This time, we’re speaking with Shari Walczak, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of The Garden—one of Canada’s top independent Creative and Brand Strategy Agencies. Shari has amassed over 20 years of experience leading breakthrough strategic work for organizations like Capital One, Samsung, Interac, Roots, Cineplex, The United Way, Audi, TMX Group, Kraft, Coca Cola and AstraZeneca. Combining a Masters of Science Degree in Creativity and Change Leadership from SUNY Buffalo State and an HBA Degree from the Ivey School of Business at Western, she has built a reputation as a both a change agent and expert facilitator.
She is a passionate advocate for creativity, particularly in the world of education where she acted as Chairperson for the Founding Committee of Equinox Holistic Alternative School—now celebrating its 10th anniversary as the TDSB’s largest elementary alternative school. In addition, she is a contributor to the recently-published bestseller The Collective Wisdom of High-Performing Women: Leadership Lessons from The Judy Project (April 2019), and a proud SheEO Activator supporting other women-owned ventures that are creating a better world.
Tell us a bit more about why you started The Garden.
My co-founder Shane Ogilvie and I started The Garden because we felt that the industry was going through a massive disruption and that we had different opinions from our employers on the best way to face this new world and rise to the challenges. It’s difficult to influence the direction of an agency that’s not really your own so we decided it was time to set out alone. The day after we officially ended our jobs we sat in a coffee shop and looked at each other and said “Great, freedom! Now what do we do?”. We knew we had a daunting task ahead of us but looking back now, four and a half years later, I can say that it hasn’t been an easy road but it’s certainly been worth it.
What’s different about The Garden?
An agency is often brought in when the client has a brief, for example—”we need a TV spot”, or “we need an integrated campaign”, or “we want a digital campaign”. In all of those cases, we always start by asking the client, “why?”. That simple question actually stops a lot of clients in their tracks. We realized that too many agencies just execute a solution without taking the time to talk with the client and encourage them to think about why they are doing it and what they hope to accomplish. When it comes to marketing and brand strategy, we felt there was a role for agencies to play further upstream and help clients even before they’re even at the execution stage. We saw an opportunity to work with clients on the challenges that they’re facing, look at their situation, and make sure that we’re actually solving the right problem.
My business partner, Shane, who’s our Executive Creative Director, often says that when it comes to advertising, the fastest way to kill a bad product is with great advertising. In too many instances, we’re being asked by clients to solve a problem with advertising when, in reality, there are many different ways to creatively solve their problem. We wanted to start an agency where we could work directly with clients in a really in-depth way, asking smart questions, being provocative, and challenging their assumptions to get them where they need to be.
That was one of the reasons why we called ourselves The Garden—any number of beautiful, amazing things can be grown in a garden but you need to understand the conditions you’re working within. Once you understand those conditions, you need the seed of a great idea, and finally, you need to set conditions for a business to thrive and adapt. We built a process that we call “dig, cultivate, thrive” and it’s rooted in that idea. It helps clients really understand what they’re getting from us. They know that you don’t come to The Garden specifically because you want a social campaign or a TV ad. You come to us when you want to make sure you’re solving the right problem and get to a solution that’s going to have the greatest impact in the marketplace.
Can you tell us a little bit about the relationship with your business partner?
Shane and I have known each other for around eight years. We actually met at the last agency I worked for. He was the Executive Creative Director and I was the Executive Strategy Director. We had both been attracted to that agency because it was independent and quite successful but looking to reach the next level of growth. They wanted really experienced leaders to join the leadership team and brought both of us in. The reason we ended up leaving to build our own agency was that we had a vision for how things could be done that didn’t necessarily align with the owner’s.
One of the seeds that really planted the idea of The Garden for us was when we were doing some pro bono advertising work for a non-profit. I had a Strategy Director working for me who recognized that an ad was not going to solve the charity’s problems and came up with a completely different solution. I advised him to speak to Shane who, as Creative Director, was answerable to the owner of the agency. When he explained his reasoning, Shane agreed that it was a really smart solution but that it wasn’t doable because we had taken on that piece of work primarily for the advertising award opportunity.
Shane and I both thought this was wrong and it actually led to one of our core philosophies—when we launched The Garden, we said we would never enter an award show. Nobody believed us. It hasn’t been an easy decision, and there was even a point earlier this year where we started to challenge that a little bit, but I came across a quote from Bill Bernbach that said something like, “a value or a principle is not really a value or principle until it costs you something.” Award shows drive the agency business, it’s the fuel, it’s the currency. But our biggest problem with it is that the goal of winning an award is, in many cases, almost in direct opposition to what your client goals are. Shane is a huge proponent of the power of creativity and developing amazing ideas, but I know he believes that they should never be done with the ultimate goal of winning an award because if you do that you will design your solution in a completely different way. This allows us to say to our clients that if any members of The Garden team are telling them, “We really think you need to do this”, they’re 100% guaranteed that we’re doing it because it’s right for their brand, not ours. That’s actually been an incredibly powerful statement for us.
I’ve always believed that the best strategists have creative minds and Shane has always believed that the best creatives are incredibly strategic in their solutions
How do you and Shane define your roles and address conflicts as co-owners?
Defining roles has been really easy—partially because of our areas of expertise—but also because one of the things that brought us together is that I’ve always believed that the best strategists have creative minds and Shane has always believed that the best creatives are incredibly strategic in their solutions. We’ve seen a lot of agencies where, unfortunately, creative and strategy were almost forced to be at odds with one another, but we’ve always seen success from working really closely together.
Shane and I definitely disagree on things and we do have difficult conversations, but it’s never disrespectful and it’s never about us as individuals—it’s always about the work. We’ve always respected each other. I think Shane’s one of the best creative minds in this country and he’s a wonderful creative leader—he’s able to get great work out of other people. I know that, conversely, he respects me and my background. If we disagree about something, we talk it through. I worked in an amazing agency that is still near and dear to my heart, but the partners could be conflict-averse and that sometimes manifested itself in some negative and unproductive ways. Shane and I have always said we would be honest with each other and try to avoid becoming passive-aggressive with each other.
At this point, we want to keep the business as a partnership between the two of us. Bringing in a third person has the potential to create teams or a “two against one” mentality. When it’s the two of us, because we were both 50% owners of the company, if we don’t agree on something, we have to hash it out until we reach a compromise, otherwise the business won’t function. It’s been four and a half years and it’s worked really well for us so far.
What is the most powerful lesson you’ve learned as an entrepreneur?
One of the things that made entrepreneurship exciting to me is that, when you’ve been doing something for so long you become an expert in your field. You’re refining and honing your skills but you’re not necessarily learning anything new. When you open your own business, you feel like a deer in headlights. There’s so much you have to learn. One of the things I learned right off the bat is that while profitability is absolutely the goal, cash flow is king. You have those moments where you think, “Oh, my God, that’s how much we have left in the bank? How are we going to meet payroll in two weeks?”. If I’m being completely honest there were times when we were offering to drive to our clients’ offices to pick up a cheque because we couldn’t wait for it to arrive by mail.
While profitability is absolutely the goal, cash flow is king
Another question I’m still trying to find the answer to is, given cash flow challenges, how do we invest in the talent and people that we want in order to get ahead of the curve, rather than having to wait for business to come in? It’s a big trade-off because when you bring in someone with a fresh skill set you’re not guaranteed that it’s going to open up new business.
Probably the biggest lesson we learned happened during our second year in business. We ran a campaign that truly went viral. It was called “Tell America It’s Great” and it ran during the 2016 US election. Our underlying hope with it was that it would unlock awareness for us as a small company, and it did. A lot of new business opportunities came in including a project with a big e-commerce company based in Dubai called Noon.com. It was an incredibly well-funded company and seemed very safe and secure. It was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. They were really engaged with us and they decided they needed us to have a team on the ground in Dubai for a couple of weeks.
They were preparing to launch a competitor to Amazon and they needed some help with their b2b portal. They brought us on to help out with UX and a few other things. We got together a team of five, including Shane and I, and flew over to Dubai. Even though we sent along documentation to the client including a statement of work and payment terms, things were moving so quickly we fell victim to delay tactics on their end. They would tell us that they had returned signed copies and were surprised that we hadn’t received them etc. All that to say, we didn’t necessarily have all of our checks and balances in place before we began the project and found ourselves with six figures worth of outstanding accounts receivable. The client defaulted on all of it. They didn’t pay us a single penny. We were still trying to get that paid right up until the end of last year, but it’s incredibly difficult when you’re dealing with an international player, particularly if they’re based in the Middle East, because if you want to take legal action, you need people on the ground who can speak Arabic.
I’m sharing this because I feel like this is a lesson for anybody who’s doing international business. Earlier this year, I met up with one of my old classmates who now works for EDC (Export Development Canada), and while we were conversing I happened to bring it up. She told me that anytime you’re going to do international business, you need to contact the EDC because one of the many services they provide to Canadian businesses (especially SMEs) is advice, guidance, and consulting on international work. One of the products they offer is credit insurance. It’s a very expensive type of insurance, but if we had had that in place, we could have potentially recouped to 90% of our accounts receivable. That’s something I would never have known.
I really feel like we did everything right in that situation and we certainly went into it with the best of intentions. We would never have thought in a million years that that would become an unpaid receivable. But the fact that it didn’t sink us makes me feel good and it certainly means that we are so much tighter now around contracts, payment terms, and involving lawyers upfront.
What are some of the biggest operational challenges you’re faced with?
I think each year we’ve had to reach a new level of maturity from an operations perspective. When I look back at old paperwork and see the way we did things in our first year, it’s actually embarrassing. It’s interesting to see the different stages we’ve had to go through.
One of our challenges as a small boutique agency is that we don’t have the big brand name recognition that a lot of the large agencies do. A lot of clients out talk about wanting to work with agencies that are agile and innovative but when push comes to shove, they still put so much credibility on size versus expertise. New business development is critical for us and it affects us operationally because, for Shane and I, that should be our number one focus but we are still so involved in all aspects of running the company. Figuring out how to carve out time each week to pursue proactive business growth alongside our other responsibilities and workloads is a challenge and we haven’t quite struck that balance yet.
We have a part-time bookkeeper who handles our monthly stuff, and we’ve hired an external business advisory group to not only do our taxes at the end of the year but to come in and advise us on bigger financial issues as well. We’ve had benefits for our staff for the last two and a half years and they were the ones who helped us figure out how to go about getting quotes from brokers. They’ve been a really great resource for us, especially as we’ve been in growth mode. In the beginning, we tried to make a lot of decisions like those ourselves but having business advisors who come in with a fresh perspective and aren’t as close to the businesses allows us to get more of an objective opinion and make better decisions for ourselves.
Having business advisors who…aren’t as close to the businesses allows us to get more of an objective opinion and make better decisions for ourselves.
We’ve moved to a flat-rate, value-based pricing model and that presents some challenges. Over time, we’ve figured out some of the things we need to do to actually make that happen but in the beginning, we probably lost some money because we weren’t quite as detailed and specific in our statements of work. If you’re going to take that approach to billing, you need to have very open and detailed discussions with your client about exactly what you are being engaged for and what the deliverables are going to look like. You really have to spell it out and it means a lot of our statements of work are four pages long.
One of our core hypotheses when it comes to our staff is that you treat people like adults, they’ll act like adults and we’ve defined some of our operational processes and policies around that notion. For example, when people sign employment contracts with us, there’s always been just two requirements—the first is that you as an individual need to do everything in your power to ensure you never miss any of your deadlines, and the second is that we will always over-deliver on expectations, both in terms of our clients’ expectations and, almost more importantly, the expectations that each of us have of ourselves. As long as those two requirements are met, we have a work-from-anywhere policy. If you have a meeting, you need to be a responsible adult and make sure you’re at the meeting, but if you’re a person who loves to work at five in the morning or to work from home, then do it. That’s where tools like Slack work really well. I think everyone appreciates the flexibility.
New people who start here don’t always believe it at first so Shane and I have to model that behaviour. When you’re in this kind of environment no one needs to hide what they’re doing. If you’ve got a kid who’s sick and you have to stay at home, you just go on Slack and you tell everybody. We also offer unlimited vacation time and that’s worked really well for us so far. We have sceptics who say to us, “Well, you’re only at 15 people. Talk to me again when you’re at 30 or 45.” I can’t predict the future and it might be more challenging as we grow, but for now, it’s working really well. It means we’re not wasting time keeping tabs on everybody, asking how many vacation days have you taken? How many do you have left?
One thing we haven’t had enough time to do is to think about more formal performance evaluations. We’ve always had fairly senior people in here at The Garden, but at the end of last year we hired our first junior people and we suddenly were confronted with the realization that we need to be more methodical around performance reviews and put a more formal development process in place. As an entrepreneur in a growing company, I struggle with knowing when is the right time to bring in some of those policies and procedures.
As an entrepreneur in a growing company, I struggle with knowing when is the right time to bring in some of those policies and procedures.
As a business owner, if you could remove one task or responsibility from your day-to-day, what would it be?
Arguably, I could say commute times, but we’ve already removed some of that with our work from anywhere policy! I’d like to say new business development, but I know it has to be my responsibility. I’m the co-owner of this company and there’s nobody who can speak more passionately about what we do and why we do it than Shane and I, but new business development is not inside our comfort zone. Sometimes I wish there was a magic bullet, but we are finding ways for us to get more comfortable around it.
I think the reason why The Garden is still here and will continue to survive is because of how much we love what we’re doing. It’s why we can deal with the really low lows that sometimes come with the job. There’s not a lot I would swap out of my days, actually.
If you take the average week or month, what percentage of time would you say is spent on doing the work you built The Garden for versus the running of the business?
This is one area where I do think we have a problem—I don’t think our proportions are right if we truly want to grow. Right now, I’d say Shane and I probably spend 85% of our time doing what The Garden was set up to do because it’s what we love and it’s what we do really well.
One of the challenges that’s hurting the industry as a whole right now is the in-house agency phenomenon. Having our own agency allows us to look at that challenge a little bit differently. We’ve done the same thing we do with our clients and said, “How do we take this new reality and turn it into an opportunity?” We are spending some of our time looking at new offerings but do I wish we had more time to dedicate to that.
It all comes back to the question of how do Shane and I step back a little bit? I think figuring that out will be the key to our success in the coming years.
For you, what’s the best part of being an entrepreneur?
It sounds a bit cliche, but having a little bit more control over our destiny and what we’re doing. Even before we started The Garden, I knew I wanted to create the kind of environment that I would love to work in. Shane and I asked each other, “What are the things we’ve loved about the companies we’ve worked in? How do we recreate that environment?” It might sound trite, but part of it is having fun. You can see it when you walk around the office. We have so many projects on the go right now and yet, because everybody’s having fun doing it, you don’t feel that palpable stress. When it’s your own company, and you’re building it from the ground up, you have the privilege and the luxury of designing the kind of culture you want.
When it’s your own company, and you’re building it from the ground up, you have the privilege and the luxury of designing the kind of culture you want.
If you look at our brand vision and brand statement, we’ve always said that we’re in the business of helping organizations grow. But the secondary part of it is that we also wanted to create a company that allowed us to grow some more good in the world. It’s why we do projects like “Tell America It’s Great” and an initiative we launched just a few weeks ago to raise awareness around the opioid crisis called “The Coke Challenge”. We create space to put good out in the world and having our own company is what allowed us to do that.
Are there any tools—technology, podcasts, newsletters, books—that have been helpful to you on your journey?
At this stage of my career, I don’t want to just look at the things that are going to help me and my company. I’m starting to feel more of an obligation to give back and help others. I really am passionate not just about supporting entrepreneurial ventures, but about supporting female entrepreneurs. Until I became one, I truly didn’t realize how few organizations are female-led and that led me to an organization called SheEO. What’s great is that it gives me the opportunity to help other ventures but I’d be lying if said that I wasn’t get something out of it as well. Not only do I have access to this amazing network of women, but as a SheEO Activator, I get to be part of the evaluation and voting process for new ventures that are going to be funded in the coming year. I had no idea how many amazing ideas are floating out there and, as a creative person, it’s been a massive source of inspiration for me.
Once SheEO opened my eyes to how few female leaders are in this industry, I reached out to 12 female leaders in the advertising and brand marketing space—some I knew personally, some I didn’t—to invite them to get together and share our learnings. There’s a lot of room for companies like ours and I know we would all be better off if we helped each other rather than narrowly saw ourselves as just competitors. Almost all of them responded immediately. We had our first get together and we’re planning our second. While I think all the digital tools that allow us to network are great, it’s so important to also take that offline. I now have this resource of other leaders who understand the world I’m in and when I’ve got a problem, I feel like I can reach out to them for support.
In terms of books, I’m always reading, but there was a time where I was just reading too many business books. I think there’s value in saying to people put those business books down and just read fiction or read nonfiction. Read other things out there that can inspire you. Having said that, I really love Ed Catmull’s book, Creativity, Inc. I think it’s such a great example of storytelling and creativity. I also love hearing about other entrepreneurs—Phil Knight’s, Shoe Dog and Guy Raz’s How I Built This podcast. One of my favourite episodes was one with the original founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnall. One of the things I took away from that podcast was when Guy Raz asked, “If you could go back and do something differently, with the benefit of hindsight, what would it be?” and Bushnall gave an answer that I loved. I’m paraphrasing, but he said, “I wouldn’t go back and do anything differently, because that’s what makes a true entrepreneur. It’s knowing that if you don’t have any failures, you’re not an entrepreneur.” You need to fail at things and sometimes fail badly. You need to pick yourself back up, learn resilience, and figure out how to apply what you learned going forward.
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Learn more about The Garden by visiting their website http://thegardencollective.com/ and follow their amazing work on Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Connect with Shari on LinkedIn.
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