“We’re optimizing for a sustainable container to take care of the people within it — and to do some cool work while we’re at it.”
– Janel Torkington, Strange Birds
Most businesses optimize for growth. Scale as much as possible, make as much money as possible, get as big as possible. It seems like the only option in the playbook.
But that path has never called to us.
Strange Birds has been operating as a cooperative for three years, and six months ago we made it official. This episode, we take a beat to stop and ask, wait, why did we do that? What are we optimizing for instead? Is it working? Also, what are you wearing?
We get into:
- Why our style of consensus-based decision-making tops out around five people
- Why and how we’ve set up equal pay for equal hours (bonus: patronage refunds vs. dividends! A tiny schmear of tax code!)
- The un-touchy un-feely case for designing an anti-burnout business
- Why we often advise our clients to downgrade their subscription tier with us
- Janel: still detoxing from US productivity culture
- Anna: anti-cutting up watermelon
ACTION ITEMS:
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Where in your work have you chosen the optimizable thing over the interesting one? Was that a decision or a default?
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If someone audited your business by looking only at where the money goes and who decides, what would they conclude you value?
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Strange Birds is a worker owned cooperative. We help purpose driven companies say out loud what makes them worth choosing.
We build stronger connections between audiences and brands with the right messaging. Then we implement it across the board.
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Listen anywhere podcasts roost (except Spotify).
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq41Qmavg1I
Learn more about Strange Birds: http://strangebirds.land
Follow Janel and Anna on LinkedIn
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Read the raw transcript:
[00:00:00] Anna Hetzel: It’s the middle of summer when we’re recording this, and if you’re not watching the YouTube video, I need you all to know that we’re both wearing very cool summer clothes. Janel has a very cool top, and I’m wearing a cutoff T shirt because we’re professional.
[00:00:14] Janel Torkington: Also, we’re stylish.
[00:00:15] Anna Hetzel: So, hey, we’re really cool.
[00:00:16] Janel Torkington: Style. What is it? Form before function. That’s just what we’re all about.
Okay, I feel a little like our intro is like stale, outdated, I don’t know. Poor thing doesn’t have its act together.
We can read it, but I think
[00:00:39] Anna Hetzel: our intro should be our elevator pitch and we should just say it over and over and over again.
[00:00:43] Janel Torkington: Okay, that sounds good. Do you know it?
[00:00:45] Anna Hetzel: Strange Birds helps purpose driven companies say out loud what makes them worth choosing. We build stronger connections between audiences and brands with the right messaging, then implement it across the board.
[00:00:57] Janel Torkington: How can I hire you?
[00:00:59] Anna Hetzel: Welcome to Flying the Coop. We’re Janel and Anna of Strange Birds, a worker owned cooperative. Strange Birds helps purpose driven companies say out loud what makes them worth choosing. We build stronger connections between audiences and brands with the right messaging, then implement it across the board.
[00:01:18] Janel Torkington: We do. And Flying the Coop, our podcast is for the people in the rooms where the hard stuff gets built and who like thinking about how that work happens. And today’s episode of Flying the Coop is a super, super duper special one that I’m really excited about because it’s just us. We got no guests. It’s just the birds themselves. Hi. And we were just talking before we started here about what are we doing again? Why are we doing this episode at all? And Anna mentioned, well, we do say we’re cooperative in our intro. We’ve been saying that for a year now. This podcast is almost a year old. And now we actually are one instead of just acting like one. We’re registered as one.
[00:01:54] Anna Hetzel: We’ve signed the paperwork.
[00:01:57] Janel Torkington: That’s right. It was a long, hard road.
And so first off, congrats to us. We did raise a glass of vermouth to ourselves, but we thought it would also be kind of cool to do, to take a beat and think, why did we do this? Why does it matter? And get back in touch ourselves with why do we think it’s cool that we do things this way.
So I like my first very snarky question to kick us off here. And it’s the question I think my dad would ask, which is why didn’t we just take the easy and obvious road and Stay a normal two person LLC and just call ourselves value driven like everyone else. Would that not have made things a lot simpler and less of a headache?
[00:02:43] Anna Hetzel: If I wanted to be snarky in return, I could say, we’re still an llc.
We just function as a cooperative. Our legal entity is still llc because being like claiming the legal entity of cooperative is honestly a lot. And it was easier for us to stay an LLC and have our operating agreement be about being a cooperative versus that. But that’s the legal stuff. So we could be snarky back and be like, we are an llc. But is this for. Were you asking me this question us? This question?
[00:03:16] Janel Torkington: It’s a nice question to ask you because about three years ago we had our first ever summit before I even joined Strange Birds. And you were the one who mentioned Janel, I have this dream and I’d like this to be a co op. And I’m like, cool, tell me a lot more.
So I. Because that first impetus came from you, I. Yeah, I’d love to hear.
Tell me more.
[00:03:41] Anna Hetzel: Yeah, I think if, if I’m gonna. Let. Let’s do a metaphor. If you follow the rules of coloring books, you color in between the lines, I view business entity types like that. These are the rules that you can color within.
And like a normal, a quote unquote normal partnership versus functioning as a cooperative. Those are different lines you can color within.
And the benefit of functioning and working as a cooperative is the colors that we get to choose are I think much more interesting and the lines are a little bit more vague. We have a lot more power in choosing where we want to go and how.
And I think power is an interesting word to throw in here. Let’s fast forward a couple years. We’re a two person partnership llc. Janel and I are the co owners of the company. We start bringing people on, we become the CO CEOs, we hold all of the power because we are the owners and everyone else’s employee. That is a very specific structure. It follows a lot of agency models. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with it, but that wasn’t the future that we wanted to work toward. The future we wanted to work toward was five years in the future. There’s three to five of us, hopefully five. We’re all owners of the company and we’re all working together.
There’s a lot of benefits in that. If we want to get into the nitty gritty tax stuff, we can because there’s some tax benefits in functioning as a cooperative. But I think it’s the typical route of color in between the lines.
It’s typical. It’s what everyone does. What if we chose a different page in the coloring book?
[00:05:23] Janel Torkington: There’s another aspect of it though, because it’s not just about what kind of picture are you painting, but it’s also about what are you optimizing for? And the default answer for most quote unquote normal companies is that you’re optimizing for growth.
The aim is to scale as much as possible, make as much money as possible, get as big as possible.
And that doesn’t call to us and co ops offer a way to optimize for something else. Which the way that we’ve defined that is that we are optimizing for a sustainable container to take care of the people within it and to do some cool work while we’re at it. But we were optimizing for the health of that container and the people it contains, namely us right now. But we hope to grow some, but not tons because scaling to 200 people would not enable us to use the same tools that we understand to be healthy for the people who are within the container.
[00:06:28] Anna Hetzel: Right.
[00:06:28] Janel Torkington: One of the questions that we’ve gotten when we sent out word that we were going to do this episode was about consensus, which is the way that we make decisions. We use a Quaker style form of consensus, which is pretty much pure consensus for really important decisions that everybody has to get on the same page. We’ve got some nuances in there about how to drive difficult decisions, et cetera, but it really, it boils down to everybody’s gotta be on the same page to make really big important calls.
And that simply wouldn’t work if we were 200 people. We don’t even think it would work if we were 20 people.
Five is about where it tops out for us, the way in which we like to run things and the speed at which we like to go. In our previous episode with Emma Technology Cooperative, we’re awesome, by the way. You should definitely check out that episode if you’re into cooperatives. Ramsey, who’s one of their worker owners, said that consensus optimizes for the highest quality decision at the lowest velocity, which means that it’s not appropriate for all shapes of businesses, for all ways of distribution of those coloring book lines. Right. But it does work for ours and it does enable us to make what we think are very high quality decisions that have everyone on board.
So we’re choosing different metrics, really. And a big part of that is in fact very touchy feely because One of those metrics is how well are the people within it being held?
[00:07:54] Anna Hetzel: Yeah.
To keep hammering on this coloring book metaphor, I’m going to use it until it dies. So in a traditional partnership llc, that path, you’re optimizing for the perfectly colored page that someone would want to buy because it’s so gorgeous.
In a co op, you’re optimizing for the experience of the person coloring it.
Right. So you’re thinking about, are you sitting by a fire with friends, calmly coloring while sipping a glass of wine? Are you sitting in an art class that you paid for and you only have 30 minutes to color this page? Right.
That’s what we’re really working on, Right, is how does it feel when you’re coloring? How does it feel when you’re working?
And if that sounds too wishy washy for you and you’re wondering how the hell do you run a business like that, I would tell you it’s extremely easy. It’s easier, in my opinion, than running a business through optimizing for profit.
[00:08:54] Janel Torkington: In what ways is it easier?
[00:08:56] Anna Hetzel: Profit only happens when people work.
And if the people working are overworked, highly stressed, always on the edge of burnout.
Good luck.
Good luck. In five years, can you sustain that? I have no idea. Strange Birds has been around for almost 10 years and has weathered quite a few crazy ups and downs. The pandemic generative AI we work with words and we’re still around and we’re doing okay. And I think that’s a testament to how we have chosen to adapt and grow with high quality decisions at a low velocity.
[00:09:38] Janel Torkington: I think one of the reasons why we thrive despite existing in parallel to this push towards optimizing for growth and efficiency is that we have created a container in which we show up as full humans. Our number one value that we actually do reference on the daily is we are humans first and so are our clients and so are their audiences. We’re all humans first and we act according to that principle.
And the people that we work with also believe that whether or not they’ve got it written on their boardroom wall, they believe it in their hearts. And I think that they look for other businesses that also run this way. And it makes a big difference to the experience of working with us. We put out good work. Don’t get me wrong, it’s solid deliverables at the end of the day. We’ve been doing this for a long time.
But the thing that we consistently talk about being the most proud of is our client experience.
When I first joined Strange Birds. You recommended a book to me that I see just beyond my computer here called Unreasonable Hospitality. And I remember picking it up, I was just fresh off the corporate path and thinking like, why am I reading this book about hospitality when I’m now joining a startup? Number one, you’re not joining a startup. Number two, there could not be anything more relevant than thinking about what is the experience of the person that you are serving. Because this is a service based business and it matters how the person on the other end feels and experiences that service. And that’s something that we go to great pains to do with every ounce of humanity that we can bring. And I think that’s why we most often see really long term client relationships emerge from that. We do one offs, but more frequently people will come to us for a one off and then they work with us for years and it’s pretty great. I, on a human level, I prefer to have relationships that look that way. I feel like I quote her every episode. But Jacqueline Radbob, our lawyer, who’s amazing, highly recommended, oh my goodness. When I think it’s in the episode we did with her, which is episode four, and we asked her, what should people do before they come to you asking to legally set themselves up as a co op? And she’s live it first, do it first. Because there are so many ways to be a co op. A co op reflects the people that are within it. The shape that it’s going to take should be a direct mirror of the people that it’s holding. And so in this way, it’s very different than a business that everyone is just trying to make as big as possible. It can take so many different forms and then setting up legally ought to respect that and protect it even. And Jacqueline’s amazing at it, really.
[00:12:26] Anna Hetzel: Plug for Jacqueline and he’ll poll in another episode. Our interview with Elijah, we started talking a little bit about queering business. Right?
I’m going to get into a little queer theory here. Queerness, how to define queer. It’s not necessarily a fixed identity, it’s a positionality, right. It’s outside of the norm.
So if we are, if we can think about cooperatives, right? It’s enough outside of the norm that we have a lot of freedom in doing things differently and radically rethinking about how business can work. If you go down the traditional path of partnership, LLC or agency model, that’s really normal. There is a ladder, there’s an escalator that you could just follow. There are playbooks upon Playbooks. You step one step outside of that, all of the sudden you’ve got a bajillion different opportunities to do things differently, which can be really overwhelming. But we get to choose and pick. Okay, that works for that, that works for that. And then we’re going to bring it together and make it ours. Right? And so it’s also this practice of queering business through how we are working within it.
[00:13:37] Janel Torkington: That’s something that I really love about the way that we approach things. It dovetails with one of our other often stated beliefs, approach with curiosity. Just whenever you come up with a hard problem or something new, or you feel nervous about a big new opportunity, approach it with curiosity. That’s our strength. Because we don’t know what shape it’s going to take.
We don’t have something prefab cut out to fit. We’re trying to fit as many clients through it as possible.
That’s not the business that we want to run. That’s not the way we want to show up in the world that that can be successful, but that’s not how we’re defining success for ourselves. And so we’re doing something that’s pretty radically different. And like Ana said, that can be really scary. I’ve used the word void, as in floating in the void, quite a few times because, man, I come off of being a content designer at Meta, which I was for half a decade, and in a giant corporation, the scaffolding had to work that in there. It’s my favorite word.
Scaffolding is very clear. You’re at level four and you want to get to level five. You need to complete requirements 1, 2, 3, and 4, and you need to complete them to this percentage. And it’s just. It’s extremely clear, you know, if you’re doing good or not. If you believe in the scaffolding, I just moved my eyes all around in a kind of shifty way for those who are only listening via audio. And then out here in the void, you gotta decide for yourself, what does it mean to do a good job? What does it mean to have a successful business? And it feels like it’s part of us recognizing our humanity.
[00:15:13] Anna Hetzel: We’re talking a lot about our experience as humans within the business and running the business.
But, like, how does that translate to the work we do with clients? I’m sure if you’re listening to this, you’re like, oh, my God. Like, when clients work with you, you’re just kind of like hippie you. Whatever works, we’re going to do it. No, I think like our approach as humans, first, our clients, you know what they need. Customers, you know what, customers are humans.
So I think that the benefit of our approach is not using the cut and paste strategies. Every business is different. There are a lot of this is what you do when you launch. This is how you launch. These are the emails that you need to have. This is the landing page. This is, this is that. But what if you go into that knowing that, yes, these strategies work, but how do we make sure that they fit the client? We’re really good at what we do. We’re really good at helping our clients work through. These are all the pieces that have to go through to make this thing launch with great success.
And also at every stage of that, we’re asking the question, what are your customers feeling right now? What promises are you making and are you fulfilling them? Because those are the questions that you need to ask if you want those customers to stay around forever. And every business wants customers to stay around forever because that means they’re around forever.
So that extra level of thinking about the human, I think is what makes our work so good. Because we’re thinking, thinking about it at the experience level and not just at the sales level. I think that they both have to come into play when you’re thinking about messaging, positioning, launching, retention, like all of that comes to work together.
And it’s one of the reasons why I think our clients really enjoy working with us because they know that we’re going to treat them like an actual human.
So I was having coffee with a project manager at one of our clients teams and he was like, how do you guys do what you do? I don’t understand. You’re so good at it. And I was like, I think it might not be our skill. I mean, our skills are quite good. We have very good skills.
But I think it’s because before the deliverables, we put client experience first and deliverables second.
And I think in a lot of agencies of companies that do the things that we do, it’s deliverables first, right? Like you want to produce the right outcomes.
Those outcomes can only be produced if you put the client first. If you think about their experience in it, if you are communicating with them early and often, if you’re asking them questions, then whatever you deliver, it’s going to actually be what they need and not just what you think they need.
We do everything in our power to never assume.
So we think this is the right path. But are we on the right path? This is where we’re going. Okay, cool. We’re going to keep going, right? Those check ins are so important because then we can adjust on the way versus spending eight hours of our time writing something, building something, delivering it, and the clients. Oh, now that I see it, this happens all the time. Now that I see it, that’s not what I want.
Every creative professional has experienced that. You do it, you deliver it, and they’re like, ooh, now that it’s in my hands, I want something different.
So it’s like, how do we avoid that? It’s not always avoidable, but checking in early, often having a lot of alignment moments also helps the client feel held.
[00:18:48] Janel Torkington: I want to talk about a question that is not on the list and it’s a segue from that. You saying every company wants their clients stick around forever? Yes, totally agree, 1000%. But most companies also want money.
I. Let’s talk about money. Because the way that we deal with money at Strange Birds, both the taking of and the distributing of is maybe a little bit different than your standard LLC values based llc.
And also I imagine that people listening to this might also be thinking like, geez, I like all this. It sounds like Happy Wonder, Rainbow World. But also I need to like pay rent and do these guys care about turning a buck or what? I think I’ll start maybe talking about ourselves and then we can move into what we do for clients. We pay each other equally and our plan is to pay anybody who joins on equally as well. If you are part of this company, then the work that you’re doing to build it and keep it running is exactly as valuable as the work that anybody else is doing to build it and keep it running. That’s a really big principle for us. We have some stuff written into our bylaws. If somebody wanted to work part time, what would that look like, et cetera. But in general, that’s the core of it. And that’s quite different than how most businesses run. That’s more based off of, oh, what is the. What does the market say about what your skills are worth or how did you do in the negotiation process? But it’s a reflection of how we think about the value of different kinds of work. An hour spent doing client work is worth the same as an hour spent doing marketing. For Strange Birds, for example, being a full member of this company, you have the same value as anybody else who is a member of this company and that’s reflected in your paycheck.
[00:20:49] Anna Hetzel: Yeah, I think with a service based company, you never quite know how you made that dollar, was it because someone was really good at admin?
You know, it could be that person is just real. There’s somebody who’s really on the invoices and has that system down. Is it the 30 minutes someone spent one day doing marketing and that person saw and then three years later they were like, I want to work with you. There are a lot of ways that money can come in.
And there’s a lot of reasons why we don’t do commission or contract based pricing based on what work is happening. Because.
Just because we have projects where it’s mostly Janel doing it and I give a second opinion when they need it. And likewise. Right. There’s some projects where it’s mostly me. And then I fling things over to Janel to be like, am I hallucinating? Is this good?
I’m the budgeting money person of this group. We have a salary that we get paid once a month with invoices that come in. There’s a split between business expense, salary, we have to put money aside for taxes, and then we also have patronage. So in a traditional partnership llc, you can do dividend payouts, which is kind of like, here’s the profit. And it’s taxed in a very specific way. In co op models, you do patronage refunds, which are very tax friendly. Dividends is how I would describe them. So it’s profit sharing. And at the end of every fiscal year, we get a certain percentage of that and it can end up being a pretty large amount.
[00:22:21] Janel Torkington: Okay, so that’s talking a bit about the philosophy of money internally in Strange Birds. But our philosophy of money and the value of things translated into money applies to our pricing and how we charge our clients and what we tell our clients they should and should not buy from us. The one that’s really going around in my head was with a recent client of ours where we were having a discovery call together to go into a new phase of work.
And it wasn’t clear yet whether what we could offer was what she really needed.
And we wanted to hear some thinking from her first in order to make sure she was at the right phase in her business for our work to be relevant. And the phrase that you said, Ana, I’ll never forget, you’re like, before I would feel comfortable taking your money. I’d like to see these things in place. I’d like to understand this a little bit better.
And I just thought, what an anti capitalistic shooting from the heart phrase. I thank you for that. I let’s get A tattoo of that. That’s great. I and the person did go on to hire us, but man, did we establish trust. And I like that. To drive all of our decisions about whether to sign on to a project or not. Do we feel like we can deliver the value that’s being paid for? And if we don’t, can we adjust something or can we refer out? That’s quite crucial to us. And again, going back to the structure in which we exist, we’re not optimizing for profit above all else because if so, we should be just taking almost every contract. Right. Especially if they’re big bucks. But we’re not. We’re optimizing for sustainability and well being of the people within the container and the people affected by said container. So it enables us to make decisions like that and to be very clear about how we can make those decisions.
[00:24:16] Anna Hetzel: Yeah. And also with our pricing, we set it to make sure that we are making the income and profit that we need in order to sustain the business. It also ensures that we’re never pricing a client based on the goal of hitting a number for the month or quarter. Right. We use a subscription model. So that’s like our version of retainers. We’re suggesting a subscription tier not based on our own revenue goals, but based on what we truly think that they need from us.
Knowing that how we have structured our pricing, it will be fine. And I think that the beginning of this episode, it was very feel good, touchy feely, emotional, like we’re humans and yay. Right. But this is still a business. One of our bottom lines is like, we do have to pay for our life. At some point we would like to retire. So really balancing like the value of our work, the pricing strategies and formulas that we use all plays into that to make sure that the business is healthy and that pricing is not taking advantage of our clients. It’s actually one of our values of the business is you only pay for what you need.
So the benefit of working with our clients, the way we work with them is we have a really good understanding of what’s happening in their business because we’re pretty integrated. We like hanging out what’s going on, what’s coming down the pipeline. It gives us the ability to say really open and honestly, you don’t need us at this much level of work for the next month. We do know that you’ll probably need a lot of us coming three months down the line when this thing is about to happen.
So pay us less. Right now we’re going to Hear support, keep things moving along so you can save money. So when that big push comes, we’ll go up right? In time, effort and money. And that.
That type of honesty is refreshing for me. Every time we tell a client to pay us less, they’re like.
You can see their mind being blown. Like the first time we do that, right? It’s always the first time. We’re like, actually, you don’t need us at this level. Please downgrade your subscription tier. And they’re like, what, you want me to pay you less? And we’re like, yeah, because there wouldn’t be enough work for us. You know how shitty it would feel to be paid at a certain tier of, like, how our subscription model works. And then we’re just sitting most of the time twiddling our thumbs.
[00:26:34] Janel Torkington: And I feel like somehow that’s.
I don’t know if it’s the capitalist dream. I don’t want to just point my finger at capitalism, although it does deserve a lot of pointy fingers. But it’s somehow this, help me out here, like, this idea of, oh, I want to get paid the most for doing the least. That’s some kind of ideal that gets tossed around.
And that is not a dream that I can buy into.
God knows what my dream exactly looks like. It changes as I age, as I go through life and learn things, but it isn’t to produce as much as possible, and it isn’t to do as little as possible either. I dream about being aligned with myself and taking care of myself and those I love. And this business allows me to do that and to get better at doing that over time. And yeah, again, that is touchy feely. And yet it is enabled by these very concrete business structures, getting things legally in place, getting things fiscally in place. And like all of that, scaffolding is the reason why we’re able to exist within it as full human beings. You’re welcome. You’re welcome.
[00:27:41] Anna Hetzel: I’m only allowed to say the word scaffolding like that. It’s like scaffolding.
[00:27:49] Janel Torkington: Scaffolding.
[00:27:52] Anna Hetzel: I. I think that this has come up a couple times in the podcast where Janel’s favorite word is scaffolding and mine is container. And that. It’s so funny because I don’t use container that much anymore, but now it’s just become part of my lore.
[00:28:06] Janel Torkington: It is. It’s on your character sheet, men.
[00:28:08] Anna Hetzel: It is.
[00:28:11] Janel Torkington: Okay, so we’re far along in the episode, and I like this big question. I want to see if we have any answer to it. If all this works right.
Strange Bird’s been running for 10 years now.
[00:28:24] Anna Hetzel: Nine.
[00:28:25] Janel Torkington: A decade? Is it a decade old? Nine. Okay. Because we should have a cake or something at 10.
[00:28:29] Anna Hetzel: I think next year is 10.
I’m bad with time. I’m pretty sure next year is 10.
[00:28:36] Janel Torkington: Okay. No, you don’t love cake. Can we have vegan ice cream or something?
[00:28:39] Anna Hetzel: Brownies. I love brownies.
I love. Cake is just like fluffy. I know there’s moist cake, but it’s just generally fluffy sugar with some flour and like, icing. But like, you haven’t had good cakes. I have had very good cakes and I am just like, not interested in them. I want a brownie that’s like the perfect brownie where the edges are crispy in the pan and then it’s like fudgy in the middle with the like kind of dry, crackly top. Oh, baby, give it to me. I want it. I want it now. I gotta make brownies. Shit.
[00:29:14] Janel Torkington: Are we just talking about desserts now? I want sticky rice with mango. That’s, I think, my ideal dessert. I never have it because it’s never right. You have to have the perfect mango. And how often do you find the fruit? I know it’s not your jam. I know. But we can have them in parallel. You got brownie, you got mango. It’s all gonna work anyway. Okay?
[00:29:30] Anna Hetzel: The big.
[00:29:31] Janel Torkington: The really big question, even bigger than sticky rice with mango, if all this works, continues to work. You’ve been around for nine years. I’ve been around for three of those years. We’ve been an official ass co op for six months, but operating as one for the last three years. What are we proving? And I have written down here to ourselves, slash to the wider world. Are we proving anything by doing this? What do you have to prove?
[00:29:55] Anna Hetzel: I don’t know if proving would be a good verb for me. I think it’s demonstrating or showing. There is.
I can’t remember there. There’s a whole. I don’t remember who came up with it, but it’s a. There’s the lighthouse versus the trailblazer. Right? So a trailblazer is someone who I. You hear it a lot in activist circles or. Wow, that person was really a trailblazer for this, that or the other. And that is so much work. You’re at the front of the trail. You’re hacking with a machete. You’ve got cuts and bruises. You’re in the middle of the forest and it’s really hard. A lighthouse is. You’re able to be there and people can just see your light and come to that shore and be really inspired. Both are necessary. The first person is necessarily going to be a trailblazer. But then how can that turn into a lighthouse? Right. For me, I would like us to be a lighthouse. I would like us to show that there’s a different way to do creative work that is outside of the agency model, that both allows for the people within the company to do really cool shit within their craft and also be financially viable and take care of the clients at the same time. So that is not necessarily proving for me, it’s showing. And if I want to get my little activist hat on to the greater world. Janel lives in Barcelona in the middle of co op Mecca, right? I live in the United States, which you say co op and people are like, oh my God, communism, the red scare, which, no, it’s simply a different way of working.
So like, how. How does this take the fear of God out of cooperative work? Which honestly, you said your dad would probably ask this question of why didn’t you just stay a normal llc? I’ve had family members be like, what about your equity in the business? And I’m like, still have it. What do you mean?
So just showing that there are other ways to be successful that doesn’t require another McCarthy era.
[00:32:01] Janel Torkington: The thing that’s on my mind right now is more on a very individual level. I use this word with caution, but I find myself detoxing from US productivity culture. Still. I notice vestiges of it. I’ll have weeks where I’m less on top of it than usual because everyone has up and down weeks. That’s the nature of an average. And I’ll find myself questioning, wait a second, am I valuable as a person, really? And I’m like, wait, where did that come from? And so being part of this and building it in the open, making a podcast about it, talk to my friends about it, getting out there and starting to be a bit of a lighthouse is. It feels healing.
And I am still very much on a path of, like I said, figuring out what is my dream. I have some values in place that are pretty firm. But then where exactly are we going?
We are finding out and we’re doing it with other people and we’re. I feel quite proud of that.
And this episode is a really nice excuse to get to revisit those kind of big feelings because it’s very easy to get caught up in the day to day and be like, oh God, I gotta write a post on LinkedIn. Like this shit, right? And it’s really nice to take a step back and be like, oh yeah, we’ve made a lot of very intentional decisions to do things in a way that’s outside of the well defined lines. And here’s what this means to us. And this not only can work, but is working in a way that’s paying off very big for us and for the people that work with us. And we do really cool shit and I’m quite proud of it.
Yeah, Not a bad answer in the end, huh?
[00:33:46] Anna Hetzel: That’s a pretty good one.
[00:33:48] Janel Torkington: Okay, okay. So as we come to the end, if there’s anybody who’s listening to this and they’re like, damn, that sounds cool. What kind of problem do you think that they might bring us if they wanted to work with us? What kind of things are we really
[00:34:02] Anna Hetzel: good at doing as a client? Potential client.
[00:34:05] Janel Torkington: Yeah, come hang out with us and have coffee. That’s also cool. But. But yeah, as a client, what kind of business problems are we really good at solving because of all of these choice that we make?
[00:34:14] Anna Hetzel: I think something that we are particularly good at is that your product, your service, the thing that you’re selling, has outgrown your messaging.
It’s evolved, it’s matured, and your messaging and positioning are stuck to a year ago and the marketplace has shifted or your company has shifted and you need to reposition what you’re doing to continue being successful.
That’s something that we are really good at.
Interviewing customers, surveying them, looking at the marketplace overall, figuring out, okay, this is how you should position it now, and then this is what the messaging should be and then integrating it across all of the different channels and platforms to make sure that it’s all singing in the same chorus. That is something that we are quite good at.
[00:35:04] Janel Torkington: I really like what you just said about having the whole chorus singing together. So in the same vein, if you’ve already got a bunch of your business going, it’s working and then you want to introduce a new element to the mix and want to have. Want to ensure that it’s in tune with everything else, we are pretty excellent at that as well. Ensuring that some big new venture that’s coming into an existing ecosystem is aligned and going to be set up to thrive, to end.
[00:35:31] Anna Hetzel: And like a stupid question. There are no stupid questions. In a thematic question of it’s summer, we went off the rails talking about our favorite desserts. What is your favorite. It’s hot as all hell outside and I need to cool down. And this is the most refreshing thing I will ever put in my body ever. And I want it now.
[00:35:54] Janel Torkington: My answer is kind of sweet. I use all of the fruit that I buy to blend up and make popsicles. And my son and I eat them together. And my favorite thing ever is sitting out on the the little step in my terrace and next to my boy and we’re eating a popsicle. That’s my favorite thing. What about you?
[00:36:13] Anna Hetzel: I really love watermelon. But here’s the thing. I really hate cutting up watermelon. So I love watermelon. When I go to someone else’s house or cookout and there’s watermelon and I will destroy it, but I will never buy a watermelon and cut it up. I find the process annoying.
[00:36:31] Janel Torkington: All right.
I think this was maybe the best episode we’ve ever done. Can I pat ourselves on the back? I like this one the best. I love you all. Guess I also really love us.
I genuinely think this was great.
Flying the Coop is brought to you by Strange Birds, a worker owned cooperative. Strange Birds helps purpose driven companies say out loud what makes them worth choosing. We build stronger connections between audiences and brands with the right messaging. Then we implement it across the board.