Episode 13
The Winding Path of Creativity with Andrew Mallis
I come back to the… you went to art school and you ended up becoming an entrepreneur and running an agency instead. So you went all the way through art school. I made it through a day. What's your story? So unpack that for me. It seemed like, right. You accidentally started an agency.
Andrew Mallis (00:41)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A little bit. I mean, it's a journey. When I was in art school, I was very politically active. you know, was a very kind of precocious artist type person. And when I was in university, I was like, wow, this is like a great microcosm for the world. Like this is my playground and let's see how the world works, right? Let's try to take it apart and see how it ticks. So I ran for student government, which I did for a number of years. And ⁓ we brought a lot of systemic change to the infrastructure for students. But I also sat on some committees and helped to redraft the legislation that governed the college and increased student representation. So I got very interested in how university systems worked. I'm running the student union. Organizing protests, getting buses, we went to Quebec City and we did this whole protest movement stuff there.
But at a certain point, I wasn't feeling, it was a lot of work and the boards would still vote for fee increases for students and I was just like, oh man. So the school administration, they had this newsletter. And so I decided like, I'm just going to spoof their newsletter. And all these stories there were some, some students, had remove asbestos from the school without any like protection. But they were like these stories that I found because I was at the center of it politically. People would tell me these things. So I made this parody newspaper and then it was like huge damage control. The university was writing letters to all of their donors and the next day they had written a communique and it was in all the faculty mailboxes. I was like, oh, this is something. This is working.
And so then I, I refounded the student press and did a newspaper and I did like print for a while, which is what eventually brought me to the web, after university, was like art director of a magazine for a little while. And I got a job in newspapers. And it was like a web coordinator role to coordinate all the the websites for the municipal newspapers in the city of Toronto. So I learned a lot and through that I… saw the kind of corporate culture of building, they decided they were going to replace their CMS and build their own CMS. So I send the reporters down to city hall and there's this giant book that there's a name of everyone who's running for elections, all the city counselors and the school board trustees and their name and their contact information, their emails. And so I get all that and they put them in a spreadsheet and I build this CMS and a CRM. I import everyone into it. I blast email them out and I'm like, hey, you know, here's this forum. So I built this like virtual town hall thing and I invited them all and I was like, hey, you're free not to be in here, but you're... the opponents you're running against are going to be there. I was able to build with open source technology this tool that had eclipsed effectively what the newspaper was trying to build for many years. And so I was like, okay, this is cool, right? And so I felt like I had this sense of agency. And then I was like freelancing and doing stuff. And I worked for the Stanford university for a little while as a project manager. And I just, wanted to work on bigger projects. So I actively went and tried to find other people that were doing something. And that's the agency like kind of foundational story. And the art thing, it's been a little bit more, in the background lately.
Doug Logan (04:35)
I've talked about this before, like to me, art and design have similarities, but design, strictly from like a visual standpoint, not designed from like a strategic thinking about how things work together or strategy overall, but visual design and art have a lot of similarities, except that visual design is is really like art applied to a problem right like we're solving something. so at least in that.
Andrew Mallis (04:57)
But it's also like design is about operating within a system of constraints. Right. And whereas with art, you can create or build your own like constraints around, around art. There's very constraint based art, but it's, it's more kind of pure, you want to build like bronze sculpture, then it's different story, but if you've got a pencil and paper, there's a more expansive kind of thinking that you can apply to things.
Doug Logan (05:24)
Although livelihood would be a constraint on both, I would say, right? If you're trying to live from your art, then the constraint is to a degree, the perception of the value of the artwork to your audience, right? And that's a very hard thing to measure especially as we get more into modern art and we talk about that. The value of something is truly up to the viewer and the inspiration and the market. Yeah.
Andrew Mallis (05:42)
It's all it's all very it's highly constructed. The art economy is very corrupt in a lot of ways. It's worse than the stock market. You've spent $15 million on a Picasso, there's no way you're going to want it to be worth like 10 in five years. So the market has to work in such a manner as to continue to have the value of those prices increase. And you can't achieve that unless you're restricting access to the market. So for new artists to come in there's only so many spots. Because it would devalue the supply would very quickly outstrip the demand unless you restrict access or you engineer the market to make it impossible to succeed. you know, for most people. And to me, was kind of a really hard thing to confront because I believed a lot in the value of art, but that society didn't support that same critical function of art was demoralizing.Doug Logan (06:48)
Well, someday someday you can be a brooding artist. Yeah. So. Art to agency owner and. It seems like that you do really much enjoy the problem solving.
Andrew Mallis (06:51)
Yeah, maybe. We'll see.
Doug Logan (07:02)
But you also alluded to the hats that you're wearing right now. And if I'm correct, from what you said earlier, it doesn't seem like design is falling underneath that role, or is it? It seems like you're more on the biz dev, HR, are you steering the ship kind of thing.
Andrew Mallis (07:18)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's ship steering. I'm switching hats between the integrator and visionary role often. I'm not the sole integrator of all things within the agency. So I have to follow through on the ideas that I have and figure out how to make them happen which has me sit within that operational realm quite a bit.
Doug Logan (07:48)
I struggle with that too. I am the visionary. I do come up with ideas and sometimes I come up with ideas at 3 a.m. and by the time I get into the office, if it's still a good idea, then maybe I'll write it down and share it with the team. Then after hashing it through with them, if it's still a good idea in a couple of weeks, then maybe it'll come to… you know, action and so easy for me anyways to come up with ideas that the follow through and actually executing on them is the, is definitely the tricky part. So I'm, I think I'm getting better at that. I'm getting better at realizing it. I'm, I'm, I'm also getting better at looking at, This is, this was the idea up here. This is what I want to achieve. This is what woke me up at 3 a.m. and made me jot something down on my phone. Then working it backwards into like smaller steps that are more bite size. We always say like, all right, well, let's do this and then this and then this. And if we see some, you know, modicum of success in those, and even if that's just like metric of success might be like, well, we did it and it didn't suck and we enjoyed it and we're going to do it again and we can fit this into our workflow, then let's move on to step two, right? And that's been helpful in a lot of ways, being able to take big ideas, figure out what ladders up to those big ideas and do them. And ideally, like even those smaller rungs of the ladder could be successful. It might get like halfway up and realize, wow, this is really, you know, we've, we've climbed enough and this is really great here. We like the view. We like what's happening. We don't need to go higher than this. And that's, that's fine too.
Andrew Mallis (09:27)
Sure. How do you define those rungs? Who's doing that and how do you go about it? I think that's maybe harder for me sometimes to spend the time breaking it all down.
Doug Logan (09:36)
I think for me, a lot of these ideas come around marketing and around creating some sort of machine, right? Some sort of engine, something in some form of content. And so what I look at is like, take this, this method of content right here. This started as just like weekly clips on LinkedIn. And so how I broke it down was to say like, well, we need to get at least eight weeks ahead of this and be able to have eight weeks of steady content so that we have a good buffer. How long does it take us to get eight weeks? If it takes us eight weeks to get eight weeks of content, then maybe we need more than eight weeks. And what did that do to my schedule? What did that do to my team? How easy was it? We also built in like a fail safe. If we really got into a bind where we didn't have a week's worth of content, then we could repeat. Cause you and I are talking for an hour I'm hoping we, you I think we've spent at least five minutes talking about something smart you have at least. And so that will be a clip and that will be enough to get us a week's worth of content. And we built that out from that model. And I have been successful with it for over a year. So then I rewarded myself with, well, the next step is do we do longer episodes and make a full podcast out of this? But that was really the approach in it. And so anytime that we can do those things,for me especially, I have no lack of ideas. I lacked the ambition to always execute on those ideas. So one of the metrics of success is, do I still enjoy doing it a year into it, six months into it, whatever it might be? Is it still enjoyable? Because that lack of passion in whatever you're doing whether that's a podcast or building a product is going to show through you can't fake passion. You really cannot. You hire for passion and you train them on anything you can possibly do but you can't fake that. How have you broken it down? Or are you still figuring that out? I'm not saying that this is foolproof, that it works. It's just what I've been doing for about the last year or so.
Andrew Mallis (11:46)
Sure. Yeah, I mean, I, I like think about the outcomes I want to achieve and then, I think kind of tactically about how to do it. And then if the tactics not working, then like change the tactic. I don't think I've been very good at saying, we should be able to do this in like three months, you know, and then some other stuff gets in the way. And then we're like four months in, and then another idea comes along. And then it's like, there's all of these kinds of, this buildup of ambition and agreement that we should be doing these things. But sometimes it's just time. Time is our enemy because it all takes time. And it butts up against standards too, right? When you, especially if you have high standards. Perfection can be the enemy of good, but it also does, it still takes time to get even somewhere good. So the concurrency of ideas, I think, remains a challenge. And delegation is challenging sometimes to make sure that the division has a clear enough tactical application. Because I think sometimes I'll assume that people can put it together, but then maybe they haven't put it together and it hasn't moved. And then I'm like coming back in. And then I feel like I'm sort of meddling after I've handed something off. So I think those are those areas I need to improve. But I'm like impatient, you know, about things. I just, I want to kind of move on to the next thing. So I struggle sometimes to sit down. Like I'm really good at the beginning part.
Just from any sort of creative process. So the beginning part, exciting, all new, and this together. And then it's kind of like this like weird soft middle is like, I don't really like that slog. But I like coming in, you know, towards the end and being like, oh, you know, this needs to change, fix this, do this, this, this. And then this gets us from like, you know, 60 to 80, right? That's, so I like the beginning part. I like that like 60 to 80 part. And then the like little bit. I like the like 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, because you know, like that's longer, road to improvement too. But like living in that zero to 100, but it's really, the first ideation stuff and then the improvements.
