Brand Design Masters Podcast

Unfiltered Career Advice for Creative Pros
Brand Design Masters Podcast Ep. 139
Philip VanDusen 

Hey everybody, welcome back. Okay, this is going to be a little bit of an off the cuff rant, and it's also going to be a little less formal than my usual show, less edited, less scripted. And why this and why now? I've had a few friends and colleagues and some Facebook group members get laid off in recent months. 

One close friend of mine got 20 years with a company, and to be honest with you, I'm a little pissed. So also I know a lot of you feel like you're just beating your heads against the wall and trying to get interviews and trying to get into a company right now. And here's some stuff that you actually need to know if you get that job or if you're in the company. 

an employed situation right now. Now just for context, I've interviewed about 4, 000 designers and hired over 400 in my 30 plus year career. I've been a VP of design in two Fortune 100 companies and an ECD at two global branding agencies. And I've led teams as small as three, but And as large as 65 across three different divisions. 

So when it comes down to it, I know a little stuff about how companies work, how they treat employees from HR to managers. And I want to share some unfiltered truths with you about your job and who you work for now, or who you might be working for in the future and maybe who you used to work for. So get buckled up. 

I've got nine or maybe more pieces of advice for you. All right. Number one, you are number one. No one is going to watch out for you, but you, especially people more junior in their careers, they wait for someone to tell them when it's time to move on or tell them when it's time to be promoted, or they abdicate the responsibility of their career. 

When it comes down to it, the only person who can direct your career, where you go, how much time and energy you put into it, how ambitious you are, how long you stay someplace, how long you sit with. not being promoted, or if you get promoted too fast, whether you're getting the support that you need to really actually be successful. 

When it comes down to it, you are number one and no one is watching out for your career, but you. Number two, HR is not your friend. Whether you work at an agency or in house, you have to consider yourself what human resources sees you like, which is a human resource. You're like a desk. You're like a file cabinet. 

The only thing that is important is external recruiters. External recruiters are your friends. And if you are lucky enough to get contacted by an external recruiter, looking to fill a role at some other company, Or you meet one at a conference or you get introduced one through social media. You want to make connections with those people and you want to develop relationships with them because really when it comes down to it, those are the people who are really watching out for you and are going to be helping you find opportunities in your career. 

So external recruiters are your friend HR is not so much your friend. HR, when you're meeting with them, always try to act like your confidant, like your therapist, like your guide through your employment. But the thing is that they don't keep things confidential in general. They will share them with the managers that they report to. 

And sometimes it gets out to the people that you don't want to hear about what you're sharing with them. So be very cognizant and careful about what you share with HR because you have to understand. That relationship, just like you own any other relationship in the company in terms of communicating with your manager or your manager's manager, the CCO or whoever that is. 

You just have to be very cognizant of how much you are divulging. And be careful about how you communicate. Don't let HR suck you in and make you feel like they have your personal best interests at heart in terms of your advancement in the company because they don't. All right. Number three. Career insurance. 

Everyone wants career insurance, especially when they get hit with a layoff or their company gets acquired and suddenly they're on the street. Your career insurance is your personal brand. Developing a personal brand is developing what I like to call professional agency. It is having ownership and options that you are comfortable with. 

Architecting for yourself as you build an entity, a presence, a level of authority, a present, a level of visibility out in social media. That is really the only thing that you own in terms of career insurance. Now. I'm going to caveat that and say that even though I said what I said about HR, there are people who may take you under their wing in your career. 

I've had two managers in my life in two different, one in a company, one in an agency who saw potential in me and they promoted me and gave me challenges and increase my levels of responsibility throughout my career and really championed me within the company. I'm not saying that everyone inside your company is out to get you because there's certainly not, but be very choiceful about the people that you build relationships and develop a level of trust with and make sure that they really do have your best interest at heart. 

Make sure that you do develop a relationship and a connection with them because they can be incredibly instrumental in your growth, but you just gotta be careful and think about it in a little bit of a political way. HR, not your friend, external recruiters, your friend, If you develop a mentor who's your manager or a, a skip level manager, they can be your friend. 

Definitely. All right. Number four is creative industries are ageist. Now there's a survey that the AIGA did in 2019. I know it was a number of years ago, but they don't do them very often. Cause they're very comprehensive. And so in that survey, the AIGA, They did this age chart of the ages of people working in the creative industry. 

And when you get to 50 years old, less than 10, and 50 and up, 50 and 60, less than 10 percent of graphic designers who are working in the industry are over 50 years old, that they were able to quantify. Where do all those older designer go, designers go? I tell you where they go, they get laid off from the full time companies that they're working for, because The creative industry, advertising in particular, the tech industry, also really bad design, entertainment, marketing, that creative industries are incredibly ages. 

And so when you're about 45, you got to open your eyes. You got to start building a personal brand, developing that personal agency, that personal independence. If you haven't, because chances are, Over 50, you're going to be made redundant, your company's going to be acquired, you're going to get a new manager who doesn't like you as much as the old manager, and you're going to be laid off. 

You're going to find yourself on the street, and chances are, it's going to be very difficult to find another full time role, especially over 50. So you're going to have to develop an approach to independent freelancing or consulting. And if you've always considered yourself to be a company person or an agency person, you I'm just here to tell you it's going to happen. 

And so think about that and prepare for it. And another thing, number five is that when it does end, when you get laid off, you're made redundant. You're not finding that getting those interviews like you used to. When it ends, it's not going to be your fault, meaning it's going to be someone else's decision. 

Your company is going to get acquired and they're going to downsize or they're going to outsource or whatever that looks like. Chances are it's not going to be for cause. So if you think you're doing an amazing job in your job, maybe you are. Maybe you're incredible, but the thing is when you hit a certain age, things get dicey. 

And it's not gonna be your fault. So if you think you're, like, immune because you're an amazing designer and you've gotten incredible reviews and you make a great salary, chances are that's not going to protect you. Now, it could actually be your fault when you get laid off for cause, but chances are, that's not, I'm not addressing that in this rant. 

All right. Number six, it's who you know, not what you know that matters. Networking, peers, relationships. Current past colleagues. This falls into the category of the shit I wish I knew early in my career that could have saved me a lot of pain. It's where your next job is going to come from. The people that you know, the network that you've built, the connections you've made, old classmates, old colleagues, old co workers. 

That is where your next job is going to come from. I hear this all the time. I've submitted 200 resumes online and I haven't received a single callback. Yes, because you know what? Your resume and your portfolio are getting read by a robot and they're not even seeing a human being because they didn't have the right keywords, or they didn't, you didn't use the a TS, the applicant tracking system format on your resume, so the robot couldn't even read it and it just got tossed in a file. 

So you wanna make sure that you're. You're staying in contact with your old coworkers. This is one of the things that I try to really impress upon people is that no one stays in their job forever. And every coworker that you had, five years from now, they're going to be working in a different company. 

And guess what? Those different companies, those different agencies, they're Those are going to be the people at those agencies that you can get your resume and your portfolio into their hands and say, please, can you just give this to this hiring manager for this role that I saw online, rather than applying to that thing online, because that's throwing your resume and your portfolio into a black hole. 

And we all know that the online application for jobs is absolutely broken right now. And so the people that, the network that you have. Are the people who are going to get you your next job. And the other thing is that when you are 45 or 50, and then suddenly you're aged out of the creative industry, those are also the people that are going to be your word of mouth referral system to get you clients and to get the word out there that you are now an independent, you're now consulting, you're now a freelancer, you now have your own agency, that network, those connections are going to be the ones that are going To be your career insurance. 

And that's that professional agency, that personal brand, those connections, that level of authority and visibility that you're going to want to build. Okay. Number seven. Number seven is Zen Beginner's Mind. You have to have a mindset of constant learning. You can never rest on your laurels. You are never done learning. 

When I decided to leave my last role, my last executive role at a gigantor company, I was in my mid fifties, and I knew that I, that decision I was making, I was walking away from full time work in the industry because I wasn't going to be able to get back in. But that was a conscious decision. And I knew that going out as an individual consultant, I needed to get small to medium sized business clients. 

And I'd been working with fortune 100 and I knew that my connections and network weren't going to get me the size clients that I now needed So I knew that I had to Build a personal brand from scratch. I had a two page wix website with black and white portfolio and a resume on it That's all I had. 

I didn't know anything about email marketing or content marketing or personal brand building Or video or podcasts or email funnels, or I knew nothing. I'd been working at a very executive level for over a decade and I had to learn a tremendous amount of stuff really fast at 55 and I've had my own business now for nine years and I have come like eons of distance, but the point I'm trying to make here is that I was extremely accomplished at the level that I had come to in my Career in agency and corporate life as a creative leader. 

But I was a babe in the woods when it came to being a personal brand or an independent consultant. And so I had to learn from scratch all of this stuff. So you have to take a mindset of constant learning, no matter where you are in your career, you can always learn new stuff. We're all being hit that. 

With that right now with A. I. right? A. I. is coming like a tsunami into every aspect of the creative professions. So taking that mindset, that Zen mindset, a beginner's mind, is one thing I want you to really grasp and hold on to and think about. Because it's going to be one of those career insurance aspects if you can stay in the mindset of constantly being open to learning. 

Okay, now number eight. Number eight is skill sets. When you are employed with an agency or an employer. They want you to have a T shaped skill set. If it's a larger organization, a T shaped skill set, meaning very narrow, very little knowledge in a whole lot of things and super deep knowledge. And the one thing that they hired for you to do the smaller organization that you work in, Or if you're independent and a consultant or a freelancer, you have to have more of a V shaped skillset where you have a deep capability and maybe two or three things, and then varying depth of knowledge and ability in a range of things from marketing to project management, to business development, to client interactions, to financial management. 

All sorts of things when you're an independent. So think about your skillsets. In your career, how much of a T shaped skill set do you have? How can you start to broaden that into more of a V shaped skill set? V shaped skill sets are more immune to the sorts of catastrophe that have prompted me to actually do this video because they give you a broader toolbox in order to keep yourself afloat When things go south. 

All right. So a V shaped skillset is for you if you want to have professional agency. All right. Now, number nine is show your work. And this is one, I want all the lawyers who are listening to this is put your fingers in your law, right? Lawyers don't listen to this. Also don't forward this to lawyers is that Non compete agreements used to be like, super prevalent in California, and they actually, I believe, don't quote me on this, but they enacted some legislation that actually made non compete agreements, you couldn't do them in California, because they were so restrictive that they were keeping people from being able to leave a company and actually continue to do the skill that they had at another company, and so they struck them down. 

But there are a lot of states that still have non compete agreements. And there's a lot of agencies and companies that make you sign non compete agreements. When you come in that say, basically you can't ever use anything that you develop in your portfolio while you work for us. You can't practice your skillset with another company for the 12 months after you leave us. 

Read it. Read your contract if you signed one, when you became employed with somebody, they are notoriously tough to enforce. But I've known a whole lot of people, a whole lot of junior people, who are terrified by them. They said, I've left this company, they laid me off, and now I have this huge portfolio of stuff, but my non competes, so they can't show any of it in my portfolio, and I don't know what to do, and they're gonna sue me if I do, and I tell you, number one, Pay it no mind. 

Your job is in it for themselves, not you. You want to show the work you did at your last company or agency. No one, chances are, no one is watching you. Put the work that you did In your portfolio and online, unless it has not hit the shelves yet. Meaning that if it's work you've done that has not hit the public sphere yet, as long as the packaging or the logo or the marketing that you did is now in the public sphere, it was published. 

You pretty much have the right to show it in your portfolio. And if anyone is watching you, and for some reason they do call you out on it. You're going to get maybe a letter from their lawyers that say, take that down, you bad person. And you don't have the right to show this. And you go, Ooh, sorry, my bad. 

I didn't read that contract that you made me sign five years ago. I'll take it down. And then you just take it down. No one's going to put you in jail. No one's going to fine you. And I guarantee you 99. 9 percent of the time, nothing will ever happen. Like you'll put that portfolio up online. No one's ever going to see it. 

No one's caring about you from the company that they laid you off from. And that work is what's going to get you your next job. So if you're super paranoid about it, what you can do is create a, portfolio section or a case study section on your website and just make it password protected. And then when you send your portfolio to. 

Recruiters or to jobs you're applying to and you make those connections, then you just let them see your portfolio and make it password protected. But that's an extreme case. I, this is not legal advice. So that's my caveat. This is not legal advice and I'm not a lawyer. So this is my industry experience. 

What I'm telling you and when I coach people, this is what I tell them is that don't worry about it. And worst case scenario, someone sees something and they say, You really should take that down. You don't have the right to display that. Then you say, okay, Ooh, I'm so sorry. And then you just turn it off, make the page invisible. 

It's that easy. But I tell you 99 percent of the time, it's not going to happen. It's a tough world out there. It's a tough employment world out there. And there are so many challenges that we have from The fact that corporations, agencies are increasingly using outside contractors. This is an example, in the education industry, right? 

And universities used to have professors, full time professors. And then if you were a full time professor for 10 years, you made tenure, right? And then you became unfireable. The tenure system is almost completely gone. And the full time professor. completely gone in a lot of universities. 

Now they use adjunct professors, which are basically freelancers who come in, they pay them dirt because people, really want to have a teaching gig and you get three or four classes and then the next year you have to fight for your contract or they might not invite you back. It's like same thing that's happening in this industry. 

They're Companies are finding it very difficult or financially beneficial not to have full time employees, not to pay them benefits. And they're using more and more external contractors and freelancers to do the work that they need to have done. And so it's a fragile system out there right now. And don't kid yourself. 

It's if you have a full time job, And you're killing it and they're paying you good money and you got great benefits. God bless you. I was that way. I had the same thing for 25 years and it was awesome. I'm not knocking full time employment at all. I built my career at two major corporations and two major agencies. 

And I came up from designer all the way up to, VP of design over six, 65 people. And It's awesome. And I made great money and I got great benefits and bonuses and stock options and stuff like that. And then I went out on my own and I had to learn an entirely different thing. But now that I'm coaching people through their careers with the wealth of experience that I have, I'm seeing how the industry has changed and how difficult and challenging it has gotten out there and how important it is that you develop a level of professional. 

So you have control over your destiny and all the stuff I'm telling you in this big rant that I've gone on here is to benefit you to give you a suit of armor to help you navigate this constantly changing sands of the creative industry because like I said, it's not super easy out there and there are people with decades of experience who are getting laid off because their manager changed. 

And I don't want to see that happen to you. And if it does happen to you, I want to make sure that you're prepared for it. One shameless plug. I started a mastermind community for established creative professionals. So mid career to late career creative professionals called Bonfire. Bonfire is a paid subscription community. 

It's 97 a month. And you get a private online platform, like a Facebook platform, but it's on the Circle platform. And you get dozens and dozens of downloadable templates and tools and checklists and strategy documents. And you get a built in network of other peers who are making headway and building personal brands for themselves. 

And we do two mastermind sessions on zoom a month. We also do another office hours session. And then once a month we have a visiting expert come in and do trainings. It's an incredible group. So if you go to philipvandusen. com slash bonfire, B O N F I R E, you can learn more about the bonfire community. 

I encourage you to join. If you want to develop. Really tight connections, learn a lot of stuff really fast that you probably don't even know, or that you're not sure whether you need or stuff that you weren't even aware of that other people were doing to build their personal brands and their professional agency. 

Bonfire is an amazing place. When I went out on my own. When I went out on my own at 55 years old, I joined a large membership mastermind community and it put my learning on, on, on steroids. It was like adding rocket fuel to the growth of building my personal brand. I, I started working with clients. 

I started networking intentionally. I rebuilt my website like massively. I started a newsletter. Six months later, I started a YouTube channel. Here we are almost 295, 000 subscribers, like seven years later, I started a podcast, I started paid mastermind groups, I started a free Facebook group. I started coaching hourly. 

I started consulting hourly. I built a brand strategy course, which is available online on demand. I taught it live two different sessions to now it's evergreen on demand. All that stuff, I had no idea even existed. I had no idea how to do it, but piece by piece, I put together a personal brand and a personal brand ecosystem that has given me now eight different revenue streams that come in from clients, YouTube ads, sponsorship, course, community, list goes on. 

And this is possible for you too. If it's something that you're interested in, you definitely want to come to the Bonfire community because I'm sharing everything that I know, everything I know. No holds barred with everybody who's in Bonfire. So come check it out. So I hope you enjoyed, or, we're gratified to somehow with this rant, or it helped you in some way, gave you some sort of perspective that maybe you didn't have. 

And if it pissed you off, that's fine. And if you want more information or you want more help from me, join the Bonfire group, or I do one on one calls. professional coaching too. But if you've stayed with me through this whole thing, God bless you. And and that's it. Hope you enjoyed this rant. And if you did hit the subscribe button and until next time, hang in there and stay creative.