Ep. 218 - George Brooks, Founder of Crema, on Lab Fridays, Business Innovation, and Culture

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that helps innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is George Brooks. George is the founder of Crema, which is a digital product agency based out of Kansas City. So right here in the Midwest, welcome to the show. 

George Brooks: Thanks, Brian. Its's good to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Well I'm excited to have you on. A couple of reasons. One, you are also a podcast host like me. Your podcast is called Option Five. You talk a lot about product development and that, close to the core of all the stuff that we talk about here at Inside Outside Innovation, when it comes to what does it take to work and live in this new world of change and disruption.

George Brooks: Yeah. Thank you very much. I'm excited. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about Crema. How'd you go about forming this company and tell us a little bit about what you do. 

George Brooks: My background is in design. So, I started as a design agency first, and really that was as a freelance designer going out on my own. And we talk about when sometimes entrepreneurship innovation happens because you have this dream and this vision, and sometimes you're just pushed off a cliff and you have to figure it out as you fall down. And mine was being pushed off a cliff. 

My oldest daughter was in the hospital for the first seven months of her life and I couldn't be at work. I couldn't be at the agency that I was at. I needed to be there. She was super critical. And so, I left that job and started freelance design about 10 years ago. Well, actually gosh, 12 years ago now. And the story used to be 10 years, right? Time has passed. 

Brian Ardinger: And Coronavirus adds another three years for this last six months. 

George Brooks: I know. So true. So, I started freelance designing. I don't have any business background. So about two years into that, my best friend and I had always dreamed about doing a business together. And I said, I think I accidentally started a business. And it looks like this agency work, doing a lot of design work for other agencies, and for developers and entrepreneurs. Can you make sure that I'm actually paying my taxes and doing all the things that I should be doing? And so, he was finishing up his MBA and so Dan and I joined together about 10 years ago and Crema is about 10 and a half years old.

What we do today has changed since the beginning. We're now a full-service digital product agency. So, we do everything from user experience, design and consulting, strategic direction workshops, coaching, agile process training, all the way through. I have almost 40 full time employees now and focusing on actually providing full-stack product teams. So, design development, test engineering, product management, and we deploy those now, used to be a lot of startups and early stage companies. Almost all the work that we do now is with large enterprise innovation teams around the world. A lot of fun. 

Brian Ardinger : Well, we seem to have a very similar background, 8 or 10, 12 years ago I started in the startup world and started the Nmotion startup accelerator and starting early stage teams, helping them get up and going and that, but starting these things in the Midwest is a little bit different. So, I want to talk a little bit about what has the evolution been like and what have you seen starting and building companies here in the Midwest, especially like 10 years ago versus what it's like now.

George Brooks: When I first was freelancing and going to the first startup weekend that took place in Kansas City. And I had no idea what to expect. I think I probably overdressed. I looked way too fancy for what kind of event. I had no idea. My wife didn't know that I was literally going to disappear for three solid days. And that was kind of back in the day when you tried to build a full stack of product in three days, right? It wasn't about putting together a pitch or a deck or something. It was like, we're going to build this thing. So, you just pulled all-nighters to make it happen. 

And I think during those days, it was that new wave of creative thinkers and entrepreneurs, at least coming through Kansas City specifically. It felt like the next wave since the early nineties, when the Sprints of the world and the Cerners of the world started here in Kansas City. These large enterprises, and there really have been a gap where you saw new innovative companies coming up. 

So, ours was spurred on by Google showing up and we got to win the Google fiber contract. And that was a big deal at the time. What are we going to do with gigabit internet? And then really what I think we saw as a quick rise, lots of activity, lots of moving around and trying to put on events and then kind of a dialing down to where you saw people...it got weeded out pretty quickly that the chaff fell through, If you will, to figure out where are the people that are going to sustain doing this work. Who's going to stick around. Who's going to actually survive the hard work it takes to start companies and sustain innovation. 

And I think that's where we're on that next wave of really the companies that have stuck. Even the new companies that are starting now, now have an infrastructure of enough great of companies that have been through it the last 10 years to say, here's what it actually takes. It's not all fun and games. Let's actually get to work. And I think that's what I've seen, at least in the environment. For Crema, it's about iteration. It's about refinement. 

And so, we've had to iterate on ourselves and experiment with new ideas and offer our services in a different way and use different language. And UX was like this super-hot, nobody had heard of term. There were two letters that shouldn't be next to each other. And it got us work in the beginning that doesn't get us work anymore. Right. Everyone does UX. So, we have to innovate and continue to iterate to stay relevant. 

Brian Ardinger: I think the other dynamic that seems to be similar to what I've experienced and seen around the country as well is there was a lot of buzz around startups was how do these companies move so fast and create something from nothing? And that's how I got pulled into the corporate innovation front is because bigger companies were coming to me and asking those same kinds of questions. 

It sounds like you have a similar type of ride from the standpoint of you were building and iterating and getting things up and going and old established companies were craving that ability to do that. So, talk me through that transition from working with startups or building brand new products, and then moving towards a more established organization. 

George Brooks: One of our clients...