Episode 17 Transcript | Brock Beeson of Bill

​​Peter Stevenson

Welcome to By Subject Silicon Slopes brand and marketing podcast. I’m your host Peter Stevenson. I’m here with my co host Alicia Smith, managing partner at Modernate and Agency. And our guest today is Brock Beeson, director of brand design at Bill. Welcome.

Brock Beeson

Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, great.

Peter Stevenson

We’re excited to have you here. We’ve known you for long time seems like, I don’t know, eight, nine years. You know, maybe tell everybody where you’re from, where you grew up, what you were into as a kid, and kind of what got you into thinking about brand design.

Brock Beeson

Yeah, sure. Born here in Utah, like northern Utah, and immediately moved to Seattle. So raised in Seattle all the way up until college. Casually got into design stuff. In my high school, they offered like Photoshop classes by a fine art teacher who was teaching like painting and stuff otherwise. So we’re kind of just learning on our own a bit in the photoshop world and started casually helping out on deck design stuff in high school with a few people that worked for Microsoft type clients and came out here to college, served in LDS mission and kind of walked into a position with someone that I knew who started his own thing as an agency for Microsoft clients doing deck design. UX design. Kind of at the time that the Metro design system was coming out at Microsoft, so everyone needed new stuff.

Peter Stevenson

This is when you were at college at BYU? This was your day job while you were there?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, summer internship kind of part time job for an agency called Carpool Agency.

Peter Stevenson

And what kind of stuff were you designing?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, so they specifically did engineering work for internal SharePoint sites for groups within Microsoft. So they all have their kind of internal wikis and portals. They’re all built on Windows 95 looking stuff. And people were pretty excited about the new look that Microsoft to put out with Metro and whatnot.

Peter Stevenson

So it was a lot of digital stuff, all digital that you were doing for this agency and all kind of the same format, just different looks and feels.

Brock Beeson

Yeah, totally. It was like a great intro job for a junior designer. Like, go learn this robust, really well documented design system and then go design in it. Right. Go make stuff look like what Microsoft wants their stuff to look like.

Peter Stevenson

So what years was this?

Brock Beeson

That would have been like the summer of 2011. Started doing that stuff and then worked throughout my time at BYU doing the Ad program and minor in graphic design, but kind of working on Carpool stuff through that time.

Peter Stevenson

What made you want to go into Ad Lab there and what got you interested in saying, I want to do design full time? Yeah, this is where you want to go?

Brock Beeson

It’s a good question. I mean, first year I came in undeclared as a freshman to UIU. Really kind of explored a bunch of stuff, took a ton of the Intro to Whatever classes. And the second semester I was there, before serving my mission, I took an Intro to Advertising class and was just like, that’s pretty cool. And it kind of just sat there and lingered. I’d done all the visual program, all the Harrison Fine Arts intro classes that you could do without declaring and was like, I don’t know, that seems a little intense on the graphic design side. And their animation program was like, way more artsy than I consider myself artsy. And I was doing this very early UX type work that didn’t feel like it really fit into those programs either. So I saw like, this is a creative space in advertising. I knew that there was like specialty programs, but not much beyond that, and came back and took a few more classes and declared kind of right away like, oh yeah, this is an area that I can go be creative while still being really applicable for a business. It felt like useful. It was also kind of like I met a lot of people in that realm and I was like, this is a cool thing to do. Right? It felt like a cool program and people that I wanted to be around.

Alysha Smith

Was the minor in the graphic design program or was it Instill, the advertising or the communication side?

Brock Beeson

Now you’re testing me, because the way I understood it is my major was in Bachelor’s of Science Communication with a minor that my classes all happen at the Harrison Fine Arts. Yeah.

Alysha Smith

Okay.

Brock Beeson

And the minor was only open within the creative track as declared Art director within that track. So they took like twelve students a year into the creative track within the advertising program, and that small group got opened up for this minor, basically. So we took classes with the BA and BFA students. Yeah, that’s kind of wondering, but there was some overlap and we would be kind of the art director role, while they might be more of the hands on design, but was Adrian Pulfer around? I only had one class with Adrian. There was a few other professors at the time that we had, one that we learned a bunch of CSS and HTML type stuff, but at the same time I worked for Jeff Sheets, who was running the Lacox Center at the time. He’s kind of bounced back and forth between the Ad Lab and Lacock Center at the time that I was there. It was all lacock center. So we got to collab with photographers and videographers people in the film program and made some really cool stuff. But yeah, that’s where I was working.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so you come out of BYU. You come out what years did you graduate there?

Brock Beeson

Would have been 2014, 2014. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

And so you have a degree, you’ve got a little bit of UX Design history for what you’re doing for work, but what did you want to do? What were you interested in? Where did you want to go?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I mean, out the gate. I went through like, BYU does a great job placing people. They want you to leave the state and you go to big. So I had friends that went to Gosh. I’m blanking. I had a friend end up at CPB, another at Shyat, and I went to Leo Burnett in Chicago for the summer and just their massive intern program. It was like 50 plus. The program. Found out a few weeks in that the team I was on, the Allstate team, was like, awesome, we’re going to do cool work. There’s not really any jobs at the end of this for Allstate. So if you want to go and float to other teams, you can. Frankly, brand new kid in the house. Chicago is awesome. Really expensive. Didn’t really feel like the right fit for me coming out. So really loved the summer there and then came back to Utah between Jeff Sheets, who I worked for at BYU. I had a few connections here and ended up at MRM a few months after the summer. So working for the Cisco team at the time under Ryan Brown. Yeah, really fun time there.

Peter Stevenson

So you end up at an international agency in Salt Lake doing what BYU ad lab kids do. So what was your role there? What was your title? What were you kind of doing there?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, so our director title, I don’t know that MRM did like junior senior directors. It was kind of like he came in. I had a writer partner who was another BYU guy. So worked on a team working on the Cisco account for the first year, and then we floated over to the Sam’s Club account and it was some big idea stuff. I got to go to Chile with Patrick Maravia on a shoot that I don’t know if you guys know Patrick. Yeah, his new company.

Peter Stevenson

The stuff he’s doing right now is super interesting.

Brock Beeson

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

I don’t understand most of it because it’s mostly in foreign languages, but it’s pretty rad.

Brock Beeson

So we did a campaign for Cisco, blowing up devices in slow mo, like one of those hyper slowed down 10,000 frames a second type videos. So we got to make some cool stuff. Ultimately, it felt like I wasn’t getting super challenged from a really creative standpoint. It was like we were getting a lot of the work that was like the mailers and the type of stuff. Sam’s club was really interesting. They would spend more on a deck for an internal presentation to employees than they would on an ABM mailer or whatever. Right. So creatively, we’re like sourcing stock all the time instead of shooting stuff. And I was like, okay, but I wasn’t actively looking. And come the summer of 2016, I had worked for Alex Bean a bunch off and on. I grew up in the same area as Alex and Blake who started Divi. So Alex had moved down. I ran into him at Costco or something and I was like, let’s catch up.

Peter Stevenson

At Costco while you worked for Sam’s club.

Brock Beeson

Loyalty never changed for sure. They don’t give you any. Yeah, there’s no love loss there. But I had freelanced off and on for Alex in the past. He had started a couple of cool things like a scooter company that he was involved in and some engineering shop stuff. So I saw him trying to drum up some freelance work and was like, what are you up to? Let’s catch up. And actually started freelancing for Divi that summer, a couple of months before making the jump.

Peter Stevenson

And this was at the time when Divi, they had gone through that program, through that startup builder, what was a startup school or something like that, whatever.

Brock Beeson

I don’t know what they were called at the time. It might be start studio. Yeah, that’s done some initial dev work and a little bit of brand, but mostly to raise a seed or a precede round of money. Right? To get things going.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. So you showed up and they were like they had like a deck and they were raising money but it was nobody. And so you’re doing MRM during the day, you’re helping with Divi at night. And what was that like? What was it like starting to do huge corporate accounts versus the startup stuff?

Brock Beeson

It felt flipped of what felt big versus little. Like the mailers and banner ads felt like the smaller, easier, more straightforward stuff and the Divi stuff was like, oh, that’s kind of the shiny interesting, that’s where I wanted my interest.

Peter Stevenson

So what were some of the first things they were asking you to do?

Brock Beeson

It’s like deck stuff. They were still pitching and kind of refining how they sold this idea. Right. I think that they knew that the branding was little rough around the edges and needed some love, but it was like to the point of the company where they’re not selling to anyone either. So they started making some initial product and vetting if the early development stuff made sense as they brought on full time engineers. And a lot of it needed to change. Basically in that year they had some goals for when we would get an MVP product into the market. So it was initially like, hey, help us think through this user flow. What does this product need to look like and feel like? So it kind of a combination of some early deck work and kind of sorting out some of that. Not a lot of brand attention, but immediately like product. So I was eventually brought on full time as like a product designer. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

And when was that? What year was that?

Brock Beeson

That same year, so 2016 in September. So I freelanced for like two months while they were moving into their space and then was the first designer that they brought on full time.

Alysha Smith

Did your prior experience at Microsoft help in that new position?

Brock Beeson

I think it helped me sell it to them that I could do it. You know what I think if you’re looking at my resume on paper, the carpool stuff being kind of part time and while I’m a student, people looked at that different. But luckily, I had worked with Alex and met Blake kind of for the first time, even though we grew up in the same area. But I immediately caught the vision and could share that with them and I could articulate back for them how the product should work and function from a design perspective. And it felt very collaborative. So, like, the rapport felt really good. And I like to think that played into it a bit. Yeah, right, of course.

Peter Stevenson

So you show up, you’re doing a lot of product design at the time. Was there any other designers, any other marketers in house at that point?

Brock Beeson

So marketers, yes, we had a VP of Marketing that was pretty early, doing a lot of the strategy work, kind of laying the ground for who we’re going to sell to, setting up some of the thoughts there. I think a lot of it had to change from those pretty early days and we saw a little bit of turnover about a month after we added another designer, patrick Waite, and a product manager, Jacob Graff. Both started on the same day. We had another product person at the time, but it was pretty quickly that Jacob kind of took over running the product for Divi and he eventually became our VP of Product through I think it was like Series C or something when Tyler Hoag came on full time.

Alysha Smith

So how many people were at Divi at that point?

Brock Beeson

I think I was number like ten or eleven, something like that. Early, yeah. And we added a handful more engineers and stuff that fall, and then we were the same group for a little bit until we got a product out there.

Peter Stevenson

Well, you were doing freelance. Did they hire anybody? And then you should have been number six, but you’re number eleven and you’re mad about it.

Brock Beeson

I mean, I was never too stressed about the numbers, but I think that they were scaling a couple of engineers. Like, I was just reminiscing with a friend last week who was before me, and there was really only a handful of people before him.

Peter Stevenson

So you move into essentially right next to where we’re recording here in Silicon Slopes in late 2016.

Brock Beeson

Right, right.

Peter Stevenson

And what was the energy like in Divi at that point? What did it feel like?

Brock Beeson

I think for me, I came in like a mid level designer, first startup, first tech company, leaving agency, and I was focused more on that transition for me, career wise, like, I was like, hey, I’m leaving creative advertising and moving into, like, a UX product designer type role. So it felt like, oh, this is cool. This is a lot to bite off. All of a sudden, I’m realizing this is a hairy beast of a project in a company to take on as a first product to design. And I think if you asked Patrick, he felt the same way. And Jacob as a product manager is like, wow, this is a big challenge. But equally a huge swing that Blake and Alex were wanting to take at the industry is like, man, this thing just feels pretty electric. And we were in a tiny little space and a really close knit group of engineers and product and design altogether. So it felt awesome, honestly, fun and.

Peter Stevenson

Exciting and there’s a lot of energy.

Brock Beeson

Yeah. I think that there was business challenges that I was probably shielded from. Like we had some early partnerships and stuff, kind of fizzle, and we had to pretty strongly pivot find new business partners. By the time we were working with you guys. We’re on bank number two. So I think there was some really high stress moments for a lot of our engineers and our leadership team that from the outside looking in, I could tell, but they did an awesome job keeping the excitement in. Everyone really motivated.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. So you called Modern Eight in 2017, early 2017, right. Because you’re now going to market. You now have a card that you’re now going to ship out, and you asked us to help design that. But tell us about those months of, like, you’re ready to go. What did your job entail at that point? You’re doing less product now, you’re doing some more design and marketing and brand. What are you working on?

Brock Beeson

I mean, I think a lot of it was like, who are we going to get to use this thing first? So I think, like any startup, you start chatting with your friends and family, seeing kind of really honing in on who this product is right for. And I think what Blake and Alex did an amazing job of was figuring out how to fit the product to the market. Everyone talks about product market fit and that it felt like Divi hit a real magic moment with understanding the customer and who this was valuable for and listening to them and making the product work for a broad customer base. Right. So a lot of it was kay. As product designers, we’re still iterating on the product. Right. It’s a living, breathing thing that we’re going to continue building. We’ve prioritized shipping, so it’s rough, but what do we need to learn from our customer base and how do we need to iterate the product forward? And I got to do that for a bit of time, kind of as we were launching and getting into, like, a full fledged product.

Peter Stevenson

I would say that this is probably something that a lot of people could use some of your insight in. What was it about those customer interviews, that research that you did in the product, in the brand early on that enabled you to find the things that worked? You were at a place that was worth nothing and then was worth a lot more. So what did you learn in those early years that allowed you to get to product market fit that maybe are not like, well, I talked to somebody. What are some of those secrets that you found out?

Brock Beeson

Part of it, I think, is the swing that Blake and Alex wanted to take with this thing. Right. We weren’t biting off a feature that needed to be fixed. They were solving a problem that was very clear for companies and controllers as well as employees that are actually spending the money. The world sucked for both parties, and no one’s happy with the system. So we were able to talk to end users and get their insight on what they would prioritize and make some cool stuff for them. And we were able to talk to finance controllers and figure out, oh, wait, this is the actual people that need to buy our product. Let’s make it amazing for them as well and kind of meet in the middle with a product that solved both problems simultaneously. I think it’s just a little bit rare. So when we’re showing it to people and getting their feedback, there’s already a lot of excitement and a lot of energy for them wanting it to succeed, if that makes sense.

Alysha Smith

There’s definitely a major pain point that you helped resolve with your product. And did you understand that pain point going into it, or is that something that you understood more clearly as you were conducting these interviews and your research?

Brock Beeson

I think I understood it from yeah, I thought I understood it from the end user perspective. I mean, at my time at MRM, I got to travel and do some shoots, and I had a Diners Club card that was given to me from them that I reconciled and concur, which super sucks, right? And anyone in charge of making decisions about it handed all of their receipts to someone else to deal with, not themselves, so they didn’t experience the pain. Even before that, I would use my own credit card and float money for the company. So I got a little bit of, like, the double whammy, learning wise, just even in two years at MRM, I don’t like either of these solutions. It was stressful as an entry level designer to float $2,000 for a trip. Yeah, a lot of stress there. I learned a lot more about finance teams and frankly, moved out of the product before we really got very deep with that part of the product buyer and that part of the research. So I have a ton of probably value to add or knowledge there in terms of what we learned. But again, it was like a ton of excitement around what we were building because people could have that light bulb moment and see crap. This can really change stuff for my livelihood and my job.

Peter Stevenson

So you said you moved out of that role. So what did you move into then?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, so I was all product all day, know all of our mobile and web stuff with Patrick and Jacob at the time. And as we went to go launch our real product and the version of the mailer that you guys helped us work on, blake kind of took me aside and said, hey, we don’t have anyone doing brand and marketing. We’re going to bring on a full fledged marketer now, and would you move over and start doing that more full time? And they started backfilling on the product design side, and I was the sole creative on the marketing side for a bit of time.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, this was right when the product was launching.

Brock Beeson

So 2017, end of 2017, beginning of 2018.

Peter Stevenson

So what kind of stuff were you doing then? What were the marketing tactics that you guys were pulling on? What were you designing?

Brock Beeson

Man, this is a fun one because Alex had this idea from an outreach perspective. We started basically sending cards to people preloaded with money to demo the product. What we learned was, like, if you get your hands on this thing, you understood really quickly the benefit. Right. So we had this called the Divi my 100 or whatever. And we would send cards out to people, ask them to reach back out to us, and we could send them in real time money as a demo. Like, hey, if you reach out to us, we’re going to load this card with X number of dollars and you can try out the product. Buy whatever you want. Right. And so that was kind of like an early marketing tactic that we kind of hacked our way into that was like, oh, crap. If we can replicate the actual experience of spending, that can be a magic moment. So a lot of the early time was like, how do we do that? How do we get the product in front of people? And we went out to the big event, the Silicon Slopes event, and had people kind of on the ground trying to demo product for people.

Peter Stevenson

I think you guys gave away $2 bills.

Brock Beeson

Yeah. So the cashback cowboy was giving away $2 bills. And I think a lot of it was just like, we need to let people have this experience because it’s pretty magical, right? Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

So you’re working on that. Was there any part of your experience working on product that helped you to be a better marketer and a better designer later on?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I think in an early startup, you get to wear lots of hats. This was kind of the moment where I came with all of the product knowledge for how we built it, why we built it that way, what would resonate with customers from some of the research we had done, where I got to wear, like, a product marketer’s hat a lot of the time in this realm. I also was pressing the buttons on building website pages in WordPress and pushing myself technically that way because that is not my proficiency. So I think if we look back, we’d all be like, oh, that wasn’t our best, but it worked. Right? So I was kind of getting to, from a messaging framework standpoint, work with our now marketing leader. That’s when Sterling joined the company. Work with him. We had a couple of interns that became full time and a ragtag group. He brought on, like, an Ops person first and still close with Andre, who was our Ops person at the time, doing all the emails. But it was like, let’s start up all the things and figure out how we’re going to reach this audience and really start generating revenue for the company. Like, Sterling came in very revenue minded, which was a huge benefit to Divi.

Peter Stevenson

Was it fun? Was this whole era of trying to solve different things and your hats in a lot of spaces, right? You’re doing a lot of different things. Was it fun? Did you love it?

Brock Beeson

I loved yeah, I the way I kind of skipped over this in the story of making the move to Divi is, like, I sat down with Alex, I was a little resistant to making the move. And he asked me at MRM at the time, I was working on Sam’s Club. He’s like, how many people need to say yes to an idea to even get a mailer printed out with a $10 off offer? It’s like 14 people that needed to say yes to something. He’s like, Me and Blake need to say something. Say yes to something for anything to go out and see the light of day.

Peter Stevenson

Right?

Brock Beeson

That’s it.

Alysha Smith

That’s an interesting selling tactic.

Brock Beeson

Yeah. So he had all these blocks. If you know Alex, they do this where he’s at now. With Tandem, you pick your priority blocks out of, like, nine, and ownership was like one of them and growth was another. And I can’t remember which ones I picked. I think he sent it to me at one point, and I’ve got it somewhere. But having that ownership level was always really important to me of what I wanted in my next role. And I 100% got that. At Divi. It became, like, a company value that we would talk about all the time was just ownership. We value owners, and we would talk about how at the time, there was nowhere to hide. So if you’re underperforming, everyone thinks in that lens, it’s like a little bit exposing, but when you’re performing, you get a lot of credit and you can see your impact on the business very directly, which is like, I don’t know. For some people, it’s kind of like a drug, right? You’re like, Man, I pull some levers and stuff happens. It’s really cool.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, I remember I showed up there say hi to you for some purpose, maybe we did some work for you in 2019. And there was like, TVs on the wall with the various sales metrics of the day, and your desk was like, right next to that. And so I can’t imagine how much, oh, I did that mailer and look at all those things coming in that are directly attributed to that.

Brock Beeson

Right, right.

Peter Stevenson

That was a lot of fun.

Brock Beeson

I think that for the whole company, though, it wasn’t just the sales and the marketing, and each group felt like they had stuff that they really cared about and they could directly tie their efforts to things that we were shipping, like our product and engineering orgs really prioritized how frequently we released product to our customers and what impact that could have. And I think that’s just contagious as a company, it generates a lot of excitement in the startup world if you’re shipping all the time. So that became a big part of the culture, was just getting stuff out there.

Peter Stevenson

So you hit product market fit, and as a marketer, that’s fun because now you’ve got something that works, you know, you can sell it. What was that light bulb moment there in 2019, 2020, when you were like, oh, this works. They now are going to pour the gas onto the fire of marketing? What was that like? What were you starting to do?

Brock Beeson

Man, we went through like a rebrand in that, man. It would have been 2019, period. We brought Michael Moulton on, who they met through an interior design firm that we were helping working with to build our office space eventually, and Blake and Casey Bailey met Michael and said, this guy’s amazing, so talented they hired him. I didn’t even get to chat with him before, but thank goodness they got him. Became like a very strong mentor for me, someone that really guided that process in the rebrand while still bringing the existing creative team. That was me and one other designer and a writer at the time in and kind of magnifying our skills as well. I felt very involved in that process, though. He led it, right? And we were like, getting feedback from customers again, kind of having that be the priority all the time. Like, Kate, you’re dealing with all of our finances, which can be in the millions of dollars. You feel a little immature as a brand to trust, right? So a lot of that brand rebrand process was like, how can we mature, become more trustworthy looking and feeling? And I think looking back where we landed was totally serving of all of that. We went into the past to look for references and made something that felt timeless, a lot more mature. Color palette. Wise, what was unique in that process was we were very embedded with our product design team and felt like Michael was leading a team of both product designers and brand designers at the time, even though, like, title wise and actual organizational wise was just on the marketing side.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Brock Beeson

It was, like, very cross functional in that way.

Alysha Smith

When you went through that rebrand, besides the look and feel, were there other brand pillars that you worked on to communicate those feelings that you wanted your audience to feel?

Brock Beeson

I think it was kind of the first time that we really defined many of our brand things from a tone perspective, how we wanted to show up, like, putting it actually on paper. So a lot of that, I think, additionally, the look and feel happened in the marketing side, but also permeated all the way through the product to pretty significant changes in some of the way that the brand would show up in product at all was kind of inherent in that. And Michael kind of led Adam Eastburn, who’s our illustrator from our direction, standpoint, into a very unique, very unique style. Right. Something that felt timeless, I think, that we referenced, like, The New Yorker and The Metropolitan in the style that obviously Adam crazy talented. He led the illustration rework for all of Bill as well, but it added an element that other brands, especially like early SaaS tech fintech brands, were not doing. So it was like we wanted something that could differentiate us while still not feeling immature, like other illustration styles.

Alysha Smith

Had you identified a personality and a positioning and things that really beyond that graphic elements and illustration and look that really defined who you were at that time?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I mean, we had a couple of different names. Like, we have a funny old deck where it’s like we want to sound like a Malcolm Gladwell, where you tell a very compelling story, but you’re clearly very intelligent about how you’re telling it. And then there was a fun one about being hermione Granger but like Books Four Plus, where she’s very realized how confident she is and is able to be the smartest person in the room with all the confidence and lack the insecurities of the earlier books. Right. So we had a couple of fun monikers, but I feel like they were kind of shifting and changing over time as well to where mostly we wanted to be personable human and present that way. In an industry where, I don’t know, jargon speak is very common.

Peter Stevenson

It’s interesting. I think after your rebrand, there were a few other fintech companies that really looked at what you did and kind of leaned into the same vibe.

Alysha Smith

From our perspective, that’s what we noticed.

Peter Stevenson

Do you feel like you were the start of that sort of, like, human element in the fintech world?

Brock Beeson

I think so. We saw the same thing even among our competitors. We saw big rebrands from some of our very main competitors that felt really similar and hearkening to some of the sentiments that we were choosing to lean into as well. That feels cool. I think from the same perspective, seeing a lot of crossover in product features and what others felt like was adding value from a product perspective, we were getting a bit of both at the same time. So I was like, yeah, we’re on the right track. This feels cool.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so you’re in charge of brand design. You’re part of the marketing team. You’re under Michael, who’s VP of Brand, I think was his title when he was there. And so what were you working on in the 2021 22? What were you doing over at Divi?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, so, I mean, 2020, we were doing all marketing design stuff. We were leading on, I guess under Michael was still PR copy and design, kind of serving mostly after the rebrand, serving mostly marketing. So we were working on kind of any and all seasonal type campaigns, stuff that was all demand driving. We were starting to set up video and photo shoots for brand style photography. Started doing a little bit of customer video type stuff in house. Brandon Peterson came on in that time as like, he was looking for a new gig, and it was like, we don’t have a spot, but we can’t say no to this level of variety and talent. And so he brought a lot of the video prowess to the team as well. And he and I went out to New York and shot with noom. We started to do all that stuff. As many businesses felt there was a lot of pressure in 2020 and there was layoffs. So the team went from a creative team of four designers down to just me in the spring going into summer of 2020. So a lot of change, right? Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

I remember I messaged you after that asking how you were doing and how things were feeling down there. And you were like, I don’t know, feels weird.

Brock Beeson

Yeah, it felt really weird to go from a ton of momentum. It felt like we kind of took the wind out of our sails. But yeah, so I was just down.

Alysha Smith

To kind of re overwhelmed at that point, for sure.

Brock Beeson

I think everyone was, though. We were all going through COVID, and it was like, hard to distinguish which was like, work overwhelmed versus life overwhelmed. It was just everyone was overwhelmed. And we were all working from home, which felt really weird. Yeah. Okay.

Peter Stevenson

So the layoffs happened, and I think from the general population, people weren’t sure where Divi was headed. But inside the company, what did it feel like? You certainly had a product that worked. You certainly were headed someplace. So a couple of years later, we all know the end story, but what were those 2020, 2021 and 2022, what were those like inside the company?

Brock Beeson

I think that the leadership team did a good job rallying everyone against kind of the path forward. Right. We had layoffs and they made it clear like, hey, this is the group that we need to go forward and kind of build with. The opportunity is still there. We learned a lot in the months after in terms of the value that Divi can still bring. We’re a free product. So businesses, as spend started to stabilize for businesses and they kind of adapted to this new normal. Our product became super valuable. People started looking to get off of paid solutions and onto Divi or look to save money and move on to Divi, which was really cool. We saw our product value go up and a lot of focus just into what can we do this quarter month and week to impact very really the business. And I think that we went from a company in the early days that was very product led and product forward and finding that product market fit to a very revenue finance run business to how are we going to a serve our customer, but B continue to fill this funnel?

Peter Stevenson

One of the things that I think from the outside that we saw during that time was you turned into a company that and maybe this was Sterling who led this on your team, but really led this celebration of business in general. You were celebrating people who were using your products not just because they used your products, but because I think it felt like you were truly happy for business and business growth. Does that sound about right during that time, like, what we saw was that kind of the way it felt inside.

Brock Beeson

It was always at the forefront of what we discussed was serving our customer, but celebrating our customer. It felt like there wasn’t a lot of brand moves to make at the budget we were spending in brand marketing to really go make Impact. We weren’t doing massive out of home. We were starting to dabble in a little bit of jazz arena stuff. And it felt natural for us to celebrate the customers. And I can’t remember where each idea came from. Obviously Sterling came with amazing ideas for how it would be actualized, but I think really everyone internally was very on board with like, yeah, customers first. And this can be an area that we play in that others aren’t necessarily doing. And if we can speak to them and celebrate them, others will kind of flock to that.

Alysha Smith

We were kind of mentioning just out there earlier that even that idea of really celebrating your clients was even inspiring to us in different avenues that have you focus more on them than yourselves. And I feel you guys were definitely a leader in that.

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I think it obviously manifested in the billboard and a few other out of home things, but it was very frequent that we would bring people into the office who were customers and hear from them or we always would make an emphasis to bring in products. I think Crumble became a customer at certain points, and you almost always can find some Crumble cookies in the office somewhere. We started to prioritize different even, like, internal swag efforts with like, oh, we’re going to use these items because they’re customers and we want to get our employees to know who our customers are and care about them, but to rep their stuff too.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, it was fun. And I don’t know who was the one who led this, but it almost felt like you as an entity became the celebrator of Utah. Like Silicon Slopes. Anyone doing great things was being celebrated by the leadership team of Divi, in a way. Was that something conscious that you were talking about internally in a marketing aspect? Was it just the leadership cared about this place a lot? Why was that?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I think it came from the whole leadership team from very early on, especially being a Seattle guy and Alex being from Seattle, I was like, they want to kind of do this and then go back, and it became very clear. No, Utah is a magnetic place for tech startups, and we want to magnify, like, all the way from Blake. And Alex, obviously, Sterling very outspoken on social with trying to make Utah a place that people care about. Tyler adding his voice, obviously different degrees of how loud you want to be on social, but I think from the whole leadership team and permeated down through the employees. Yeah, people are excited to build Divi, but to build it here as well.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so I do want to make sure we get some time on what you’re doing now over at Bill. But what was that transition like as a marketer to go know you’re representing Divi, you’re thinking about divi and then all of a sudden, now you’re divi Bill and then you’re now Bill, and then you’re now Bill. So, like, the last year and a half, two years of your time, what has that been like as a marketer? How do you handle that?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I think a lot of the sentiment that we landed with was like, just keep pushing forward. Right. We still have a product that a is like financially revenue perspective, very important to move for both businesses.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Brock Beeson

And we’re really good at moving it, so let’s keep moving it. And up until last couple of weeks, it was Divi. Right. Like, we’ve been selling Divi for just over two years still, even under the Bill umbrella, divi by Bill or whatever it was.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Brock Beeson

Yeah. So uncertainty in some transitions. Bill we’re their first acquisition as a company, so there’s some growing pains. And I think everyone saw the potential for this, bringing together of two massive products and that there’s a ton of value to be had there. And we’re starting to now see what that looks like. And our products are becoming more and more integrated, but for time they’ve been very separate. Right. And so I think a little bit of uncertainty from a marketer standpoint with mostly timing on stuff, I don’t think that there’s been uncertainty on what we’re going to sell, who we’re going to sell to. The ICP totally overlaps. Like, who Bill wants to sell to is exactly who Divi wants to sell to, for the most part, kind of at that young to mid small business. We don’t want the people of Solopreneurs a ton. We don’t really scale amazingly to the enterprise. We sell a little bit to the enterprise. Right. In that five to 200 people companies. That’s a sweet spot. So a lot of similarities there. And it felt very natural to continue that sales cycle. It’s mostly been like, how do we go reach the masses that Bill had as a customer base, and how do we add value to that group? By getting them on what’s now Bill spend and expense.

Peter Stevenson

Right. You now are just part of Bill, part of that same thing. So they brought you in. You’re now director of Brand Design. What does that job entail? What are you doing for Bill that you weren’t doing before?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, so I think a lot of it is just like we have a much more robust team. Again, being one of two designers really early at Divi for a couple of years, scaling to a group of four and then back to one. Having 15 creatives on a team feels like a luxury. That’s a lot. And we brought in a VP, Kate Harmer, who’s my boss now, a really strong creative from Amazon. She worked on prime and then worked on AWS. So like a similar type of buyer group at AWS specifically, and a really great manager and orchestrator of the team. And we’ve kind of organized in this world where I lead a core brand team, as we call it internally, where we focus on a lot of new to the world creative. In the last year, we’ve gone through a whole rebrand at Bill that I got to lead kind of before Kate’s time, working with Sarah Acton, our CMO, but got to kind of refresh what Bill looked like. They’re an older company now, like in the 16 to 17 years old type of biz. We dropped the.com and kind of evolved the look and feel not to look more like Divi, but to kind of take the values from Divi and from Invoice to Go, which they also acquired and later finmark. And how do these move forward altogether and kind of evolve into not just Bill before, not just Divi or Invoice to Go, but something that we can kind of march forward together as owning the legacy thing of orange. Right. Orange was the thing that we carried over from the main brand before. But yeah, got to do that. And that kind of evolved into this role as the leader of the core brand team, where, again, new the world, creative, working really closely with our brand team on big brand level campaigns, but kind of setting the overall guidelines, look and feel templates, that type of stuff for the rest of the creative studio to build against.

Alysha Smith

Is that position, brand head of brand, a unique position in your industry, do you think, or a new one?

Brock Beeson

I think it probably feels a little bit new and it’s a little bit nuanced as like, we still do have brand strategists and managers in a separate team that we collab with a lot. So people internally might get a little confused, like brand design versus just brand management. Luckily, they’re like some of our favorite partners to work with. We’re developing the strategy together, them leading a little bit more on the, I guess, brand personality type decisions and some of the strategic stuff there and then partnering with. How does that manifest visually in specific writing right. With our whole team. But I think companies are starting to see the value of those two partners working really closely together, not necessarily to go outside of agency, but just from the value of having it internally as well. Right, right.

Peter Stevenson

As you look back across your career and who you are as a designer now, who are some champions who have helped make you a better designer, a better brander, a better marketer, that you look back and you really value the contributions that they made to you and your career and your ability and your talent.

Brock Beeson

I think for me, it’s been those that I’ve reported directly to that have had that influence, which includes the time that I reported to Blake directly.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Brock Beeson

Being able to see someone who’s extremely business minded, obviously super smart, also be able to pull in and care about the aesthetics of the company and the feeling. I do remember that he was passionate about, very passionate. And we had other people on the leadership team, I’d say like Casey Bailey was of that group where it’s like, no, those things matter. Let’s pump the brakes. We need to present something that can be timeless and that people will resonate with. That’s very important. I learned a lot in terms of balancing those two things that I don’t know, maybe some people feel like are at ODS is like prioritizing the quality of something versus, I don’t know, speed. Like, for the business that we can have both. There was often the debate of, like, should we work harder or smarter? Blake was like, you have to do like it’s always debated to start up, which one do you like?

Peter Stevenson

Just those leaders who you reported to, who gave you what, what were the qualities that they had that allowed you to now that you look back on them and you say, oh, this was really great for me, or great for my career.

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I feel like I’ve learned a fair bit of just like resilience from being in internal teams. When you’re working on the same thing day in, day out, like what I’ve learned from my managers, you can keep pushing things forward. It doesn’t need to just be good enough or that we just stay the course. We’re able to innovate and continue pushing things forward kind of all the time. And sometimes that means working with business partners that don’t prioritize the same things that we do, but we can create solutions that are valuable for the business and we can be of that same mindset. Like we don’t just have to be creatives. Right.

Peter Stevenson

As you think about your own, you’re now ten years into a career. You’ve been part of one of the more successful exits here in the state. As you think about your own mentorship, there are things that you are trying to do now to give back to that community that who are you seeing come up nowadays? How are you seeing your own mentorship grow?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I think for me a lot of the time that I have been in various amounts of leadership at Divi and now Bill, I’ve had all the way from one employee reporting to me to now a handful. And a lot of that has just been making that kind of career transition for myself as like, oh, I need to move from pushing the pixels myself to helping others from a more manager role. And a lot of that is just prioritizing what paths people want to take and they want to find obviously in the broader community here, I want to get more involved and start doing more of that. But we see companies in Utah still become powerhouses in terms of businesses and the type of exits and swings that people are trying to go for. And I’d love to see more of that design forward thinking come forward in those companies. Like, we get a mixed bag. We’ve had some amazingly great design companies come out. It’d be awesome to see that prioritized a little more.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. Interesting. As you think about you went to school here, you’ve worked here your whole life. What are some of the positives and negatives about being a marketer or designer here in the state?

Brock Beeson

I think it’s a small community which can be good and bad for people. I think it really matters the type of relationships that you build and obviously you’re going to cross paths with people kind of continually. I think we see that today. Been a couple of years and getting opportunities like this, but bigger than that, I think Utah is just really ripe for there’s a lot of people that are motivated to build here. It feels like I haven’t lived in a lot of other places, but it feels like there’s a lot of entrepreneurial energy in the state and people that are like minded in that that they want to take some big swings. And I think that that’s contagious for anyone that wants to try out startup type world or like in a building type world that you want people that are hungry. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Alysha Smith

Well, love to end with a question of if you could give a single piece of advice to either a brand designer marketer, someone that is maybe interested in pursuing this career path, what would that be?

Brock Beeson

I think for me, looking back now, having the opportunity to have my hands on lots of different types of things really quickly and over a short period of time, being required to execute in lots of mediums was the biggest thing for me. Figuring out where I kind of wanted to focus and create value for my career. Right. If I didn’t have the time I had building the divi product, I don’t know that I could know that brand design is where I wanted to more focus. So my piece of advice would be like, find somewhere that you are able to have your hands in as many things as possible or if where you’re at, find ways to kind of push yourself out of there and don’t just wait for the invitation from people. I think in any startup you need a lot of people that are ready to raise their hand, but sometimes also to just kind of break the door down and run through it.

Alysha Smith

Do you ever think what would have happened if I didn’t end up at costco that day and didn’t have that conversation?

Brock Beeson

Yeah, I think it’s definitely really weird to think back. Like I really wrestled with the decision to leave a very stable MRM job and the amount of that equation that went in just that they were here and I lived in lehigh versus salt lake that I was commuting to is like embarrassing how much that was a factor in the decision. But really within a couple of months, it was very clear that I had made a good decision. I was really stoked. I went from pretty unmotivated, just not like it was easy. It felt easy, it felt normal. I was in a routine, I didn’t hate my job at all. Like, I wasn’t miserable, that’s why I wasn’t looking. But I immediately went to like, holy crap, I really am enjoying this. It’s hard, but I really enjoy that. I think I haven’t switched jobs in a while though. I switched roles a lot. I think that that’s important. When we were acquired and as roles started to change, I really gauged pretty quickly, like, is this something that I’m actually excited about? And I think you can know that in the first couple of weeks or a month. So I don’t know. Extra piece of advice, take the shot, but be willing to be wrong and change things up if you need to.

Peter Stevenson

All right, final question. Where should people eat along here in the silicon slopes. Where should people eat or drink or.

Brock Beeson

Get coffee down here in Utah?

Peter Stevenson

Anywhere you want to recommend, man.

Brock Beeson

Well, my old writer partner, Matt Reshke, he wrote an MRM. I think he’s written at Struck here, so a lot of people might know. Matt just opened a restaurant in Midway. It’s a bit of a jaunt, but it’s called the Pizza Yard. And it’s the best pizza I’ve ever had.

Alysha Smith

Really?

Peter Stevenson

I was down there in Midway a couple of months ago, and they were working on yeah. And in fact, the restaurant I was in, some of the workers were complaining about how hard it was. They’re like, man, this thing has been a hard project. But I’ve heard great things.

Brock Beeson

Yeah. They converted, like, 100 year old house into a restaurant and airbnb upstairs, and.

Peter Stevenson

It took, like, two years. Right? It took forever, at least.

Brock Beeson

Yeah, it’s been a long time coming. They’ve soft opened. I think this Friday is their or Saturday is their first official grand opening. But Matt makes the best pizza cool. They call it the Pizza Yard because at MRM, they had a yard, and they would bring people over and host dinner parties. And I’ve been, like, the crazy person when people ask your favorite pizza for years of no. Like, my friend makes really good pizza, I swear. And now you can go find Midway.

Peter Stevenson

Is there’s a couple of amazing restaurants in Midway? In fact, I would say that Midway is better, food wise than Park City.

Brock Beeson

I love it.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, I’m super excited for his opening down there. Okay, where is it in Midway?

Brock Beeson

It’s like, right on Center Street, right on that rim. It’s like 35 center or something where they’re at.

Peter Stevenson

By the time this comes out, it will be open. And the most successful pizza place in.

Brock Beeson

Got to be state.

Peter Stevenson

What kind of pizza is it? Is it more like artisan? Is it fancy toppings? Is it, like, standard? What kind of pizza?

Brock Beeson

It’s, like, very neapolitan. So the 92nd cook time, in this beautiful oven, they’ve built the most beautiful little restaurant. It’s pretty small inside. It’s intimate, and then there’s a lot of outside seating for the warmer months up in Midway. That’s not all the time, but, like, seasonal menu. I think he’s planning to have a couple of steadys, like, his margarita, hot honey pizza, and then stuff that is just completely influenced by what they’re growing right outside the restaurant in a greenhouse and what they’re sourcing through some local farmers. So he’s, in this whole build time in Midway, made really good friends with a bunch of the local sources for produce. And I can’t even think of the one he did last week in their soft open. But it’s, like, very seasonal.

Peter Stevenson

There’s a bakery that just opened up that our client, Pink Elephant Coffee is doing. The coffee just down, like, two doors down from it, and I’m super excited about getting up the trip.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, I cannot wait. Thanks, man. Appreciate you being here.

Brock Beeson

Yeah. Thank you.

Peter Stevenson

By subjects is a production of Modern eight agency and silicon Slopes. Executive producers are Alicia Smith and Peter Stevenson. Editor and producer is Dave Meekum. Video Production by Connor Mitchell development Production by Eric Dahl production Management by Shelby Sandlin Original music composed by Josh Johnson. Website designed by Modernate. Please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends and your enemies. Thanks for joining us.