Moving from Designer to Full Time Brand Consultant

Ian Paget: Looking back at your career, I see that from, I believe it was 2003 to 2008, you was a designer, but fast forward 12 years, you're now a brand consultant. I think the thing worth pointing out is that, there's not even a mention of graphic design in your role. You are a full-time brand consultant now. What was the reason why you made your mind up to make that transition to full-time brand consultant rather than graphic designer?

Matt Davies: These are exciting questions. First of all, Ian, thanks so much for having me on and absolutely loved the podcast. I mean, what you're doing here is phenomenal. Thank you. It's an absolute honour to be on.

Ian Paget: I appreciate it. Thanks Matt. It's good to be able to chat as well because since we last spoke, you are also now a podcast host as well with Jacob Cass, which is awesome. Congratulations for that.

Matt Davies: Yeah, I'm loving the podcast. Yours is far more advanced and mature than ours. Me and some Aussie bloke just like talking about brand strategy but yeah, no, it's pretty interesting medium, it's an interesting medium and I think they're fantastic because you get to speak. If you start one, you get to speak to some really interesting people and I think that's only a good thing for self-development and developing your listeners. Awesome. Anyway, let me dive into this question.

Yes. My background is in graphic design and I run my own design studio. I actually built my own little company up to about 12 people and we basically focused on design. Prior to that, I was a designer myself, a graphic designer but one of the things Ian, that I'm sure you face and a lot of the listeners face is this question, well, there's lots of things we face, but one of the issues with graphic design anyway, is, it's becoming more and more, if I dare say it, commoditised. By that I mean, that in the global economy that we live in, if somebody needs a design, be that a logo, brochure, even a website, they have lots of options available to them.

What that means is, is just from a commercial perspective, it's becoming very hard and I was in this boat, it was becoming very hard to be competitive and obviously, that's not a great place. That's one point, the one issue that I was facing. The other issue that I was facing when with my design agency anyway, which I was the creative director of when this all came to the fore was that we were doing a lot of small websites. One of the things that we could see coming over the horizon, if you like, was the technology of Wix and Squarespace and even WordPress getting better and better, it's the functionality it offered people.

Even if you take the general boom in desktop publishing and Word and all those things that we as designers shutter at and people, the clients, think they can design because they have some tools that they can start to use to put something together. What that means is, is that your value as just a designer or this is how I see it anyway and I hope I'm... we're probably talking about some hard truths here but this is -

Ian Paget: No. No, it's good. This is exactly why I wanted to talk to you about it because I know you're not the only designer that has made this transition. I have a lot of friends that are considering it. I've seen graphic designers when they've been doing it for a number of years, they get more involved in the strategy, they start to enjoy that more and transition over. That's why I thought this would be a great episode to dive into.

Matt Davies: Cool. Yeah, well, I think it does come down to that point of value to the client. Here's the thing, why do we get paid? This is a big question. Why do people depart with their cash? They depart with their cash because of perceived value. They think that you are going to add some value to them. Maybe they can't do the thing that you're doing. Maybe they think that you have an expertise and maybe you do, or maybe you don't, it doesn't really matter at the point of the sale because it's perceived at that point. It's what they think.

The real question is, what problem are we solving? When I started thinking about this, maybe 10 years ago, I was thinking the problem that I'm solving is not big enough. I'm being used as a commodity, someone thinks, "I need a logo, I need a brochure." The truth is, they don't really need those things. What they actually want is, they want to grow their business or they want to distinguish themselves in a marketplace or they don't really know what they want, which is even worse. What I found was, the story goes like this, this is how it happened. It was by accident, to be honest with you.

What happened was this, I had in my studio a project manager. One of the problems we were facing was this back and forth with clients, and I'm sure all designers face it where, you fulfil the brief, you send it to the client, they look at it and go, "That's not what we like," and you're like, "Hold on. That's exactly what you want and you've asked me to do it and I've done it," and they can only make a decision sometimes when they see it and when it comes down to opinion, you're in trouble because then it's their opinion versus yours. Then they make you feel bad and then you end up spending way more time on all the revisions and it's a huge headache and we were facing this on quite a few projects.

Anyway, this project manager, he said to me, "Matt, do you know I think we should do the next project we get? We are going to run a kickoff workshop," and this was 10 years ago. I was like, "What's this kickoff workshop? What are these workshop things?" I said, "Okay, let's try it." I let him run away with it and I said, "Do you mind if I sit in?" I was the creative director, "Do you mind if I sit in?" He said, "No, no sit in." I sat in this workshop and what he did was he got one of our design team in, he got myself in, obviously as the overseer of creative, there was himself as the account manager, project manager and then the client brought their team in, their marketing manager, a few others.

We sat down and I just could see immediately the value in what now I call swarming on the project, on the problem, but we'd already made the sale at that point, but I realised, "Sugar. We're doing all of this backwards. We need to do these things in a discovery angle so that we can really understand the client's problem before we then try and sell them something," because often, they don't even know what the main issues are and they're not often aligned around them. Anyway, so we did this workshop and we started doing these workshops for free after that point and then suddenly we realised, "Wow, there's a lot of value in this and people will actually pay us."

At that point, what I then did was, I was thinking, "Okay, well, how can we add more value to these workshops?" That's where I started to read loads of books, tons of books and really realised that one of the things that we were positioned to do fantastically well and designers are, is this weird, hairy subject called branding. This is probably about 10 years ago and then I realised, "Wow, we could make an impact with that." Do you mind if I just clarify for the readers how I see brand and branding, because I think that's kind of a huge-?

Ian Paget: Oh, yeah. Of course, yeah. Yeah. More than happy to. Go for it, Matt.

Matt Davies: Yeah. I mean, the reason for this is, when some people talk about brand and I'm sure you come across this, they mean a logo in some fonts.

Ian Paget: Yeah. It's very common. Graphic designers say that a lot and especially clients. Clients come to me saying that they want me to create a brand but they actually mean a logo so yes, if you can provide some clarity for that, that would be amazing.

Matt Davies: Sure. I mean, there's lots of definitions out there, but the one I like to use, the one that I... I have a little book called Storyategy, which is where I penned this. It's basically the meaning that people attach to you and your offer, that's what your brand is. It's the meaning. I think Jeff Bezos calls it what people say about you when you're not in the room. Our good friend, Marty Neumeier says it's a person's gut feeling. I summarise it as the meaning people attach to you. It's like your reputation.

That's all great. That's the brand, but the game that we can play in, the fun game, is the game of branding and branding is the attempt, the calling, if you like, to manage that meaning. Because what a lot of businesses do is, they don't manage their meaning. They run after the short term. They run after the sales. They recruit people based on skills, not on a big vision or a big belief system and then what happens is as businesses grow, they splinter. What I realised was that we'd worked with a lot of marketing directors and they would be fantastic in tactics and generate leads for example, for their business.

But, when we asked them big questions in these workshops we started doing, questions like, so... simple questions like, "Why do you exist beyond making money?" Or you'd say, "Why do you exist?" They'll say, "Oh, well, we exist to turn over 10 million pounds," and you'd be like, "Well, that's a great reason for you to exist but your customer does not care about that." You can't go out with that message, "Come and buy money from us so that we become rich," that doesn't wash. Give me a compelling reason why you exist beyond making money. There's the big question. Why do you exist? Who do you exist to serve? It's amazing how many businesses do not have clarity around their audiences.

The other big question I always used to like to ask and still ask is, why are you different? What makes you special? Why should I choose you if I'm in your audience group over your competitor? These are huge questions. What I used to find was, even if the marketing director, CMO or whatever, might have some ideas around this, we might be doing some work with them and then as soon as they floated that work maybe up top to the board, people would then be like, "No, that's not right. That doesn't work," and then sometimes have to start again and you think, "Well, hang on. This is really weird."

What this showed me, Ian, was that most businesses have a major problem with alignment. That's the problem and that's what our workshops started to solve for people because we get people in the room, we get them all excited, we talk to them about the big, hairy questions of brand, we'd map stuff out on our big glass walls and we used to get glass pens and it used to look really funky but in essence, the guts of what we were doing was walking people through a way of articulating and defining their business that allowed them to begin to manage the meaning. Then from that, we would take that and say, "Okay, let's express that strategic thought creatively."

Now, over time, just to get back to your question, over time what I realised was, was this was where I really excelled. I was an okay designer, I still can pull up InDesign and do some grid layouts and typography and stuff, but where people were banging on the door to work with Matt Davies wasn't for my design stuff sadly and that was quite a horrible realisation, but where they were really happy to work with me and literally travel across the world to work with me was when they'd heard or they'd experienced me do these workshops. What happens as you say, when you get more experienced is, once you've delivered huge value to somebody and you've... say a CMO or a marketing director, you've actually made them look phenomenal in front of their bosses.

When they move, which ultimately, they might do after two, three years, they go to another company and then they're like, "Hey, this company doesn't have clarity over its brand. Well, let's get that weird bearded guy in to help us with that." Then you'd get wheeled in to do that and then over time you carve out a little niche. What happened was, was I started to play in that space and in this region in the Midlands, I am currently in Nottingham, originally from London, but now in Nottingham and there wasn't many, and there still isn't many people playing in that space. It did another thing for me, which is where when you do design, it's called a red ocean. There's loads of people, competitors, in that ocean and we wouldn't like to say this in public, but reality is we're all fighting each other. It's really a race to... a price war sometimes and it's kind of red, with blood everywhere!

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah, even though graphics designers are very supportive of each other. At the end of the day agencies, graphic designers, we're all trying to get the same clients in the grand scheme of things, so you're right. Yeah.

Matt Davies: What I found was, by playing in this new space, it was like a blue ocean where there weren't so many sharks and I liked that. I don't like vicious competition as much as the next person. Yes, so that's where I ended up. But what happened was, I developed that as an agency, I worked with hundreds of clients in that agency. I eventually sold the agency because what I realised was, I'd lost the passion in managing creative teams to deliver and execute on design. I really wanted to pursue this consultative strategic approach and it became very difficult in this marketplace for all the reasons mentioned and then I sold it to a digital marketing agency, a much bigger digital marketing agency. I think there were about 40 there.

I joined them and eventually was promoted to creative director after a few months, which was a real honour. Headed up their design team and I thought, "Hey, maybe I can focus now just on the design rather than running the whole business," because they were a lot bigger, there was a board and there were other resources that I didn't have access to. I did that for a bit. I did that for about a year and a half and oversaw designers and still did consultancy. But then I realised the same problems existed and to be honest with you, I got burn out and I was absolutely shattered. I probably have ADHD as you can probably tell anyway. I needed a rest. At the time, I had a big corporate banging on the door. They wanted me to head up an in-house creative team and so I decided, you know what? I'm going to do that.

I left the agency world. I went in-house. I ran a creative team and built a creative department for Capital One actually, which is a big credit card company. I sold my soul to the corporate devil, so to speak, and then basically, there was an opportunity to basically leave there to take redundancy. The corporate world was great, but it really wasn't for someone of my brain. It was quite restrictive as you can imagine but it was a great experience. I left there and then I ended up thinking... so this was... What was it? Back end of 2018 I think, and I thought, "What do I do now? What's next? I've run an agency, built an agency, sold an agency, gone in-house, what am I doing?" Those life moments, they cause you to reflect, where do I add the most value?

What that then led to me thinking was, "Look, why don't I just give this a go, just completely be and position myself as a brand strategist, not as a designer that does a bit of brand strategy, but let's be brave. Why not? Burn the bridges. Let's just go in. Burn the boats, so to speak. Send the horses back into the sea. Let's just try it." I had a few companies interested in working with me in a consultative role and it was a no brainer in the end. I just started doing it and it snowballed from there.

I was privileged enough to work with Nestle a few months ago. I've been working with some big brands. I've worked in Dubai. I've worked in Sweden last week. I was working in New York and Chicago a few months ago so, it's really weird and with the current, just for context for the listeners, we're actually doing this right in slap bang in the middle of the COVID problem.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you said that.

Matt Davies: Yeah. Well, someone might be listening to this in a year or two's time.

Ian Paget: Yeah, you're right. Yeah.

Matt Davies: Since that's come up, what this has opened up to me as just somebody who's just focused on strategy and really, I sell workshops and research, that's what I do and I work with leadership teams, but what the COVID issue has opened up is even bigger market because people are now open to virtual workshops. I happen to be okay at workshops. I pivoted very quickly, I was doing some online anyway, virtually, but pivoted very quickly to just doing them online. Now I do that all the time.

It's one of things. It's just, is there a grand master plan, Ian? I'm not sure. I just want to play where I can do meaningful work and that for me is my journey. I hope other people have found that interesting because I think if you're good at communicating, if doing meaningful work excites you and when I mean meaningful, I mean work that really solves big business problems, then definitely strategy is something to hone your skills in to get better at, because you can add some real value to businesses in that space.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I would say, you mentioned earlier that there's less competitors. I think it's because it requires a lot of skill and you build that up over the years. I don't think someone that's just starting out as a graphic designer could transition to a strategist.

Matt Davies: I agree.

Ian Paget: I think you build up a lot of skills whilst being a graphic designer and whilst working at agencies so that you are very good at what you do. You've learned a lot, you said that you read a lot. I am curious, so now that you are a full-time strategist, I know a lot of people that do strategy, but they tend to do the graphic design as well and see it as like a bolt on to that service, but now that you are doing that full-time, do you feel that that's opened up the doors to all of those bigger projects?

Matt Davies: Yes. I suppose it does open up more interesting doors. I mean, basically, it allows you to charge more eventually because they... basically, let's talk hard truths, right Ian?

Ian Paget: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matt Davies: If I said to you, "Put me together an A5 leaflet," I need an A5 leaflet and I'm looking for a designer to do that and you say, "Well, Matt, I could do that for 200 pounds, and you get one revision, one set of revision," or whatever, however you define that. I look at that and I go, "That's nice but there's this guy I know in the Philippines who can do it for five pounds." What that does is, you've got this problem. Now you're on the back foot. You've got to sell yourself. Yeah, but I'm like, "I'm Ian. I'm awesome.” But how do this distinguish? Very, very tricky. Very, very tricky, whereas... so what I'm trying to say is potentially I could go to... as a client I have more options and if price is my driver, which it shouldn't be but if it is, then you're going to lose Ian, right?

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the way it is. I see that a lot myself. I have these calls about someone comes to me, like a plumber wants a logo, I give him the price and he's like, "How much? I can get one for 60 pounds." It's like, "Well, go and get it for 60 pounds." Yeah. It happens a lot.

Matt Davies: Well yeah, this is it. But that's because they think, they perceive that what you're delivering they can also get elsewhere for cheaper, right?

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Davies: When you evolve into the consultancy space and you manage to get some clients under your belt who you have created great value for, who you have solved problems for, this thing that I go, that I really believe I solve is this question of alignment. It's a massive problem for businesses and leadership teams. I often work say with a CEO who wants to change their business, maybe they've just come in to the role and they're looking around the leadership, the boardroom table, and they realise, "Flip, everybody is pulling in a different direction. How do I get everybody unified?" For whatever reason, they don't have the skills or don't have the inclination to lead the charge on that. Then maybe they come and hear me talk or they see, they hear of me or they're talking with their friends about this problem and someone says, "There's a weird bearded guy. He's cool. Speak to him."

Then basically what I do is, I talk to them about brand, but brand is just the trojan horse to lead them to alignment around a future strategy around what could be. That's a huge problem. Once you solve that for people, they want you. They don't think they can get that from many places and particularly if... I don't know, people buy people in that space. If my personality resonates, if they think, "Look, this guy is passionate, energetic. He's English and he's quite polite and he's got a beard," and all those things tick their boxes, then they can't get that from many other people and the skill of leading those workshops.

What then happens is, is I'm now in the driving seat. They can't get this from anyone else. They have to come to me. What that allows me to do is say, "Well, look, I'm actually super busy right now. This is how I want to structure our arrangement," and that then leads to some very interesting sales whereby I'm able to charge way much more than I ever could as a designer.

Ian Paget: Can I just ask, because I know we've had separate conversations, not recorded, but you've given me some figures of what you got in a day, are you open to sharing that publicly and I'll cut this out if you don't want to?

Matt Davies: No. No, it sounds really arrogant. But I'd rather say a month to be honest with you, Ian. I have had some insane day things but the best month I've ever had, I earned 25,000 pounds in one month.

Ian Paget: Wow.

Matt Davies: Which makes me feel awful because when I was a designer that would be over a year's wage for me. I appreciate that that sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. Sometimes I'm like, "What is going on there?" But the reason for that is, because you can look at a project and if you can solve the problem and they can't get it anywhere else, you're in the driving seat. But to be honest with you, that's just one example. I don't want everyone to think I'm getting that all the time.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I understand.

Matt Davies: The real value in the consultancy role rather than delivering a commodity as I call it, is that you can basically charge and sell retainers. When I ran my design studio, we did have some retainers in terms of some retail companies who needed to constantly change their shop windows and their campaigns so we had seasonal retail shops, for example. We would sell retainers to them or menus for restaurants that they know they're going to constantly change. You can sell in a retainer to that type of business but again, it's low value.

When you're a consultant, what happens is, so your client might come to me and say like, "Matt, we need to get our brand strategy in place. We need to get our culture sorted out. We need to get our customer experience sorted out," these are huge, huge big things. You can't just go, "Okay, that will be done by next week Tuesday," because you don't know, and they don't even know. You need to link in with a lot of their people, you need to do interviews, you need to do research and you need to have the space to explore that.

They of course have to trust that you're doing that but what it means is this, that you can basically say to them, "Well, look, let's do a six-month agreement." The way that I tend to work is, I say to people, "Look, I'm going to report in to you every two weeks, we're going to set some big goals at the outset, and we're going to maybe set a quarterly goal like three months and then I want you to leave me the space to get on with it and give me access to the right people and I'll check in." That's how it works, which is a very different model. It gives me control over my time, it gives me control over a lot of things and I get regular income.

That's one type of sale and it's bliss to be honest with you, compared to having to constantly find the next project and the next project and the next project. It's a very different approach and of course, I do take on one-off projects and speaking appointments and various other things, which is where you can add other value, but in terms of stability, I feel much more stable financially in this model than perhaps before.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah. I've seen the other side of this because, whilst I haven't hired a strategist, now that I'm full-time, so I've been full-time now for about three to four months, I have considered hiring a consultant that can help me improve certain areas. Some of the hourly rates are as expected, 300, $500 for an hour.

Matt Davies: Crazy.

Ian Paget: Or they can pull you in to help you over a period of time and generally, that's in the thousands but even though that's a lot of money, when I consider the problem that it's solving, having that problem fixed for me is the significant value. It could bring my annual sales, this year alone it could double, it could triple it so immediately, the hour or two hours with that person could make me an extra 50,000 pounds this year and even more the following year. Something like just graphic design, that tends to be very temporary but something like consulting, something like advice strategy for businesses in particular requires a lot of trust, a lot of confidence.

You ideally want the best person that you can afford and if that means spending 10,000 pounds for an hour, you're going to spend it. Yes, so I know you've said that you had that month where you made what a lot of people make in a year. You have to understand as a listener, when you're doing strategy, you're not solving a surface level issue, which to be fair, graphic design could be seen as, you are solving fundamental issues that will make that company and, in some cases, it could potentially make them billions of pounds and you can solve that in a few hours so to charge for that make sense.

Matt Davies: That fee, I said, I don't think by any stretch of the imagination have actually leveraged and got to the bottom of the barrel. Do you know what I mean?

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Davies: There is more. Can I drop a book in here, Ian?

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I was going to ask you about books as well because you did say that you've read tons of books so please mention books.

Matt Davies: I'll drop this book. Yeah, I mean, there's loads, I love books. It's so important, I would say to designers, to read business books because you're trying to solve business problems so you've got to read business books and you've got to speak the language of the boardroom, which is important if you want to be perceived as being able to solve problems for that business. Anyway, the book I was going to recommend is... it's quite old, but it's a book by a chap called Alan Weiss, spelled W-E-I-S-S. He's got a book called Million Dollar Consulting and I think you may have heard of Blair Enns, he quotes from Alan's books about that.

Ian Paget: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Matt Davies: Now, Alan Weiss, his book, it's a different category. I think he's a sales consultant for big businesses but, he really explains the consultant lifestyle. He explains from a business perspective, he goes into how to do your billing, how to do your proposals, loads of stuff. Now, when I read that, I realised that I was doing it all wrong before, if you like, I'm positioning myself incorrectly, billing incorrectly, I was billing... you mentioned hourly rates, I don't have an hourly rate now, I don't do hours. It drives me nuts. I think that's how I used to do it as a designer, you'd total up how long you think each task might take, put the hours in the side, give yourself an hourly rate that you think you're worth. I don't know, I think we were on 120 pound an hour at one point when I was running my agency and that's it.

Then the client doesn't care about that though. They just look at the bottom, the total, and they assume that you're going to solve their problem for that fee or you're going to deliver on all the stuff for that fee. Then they assume that they can have as many edits as they like to things and they don't realise that you're charging out by the hour. You've got overheads that you charge by the hour, et cetera. Consultancy model is very different. Consultancy model, you charged by the value. It's called value-based billing and you actually, in the sales process, you try and work out with the buyer, how much value monetarily, return on investment, they will get if you solve their problem. Now, suddenly it's equitable. It's a balanced approach to the fees, which allows you to charge a lot more.

For example, say there's a business and they are turning over two million pounds, for example, but all their leadership team are squabbling and pulling in different directions and the CEO knows this and they've come to you to solve that problem, you say to the CEO, "Where do you see yourself in five years if we sort this out, if we managed to get brand thinking right there across your customer and employee experience and right into the boardroom itself?" Then, they suddenly see a lot of value in what you're talking about. If they trust that you can deliver that, which of course it does come down to trust like you said, then you can charge what you want pretty much because the value to them is huge.

It comes down to the problem we're trying to solve for people. I know what I'm talking about right now is not going to appeal to every everybody. I, for many years, saw myself as a designer, I am a designer, designer Matt Davies. I prided myself on typography and grids and colour wheels and all that stuff, Pantone colours, all that stuff but the truth is, is that I've had to relinquish a little bit of that. I think you're right, I think a lot of designers see the value in strategic thinking because it allows them to get a great brief to then execute on but the truth is, is that I see now, and this is going to be the controversial statement of the interview, I see design as the add on to the strategy, if you see what I mean, because that for me is the main... is where we can add the most value.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Well, I'm just going to add, I totally agree with that because I obviously started off as a graphic designer, focused more on aesthetics as I've got older so now I've been doing it for over 15 years. I'm more focused on the strategy side of things. I still want to be a graphic designer. I want to make that really clear. I want to be a graphic designer that thinks based on strategy but, I have to point out, I cannot do the job without knowing the strategy or assisting with the strategy. Now, compared to last year, the more I've been learning about strategy, especially after doing Marty Neumeier's course and reading all the Marty's books properly, I'm at the point now where I have clients who really need the strategy and I'm designing for them, but I don't feel like I'm helping them so I see, I totally agree with you. Totally agree with you.

Matt Davies: It's a bit like the emptiness, because once you've experienced the strategic side and you see the value that it brings to your work as a designer, and then you pick up another project and they don't care about strategy, and they're just going to dictate to you what's what and then you execute on it and then actually you realise they haven't got a clue what they're doing here, this isn't going to distinguish them in the marketplace.

This is just a, me too and that's not going to actually solve their real problem, which is they want more sales or whatever it might be. Once you've experienced that you're like, "Why doesn't everybody do strategy?" It becomes like a light bulb, or at least for me it did, a light bulb moment. But what I was going to say to you was, yeah, I love that you dropped out Marty. In fact, I think that's where we first met Ian, wasn't it? At Marty's course in London.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Well, it's how we know each other. Yeah, we met in person.

Matt Davies: Marty Neumeier. Yeah, I mean, he was massively influential to me as well. All of his books, The Brand Gap, The Brand Flip. Zag is a great book that he's written and even his most recent book, Scramble, is pretty cool.

Ian Paget: Scramble, yeah. It's great. I love that.

Matt Davies: That's a business thriller.

Ian Paget: That one is a story, I love that. It's a story, but you learn so much with that because reading Marty's books, they're whiteboard books that you're learning the theory, but with Scramble, it's got the person in there that's totally against the processes. It's got the arguments, it's got all the disputes in there.

Matt Davies: It's got the emotion.

Ian Paget: It's got all the conversation. Yeah, and I love that. You see both sides of it, so it's not theory at all. You see the theory and the frameworks being used, but then you hear the conversations, the real conversations. I mean, these must be based on real things. You see all of that happen in the book and how it unfolds. It's a fantastic book. It's one of my favourites from Marty, it's brilliant.

Matt Davies: I would definitely recommend that. I would say that that book, it describes a lot of the situations I get myself involved in, in terms of going in, pulling teams together, swarming around these problems and just helping them to get clarity. Often as a strategist, you don't necessarily need to have every answer, but you need to have tools and methods and the energy to help people come to the answers themselves and that's really exciting.

When you've actually helped a leadership team and they all click and they all are like, "Wow," and you can give them some, politely, some hard truths from research that you've done and customer research or employee research and when they realise that they've solved some of these problems and they've got a vision for the future, that's so powerful.

I was going to say, as a designer, you mentioned honing your skills and developing skills over the years, and just to give the listeners, I feel pretty old now, I used to be the kid on the block. I never went to university. I went straight away into agency life, and I always used to be the kid, the kind of the guy and then suddenly, at some point you turn around and you're like, "I'm not the kid anymore. I'm the old guy in the corner with the beard," that's me.

I've been doing it for now about 18 years and you're right, I think the thing I would say is, get comfortable being uncomfortable. Throw yourself out there. My view is this, don't pigeonhole yourself in a box, "I am a designer. I only sit in front of a Mac and play with the Adobe Suite." No. Branch out. Go to some workshops. Try some new things. Get on some calls with customers.

If you want to solve the real problem you're going to have to really level up. The only way you're going to level up is to throw yourself into those areas and you will make mistakes. I've made tons of mistakes and sometimes it's like a punch in the stomach, you might get lambasted by a client for overreaching or just be like, "I have no clue on how to proceed." Those things are normal, but what I would say is, is the quest is... my quest was always truth.

It used to really bug me and still does when somebody says one thing as a business, or you're asked as a designer, "Put this on the brochure," or, "Put this on the website," and you know because you visited their offices or whatever, that the reality is far from that truth. That upsets me.

This idea of doing the strategic stuff fitted in with my view of how things should be, and truth is as a core thing that I really champion so, that's where my drive came from and I'm sure a lot of people have a similar thing. But as a designer, here's the thing, this is what I wanted to say, as a designer, you are brilliantly placed to work in strategy. The reason for that is, is that we as creatives, we can imagine what is not yet, if that makes sense and not only can we imagine a better future, as designers, we can also articulate and design the way towards that future.

I'm still a designer, Ian, even though I've got strategist slapped on my label, but really I'm helping people design their business. I'm helping them design customer experiences and employee experiences. I am helping them design a way forward that will align their leaders. These are all design skills.

When you have that logical but also chaotic and creative mind, so you get the craziness of the creative brain, it has to exist in some process, we love to try and at least articulate it in a process, even though we know reality is it jumps all over the place.

Once you start being able to define things and you can put together the core purpose and the values and the overarching strategy in a diagram that makes sense to people like, everybody loves a temple or a wheel or a grid or something. People love that stuff and it makes sense to them and it creates meaning, that's what branding and brand strategy is all about, managing that meaning and as a designer, you can do that. You've got the skills usually tucked away inside of you to develop that and to do that really, really well. That's my belief anyway.

Ian Paget: I love that. I love that. Now, I am conscious of time because just before the call, you said that you have a call, which is in about 10 minutes, so I'm going to throw one last question at you and then we can wrap this up. Knowing what you know now, so you've learned a lot over the last, what was it? 18 years, if you could travel back to any time in your career and give your younger self some words of wisdom, some advice, what would you tell yourself at some point in your previous career? It could be at any point. It doesn't need to be at the beginning. It could be last week if needed.

Matt Davies: Yeah. I probed myself last week, probably these are a few telling to's to be honest. Well, I think if I was to look at myself, scrawny kid from South London just starting out, I think I would... When I was a kid, I was just sick of the education system, to be honest. I just wanted to get out there. I wanted to do real stuff. I wanted to prove myself probably to my dad, to be honest with you. I wanted to prove I could make it. I'd probably just say to myself, "Don't take yourself so seriously. Just learn." I think people... I don't know, the 20-years-old, this was me anyway and I thought I knew everything, to be honest and you don't. You need experience so you need to learn.

I would definitely say to myself, "I wish earlier in my career, I had read more books. I had gone to more lectures or watch more Ted Talks or whatever." However you learn, definitely do that because, experience, you can't buy experience. Get your learning, and then try and apply it I guess is what I'm trying to say. If you fail in your application, that's an experience, take that with you. "I tried that there, it didn't work," adapt and move on because it's only by testing and trying things and failing that you're going to grow. My advice to my younger self would be, "Learn more and apply your learning and don't worry if it fails."

Ian Paget: Yeah. I love the advice and I've just taken that myself because, I don't know if you know Michael Janda?

Matt Davies: No.

Ian Paget: He's actually just released a training course for anyone that wants to get into freelance. I've just signed up for that myself. If you don't know him already, you have to go and find him, speak to him and get him on your podcast. That guy is amazing. I love Michael. He's one of these people that's been doing this for years and he's at that point where, he's had a successful career, he's got enough money to do what he wants to do and that's what he's doing. He's giving back to the graphic design world. If you don't know him, go and check him out and he's just released that course so-

Matt Davies: Sounds like an awesome guy.

Ian Paget: ... I'll include that in the show notes.

Matt Davies: Brilliant, yeah, yeah.

Ian Paget: Definitely. Well, Matt, thank you so much for your time. It's been a really great... and for listeners, this is actually take number two, we had some serious technical issues last time so thank you, Matt, for being so awesome, understanding and thankfully, I think this second take was a hundred times better than the first one as well. It was awesome. Thank you very much Matt for your time.

Matt Davies: Ian, seriously thank you for inviting me on. It's been an absolute honour. I just wanted to say to you, keep doing what you're doing. The show is fantastic. I know those of us in this space really, really appreciate all the work and effort. I mean, it is... guys seriously, having just started a podcast myself, it is a lot of work-

Ian Paget: It is, yeah.

Matt Davies: ... scheduling the interviews, thinking of the questions and actually doing them and then editing them afterwards. I appreciate the volume of work behind the project. I just want to say, if I can take on the voice of the people, thank you to you from the voice of the people. Thank you.

Ian Paget: You are welcome Matt. Thanks so much for your time. It's been great.

Matt Davies: Take care mate.