Episode 5 Transcript | Mike Harris of Dondé

Peter Stevenson

Thanks for joining us today on By Subject, a Silicon Slopes brand and marketing podcast. I’m your host Peter Stevenson, and in this episode, my co host Alysha Smith and I had a chance to sit down with Mike Harris, VP of Design at Donde. Mike Harris, thanks for being here. Tell us a little bit about your past, where you grew up, where you’re from, and where you went to school.

Mike Harris

All right, let’s start there. Originally, I’m from Ogden, Utah. That’s where I was born very early on. Moved out to Southern California Laguna Beach area. Okay, Laguna Gale, I guess it’s a little further away from Laguna Beach. Got the little California kid inside me, and then eventually pretty young, moved to Utah, Convert Heights, went to Brighton High, went to the University of Utah, eventually on scholarship. It started out as a fine art scholarship, then decided to go toward graphic design.

Peter Stevenson

Tell me a little bit about that decision to move into graphic design. What was some of the stuff that led you to go to graphic design versus some other art got you? How did you decide graphic design over.

Alysha Smith

Some other or even just to stay in the same.

Mike Harris

All right, so that fine art scholarship that I started out with from high school was actually a full ride to anything I wanted to. And after the first year of general, I had no idea what I exactly wanted to do, but I still had an itch for art. So for the way that the program works, you actually had to wait a full year until you got to go into the art program. Then within the art program, toward the end of the year, I just heard of this opportunity to get into what I really didn’t know anything at all was graphic design. Get your graph design portfolio. It was kind of this more exclusive school, I guess, through the art program. And I think only 20 or so people got to get in, and I figured, why allow yourself to have the opportunity? So put together a portfolio of your drawing, painting, showing kind of your fundamental ideas of contrast or understanding of color theory and stuff like that. So put it together, got in, decided to just all right, I’ll go for it. Partially because that full ride scholarship that I initially got, my parents, I’m sure, were a little upset that I wasted it not being a doctor or a physical therapist or radiologist or something and went straight for drawing and painting. So I was like, all right, well, I want to actually make some money doing some art versus I know that there are some good artists out there, great artists that actually can make a very good living and feel extremely pleased with their choices and their lifestyle and everything like that. But I just knew I wasn’t quite there and wanted to do something that’s a little bored. More of a sure thing. Still not a sure sure thing in graphic design to make a ton of.

Alysha Smith

Money, but so beyond it seeming elite, what else was intriguing about it? Since you said you didn’t know much about it to begin with, I think.

Mike Harris

Also some of the students that got through. So there were actually three or four people in the art program from my art who I had art class with at Brighton. So from high school. Yeah. And one of them was Sarah Martin. She’s now actually still a graphic designer in Oregon, in Portland. And we were always just when it came to art, we were sort of like, always buddy buddy. Like you’d never really be able to get. She was in my wedding, actually on the line as one of my grooms maidens, I think, is what it would be.

Alysha Smith

Do I remember you were there?

Mike Harris

And I think just the two of us sort of maybe encouraging each other to get into it. She still is way more crafty and artsy crafty, I guess. And then I was more focused on learning the new technologies like Illustrator and Photoshop and that sort of thing. It still piqued my interest and curiosity. It feels like there was a whole new realm of challenges and problems to solve, which I’ve always been a big fan of and ended up wanting to just take that step and see what it was all about. And again, the potential for having a more steady job doing something in the arts was extremely appealing for me with that scholarship.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, great.

Mike Harris

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

As you look back when you graduated from the year, you talk about Illustrator and Photoshop being new technologies at the time. So maybe talk a little bit about what graphic design was like when you were graduating. What year was that? What was your first job in design marketing? Where did you go? Did you go in house? Did you go to an agency? What was sort of the world like at that point?

Mike Harris

Yeah, the early days of high school and early college, I was definitely using student versions. It’s kind of weird being so close to Adobe and being like, yeah, I was using pirated versions because that’s all we had, really. It was all we could afford being in college. Yeah. Kind of that sort of thing. Let’s see. I guess I entered the graphic design program in about 2008. Okay. So between 2008 and 2011 is when I actually graduated. Okay. Starting I guess we want to get into the question again. It was more my first job, so I junior year, just after junior year this summer, I had an internship with we like Small. Okay. Which is extremely fun, very way more digital. And I was actually doing a lot of motion graphics with them. Mike Kern is a creative director there. I think they might be Think Box next. Yeah. Thinking box. Mike Kern. So I interned with them for one summer and then wanted to focus on school and had a job throwing bags at Delta as a baggage handler. The next summer, I had another internship with him. So that was the summer that I graduated college, and he actually offered me a job. I said, I actually want more exposure to what’s out there. So I took another internship with Struck. And then when that internship was done, I used my flight benefits and said, all right, I’m going to fly out to Brooklyn, and, well, I’m going to apply for some jobs finally that I have enough internships under my belt and fly out to Brooklyn and work with my cousin, who was kind of helping kind of freelancing for a fashion design or fashion design doing the marketing for them. And I wanted to get kind of into that. You know, I want to start using, you know, Bedoni and dito, and I really want to start using some of these fashionable fonts. And I landed, and this was kind of a free flight, so I landed 05:00 A.m., probably got to their studio, set up shop in their house, and then within an hour, basically the apartment, obviously in Brooklyn. And within an hour of me basically landing, I got a call for my for an interview, which was going to be the next day. So I said, all right, well, thanks, Scott. I got a I got a bounce. So I got there and then immediately, basically because at the time, especially again, 2008, I think there was kind of a fear of not having a job then. The market was kind of crap all around, and I didn’t really want another opportunity to pass up. So Jive Media called me and I said, all right, you know what? I’ll do that. This could have been a fun opportunity, but I don’t want to miss out. So I was taking this call on the phone about, oh, when do you want to plan this? And I was at a Chipotle or something grabbing lunch, and they just said, oh, let’s see if we can make tomorrow work. So I said, all right, I’m going to get on that flight because I want to give myself plenty of opportunities, flying standby, all that stuff crazy because.

Alysha Smith

I was like, how did I miss that you did an internship in Brooklyn? Like, how would I not know that?

Mike Harris

Because I wasn’t like, it’s more of a job shadow, I guess. Okay, that one would have been a job shadow. And I just immediately got a call back to Salt Lake, and I was like, all right, well, that sucks timing wise, but let’s get back over here.

Peter Stevenson

So what kind of work were you doing at Jive Media at that time? So 2008, Jive was how big what kind of clients were you servicing at that point? What were some of the roles that you were doing in the marketing and designing field?

Mike Harris

Yeah, so let’s see I think the main work that I did with them, there was a lot of mountainstar, so it’s kind of a network of hospitals from Idaho to throughout Salt Lake Valley. There was a ton of for them, it was a lot of billboards. I think they would have certain not deals, but promotions that they want some sort of artwork for illustrating, for kind of medical illustration, for blog posts was kind of weird. There was, like, this one that they threw over that they were like, hey, can you just have your designer whip up something? And it was like, throw ovarian cyst. So I had to go deep into it. I swear, having all these tabs open on your computer and being like, guys, I’m doing research for this job, so please just let me just don’t judge me for what I have on my screen. I swear. It’s making us money for that. There were some other motion graphics. Motion graphics was a big one that actually got me into the door at Jibe and my next job, especially. And I did a lot of motion graphics. I just can’t quite remember all of those, like, ten years. I can quite remember all of the big hitter clients that they had. But one of the reasons I wanted to leave was eventually it turned into a lot of social media was still really kind of budding, and Mountain Star Hospital wanted me to just create Facebook banner after Facebook banner image of just doing social media, kind of the stuff that I was not really into or wasn’t really fulfilling. And my art director at the time, it was Ali Gwynn, she had left just recently, and she was like, we were a good little tag team there too. And I think she ended up going to maybe Axis 41. I can’t quite remember. But yeah, that was a that was a bummer. She left, and I was fine with the other art director, but I kind of wanted to change the pace at that point.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so you wanted to do something a little more challenging. Where did you end up after that?

Mike Harris

Okay, so I took actually, a pay cut to work with my old professor and kind of one of the godfathers of graphic design in Utah, at least with Randall Smith at Modern Eight. We’d left or, let’s see, one of my old I would say I was near the top of the class, and another person who I would say we were right there with each other. And sometimes I think based on project by project, he would just barely beat me out, creatively or conceptually. And that was Derek Bowman. I think he wears the MX now, I’m trying to remember. He’s got to just name drop every agency.

Peter Stevenson

So just tag them all in Twitter.

Mike Harris

This will blow up as long as I speak nicely. Yeah, Derek’s. Great. He left. And actually, I think, suggested to Randall that I not really be head hunted, but it was kind of reached out.

Alysha Smith

Recruited.

Mike Harris

Recruited. Modern Day at the time was two doors away from Jive Media, essentially downtown. So it was an easy little interview. It was little kind of weird walking out one door and then putting on your sunglasses, pulling up your collar and just walking through another one and have you written view. But that was fun though. That was a really good time. Focus. That was 2012.

Peter Stevenson

2012.

Mike Harris

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

And so you came over to Modern8 to work on brand, mostly brand related projects.

Mike Harris

Branding. I’d never done really any packaging, but the very first day, I didn’t know the client, I didn’t know the project. And Randall and the art director there at the time was Brian Wilson. They both had to be I think they had a meeting with a new potential customer and they said, well, you just do a press check. And I was like, totally no idea what a press check is. No idea what you’re supposed to look at. I don’t even really know the colors. I mean, I think I was given the two pantones. It was some gray and orange. I’m not going to try to spout the exact pantone, but I was like, I think this is good enough. You guys like, this is stressful. Wow. Yeah. So that was the very first day. Kind of just orientation and then go do a press check on your own.

Alysha Smith

Yeah. I’d like to hear a little bit about what you learned at Modern8 while you were there. What kind of skills I learned?

Mike Harris

Yeah. Process was major.

Alysha Smith

Process.

Mike Harris

In what way do you want me to go into the 5D process?

Alysha Smith

Like brand process or process?

Mike Harris

I think it was more to the process of how to get the research under your creative or enough research under your creative to be able to then help a client or customer along the way understand how you came to that and why it’s the right decision. So it helps you elaborate on the concept itself. And we would make beautiful logos. We would make beautiful designs. We did beautiful illustrations along the way for something like Pioneer Theater. We did a ton of work for them where the designers themselves actually got to illustrate. But without this specific process, we wouldn’t be able to kind of distill our research and showing the discovery distilling the research and then being able to come up with the design that then helps the customer realize what your vision is and that it is the right decision. So process was major.

Alysha Smith

That’s great.

Mike Harris

Yeah. Also one thing that I really learned at Modern8, there were no Randall Smith. He very much valued free time away from work. So no working past 06:00 p.m.. That was amazing. No weekends that I’d ever had to work at. And that was vastly different from kind of my next job, which was more in advertising and where did you go.

Peter Stevenson

Next after Modern8?

Mike Harris

That was at Contravent. Okay. And one of the reasons there was it had been four years as at Modern8 and moving more toward, I guess, UX and UI. I’ve really learned at Modern8. I was still designing in, I think, Illustrator and Photoshop for websites and then kind of wanted to start moving in that direction. I knew there was a lot of opportunities in UX and UI, so wanted to continue challenging myself and did so at Contravent, which it was exactly that. I mean, at that point I was learning Sketch and using it every single day for months on end and creating probably three or four websites within the first two or three months that I was there. And that was exciting. But again, it’s advertising world. Utah or anywhere else, it’s just going to be nights and weekends. There’s no real getting away from that. It’s the name of the game, I suppose.

Peter Stevenson

And so you went over to Countryman is another Salt Lake City based agency. And so great agency doing a lot of really great work. So tell me some of the clients. What are some of the projects that you worked on besides websites you talk about UXUI, what other clients were you working with? How are you diving into those clients, and how did you use some of the stuff you learned at Jive and Modernate to push forward what you were doing at Contravent?

Mike Harris

Yeah, I mean, internally. So I’ve always had a fair bit of my gosh, a fair amount of autonomy wherever I went. It was never big large groups until I got to Contravent, but even in Contravent, it was still maybe working on a smaller team of three or four other creatives at the time, not really heavy handholding. So the process that I learned at Modern Eight was huge. And early on, some of those skills that I refined at Jive came into play as well, fairly significantly. A lot of that was one thing at Jive that I learned was just how picky a client can potentially be. And I’m not going to name which client that was necessarily. But early on, I realized that you don’t want to put your whole heart and soul into. You can put it into a project, but don’t put it into how the customer or client is going to react to that. So I would say there’s a little bit of emotional distance that you want to keep to how they react, because also your client or customer or whoever the project lead that you’re working with, however they’re going to respond, could be a day to day basis. They could have liked an idea yesterday, the next day, absolutely hate it, and you can’t attach your emotions to that too much. The nice part about being in a large agency is that you’re able to have the support system with your account manager or your project managers to say, all right, well, here are your records. This is what you wanted, this is what we delivered. And if you want something else, it’s going to cost you. The nice part about having an advertising agency is just the support system, and it’s a good culture. It was fun having the different kind of culture exposures, I suppose, along the way with a smaller branding agency that felt extremely small, family to another one, that you’re able to be large enough that you find a number of creatives who I’m still extremely great friends with today that came out of Contravent. And I guess, okay, well, if I want to get back to two, that’s kind of how some of those things helped prep me for my time at Contravent. Doing advertising was, again, the process that I learned, some of the refinements and the different programs that we had to use.

Peter Stevenson

But tell me what it is that a marketer and advertiser can do and what they can bring to you as a designer that’s going to end up with a better output for a campaign or an advertisement.

Mike Harris

Yeah, I think the best thing they can do is trust the designers. So actually treat them as part of the team. I suppose. So it’s not just I’m trying to get from you what I want. The marketer needs to feel like they’re part of the team. I think it’s part of the designer’s or part of the designer’s responsibility to make them feel like they’re part of the team and that their input is valuable, but not that the designer or the design team is going to just bend to whatever will, because there are things that we know better than the marketer. There are things that the marketer knows better in terms of what the company or client actually want out of this project. So there are moments where I feel like working in the advertising world, needing to make a marketer feel as though they are part of the team. Yes, we would have the pristine PDF presentation, kind of flip through the different pages, show what our creative is. But then if they have any kind of feedback, assuming it seems like feedback, that, what if we did this? What if we nudge this? What if we did? I would straight open the file and start working with them. Not an over the shoulder, not like they’re drawing your hand, making you do the clicking. But I would say, all right, this is what this looks like. I’m going to try it because I know it’s going to look bad, and I want to prove it to them right now just so they know that I did try it. It’s not just feeding them lines that I’m going to do this. Yeah, we’ll try it. It didn’t work. I want them to actually see that my opinion is valid, that I’ve experienced at this point that that color in that background photo is not going to work well with the type that we have currently. And this is your type. This is your brand guideline that we’re actually using. A lot of it is that it’s to find a design agency that allows you to be part of the team and then treat them as part of your team.

Alysha Smith

Yeah. So less of a vendor relationship and more of a true partnership.

Mike Harris

Yeah, I think that’s huge. It’s extremely helpful. That’s the reason why even if a marketer leaves their position, they usually would contravent especially bring us along with them to whatever new job they had. It’s just because they liked that sort of relationship.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, great.

Peter Stevenson

So you leave Contravent a couple of years ago. Tell us where you went and sort of the founding of and why, where you went and why and sort of how that came about.

Mike Harris

Yeah. After about four or five years of contravent, I think a lot of it had to do with mental health and it was just kind of burnout at that point. So there were a few factors. There was a little bit of burnout. And then as I was saying, you know what, I want to go part time. I want to try this out. And they were extremely and wanted me to go that route. And I said, okay, let’s do that. And then basically as soon as we tried a little trial run, that’s when the world shut down with COVID So.

Alysha Smith

Part time to 40 hours a week.

Mike Harris

It was part time, part time being a regular job. But then everything kind of kicked up and it was like, okay, you know what? I do need this ability. If I’m going to be working from home, I want something to do this entire time. And at this point, I’d like the security of having a job, so I want to maintain a full time job. So I went back to full time and work from home along with everyone else in the world and after another basically a year of that. So I was already kind of ready to sort of want to try to pursue some other things and again continue to challenge myself outside of doing the kind of creative direction that I was doing. So I actually gone up from a senior designer or kind of UX design to creative director at that point in my time with contravent and just needed, again, something else. So I started working with two. Okay, well, I’m going to go back a little bit. So one thing that I remember in college was Dan Evans. He’s a great adject professor. I think he’s full time now at Bu. And they were asking, what do you want to do with your design career? Some people had answers, which for them, maybe it worked. They were saying, I really want to design a really nice coupon book for a store, or something like that. Some other people were saying, I want to do promotions or advertising for Air Force. Everyone had a really good idea. Mine was like, you know, I at least want to get to creative directors. So mine was all title based. Once I got there, I needed to figure out from there where else? But the nice part about Dan Evans was he was saying, that’s it, that’s all you want. That’s all you want. What else do you want? I think his was more of a conceptually, what do you want to get out of this? Or maybe yeah. Instead of just what title do you want to hit? Or how much do you want to make? Or what client do you want to work for? It was what else is there? And that kind of I hate that he asked that because it’s stuck with me ever since. And then I got to creative director and I was like, what do I want to do?

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Mike Harris

So at that point, I got to the creative director role and I still wasn’t quite sure what I wanted or where to go from there. And again, mental health and everything, I wanted to focus on that. So I actually sounds stupid that for mental health. I wanted to start a new business that’s kind of a silicon slopes type business. It’s a start up and I wanted to be ground floor and I wanted to have really whatever say in terms of design that I could. Something that a brand that basically fully represents my ideals, which is kind of fun. Kind of hard to do that on a startup budget. You’re not able to quite pick all the typefaces that you want to represent your brand.

Alysha Smith

So how did that tie back to your mental health? How did you bridge that together?

Mike Harris

I think that was a vehicle for me to get out of the advertising world. Okay, so I kind of applied advertising worlds to probably not the best for my mental health and wanting to take a step back. And then obviously with COVID and and everything, it worked out that I had the opportunity to start doing this travel startup and it was kind of a nice escape valve, I guess.

Alysha Smith

I mean, what did it do for your mental health?

Mike Harris

Well, small team, first employee. I wasn’t going to have to work a ton with various type of customers, I guess. What does it do for my mental health? I think a lot of the time, just fresh start kind of helps your mental health. Focusing on one client versus feeling stretched too thin and serving up creative that is subpar, in your opinion, even if the customer likes it. Just not feeling like you’re able to get out of your creative what you want. It just wasn’t feeling good. And then COVID hit and it was just even worse. Yeah. And I just wanted something new.

Peter Stevenson

And so how did that how did this startup come about? How did you get approached, how would you introduce to the project? How did the opportunity come about? And tell us a little bit about those first couple of months.

Mike Harris

Yeah, it started with Riley Butters, who even in Silicon Slopes, I think people know her pretty well. She’s had a couple of talks here, and I think the stage right outside this room.

Peter Stevenson

So her and I were on a panel together judging a startup competition.

Mike Harris

There you go. So she reached out to me. She knew that I had a lot of I think the breadth of design work that I’m capable of is really good for a startup where I have the branding ability that I got from Modern Eight. I have some of the motion design work that I got from my internships and everything. There’s branding, motion illustration, everything across UX UI that I got from Contravent. I’m sort of a Swiss Army knife, I guess, in terms of a designer, which helps a startup just be able to essentially do anything with a very small team. So Riley reached out to me to help with the logo, and then it turned into, all right, well, we want to start getting this thing going, and let’s find some investors. So it turned into, Will you help with a presentation deck? And then it turned into, Will you help with the UI? And then it was, all right, let’s make this thing kind of more permanent. So myself and Howard Dev, our front end dev became along with the founders, they have the three founders. And then it was myself and he were employee number one same time. So there’s no we crossed the finish line of the first. Yeah. So we were employee number one, and we’ve maintained still a fairly small team, but we’ve more than doubled since. And that’s been fun. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

I’d actually love to hear more about what your experience is like the last year and a half, two years at Don Day and what your day to day is like. What are some of the responsibilities that your title of head of design is in charge of and what you do for them as head of design?

Mike Harris

Yeah, let’s see. So it’s mostly a product focus, but I would say half the time I’m working with a product team, which the day to day is we kind of ramp up until starting at 09:00 a.m. 10:00 A.m. Hits. We have a status meeting with the product team to talk about any kind of key updates or blockers and then how we can address those, whether that’s well, I’m still waiting on an email from this person to know if we can include this API or what this API looks like or what. I need some feedback from our front end to tell me what is capable in this modal that I have. What endpoints could we need to connect to? There’s a whole slew, and that’s just the product side of things. So then working on updates to each page of our app, essentially of our product, working through whatever compromise we had to make for MVP, trying to come up with what’s the best damn thing that we can actually come up with at this point. I don’t know if I can square on here, but that’s a soft one.

Peter Stevenson

You can. We’ll allow it.

Mike Harris

Okay. So a lot of the product side is that we have some huge milestones that we’re trying to hit by the end of the year. So every single sprint that we dedicate to sprint of design, followed by a sprint of the development and there’s just a lot there’s a lot that we have to focus on over a two week sprint that it’s super stressful, but for the users, it’s kind of the end goals. That’s kind of fun is like when you have your own product now, your users are your audience, and you need to make sure that you provide the best experience for them. So you actually get to see, aside from being in a marketing or advertising world where you don’t really get any kind of interface with a customer or something like that, or the audience, or you have a billboard up, you don’t hear anything about that. You get direct feedback from the users that something’s broken. And then it’s on us to try to be as quick as possible of updating it, educating whatever may be required, I suppose. But then there’s the marketing side of things. So with a startup, there’s a ton of trade shows that you have to prep for, which includes some swag, which includes billboards, and we got some digital billboards ready to roll out soon. A whole social media plan. It’s a ton. And then I do have a small group of former coworkers and former coworkers coworkers, the kind of little network of freelancers that work directly with me, which is kind of fun.

Alysha Smith

During the pandemic, you had mentioned prior to that that you had burnt out. And so working from home, a lot of the feedback I heard from our team and kind of around is that it was really difficult to sort of not have those lines distinct, like start and end times. It was blurred between work life and personal life. How did you manage that? And did you find that you had less burnout once you were forced to be at home?

Mike Harris

I think I did have a little less burnout. One nice thing was no one was able to see you take a group meeting or an all hands or something while you’re on a walk or on a run or something like that. It was kind of difficult not having a dedicated start and end time. But again, in an advertising agency, there isn’t always a start and end time that you can actually adhere to. So I was actually able to, I think, work a little bit less. I actually do think that there were a lot of benefits. I was the healthiest I’ve ever been from a physical standpoint, like, working out. I was able to maybe it was the fact that I didn’t have to. It wasn’t even a long drive, but maybe the commute, just not having to do that and not having to get ready for the day or anything like that, you could just stay sweaty and keep working.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Mike Harris

So I was able to get extremely fit. I’m not a bodybuilder or anything, but I was able to, I think, find a little bit more balance with work, actually, during the pandemic.

Alysha Smith

And do you think that those things that you learned or new habits that you picked up during the pandemic, have you brought any of those into what you’re doing now, and has that helped create more of a balance for you?

Mike Harris

I have probably lost some of those good habits, mostly because I am so invested emotionally, and even as I’ve got some stake in the company at Donate. So I am a little more in. Like, we got to make sure this thing works. So it requires a lot of sacrifice, but it’s the kind of sacrifice that I feel at least I’m invested in. And it’s not just for hitting a deadline that then helps a marketer or something feel better and be able to report to their CEO or something like that. So it’s a good kind of sacrifice.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Mike Harris

Or I’m sacrificing for myself, which is.

Alysha Smith

Great for a better future.

Mike Harris

Better future.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. Tell us about Don Day and what you as a company are trying to do, where you’re hoping to go as a company and what the product is. For those who don’t know.

Alysha Smith

How it’s different yeah.

Peter Stevenson

How it’s different from what’s out there.

Mike Harris

Yeah. I don’t know of many OTAs, which is basically a travel agent, I suppose, or travel agency, I guess, is how you can kind of consider us. So we’re trying to change the world and people through travel in a positive way and with COVID with difficulty retaining people. Let’s see, retention. Recruitment is kind of difficult. We wanted to be able to provide for employers the opportunity to with unlimited PTO kind of being a big thing, but also employees being kind of afraid of being able to take or access that unlimited PTO. We said, well, here’s another way for you to be able to add a benefit to potentially kind of put your money where your mouth is. And that’s my most blunt way of saying it, essentially, and help fund the trips that make for a more refreshed, revitalized employee to come back. Be grateful that they were afforded the opportunity to go on this trip that was employer funded, and hopefully that would help retain for me, that would help. We obviously, at Donate have a good benefits package for employees at Donate. So you’re able to either get, let’s see, incentives or rewards or just any kind of match program is a huge thing. So if you want to treat it like a 401K in a certain way, you can say, you know what? If you as an employee want to value travel the same way we want you to value travel, because we think that it is a good thing for an employee to go on those trips and have the kind of huge experiences that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. Then if you want to put in $100, we will match $100 per month, and that way, essentially, travel becomes half off if that’s the kind of program that they have. And that’s what we at Donate actually have. But there are some other companies that just want to use it as performance incentives. Just bonuses, milestones, birthdays, that kind of thing. There’s a whole slew of ways to actually give. And the nice part about getting more and more customers is that we’re able to start seeing what the most impactful and effective reward program there is.

Alysha Smith

So this would be an additional benefit over trying to think of some of the other kind of benefits.

Peter Stevenson

401K is retirement time off PTO, that.

Mike Harris

Kind of thing is actually, I think, around the third highest requested. So you’ve got medical and dental account as one. I think that’s the first. The second would be retirement. I think it is. Retirement is up there. Yeah, I think 401K honestly might be less than PTO. I could see them. I don’t have the numbers on me, but I know we have plenty of decks that you pull on. We’ll enter the numbers here.

Peter Stevenson

I’ll pop them over my head.

Mike Harris

Some graphics. I’ll help you with that. Make it work.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, we’ll need it.

Mike Harris

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Tell me, what, from your standpoint, makes a great designer in the startup ecosystem? What are the functions and what are the skills that a designer in the startup space should have? You clearly have had a lot of experience in a lot of different places. What are the things that those designers in this space should excel at?

Mike Harris

I think one of the reasons that’s worked for me, I can only really speak for myself, would be that I continue to try to learn a ton of new skills that’s prepared me to be able to wear as many hats as I have to. Sort of like a necessity. So I think just that curiosity, that drive for challenge, that for a young designer who does want to potentially start working for a startup, that’s huge. Other than that, it’s just a dedication to getting the job done to follow your leader. A lot of the time. You know, Riley Butters is she’s kind of amazing. If you’ve heard her speak it’s, it’s incredible. But she knows how to drum up support from both employee or I guess potential investors. But employees alike, we 100% believe in her just being dedicated to your craft, being dedicated to your team kind of understanding that your founders know what the hell they’re doing and just get the work done.

Peter Stevenson

That’s it the branding that you’ve done for Donday and the marketing that I see online is so far and away above what most other startups have done that it’s clear that there is a design eye inside the organization. You and Riley and some of the other founders. How do you think that that elevated brand has led to better or higher performance for the company, if at all?

Mike Harris

I mean, it is that hook, right? The visuals are what’s going to hook people into wanting to learn more. So as long as you don’t make any kind of stupid screw ups with the design, as long as you don’t have any weird kerning that’s obviously getting into the weeds kind of straw manning. But yeah. What does good design actually do? I do think that it is memorable. So it’s going to be longer lasting. Once someone closes their eyes, they can still kind of picture our logo. I think that a strong brand. This is a trickier question than I expected. I think that if it’s something that is visually compelling, it’s going to capture a person seeing it to want to learn more.

Alysha Smith

What about the emotional piece? How does design relate to emotions? Because we know that we mostly buy with our emotion or make decisions based on our emotions. How does design influence that?

Mike Harris

I think are you speaking specifically with how we use design in Donday or just in general? How does design maybe both. Yeah, I think it is huge. I think that design and emotion are kind of a hand in hand. Otherwise everything would just be kind of stale. I don’t want to go into, like, always using helvetica isn’t going to create the well, I guess actually only using helvetica would create a strong emotion in certain ways. It’s a little more it’s clean, it’s clinical. There are emotions that regardless. So yeah, if I guess we just use typefaces alone, then there’s a different emotion that comes with every single typeface that you have. You want something to be a little funky, then hobo standard. Or if you want something to be, again, more kind of just clear cut clinical telvetica. If you want something that all caps Gotham is going to make certain people think of Obama campaign, then that’s going to stir emotions in people. I think a lot of it might have to do it’s doing some of the legwork. I think it’s the association that it has with the emotion. So if there is a design that is this is a trickier question. I haven’t thought about it in a while. I’ve been too focused on product.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Mike Harris

Been too focused on the startup life.

Alysha Smith

What was the emotion you’re trying to draw within while you were trying to draw out of potential customers for Donday?

Mike Harris

Yeah, a lot of that’s wanderlust. We’re not doing happy people necessarily. We don’t want to just show smiling people. But I think the assumption is if you see your employee and we talk about it in a way that this is a good thing for you, better time off means better time on is one of our lines. We have to figure out who our audience is first of all, which would either be a lot of the time it’s HR representatives, Vps of people, it’s CEOs who do have an Itch to try something new to shake things up. There needs to be buy in. Also just with they believe in travel, so if it’s a home body CEO, they’re not going to give a crap about donate as a benefit because they don’t believe in the power of travel. I think travel is a human nature type thing. There’s a desire and 95 plus percent of people I would imagine who actually want to try new things, test themselves, go on adventures, or at least if it’s time off, they want to go to Utah’s huge for Disneyland, even though that’s the same thing they want to do multiple times a year. There’s a need for you to be able to leave the comfort of your home to either the comfort of a second home or the comfort of the coast or the beach, or you want to get out of the desert in the middle of the summer. You want to go to Alaska and enjoy some midnight sun or something. I think that’s in everyone. So I don’t think that there needs to be a ton of emotion when it comes to or you don’t need to leverage a ton of emotion when it comes to just practically saying travel is good. Yeah, but there’s a lot more emotion when you actually show it. So if it is a person canoeing off the coast of Italy or the Malte coast, or if it’s a person air ballooning, there’s still some like I’ve never done that. There’s a lot of FOMO that can come from marketing for travel and that’s I think one of the main things that we try to actually capture too. It’s a long winded way for me to get around to this.

Alysha Smith

You’ve got a lot of emotion about it.

Peter Stevenson

Ask your question about where he wants to go, what he wants to get out.

Alysha Smith

Well, I kind of was thinking back to that Dan Evans question that he proposed. Like what do you want out of your career? You’ve had a pretty vast path towards where you are now. And do you think that if you were to go back to your college self and say, this is where I am, do you feel like I do.

Mike Harris

Not think I would have thought that I was starting a yeah, a tech start up. I honestly don’t even think I would. Back then I probably wouldn’t have even thought I was still in Utah, would have been in Seattle or la or something, maybe even New York. What would I thought back then? Or where do I go from here? Sort of both. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

What do you want?

Mike Harris

I don’t know what I want, but I think that I’m setting myself up for success with some of the decisions I’ve made where I can kick that decision down the road a little bit and be able to have the funds and more mature and maturity and maybe some more added knowledge, more conversations like this that are thought provoking. For me to be able to decide that.

Alysha Smith

I guess the follow up question would be, do you feel like the steps that you’ve taken your career have led you to be able to do this now?

Mike Harris

Yes. Looking back, it seemed like there was a clear path that I didn’t know was there. So you look back at the path and it’s like, oh, yeah, I’ve made every step along the way has led to this point, and I kind of feel like I need to get to the next place to be able to look back and say, that made sense too.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Mike Harris

We’re all in this world just kind of going through things and you just sort of got to power through it all.

Alysha Smith

I guess the other question is, do you feel fulfilled?

Mike Harris

Yeah, I do now. I think finally, it feels like the summation of my learnings up to this point, I’m still challenged every day with new things. I mean, meetings that aren’t design related, that are way more either research based or even let’s have a talk about fundraising. It’s like, I did not know I was going to have a conversation like this when I was two years ago. Only having conversations about this color isn’t quite what we expected. Well, RGB is difficult to capture when it’s a CMYK that we’re using as a basis, that kind of thing. So, yeah, the conversations are way more grand scale, but our responsibilities are still, I think, grounded in my past, essentially.

Peter Stevenson

Well, we always end with one question, and that is, what are some restaurants, bars, coffee shops that you would recommend that our listeners should go to?

Mike Harris

I’m going to keep it in a walking distance, and it’s not just because I’ve worked there at both Contravent and Donate. They’re very close to each other. But I’m going to go with blue copper for coffee.

Peter Stevenson

The one on 9th. Central 9th?

Mike Harris

Yeah. Well, 9th west central 9th. Now we’re talking about good sandwiches, but that’s different. You didn’t ask for that. But they have the best breakfast sandwiches, especially great sandwiches. All right, good guys. I did the branding for them. Okay, which one? Central 9th?

Alysha Smith

Oh, that’s an actual place?

Mike Harris

That’s an actual place. And it’s right next to it’s right next to Blue Copper. So if you walk Blue Copper for coffee, get your nice latte, take a stroll over to SLC Eatery. Yeah, it’s sort of dim sums out you know, they have the little carton trays and everything like that. So I love that. And then I’m guessing you’ve had a glass of wine by that point. So you don’t want to drive anywhere, walk for more drinks and go to the water witch, which has some of the best cocktail bartenders or baristas in town and even some of their and they have a good run of or good, I guess some backup or guest bartenders that are the best, especially for tiki. Cool. Great for tiki. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

They got a James Beard award this past year for their bar program.

Alysha Smith

Can’t go wrong.

Mike Harris

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

And I’m excited about their new place.

Mike Harris

New place. There’s a new one. You heard it here first, guys. All right, here we go.

Peter Stevenson

It will be new. It will be new at some point, and we’ll announce it when I hear more about it.

Mike Harris

Got you.

Peter Stevenson

Thank you so much, Mike. I continue to keep making just unbelievable design happen at Donde. And we’re excited about what you and Don day you and Don Deh are going to do.

Mike Harris

The accent is important. Yes.

Peter Stevenson

Clearly. Clearly. Thank you very much.

Mike Harris

Thanks, man. Bye.

Alysha Smith

Thank you.

Mike Harris

Bye bye.

Peter Stevenson

Subjects is production of modern8, a8ency, and Silicon slopes. Executive producers are Alysha Smith and Peter Stevenson. Editor and producer is Dave Mecham. Video Production by Conor Mitchell development Production by Eric Dahl production Management by Shelby Sandlin Original music composed by Josh Johnson. Website designed by modern8. Please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends and your enemies. Thanks for joining us.