William Warren, The Sketch Effect and Author "The Conquering Creative"

  Welcome back, friends, to our podcast, Unlocking Your World of Creativity, where we travel around the world talking to creative practitioners about how they get inspired and how they organize ideas, and most of all, how they gain the confidence and connections to launch their work out into the world. And today's theme is Making Your Ideas Understandable and Actionable.

And there's all sorts of ways of doing that with animation, live events, sketching, this graphic recording, we often call it, and infographics. And my guest is an expert in all of these areas and has a new book that we'll talk about as well. Welcome William Warren

. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me on.

Really excited to dive into our conversation. It's

terrific. And we've all been in these meetings where ideas are coming , an idea per second. And then you walk away and you go, boy, that was a great meeting. What'd we come up with again? Yeah. What

did we learn? What was that all about?

What am I doing now?

I thought group B was handling that. Yeah, exactly. Tell us about your service and how you get involved in these kinds of sessions with your sketch effect and really try to bring these ideas to life.

Yeah, I love how you described it, how you illustrated the value of what we do with the sketch effect, because the business really emerged from that pain point, which is that we attend a lot of meetings, we go to a lot of conferences, we attend a lot of sessions, we work really hard, we have these fantastic conversations, and then we walk away, and we tend to forget most of it, and we don't know what Is happening next and who's owning the next action item.

And yeah, my business was born out of that experience. Before I started the sketch fact 10 years ago, I worked in corporate marketing and I would attend meetings and workshops and team sessions. And for me, I've always been a creative at heart. I've always loved illustrating.

I've always loved comics and cartoons. And so for me, in order to survive these boring meetings or in order to make them a little bit more engaging for myself personally, I started to sketch during the meetings. If I was, sitting there taking notes, I would doodle in my notes, or if it was appropriate, I'd hop on the whiteboard and grab some.

Expo markers and starts doodling out or sketching out the main concepts, or if I was delivering a presentation, I would sketch out my concepts in visual form, scan them in and put them into my PowerPoint and then present a deck that was verbal and visual, auditory written and visual content all in one.

All in one go. And so for me, that was just a creative outlet. That was just a way for me to express myself creativity or creatively in the context of this corporate, corporate meeting day after day, corporate meeting life. And the magic happened when people around me saw value in what I was providing, they said, William, this sketching you're doing is really cool.

Can I take a picture of it? Or can I have, can I put it in my. Powerpoint or will you come do that sketching thing in our meeting? And so soon I was hopping around this organization as a hired gun drawing and doodling and doing the sketching thing And what I realized is I was stumbling into this world of graphic recording or visual communication Which is rooted in visual science visual learning science, which is that?

People learn ideas better when information is presented, not only verbally, but also visually. It's part of how we're wired as human beings to think and process visually. And so I was stumbling into this world. And the product or the service is called graphic recording. And it also goes by the name of sketch noting or live scribing or visual facilitation.

And yeah, it just was this snowball that was gathering momentum and gathering steam and A few things led, I got a couple of side gigs here and there, turn into a side hustle, took, I would start to take a PTO to go and do these assignments and do these gigs as we call it.

And then it grew to the point where there was a real viable business opportunity here. And so 10 years ago, I left that job and started the Sketch Effect officially. We've been in business now for 10 years. We've grown every year. And yes our, what we do, what we love best is visual communication, helping make mostly corporate ideas, business ideas, more understandable and more actionable by introducing visual language and visual learning through live sketching, animation, infographics.

And all the above.

It's a great art. And as a workshop facilitator myself, trying to herd the cats in a group is one thing, but you're doing these they'd be beyond mind maps true graphic recording live. And I've heard that one of the challenges is, you have to represent the idea.

You're not really judging it. So depending on what you draw to represent that idea, it's that's not what I was thinking at all might come up, but you take the

chance. Exactly. We tell our clients we're third party listeners, we're in the room where we're engaged in the meeting, but we're not actively steering it or guiding it we're third party listeners we're listening to the content we're synthesizing, and we're trying to draw out.

Literally and figuratively draw out the big ideas, the main themes, the big takeaways and help make that meeting more effective for people in the room. And yeah, sometimes maybe we get it wrong or a client might say, Hey, the way you interpreted that is not really. What we had in mind. That's pretty rare though.

Most of the time our team of artists and we do have a team now we've scaled up most of the time our team of artists, they do a great job of being able to pull out those key ideas and main themes in a way that gets everybody aligned and everybody on the same page. Yes.

And you've done with this done this with companies ranging from GE and Marriott and Delta and MailChimp and then the leaders and speakers like Brene Brown and Sheryl Sandberg.

I can only imagine Sheryl Sandberg. She's standing there giving the talk. Is she looking over her shoulder to see what the graphic recording is looking like? There's a lot of trust.

There's a lot of There's a lot of pressure and a lot of trust. I believe in that session where we sketched Sheryl Sandberg, which was quite an honor.

I believe that was a really big conference. And I think we were, I think our artists were off stage, maybe like off to the side. So I doubt that she was actively reviewing our work in the moment. That'd be cool if she was, she could give us real time feedback, how as to how effective our synthesis was.

But but there have been times where we will be there right next to the speaker, whether it's someone famous and well known like Sheryl Sandberg or, the CEO of a small local business. And they do look at our work and they do assess how are we interpreting the information? How are we capturing it?

And 99. 9 percent of the time they're happy with it and they're just. They're more than happy that they're enthralled with this idea of a person listening, synthesizing, and then visually depicting what they're talking about in real time. It's really quite a magical thing to behold.

I Wanted to also then go to your point of the team. I was looking on your website and you've got people all over. So it's not only a remote team, but I was also wondering how you, screen for this talent, and then train up and deliver the experience.

Cause people, when they hire you, they say, this is the experience I'm looking for. This is the output that we're hoping to get. So how are you standardizing this experience as best you

can? It's an amazing question. And it's one of the biggest hurdles to our business model and to how we scale big, which is finding talented people who can do this skill because you're right.

It's a very demanding, it's a very difficult, highly. Highly specialized skill that we're looking for. So in essence, we're looking for four things when we're hiring and onboarding new artists. First of all, we're looking for people who have just a baseline level of creative ability.

They can draw, they can sketch, they know how to use color effectively. They can render concepts quickly. They can draw motion. They can draw. People, they can draw context, environments, and scenery. So we're looking, first of all, for people who are just confident at illustrating. That doesn't mean they're fine artists or they have to have a master's degree in illustration.

That's great if they are, but we're looking for people who can just draw quickly and confidently. And are okay drawing in front of a crowd. That's another important thing. So that's element number one. Element number two is we're looking for people who also have the cognitive ability to where they can listen to oftentimes complex Subject matter, usually corporate business related subject matter, and they can decipher it.

They can interpret it. They can synthesize it and they can pull out what really matters. Now that doesn't mean they need to be subject matter experts. Cause no one's going to be a subject matter expert on everything. We sketch for every kind of industry, every kind of business you can think of from water utilities out and out in the Western United States to healthcare policy to.

Travel international travel compliance law to, you name it, everything we've every kind of topic you think that we sketch for. So we're not looking for artists who have business or who have subject matter expertise about everything, but we're looking for people who can listen to a conversation.

Interpret what matters most interpret the emotions behind it, and then be able to capture those high level themes. So that's number two, is this kind of cognitive ability. And then number three is just the matter of flexibility. We're looking for people who can hop on a plane, and go travel to to Boise, Idaho.

Or to San Francisco, or Orlando, or wherever it needs to be. They can travel to these places, they can work a couple days, and then they can fly home and then maybe take a gig the next week. So we're looking for people who are, we call them flexible freelancers. Who can take on a gig here and there, they can drop their work and then go, do a last minute client.

And then the fourth thing we're looking for is probably the most important thing for us, which is culture fit, at the sketch fact, we are growing a brand and we're growing a team and we take our culture and our core values seriously. So we're looking for artists who are going to not only do great work, but also represent.

They're going to embody our six core values of positivity, integrity, whimsy, excellence courage and adaptability. They're going to do it with a smile. They're going to treat our clients with honor and respect. They're going to be hard workers and they're going to, ultimately make that client session.

Better by being there and providing their service. So it's a lot of things we're looking for. Thankfully, these people do exist, we've had to hunt all over to find them. I'm sure. But

you're describing a great constellation of skills. Because you look at the first couple and you go, yep, check, check.

And you go, oh, wait. I got to have business acumen. I need to get along in a room in a group. But it really leads to this thought that blending the business acumen and the creative talent that one has. And this is really the basis of your book as well, which I wanted to make sure we get to here.

So let's talk about the new book. It's called the conquering creative nine shifts to build an unstoppable creative business. And it's just out earlier this year from Ripples Media. This conquering idea, I love the cover even. It's got this kind of almost Iwo Jima carrying the flag look to it.

But there is a conquering nature to it. But you're really saying that the future of creativity in this case is the blending of the business and the creative.

The premise of the book is this most creative people go into a creative career because they don't want to do the businessy stuff.

You know that they pursue creative work because they don't want to be lawyers and they don't want to be salespeople and they don't want to be doctors and they don't want to read spreadsheets. They don't want to do all that. And that's why they go to art school. That's why they develop their skills.

That's why they want to pursue a lifetime of creative work. However. The conundrum, and I present this conundrum in the introductory chapter, the conundrum is this. It's that if you want to be a successful professional creative, or have a successful creative career, or grow a successful creative business, You have to get good enough at all that businessy stuff that you've been trying to avoid your whole life.

And the reason I know that is true is because that was my experience. From a young age, I wanted to be a cartoonist. I wanted to be an illustrator. I didn't want to look at spreadsheets. I didn't want to do sales calls. I didn't want to look at the PNL, didn't want to do that stuff. And then in my mid to late twenties, when I started my own creative business, I realized.

Wait a second. I got to do all that stuff. And the secret, the dirty little secret is that, and I mentioned this in the book, you don't have to be an expert at these things. You don't have to be an expert accountant to know how to read a PNL. You don't have to be a master salesman. To be able to do a great sales call or write a great proposal.

You don't have to be a master manager to, to delegate stuff and to start building a team. You just have to have a good enough level of acumen to to successfully grow a successful career. And the amazing thing is if you can do that, if you can have a good enough level of business acumen, then you get to unlock.

More potential to do what you love, you get to create more opportunity to do your art and do your creative work, without a solid business foundation, then there's no future for you doing this creative work unless you want it to just be a hobby, which is fine. That's fine for a lot of people to have their creative work.

Relegated to the hobby zone but if you want to have a professional creative career or creative business, you've got to do some of this business stuff. You got to figure it out. And so that's why I wrote the book mostly because I've learned it. This has been my journey over the last 10 years.

I don't consider myself a natural business guy or natural entrepreneur. So the conquering creative, my new book, I know you're recording this. So I'll hold it up as well. This book is designed to help creative people. Launch and sustain great creative careers and businesses. And so it's condensed down to nine lessons or nine shifts.

Around nine kind of key themes from anywhere from finance to sales, the delegation and it's designed to help people figure out business and

this organization, these nine shifts it's really a good way and it becomes the table of contents. Basically, here's nine shifts. And I'd like to highlight a couple of them if I could we'll start with this one that the first thought that we need to shift is that business is a necessary evil.

And if we could just shift that to business, we'll unlock my dreams. We started the creative business as a dream. And so that's what we want to shift to. We've talked about a little bit of the necessary evil part, but how do we shift to really embracing it more than resisting it?

Yeah, so the first chapter is really more of a philosophical one, and this comes from my own experience in art school.

I went to art school, I got a master's degree from Savannah College of Art and Design. And the overall feeling amongst creative people is that business is a necessary evil. It's something you just have to do. You gotta just grin and bear it. You just got to muscle through it or whatever. And the first chapter late makes the case that no it's not actually if you can figure out the business side of things, you can unlock so many dreams in your life.

You can open doors to new relationships. You can open doors to collaborating with your heroes. You can travel the world. You can make great money. You can build a life of freedom for yourself. If you want to be successful. professional creative, you have to make peace with the fact that business is a good thing.

Profit is a good thing. Efficiency is a good thing. Like these are all things that I think a lot of creative people are naturally hostile towards. Because they've seen all these horrible examples and they've, read about the wall street greed and the, the scams out there and all that.

And that's that's colored their. Perspective of business but I believe that business can be done in a way that elevates people around you adds value to your community. You can create jobs. You can make your life better. You can make the lives of those around you better. And and.

Chapter one specifically. So that's the philosophy behind it. And then we dive into tactics and that's the finance chapter. Which, I don't want to be like, this is the finance chapter, cause that's really boring. But it's the sneaky backdoor into, okay, if you want business to unlock your dreams, you got to first start off with financial financial viability.

How do you how do you look at your numbers? How do you track profitability? How do you How do you control cash flow? How do you price your work? All that kind of stuff. That's

very helpful. And it certainly goes beyond keeping the lights on and keeping the doors open to some of these bigger dream bases.

Exactly. Let's move down the list a little bit. I was attracted to shift number seven. I wait for inspiration. We've heard that I can't work. I'm not inspired right now. But if we shift that to I create systems for inspiration and maybe even William, I often ask authors to read a excerpt from the chapter.

Maybe this is the one I could ask you to read from just to hear it in your own voice from the book.

Of course. Yeah. I love this. I love this chapter because creativity, you know what? Let me read it. Let's just read it. Let me hold up the picture first. There's a drawing here of a creative person being guided by the angel Muse.

And then there's a side by side picture of the same creative person working at a desk with a calendar and deadline hovering over her head. So let me read this this introduction. Creativity by its nature is loose. It's unstructured, it's free flowing, it's fluid, it's not rigid, governed, or restricted.

It begins with the muse, with that divine inspiration, and flows forth from the soul. It calls upon our emotions and shuns our better judgments. The output, if it's ever actually finished, is a work of magic and wonder. It's not early or late, it just is. The problem, however, is that business The professional world requires structure, gives deadlines, and demands results.

A professional creative can't wait for the muse to show up and light a fire of celestial inspiration. He can't sit around and create when he feels like it. She can't work and work until it's perfect. Conquering creatives accept this and make peace with it. They create their own muses and build their own systems for inspiration.

They create steps to start, design processes to produce, and foster disciplines to finish. The first way to shift your outcomes is to create a, is to create systems that facilitate your creative work.

tHank you. That's William Warren reading from his book, The Conquering Creative, Nine Shifts to Build an Unstoppable Creative Business.

Yeah, that was fun. I don't have an audio book version yet, but maybe there you go.

Now you're warming up for it. That's right. Definitely there's nothing that is the bane of the existence of creative people as a deadline. But also, just I don't mean to demean us because I'm one of them.

But just like junior high school, you wouldn't. Get the book report done if there wasn't a deadline, of course. So we've got, I love the fact that you've drawn a calendar above the creatives, on the wall. So I got to have it done by Wednesday.

Yep. And I'm in one of the strategies I introduced in that chapter is this idea of creating artificial deadlines where, the client may say, hey, I need to think by Friday, but then.

In your own mind, in your own system, you forget about that. And you say, wait, this is due on Wednesday or this is due on Tuesday. And then just having those artificial deadlines force that urgency earlier in the process. It moves it earlier upstream so that you actually get the work done. It's quicker.

And then maybe you have time on the back end to polish it and refine it before you actually have to ship it out to the client. Yeah, that chapter dives into a whole bunch of strategies on how processes can support the creative work. Because, as that introduction said, the inspiration.

May or may not show up. So you can't rely on it. You got to rely on your processes. That's right.

And there was always never enough time for the quality checks, for the proofreading and forget polishing. Just really get into quality and nothing irked the clients more than saying yeah you got it on time, but it was half baked.

And so now we got to go back and do it again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're costing time either way. That's fantastic. Thanks for reading that. And it's really the whole theme that I'm getting here and it's on your website and it's in the book to help other creatives, turn their talent and passion into business.

bEcause I think a lot of listeners are saying, I do have the talent, but I'm just stuck on how do I make this a business? And it's not just how do I quit my day job and tell the man to stuff it. But it's like, how do I make this a sustainable income and business proposition so I can earn a living doing my passion?

YEah. Early in the book, I introduced two concepts. One is the personal sweet spot, and the other one is the professional sweet spot. And whenever I sit and talk with creatives, and they ask me this question, How do I, how do I make this my living? How do I make a business out of this? I ask them to first do those exercises.

The personal sweet spot exercise, and the professional. And the personal, exercise, this is nothing new, it's nothing unique to me, but it's it's looking at three, three variables. The first one is, what am I naturally good at? What is the thing that people around me, since I was a kid, have told me that I'm great at?

It's not a mystery. Just ask your friends and family, what am I good at? So that's circle number one. Overlapping circle number two is, what am I passionate about? This is more about things that inspire you on an intellectual level, on an emotional level. What are ideas or things that really make...

Get you, get your passion. And this is different from skills because there may be something we're really good at that we're also not. Emotionally or intellectually passionate about oftentimes they overlap, but they don't always, but you want to look at those two circles and focus on the overlap.

And then the third circle is what is the market asking for? What are people paying money for? What are people spending their hard earned dollars to buy or to do? And then, so if you look at those three overlapping circles, you want to plant your career firmly in the center of what you're good at naturally.

What you're passionate about and about what the market needs. Because without that market element, it's just a hobby. If people aren't going to pay for you then, or pay for you to do it, then it's just a hobby. For me, I love making barbecue. I've got three smokers in my backyard and I'm always out there making brisket or pork, pulled pork.

Will the market pay for that? Maybe, but I don't think that, there's plenty of great barbecue out there. I don't think so for me. So for me, I'm happy keeping that in the hobby zone. But for creatives, there's something that people will pay for. So you got to do that exercise.

And then the second one is the professional sweet spot. And this is really all about finding product market fit. And that's a concept that a lot of creative people are not familiar with, but it's a, it's an essence thinking about what, what am I first going to offer? That's the product.

Who is going to buy it? That's the market. Are there actual people out there that are willing to buy it? Who are the customers? And then this idea of fit, what is a price point in a process in a channel that I can present my product to the market that fits in a way that people will say, sure, I'll buy that.

Or sure, I'll sign up. And cause you might have a great, brilliant, creative business idea. But if you don't have product market fit, then it's not going to go anywhere. So I always encourage creatives to do both of those exercise exercises and really think through what is my personal sweet spot?

What is a long term viable career path that marries my skills, my passions, and my, and the mark, what the market needs? And then what is a product I can offer that has customers? That is priced well and is positioned well in the market where people can actually buy it.

So good. So encouraging.

Folks, my guest has been William Warren, award winning illustrator, author, and entrepreneur. We've really been talking about this power of visual communication to bring ideas to life. And then we've been talking about the people. That can bring those ideas to life and the kind of business acumen and the blending of our creative and business worlds to really make that happen.

William, I can't thank you enough. What a fantastic conversation. Hey,

Mark, I appreciate coming on. Hopefully this was a valuable conversation to your listeners. And yeah, let's go. I know creativity. Where

can we find you and learn more

about you and your work? If folks want to learn more about the sketch effect or our visual communication business, they can go to the sketch effect.

com. We also are on Instagram at the sketch effect, where we post all kinds of tutorials. We even have a community for people who are either interested enthusiasts, hobbyists, or professionals in the visual communication space. So check us out on Instagram. If folks want to connect with me I'm on Instagram at the conquering creative also active on LinkedIn.

So Connect with me let's chat on LinkedIn. And if folks want to learn more about the book, they can go to the conquering creative. com slash book. It's on Amazon. It's on Barnes, noble. com and yeah, I'm really proud of it. And I hope people will check it out.

We should because there's nine shifts.

We, we can't wait another day, another week, another year to say someday I'm going to make this my business. Let's take this someday out of it and

let's get on with it. And I will say the book is fully illustrated. By me over 100, 150 illustrations at a lot of fun doing it. And so it's a quick read.

There's an illustration on almost every page. And I think it will appeal to people who are not necessarily business book readers.

Yes. I would expect nothing less. In fact, if I opened this book and saw nothing but words, I

would be shy. I'd be a fraud. I'd be a fraud.

Fantastic. Thanks again to William Warren for being my guest.

Of course. And listeners, come back again next time. We're going to continue to stamp our creative passports around the world, talking to creative practitioners about how they get inspired and organize ideas, but also how they gain the confidence and the connections to launch their work out into the world.

That's what it's all about. So until next time, I'm Mark Stinson, and we're unlocking your world of creativity. We'll see you next time.