that in the show notes on the website.
Nick: All right, thanks brother.
Dave: Okay, thanks. I’ll talk to you soon.
Moderator: For show notes, links discussed in today’s podcast, and much more visit jumpstartpodcast.com. Thanks for listening.