Ross Drakes 11:33
Yeah, so So I had a fairly decent freelance Good luck, kind of portfolio because I’ve been freelancing. So a lot of our initial clients came from, from that pool. But we quickly learned that the client that fits for a freelancer doesn’t necessarily threaten agency because, you know, agencies have more complexity and are more cost, you know, they’re more expensive, and you need more cut like clients to survive. So I think, you know, the lesson there was that, that the clients who work and really good as freelance clients don’t necessarily work really well as agency clients. And then we just once again, I think the secret to our success has always been referrals, it’s about, it’s about really deeply caring about delivering something amazing for the clients and doing it to the best of your abilities. And most of the time, people will then refer you on to someone else, or come back to give you more. So that has kind of been the secret. And now, you know, any 15 years later have I realized the proper value in building advertising and perception and brand around your business. And I think it’s a bit embarrassing to say that as a branding, marketing business that we didn’t brand or market for the first sort of seven, eight years of our business, we didn’t do anything it was all purely word of mouth, is how the business survived. But now we’ve we’ve got a lot more intention in how we position ourselves how we communicate how we grow in our chosen speciality. And that’s where things like the podcasts have been tremendously valuable for us, because advertising or branding is a difficult thing to, to sell and to market. Because if you don’t want to rebrand your company, there’s very little I can do to convince you otherwise, so you kind of need to be out there. So that when people reach that point of, oh, I need a new brand, or oh, I’m launching a new product, or Oh, my company doesn’t feel right for me anymore, that you’re sort of in their periphery, or even better in one of their friends peripheries. Because then you get those people going, oh, you should speak to Ross at night. So they totally the right people, which is the way we’ve managed to actually scale our business. So if I could go back to original Ross starting Nicework, I would have started content production and thought leadership and and brand and marketing ourselves from day one, because I think we would be exponentially further forward. Now.
John Corcoran 14:24
One thing I like to ask people about is how do you know when to branch out and expand into a new service line? So you mentioned DVDs you mentioned, Flash mentioned HTML websites, all these different things. Now you’re into MFTs. Now you’re doing web three. But there’s always a tension between, you know, we’re good at this thing. Versus the clients would like us to help them with this other new thing, which requires learning how to do that new thing. And should we do that? Should we just really stay within our lane? How do you decide whether to branch it out whether to start offering new services?
Ross Drakes 14:58
Hmm. So so I’d like to Do I’d like to stand here going, I’ve totally figured this out.
John Corcoran 15:03
Three years,
Ross Drakes 15:06
we’ve made some some bad mistakes in the history, and we’ve made some good mistakes in the history, I can tell you kind of the strongest reason to branch out for me is when you’re getting signals from your clients. So if your clients are consistently asking you about a thing, then I encourage all businesses to explore that as an opportunity, especially if it’s if it’s tangential to your, your core business. So if people are asking, you know, which is why we ended up doing things like web and social media, then of course, our business, but it’s very difficult to build a brand without having a web presence and without having social media and without having a video. So we’ve almost been forced to expand into those, those pieces. Web three, was an interesting one for me, because it was, it was a core of something that I was deeply passionate about. I mean, I’ve been playing in cryptocurrency, you know, for a long time, and I’ve been deeply interested in it and have fiddled around, you know, in the onion network and in the Silk Road. And, you know, so interesting to me, you know, it’s interesting to me personally, and then, you know, I saw this this, like, I could never figure out how to fit cryptocurrency into Nicework, because it doesn’t make sense. But as soon as this ownership layer of NF T’s was there, I was like, this is huge, because ownership is is the key to most economic and cultural and social interactions, there’s some level of ownership is why we interact with each other. So to ignore digital ownership, as a person building brands, and building companies, for me is completely insane. I’m not saying everyone needs to think about it. But you know, I was like, There’s something amazing here. And go ahead. And interestingly, by by being early, we were able to make a bunch of mistakes, before anyone really was looking. And now we’ve done more work than probably 90% of the companies on Earth in the space, because we started so early, that in the beginning, it was just people experimenting, and they’re like, Oh, help us do this thing. And once again, that kind of enthusiasm and curiosity comes in that you’re like, Okay, well, let’s see where this goes. And we moved into, into that business. So I think it was in that case, it was a combination of, of what I know works plus a new technology was a really interesting thing for my business, but also managing to, to differentiate by industry as opposed to service offering has been revolutionary for Nicework, because it’s always difficult for us to go, Okay, we only want to do this piece of the pie because customers and our clients don’t think like that they don’t go, oh, you know, what I need is a brand mark, you know, nobody comes to us with a brand mark problem, they come to us going people don’t understand us, we don’t feel that you know that we have the right representation in the market, we don’t feel that people respect or understand how you know, cutting edge we are or this company the way we look and feel, right? And that problem requires us to do positioning, storytelling, branding, logo, design, graphic design, web design video. And if we say, are we only going to do this kind of slice, then it’s very difficult for clients to go, Okay, well, we can, we’ll use you there. And then we’ll use other people, you know, kind of to pull the rest of it. So yeah, it was very difficult for us to differentiate over the years as to what services we offer.
John Corcoran 19:03
So let’s dive into NF t’s a little deeper, you gave a talk recently titled NF t’s not just overpriced, JPEGs and monkeys. And, you know, one of the most famous NFT examples out there, he’s got a lot of attention is this board a board a yacht club? That was basically people buying and selling images and an NF T. But there’s many, many more applications for NF Ts, which I think is really fascinating. So talk a little bit about like, where you see the potential with NF T’s what types of companies should be thinking about this technology, which and more equal importance, what types of companies should not be thinking about
Ross Drakes 19:43
using them? Well, so So I think before, before we talk about that I want to talk about, like conceptually what this technology represents, because I believe I believe that technology is the least interesting part of this, you know And the last sort of year and a half or two years, everyone’s been talking about the technology. But if you think about something like social networks, they talk about the connections that are enabled, they don’t talk about how it is, you know, they don’t talk about the layers of servers and how they interconnected and how they use, you know, kind of web services to make your data available everywhere. They don’t talk about the technology layer, they talk about the opportunity that sits on top of it, or the output that sits on top of it. And I think NF T’s and cryptocurrency have been trying for too long to talk about the technology to get around to fall in love with Blockchain. And to fall in love with the you know, decentralization. But these are not things that average human beings can actually care about. Because, you know, most of them don’t need to understand that stuff in order to benefit and have a better life as a result of the technology. That’s, that’s being implemented. But what interests me about NF T’s is NF T’s unlock true digital ownership. And what true digital ownership is, is, in order to own something, you need authenticity. So you need to be able to prove that this thing is mined, right?
John Corcoran 21:15
But traditional problem with digital is that you can copy it an infinite number of times. And then
Ross Drakes 21:21
there’s things like, you know, there’s like DMR, and all these things that try and stop you doing that, but they fail, you know, and then there’s people like Disney MC, have lawyers, teams of lawyers that sue people for doing that stuff, but they haven’t managed to, like, do it. But it’s very difficult to own a digital assets that you can go, this is mine, you can prove their tools, and other things you needed, you need interoperability, or you need to be able to trade that thing, because ownership is worthless, if nobody, if you can’t give it to anyone else you have so so NF T’s also unlock the ability to transfer that ownership to other people. Now, if we look at the history of ownership, you know, for the vast majority of human kind of history of ownership has been a physical thing. This is my anti cutter, because it’s in my hand. Now for a long time, before we had rule of law, you could have walked up to me and punched me in the face and taken this anti cutter and then it would have been your anti cutter, because you can prove that it’s authentic, because here it is. And it seems to operable, because I can hand it to you. And now it’s your so that’s what we had. And that was the basis of agrarian societies it was the basis of trade it was the basis of the Roman Empire was the basis of all of these things, physical, physical ownership of it, if you think about all of these people that used to go across the world, and like conquer lands and stuff, they were just rocking up and being like, This is mine now. That’s why they were doing it. And everything that’s here is now mine. And if you don’t agree with me, I have a long pointy stick that I’m going to stab you with, you know, until you agree with me. And that’s what we had for a long time. But then in 18, at the Dutch East India Company, which is not a great company, but they were trading around the world. And they came up with this thing that if you have a thought, or you you you Figure Figure something out, you can own that. And that was the biggest leap in ownership ever. And this was the invention of intellectual property. So now I can say that whatever this song is mine, because I compose that. And I can then sell the rights to that. And I can do all of these things in an unlocked businesses like, you know, what’s it like talent management, and all of these things is based on the idea of intellectual property, this whole legal fields that were invented, because now a thought has value and a thought has ownership that unlocked all of these other businesses. And what NF T’s represent for me, is the next evolution in ownership, we have an opportunity to create digital things that we can own. And now you pair that with a worldwide trend of people spending more and more time in a digital world. You know, so there’s, you and me are sitting here having a conversation in the digital space across the world. But if you’ve got small kids, they spend time and things like Roblox and fortnight is this is where they’re socializing is happening. It’s where their communities are forming. It’s where they are building things. It stands to reason that if they’re going to want assets inside the space that they spending 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week, 150 hours a week if your kid is properly properly in there. So you combine these two things together and there’s there’s immense opportunity here. And what excites me is you know, there’s there’s a saying that often when new technology arrives people just mimic the old use cases. And that’s what we’ve sort of been through in the last while is people just mimicking. In the conversations. I have people it’s like, yeah, but if I take a photograph of, you know, a copy or JPEG, it’s now mine. And I’m like, Well, if you go and take a photo of the Mona Lisa, it doesn’t no one believes you now own the Mona Lisa, they believe you have a photograph of the Mona Lisa, you know, maybe you’ve taken a beautiful photograph of the Mona Lisa. And you can print it on a t shirt and sell it to someone, but it’s not actually yours. This thing, now you can go this digital thing is mine. And what that does is being able to transfer ownership to people in a digital layer has unlocked opportunities for brands, Nike launched the thing yesterday actually called Nike dot swoosh. And essentially, the beginning of the technology becoming invisible is happening. And the opportunities for companies and brands are becoming more and more apparent. And what Nike swoosh is, is you can buy into this platform. So you go on to Nike swoosh, I think it’s Nike dot swoosh. And you buy one of the tokens, which is an NFT, but they haven’t called it an NF T, I think they’ve called it a digital collectible. And by owning that digital collectible, it gives you access to their platform. And on that platform, you can design your own Nike sneakers. And if users of this platform like your sneak it enough, they will make it and put it into production, right?
John Corcoran 26:42
re engineering the way that choose and other products have been made for a long time.
Ross Drakes 26:48
What are you asking me? How do you move your services? How do you know when to move? Yeah, it is you don’t have to know. Right? Yeah, basically, get the market clients your ecosystem, let them design it, let them market and let them find market fit. And then all you need to do is put your entire business engine of building these things and securing all the global supply chain and making sure they’re available in every country. And making sure there’s an advert on every device, you see a marketing now Nikes got this, this fan base, which now has this idea of coming back to ownership, you know, so I can love a pair of sneakers. But if I’ve designed it, you know, and then you’ve shipped it to me, I’m gonna tell everyone and be like, Hey, have you seen my shoes? Excuse me, you know, strange person, I designed the shoe. You know, so you get the spike this irrational, you get this irrational connection to the product into the brand, because people feel like a fractional sense of ownership in this thing. And they also have a tangible real ownership in it. You were talking about bordick earlier. And you know, a lot of people get caught up in the hype of how much they were and how how interesting they were. But what the team at UGA labs which is the company behind board a did which is revolutionary is they created the series of characters, right. But what you got when you bought the token was you bought the commercial rights to it. Now, this has never been doable at a scale before. Think about Disney writer, you go into a shop and you buy a Disney Doll, you know a frozen doll because your daughter wants it, you have no rights to that product. All you have is the right to have the physical objects like you don’t, if you take a photo of that and put it on a t shirt or on a billboard or in an advert Disney will sue you because you’re infringing on their patent on their thing. So if you own a board, eight, you own the rights to not all of the apes, but the one you have. Now what people have done once again, coming back to ownership because they now have ownership in this thing. They have built hamburger brands, they have built food shops, they have built sneaker brands, they build coffee brands they’ve built there’s a club in Miami called 11 that instead of paying celebrities to show up, they have board apes show up on the screens in the clubs. Now what this is doing is it’s helping those businesses right so they are able to to build a brand quicker because people recognize board apes so I don’t have to like fight up the ladder. I can start sort of five steps ahead. But it’s also building the value of the board a franchise as an entirety because now I’ve been to a club and I’ve eaten a hamburger. And Jimmy Fallon has one is his Twitter profile. Maybe I’ll buy one too, you know. So the perception increase of this brand goes up and it’s because of this opportunity to distribute ownership. I Unlock the creativity of the broader market to build your assets, which is a shift in how businesses need to think because more often than not the entrepreneurs I speak to want to protect their assets, and they don’t want people to innovate on top of them. And they don’t want to because they worried about losing out on the opportunity of that. But now, because the ownership can be shared between the creative IP and the person who purchased the digital assets, there’s now a mutually beneficial relationship. So the more successful you are, the more successful I am the more successful I am I pass that success back to you. I feel like that was a very long answer to your some,
John Corcoran 30:39
you know, it’s a great overview, and I have a bunch of question, follow up questions about it. I want to ask about how other businesses that aren’t Nike can apply these principles. So maybe we can talk about an example around that. But before we do that, this is such a shift in the way that creatives are compensated. And I’m wondering how you feel about this as a creative as an agency owner, that it’s kind of flipping the model, you know, that some people would say that this idea that someone has to buy in to buy an NFT, for the privilege of designing, you know, a pair of shoes that Nike used to pay an individual to design those shoes, that that is maybe a lack of fairness to the creative, and a lot of people are not going to be compensated for their work, but maybe I’m missing something, what are your thoughts on that?
Ross Drakes 31:33
So So I think it’s, it’s the biggest shift to as a creative industry that we’ve ever seen. So generally, most creatives are paid by the hour, which is probably the worst way of being paid. And then you seeing things like Fiverr, and Upwork, basically, doing almost like the Uber thing where they are harvesting all the kind of the middle and lower market kind of trade. And they’re pushing the price down, like at an exponential thing. So now, instead of being able to charge $90 an hour, I’m having to charge $10 An hour $20 An hour, which then necessitates me doing 10 times more work, which necessitates all sorts of kind of bad things. But now there’s an opportunity for creatives and clients to work together because you know, in an hourly billing model, it’s in my interest is the creative to spend the most amount of time on it. And it’s in your interest as the client to spend the least amount of time on it. So now we start our relationship in an inherent tension, we are not, we’re not working together to a common goal, I’m trying to push my hours up, and you’re trying to push my nails done. Now the next thing was like, Okay, well, let’s do bundles of work. Now, the problem with bundles of work is as you start creating stuff, opportunities appear, but they don’t necessarily fit into the original bundle that we agreed. So now I’m coming back to you going, oh, I need $10,000 more, I need $5,000 More, and you’re like No, but I only had the original kind of budget for the original parcel. So those opportunities sort of die. And they they reduce the value of the thing that’s ultimately created unless the creatives do a lot of creative people do because they care about it is to just build that stuff anyway, and then not build a client. Now what this has done for our businesses, we have an opportunity to partner with people, we have an opportunity to own a percentage of the outputs of what we create. Because if you’re creating 10,000, NF T’s, we can go kill 100 of them with us. So now when there’s an opportunity to increase the value of the overall pot of 10,000, we know the beginning 100 of them at the end. So putting in that extra effort and putting in that extra energy isn’t something we resentful of, it’s actually something that we are now deeply encouraged to do. And this is an amazing way for companies start working with creative people. So instead of having that inherent tension from beginning, you have an inherent partnership in the beginning. So now the incentive sits on both sides to make this thing work. And the drive of both parties is is different. And it doesn’t mean that you and mean I need to get into an equity agreements in your business and I need to understand how you do it and are your wife is on payroll. Why is your wife on payroll? I don’t know. You know, I’m a and you’re going to do a 2% shareholder, you know, I don’t have to answer to you. And now there’s all those kinds of fights this way we just going in this project. We are partners and at the end of that project, we can choose to do another one. But we could also choose kind of not to so this is mutually beneficial thing from from day one. So yeah,
John Corcoran 34:38
and I think what I think is really interesting about it is that one it can be multimedia doesn’t, you know we’re thinking about like a graphic design like an image of an ape, but it doesn’t have to be just that it could entail music and video and other kind of multi discipline, which I think is really fascinating. And then also that that it can carry on in the future. So you know, you could have essentially a royalty For that NF T into the future each time it changes hands, which is something that we haven’t had in the past. But the other question I was gonna ask you about was how are we different? Maybe a smaller, you know, Main Street type of business? How could they apply this because not every business has got, you know, a huge following like Nike does.
Ross Drakes 35:19
So, for me, I think it’s the same as building a brand is doing a web three or an NF T project is what is your intention? What is the what is the thing you’re trying to achieve? And then we always start by asking you to create like the questions of a client, like, if you’re doing this, because you saw the tech and you think it’s cool, but you don’t really have a use case for it. And you’re kind of squeezing it in then don’t do that. But there’s a huge opportunity for, for small businesses to leverage the scalability and the security of blockchain using freely accessible things. And what I mean by that is, it’s hard not to open, you know, the news, every month without hearing or Microsoft was hacked, Sage was hacked. You know, all of the people uniting as TD Ameritrade, everyone’s emails were hacked, you know. So information is being stolen, left, right and center. And they’re these, these really onerous laws being passed by governments basically saying that businesses have to secure data, and they have to be very kind of hardcore with it. And for a small outfit, you just don’t have you know, if Google can’t secure their data, how the hell is Nicework supposed to secure its data? You know, it’s just not possible. You know, and the only reason we can secure it is because we so small that the hackers haven’t noticed us yet. And you know, and I’m looking, but the day they do, we are, you know, there’s no way that we can protect ourselves. But if you start storing information in the blockchain, and leveraging that you are inherently secure. So unless the entire cryptography of the chain you’re building on falls apart, what you have is secure. And it doesn’t mean that people can’t be scammed and stuff like that. But at least the core data is secure. So that is an interesting thing from an opportunity perspective for a client. The the business opportunities for me is how do you how do you extend the reach of your business and get people to own a piece of it, you know, in our showing an example of Nike and a shining example of board ape, and there’s an ownership layer in. And I’ll give you an example of a client we worked with, which is a set of three burger companies in Ohio called main cheese brothers, they, they claim to be the inventors of the hamburger, and they’ve got a great great grandfather’s recipe from 1820, or whatever it was that they started making this hamburger. Now, they had a challenge where they had expanded this family business to three locations. And they were like, now we want to keep expanding, like we want to expand our reach, because we’re now the next generations coming up. And you know, there was one and then there were four, and now there are 15, or 16 kind of people who want part of it. So the traditional route is to go okay, well, let’s go to Burger King McDonald’s, you know, like, let’s have a stretch of franchise, country. Yeah. Which is, is one way to go. But they were like, well, let’s, let’s see if we can use the scalable technology to create something of interest. So they created the little Midge and the little mange is a hamburger that you can buy. So it’s an NFT that you can buy. And if you own that, NFT, remember, the intention that they came up with was to scale this business into a bigger audience. If you own the NF t, you can buy the original spice mix off a website, which you only have access to if you have an NF t. So you can then make that if they can make that hamburger at home, and opportunities we’re now exploring with him as like, how do we turn this into a franchise model? So if you own 100 NFT, yes, then we’ll give you more access to what we understand about this product. And you can build your own restaurants off the back of the IP that we have built over the many years. If you have 1000 NF T’s you get like deeper and deeper access. So now they have an opportunity to scale their business beyond their three locations without actually having to having to have more locations because they’ve got a really interesting story. They’ve got a beautiful thing and they’ve got a strong product. And now we can use that to create a digital sort of engagement for them that allows them to now speak to people in New York City and in South Africa and all over the space. So By by leveraging the ownership piece, they’re unlocking a licensing model that unlocking an access model that they can use very easily. And they don’t have to build all the underlying infrastructure as in how do we verify that you have this? How do we get the access? How do we secure the information, the blockchain is doing all of that. So that’s why it makes a lot of sense for them to do a web three experience with that,
John Corcoran 40:27
what a fascinating application. I know we’re almost out of time. So I want to wrap things up. Ross, thank you for breaking this down in such a understandable way, really love the way that you explain these really, kind of Advanced Concepts, revolutionary concepts that I think a lot of people are still just learning about. I know I speak for myself, I’m still learning a lot about them. Well, I want to wrap things up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude publicly to those who helped you along the way, especially piercing and temporaries. Who would you want to shout out and thank you.
Ross Drakes 40:59
So it might sound a little bit silly, but I want to thank my son, Sebastian. He’s only four and a half right now. But, you know, during COVID, I was suddenly forced home. And before Before COVID, I was working from eight in the morning, until sort of six o’clock in the evening. 630 In the evening, so I was seeing him in the early morning when he was just waking up. And I was seeing him late at night or missing him by the time he was down. And in COVID, he was always there. And he was always kind of around me. And it was this sort of deeper mind that, although up 15 years of work into Nicework, you know, he and my family are infinitely more important to me as an individual than the business ever, will be. And the lesson I carried out of that is, I try and every single day spend lack of deep, focused piece of time with him as an individual, as he sort of grows up. And it’s just a reminder that this world that I put myself in this badge that I choose to wear as a founder and entrepreneur isn’t actually the most important piece of my identity. That’s that there are other things. There’s my wife, and my child, and my family and my friends that are are of equal importance. And then weirdly enough, you’re asking duck, what happened recently, but last night, I actually had a drink with the man who got me into yours name’s Rob Dennison. And we’ve been sort of friendly ever since. He pulled me into EO and he was saying that his son Tom is now 18 years old. He’s in his final year of high school. He’s going to university next year. And he was like, Well, we had this accidental time on Saturdays, when his wife and his daughter would go and ride horses together. The two of them were sort of left at home. And he was like, now looking back, obviously Tom’s 18 And he’s got friends, and he wants to go out. And he, you know, he’s he’s now living his sort of adult life. And Rob was like that time that I spent with him, is time that I will carry to my grave with a smile on my face. And I think when he asked me that question, I think Sebastian, sort of forced himself on me during COVID, but at least had the ability to learn that lesson, and I’ll never let it go.
John Corcoran 43:31
That’s great. Ross, where can people go to learn more about you?
Ross Drakes 43:36
You can go to rossdrakes.com. And that’s where I frequently and infrequently update all of my stuff. But if you want to see the work that we do at my company, you can go to nicework.in.
John Corcoran 43:48
And check out the One More Question podcast, the RadEO podcast as well. And quick shout out to PG Gildan hoists. I think it’s how you say his last name is golden. Okay, there we go. Golden haste. Founder shoshan walks who introduced me to you and recommended you, Ross. So appreciate that. Ross, thanks so much.
Ross Drakes 44:08
Well, John, thank you for the time and energy you put in this, I think one of the most prolific creators that I’ve seen in the space, it’s that I know the work and energy that it takes there. Thank you for the time and thank you for creating this platform.
John Corcoran 44:23
Great. Thanks so much.
Chad Franzen 44:27
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.