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The PodcastEPISODE #1 - Going Big In The Ad Game: Jim & Robin Whitney - Part 1
After working in New York and Los Angeles, Jim & Robin Whitney managed to sack their big agency careers and move to a Utah town with a population of 7,000--and proceed to crush it with a mighty little advertising agency. They talk about living, breathing and sleeping their work, having great respect and admiration for each other, staying out of each other's turf, how the business affects their kids, and much more in this inaugural episode of CoupleCo: Working With Your Spouse For Fun & Profit. CLICK HERE FOR A COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF PLACES TO HEAR THIS SHOW FOR ITUNES, CLICK HERE FOR SOUNDLCOUD, CLICK HERE DOWNLOAD THE MP3 BY RIGHT-CLICKING HERE AND SELECTING "SAVE AS" |
THE SHOW NOTES
LOGLINE: Leaving behind their careers in big New York and Los Angeles advertising, Jim & Robin Whitney become couple entrepreneurs, moving to rural Utah, starting a husband & wife ad agency, and making their lives into exactly what they want them to be, Part 1.
How Jim & Robin Whitney met (or almost didn't) while working at an ad agency 3:20
After working in New York and Los Angeles, how they decided to open an advertising agency in Park City, a town with a population of 7,000 12:54
The synergy of bringing their combined talents together, and how it became a whole new income equation 16:28
How they got clients 17:20
Priority was always family 18:48
She was always grateful for everything he did to make the business & family work 19:40
Never had conflicts about how to run the business because they each come from separate disciplines 20:15
The biggest arguments in the business are creative arguments 20:50
They purposely never learned how to do each other’s jobs 20:10
Division of labor is key, and respect that the other person knows what to do 22:05
Over time, they’ve evolved into more of a creative team 23:30
Often, couples struggle with one bringing the other into their profession, and there’s the perception that the other is glomming on 24:00
People often make the mistake that Robin is just The Wife, and they learn pretty quickly what a bad idea that is 24:40
The mistake becomes evident because she runs all the meetings, then he does so much of the heavy lifting 25:00
She admits to being argumentative, asks probing questions, and surprised people who are expecting “just the guy’s wife.” 25:30
There are times when the client overestimates his authority because he’s the husband 27:30
Robin dominates the conversation, since it’s her role, and it’s in keeping with her lifelong position as a feminist 28:10
She asks the hard questions, which can be uncomfortable, and wonders if the presence of her husband makes that OK in a conservative state like Utah 28:48
He’s the good cop, she’s the bad cop 29:35
Going into business in Utah was never about the business, it was about a lifestyle choice 30:23
Doing good work for the client requires the client baring all, and they often aren’t prepared 31:00
Heard about other husband & wife teams in the area who behave in a way that shortchanges the Whitneys’ business 32:18
There has to be a degree of conflict in the relationship for things to turn out great 33:23
How Jim & Robin Whitney met (or almost didn't) while working at an ad agency 3:20
After working in New York and Los Angeles, how they decided to open an advertising agency in Park City, a town with a population of 7,000 12:54
The synergy of bringing their combined talents together, and how it became a whole new income equation 16:28
How they got clients 17:20
Priority was always family 18:48
She was always grateful for everything he did to make the business & family work 19:40
Never had conflicts about how to run the business because they each come from separate disciplines 20:15
The biggest arguments in the business are creative arguments 20:50
They purposely never learned how to do each other’s jobs 20:10
Division of labor is key, and respect that the other person knows what to do 22:05
Over time, they’ve evolved into more of a creative team 23:30
Often, couples struggle with one bringing the other into their profession, and there’s the perception that the other is glomming on 24:00
People often make the mistake that Robin is just The Wife, and they learn pretty quickly what a bad idea that is 24:40
The mistake becomes evident because she runs all the meetings, then he does so much of the heavy lifting 25:00
She admits to being argumentative, asks probing questions, and surprised people who are expecting “just the guy’s wife.” 25:30
There are times when the client overestimates his authority because he’s the husband 27:30
Robin dominates the conversation, since it’s her role, and it’s in keeping with her lifelong position as a feminist 28:10
She asks the hard questions, which can be uncomfortable, and wonders if the presence of her husband makes that OK in a conservative state like Utah 28:48
He’s the good cop, she’s the bad cop 29:35
Going into business in Utah was never about the business, it was about a lifestyle choice 30:23
Doing good work for the client requires the client baring all, and they often aren’t prepared 31:00
Heard about other husband & wife teams in the area who behave in a way that shortchanges the Whitneys’ business 32:18
There has to be a degree of conflict in the relationship for things to turn out great 33:23
TRANSCRIPT
Blaine: Finally, we are here and we are talking to the legendary Jim Whitney and Robin Whitney of Whitney Advertising in Park City, Utah. Our first favorite couple in the Couple Co Hall of Fame.
Robin: Yay.
Blaine: We have an important question.
Robin: We're honored.
Blaine: Thank you.
Honey: No, we're honored.
Blaine: What is the first question? Do you have a question before that first one? I know you wanted to like throw some stuff out.
Honey: No. Let's get it rolling, and then ruin it.
Blaine: How the hell did you two meet?
Robin: Oh my goodness. I've said to myself, I'm going to try to sound like have a really good voice instead of my scratchy, Midwest voice. So it's going to start out sexy and then it's going to turn into.
Honey: We'll pitch you down.
Robin: We worked together. Doesn't everyone meet at work? We met at both of our first jobs out of college in a big agency in New York City.
Honey: I didn't realize it was your first job out of college.
Robin: It was my first and his first too.
Jim: Both, yeah.
Honey: Wow.
Robin: We worked in completely different departments. It was a really big company. There was a big active social scene and everyone was always partying around all the time. But we just worked together. We didn't party around all the time together. We worked together for probably a year.
Jim: Oh yeah. At least before we really ever really met.
Robin: Yes. I mean, he was just this blonde art director who worked on a couple of different accounts.
Honey: So you were just kind of in the same. So he was on the art directing side and you ...
Robin: At the time, I was ... At the time that we first met, it was my first job in advertising. So I was in the traffic department, about to be promoted into account management.
Honey: Whoa. Whoa.
Jim: Right.
Robin: So I was a traffic on his account. I was really so ambitious about my career that I was probably the worst traffic person ever. So he does tell a story about how he would call me to get templates or something, and I would hesitate to even take the time to bring them to him. I would tell them where they were. Go get them yourself.
Honey: My future husband.
Robin: I really had no idea.
Jim: The biggest account at that agency was a (bleep) tobacco.
Honey: Big account.
Robin: Why would you say that?
Jim: Because it's a fact. It's all right.
Robin: This is a fact we try not to talk about.
Jim: Why?
Robin: Because it's ...
Jim: Advertising. So we did a lot of outdoor. You can edit that.
Robin: We can be subpoenaed.
Jim: So we did a lot of outdoor advertising back then. There were a lot of 30 sheets and 14 by 48's.
Robin: I know what those are.
Jim: Somebody said we need to do this outdoor board. So call that Robin over in traffic and get her to bring you the template. So I call her on her extension. I say, "I need that template for the 30 sheet." She goes, "It's hanging on Bobby's wall. Just go get it."
Robin: I'm sure I didn't say it quite like that.
Jim: Just like that. That was basically our first interaction.
Robin: So proving that you really might know the love of your life right now and you might not know it.
Jim: Yeah. It's true.
Honey: Fair enough.
Jim: You maybe had already met.
Robin: Always wear clean underwear. You never know.
Jim: So it wasn't until we had a mutual friend who was having her 30th birthday party. The two of us were like 23. So she was 30. Oh man. Wow.
Robin: She's old.
Jim: Birthday party. Yeah. We went separately with different groups of people, and it was flat out across the room eye contact. Spent literally the whole evening at this birthday party in a corner just talking to each other like this close together.
Robin: It was amazing. I really felt like ... I look at that as the night I met him, even though I had known him for a year.
Honey: Right.
Blaine: It was social. There was the agency business in the middle of it.
Robin: Yeah. He just really was extremely attractive.
Blaine: Might I say he still is. Might I also add, something we didn't point out, we have two advertising mucky-mucks from Park City here. They're both wearing designer eye glasses and they're both wearing black shirts.
Honey: I have on a black shirt. I was trying to measure up.
Blaine: We're fitting the stereotype. So anyway, if I recall correctly that you had a ...
Honey: Stipulation.
Blaine: Rule. A rule about ...
Robin: I was dating someone else. I didn't show up to the party with a bunch of people. I came alone. I didn't have any friends at the office that I hung around with very much. So I decided to go. As we were leaving that party, the group of people who Jim was with was a number of young women, and they called a cab and sort of pushed me into it and sent me on my way.
Blaine: Slammed the door and said, "See you later."
Robin: I didn't date anyone at work. I was never going to date anyone at work. But I was curious and interested. So I invited him out to lunch, which I was going to pay for so that I could decide if there was any real potential or if that was just one night's insanity. We had a nice lunch, and at the end of the lunch I said, "Yes, I would date you if you worked somewhere else." Luckily ...
Jim: “Policy: I won't date a coworker.”
Robin: Luckily, he went and got a job somewhere else right away.
Jim: Luckily, I was already looking for another job.
Honey: Oh, okay. I was going to say, Wow you must have just known.
Blaine: Motivation.
Jim: Didn't abandon my career.
Robin: How long was it since the time I told you to get another job that I would date you if you got another job?
Jim: It was probably a month.
Robin: A month.
Jim: Yeah. Three or four weeks.
Robin: Then we started dating. Yeah.
Honey: How long were you guys dating before it was like, "Yeah. This is just a forever."
Robin: Oh, no. No, no, no. I relentlessly pursued him. I invited him on every date I possibly could think of that he could not resist going on. I was definitely the pursuer.
Jim: She was dating another person.
Robin: I was dating another person.
Jim: I was too.
Robin: Yeah.
Jim: So all you knew ... Robin was very mysterious. Clearly people in the office who understood that I was maybe having a lunch with Robin were dumbfounded that this could even possibly be taken place. Because she was dating a very wealthy man and ...
Robin: It's true.
Jim: Very wealthy man, foreigner.
Blaine: You become a kept woman? Was that your plan?
Robin: If you're really cute in New York, there is a period of time when it's really hard not to think about what opportunities might be up.
Honey: I was never cute enough when I was in New York.
Blaine: Jim, did you find that to be true?
Jim: I was never cute enough. It was really tentative at first. But Robin would call, and she's say, "I've got a bottle of champagne and I'm going to meet you on the benches in front of the Natural History Museum." Because I lived on 80th and Amsterdam, right by the ... "Can you meet me there? I'll be there in 20 minutes." I would say, "Okay. I'll be there." So we would meet and ...
Robin: Or I've got tickets for Bowie.
Jim: Yeah.
Robin: Do you want to go? You know what, I feel like buying ... I feel like eating a whole lot of shrimp at that great place on Central Park West, do you want to go?
Jim: Of course I would say yes. But this persona that she had, she was still, at that time, dating this very, very wealthy man. She had great clothes and everything. Partly because of that.
Blaine: You can't see the faces that Robin's making.
Jim: I always just thought ... My whole point of view was I kind of had this girl I was dating, and it was just like totally she's messing with me. This is going no where. This is never going to work. I don't know why she's messing around with this Podunk kid from Utah. But one day it's going to end in a tragic ...
Honey: Blaze.
Jim: Final ... Yeah, one giant swoop and it'll be over. So I never allowed myself ... Early on, I didn't get too committed to it.
Robin: Yeah.
Jim: She would call me up and say, "I got tickets to the B-52s on the Pier, you want to go?"
Honey: I'd say yes.
Jim: Okay.
Blaine: Why not?
Honey: So what turned the corner?
Robin: Well, after a bunch of months of really doing everything I could to get his interest and get him to want to go out with me and spend time with me, I decided that it's true. I have a rich boyfriend and I have all kinds of other things going on. So I should just give up. Why am I doing this? So I kind of gave up. I decided I would just follow my own trajectory. Around that same time, Jim decided that maybe he should pay more attention to this girl who was interested in him.
Honey: Is it because she backed off?
Jim: Totally.
Blaine: Yeah, we all know how that works.
Jim: Reverse psychology.
Honey: We know that exactly.
Blaine: Yes. So what we need to do then is fast forward to your blazing careers in advertising, which I know were both stellar. You end up deciding you're going to open your own advertising agency, is that the deal?
Honey: So you did New York then you were in LA.
Robin: We both worked separately, and then we moved to LA and we worked separately. So we had worked separately and pretty much matched each other's advancement and salaries and everything the whole way. We were equal the whole way. Then we were in LA and we had child. We were both ...
Blaine: You were married, right?
Robin: We got married and we had a child. We were both really type A personalities, just working like crazy. It occurred to us that we needed to change our lives. So we decided to drop out. I mean, before we ever worked together, we kind of threw our fates together even beyond our marriage and children. We decided to drop out and move to one of our hometowns. Mine was Cleveland, his was Park City, and we picked Park City. So we moved ...
Robin: ... Park City and we picked Park City. We moved without jobs, without anything to Park City. We just sort of left our house behind and came here in search of the life we wanted to lead.
Blaine: I need to ask a question, how on earth did you decide Park City over Cleveland?
Jim: Yeah, go figure.
Robin: My mother still wonders that, and you know, the truth is, is that there's probably about 10000 times more business in Cleveland than in Park City, which we also failed to completely understand at the time. We came to Park City, and that was really, we didn't have jobs, we had nothing. We had a Mustang and a baby, family here, and we just came. We rented a house. We said, we'll be here in six weeks. We went back and quit jobs, and Jim at that point had his own business.
Honey: Wow.
Robin: He just left it and I left, I quit my job and we just came.
Blaine: You quit your own job?
Jim: Well, no, I actually had basically gone freelance, and so I had a couple of clients that were real steady, and then a lot of little project things. I talked to those couple of clients, and they all said, "Heck, I don't see why we can't do this by dial up." I didn't leave my business, no, my whole plan was just to work from here instead of there.
Robin: And it worked, he did keep those clients. But, so we came together, and we were here for a couple of years, we were probably here for a couple of years before we actually went into business together. I mean, Jim was then still, he had his own business in LA. So it was logical that he would start a business here, and I knew a lot about how it all worked, of course, but we would never work together. I started some crazy wholesale clothing business. I mean, I start, and I had another baby, and we were just sort of moving along.
Robin: Then Jim said at one point, "I think that if we partnered together, it could be really good ...
Honey: And what did you say?
Robin: ... I think we could make money and I think it could be really good." I said, "Oh, that's so corny, a husband, like darn." I was really skeptical. You never saw that in New York, you never saw that in LA, that was corny. He said, "Well, there's a lot of people in Utah who have had longterm agencies that are husband and wife, and right here in the town we live in, and we're in Utah now, that's not cony anymore." I was persuaded, and I think we went out. I was kind of persuaded that that would work.
Robin: We went out and got our first client, who I believe our first client we had together was Bill di Pasquale. And it really worked, it really did make sense, because we had so much experience, we were bringing together all sides of the whole equation. It was a unique thing to be able to offer, and it was immediately a whole different income equation. When Jim was doing the art direction and design, it was one part of equation, but when you added into it my whole skills set, you had a full agency services that we were able to provide.
Robin: It really made a big difference. We started getting more clients and growing, and we each majored in ... I think we would say we would each major and minor in some clients. We both had our, it was our company, but he would major in some clients and I would major in other clients. We often didn't know about what each other was doing with our individual clients.
Blaine: How did you get clients?
Jim: Almost entirely word of mouth.
Blaine: I'm familiar with that.
Jim: When we first moved here, we had a young child, three year old and so I did a lot of cold calling and a lot of knocking on doors, and that's how we first originally got into Marker Ski Bindings. But once it started to just sort of pick up, it was all word of mouth. Somebody would say, "Oh, I was talking to so and so that you've been doing work for."
Honey: What was the biggest challenge at least in the beginning of figuring out how to work together without making each other nuts?
Robin: I don't know that that was ever the challenge.
Honey: Really?
Robin: Well, I think that we came here and we did this because we really, it was lifestyle driven. We came here because we had a child and we were looking for a way to make this all work. We brought with us a whole lot of experience. We've met a lot of people who said, "I wish I could go live and sit in my house and work on the projects you do, and make a bunch of money like you are doing it." And we say, "Well, yeah, fly around at all hours totally inconveniencing yourself for 20 years, and you get to do that too."
Honey: They can be as glamorous as you are.
Robin: Yeah, so we came here to do that.
Honey: Yeah.
Robin: Part of the priority was always our whole family. I mean, if we wanted to make a bunch of money and work on a bunch of accounts, we would have stayed in New York and LA. This is not the hotbed of creativity and profit. It's Park City, Utah. We had for years, we built our business, and we had breakfast with our children every day. We had dinner with our children every night. We worked round the clock at all hours, but part of the whole purpose of it, and part of us throwing our careers in together was the day we moved here.
Robin: If we had wanted to, we'd completely changed our values then. Of course, we were trying to make everything work. We were trying to, and so we were grateful. I know I was grateful for everything Jim did for our family, as a father, as a family member, as much as my partner in this business. Everything he did, I was completely grateful for, because it wasn't just business and family, it was all blended into one. At any moment, the fire was, you put out a fire at your business, you put out a fire at your home.
Robin: It just became this completely different schedule lifestyle. We were just trying to do the best we could with everything, and so I don't know that we ever had conflicts about how to do the things that we were doing.
Jim: Not really, I mean mostly because I came from the art direction creative side and Robin's real background was client services, account management. So it was very [symbiotical 00:18:07] in that, so any time we would disagree was really much just like you would with anybody in an agency, in a real agency environment. The creatives are fighting for this, and the account people might be fighting for that.
Blaine: You weren't having creative arguments, you were having more procedural business arguments?
Robin: Sometimes, the biggest arguments we have are creative arguments, and about really the nature of the work. Is it good enough? Is it on strategy? Have we tried hard enough? Have we pushed ourselves hard enough? That's the thing we argue about the most. But we don't argue about how we do it, because I have specifically after all these years never learned how to use any of the design software. I've never even tried. I have stayed out of his tuff.
Honey: Yeah.
Robin: I don't, if someone said, "Retouch this." I couldn't. There's hardly any people who do what I do for this long who haven't played around and don't know how to do those things, but I don't and I never have tried. So every time he does anything, I am profoundly grateful 'cause I haven't a clue. So if I need something art-related, I don't try to create it myself, I ask him for it.
Robin: I think that's been a part of it. We've stayed off each other's tuff completely, so that we're not second guessing each other about it, and so we're completely grateful for what the other one does, because we're completely helpless without the other one, in certain areas of our business.
Blaine: I feel like that's ...
Honey: That's brilliant.
Blaine: ... it's got to be an object lesson for any couple that wants to start a business together on how to make it work, is just do not know how to do the other one's job.
Jim: Right, right.
Honey: And respect that the other person does.
Blaine: Yeah.
Jim: Right.
Robin: We have tried to say that to people. It's very difficult. I mean, some people are shocked that I have not learned how to use Photoshop, but I haven't.
Blaine: I haven't.
Honey: He doesn't know how to use Photoshop, illustrate and design.
Blaine: Thank you.
Robin: That seems like it's ...
Jim: And I really want nothing to do with Microsoft Excel at all.
Honey: Well, right, my least favorite program.
Robin: It seems that that division of labor has helped.
Blaine: Yeah.
Honey: Yeah.
Jim: Yeah, I mean, I can't really say this, but I think a lot of couples go into business let's say they're going to make T-shirts or widgets or something, and they somehow kind of have the same job. But they're going to tandem up, and that's I think, would be really difficult. We had 15 years, 20 years of experience in big agencies doing our jobs separately from each other, and so when we started our company together, it was like, "Okay, yeah, you're still doing your job, and I'm still doing my job, and that we're relatively very separate." As time's going on, we've blended that a lot more, Robin writes a lot more copy than she did in the beginning, body copy, and the creative has become more blended.
Honey: Evolved.
Robin: We've become a creative team over time, which has just been natural and not we needed to, it worked, we produced great stuff. I think if we were to go back to the big city, and we went as a creative team now, I think we'd be pretty good. The other thing that I think is I see all the time is that a lot of couples in business, it's one of their profession, and then the other one joins them.
Jim: Oh, yes.
Robin: So there's like the real professional and then the person who's joined and is learning, but has never really done it. I think that's what people expect when they see a husband-wife, that one of them has the credentials and the pedigree, and the other one is just sort of glomming on. They usually think it's ...
Robin: One is just sort of glomming on, and they usually think it's the wife.
Honey: I was going to ask you, knowing the kind of person you are, but has anybody made that mistake and treated you like you're the wife?
Robin: Everyone. Everyone makes that mistake pretty much, and they don't make that mistake for long.
Jim: Not for very long. Yeah. No.
Blaine: Having known you for the short time I've known you, I know what a horrible mistake that would be.
Robin: Well, they do ...
Robin: And they naturally are mistaken, and the thing about it is is that they're mistake becomes evident very quickly because my job is what happens at our meetings. My job is in that conference room. After we leave them and go to do our assignment, Jim does so much of the heavy lifting as any art director in the studio of our agency does. He runs that studio, and those deadlines get met, and everything gets produced.
Robin: But at that first meeting, when the pointed questions are asking, when all the things are being talked about that we need to do a good job, that's me. I'm argumentative. I sometimes wonder ... I will question them. I'll do all the things you need to do to really get the right answers, and that's not what you expect if you think that this is the guy's wife who's just part of the business. Right?
Honey: Helping.
Jim: Yeah. It only takes 10 minutes for them to realize that that's not the case.
Robin: Helping.
Honey: Yeah. I'm watching Jim. I'm watching your face. Do you just let them run down that rabbit hole and ruin themselves?
Jim: Sometimes, yeah. You know what? I've gotten to the point where ... I mean, we walk into a meeting, and I have so much faith and understanding of what Robin is about to do in terms of running this meeting, and trying to get to the bottom of what they're looking for, particularly when we're working on a bigger branding-type project, that a lot of times I forget, and it doesn't even occur to me that this is how this is going to go, and Robin's in charge.
Jim: Especially in those first meetings, largely what I do is I listen, and take notes, and just kind of absorb it all while she's talking, and she's drawing them out about where they want to be, what their point is. "What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are?" And so a lot of the time, I just listen and take it all in because, yeah, then I am the ... a lot of the time, when we leave there, then it is going to be my task to start putting that down on paper, and it's easier for me to just wait, and listen, and watch.
Blaine: To flip this around for a second because have there been times when ... The question was have there been times where they underestimate you because you're the wife, Robin, because you're obviously not the wife, Jim? Have there been times where people thought that, your clients thought, "Well, he's the man. He's ..."
Robin: And just talk to you?
Blaine: Yeah.
Robin: Oh.
Jim: Yes. There are a lot of times, but again, it only lasts for about five minutes before they-
Blaine: Before they get straightened out?
Jim: Before they--
Honey: The hammer comes down.
Jim: Yeah. Over the years, we've done several situations where, particularly men ... and largely a lot of these clients are men ... and, yeah, they just keep making eye contact with me, and they keep kind of talking to me. And then finally, at a certain point, they start to go, "Yeah, wait. He's just sitting there. He's not saying a whole lot, and Robin is complete dominating this conversation."
Robin: Because that's my role, to do that then. But I do ... I've always been a feminist. I went to New York alone. I have made my own great career alone. And I have wondered a number of times in the last 20 years we've been in business together, how much a role it plays or doesn't play in the pointed, pressing, challenging questions I ask people, that my husband's in the room. I sometimes wonder if I were just a woman, a part of team alone ... I'm not saying the questions I ask are unpleasant. I'm just saying I really ask questions, and I really get answers, and it's a little uncomfortable most of the time.
Blaine: They're what we call the hard questions.
Robin: I ask the hard questions, but my husband's always in the room. And so when we first started this business here in Utah, which is a very conservative state, with the very first clients we had, I felt clearly that that allowed me to say things I might not have been otherwise able to say 20 years ago in a conservative state. The presence of my husband in the room allowed me to be able to say something, which in a New York conference room, wouldn't even-
Jim: They wouldn't think twice.
Robin: But here, maybe. And I haven't thought about that in a while, but I definitely used to feel that way. Jim is ... If there's ever a good cop, bad cop on our team, he's good cop. I'm bad cop. I mean, he's got that reassuring smile and presence. I'm asking these questions that are annoying. We know, both of us, that if I don't get the answers to those questions, we are never going to be able to do our job and help these people ever, ever, ever. And so I have to keep going, as uncomfortable and difficult as it is. And so here's this woman asking all these questions and challenging everything with this handsome, mild-mannered, smiling husband there.
Robin: In 20 years ago, it let it work. I don't really know if I would have ... I never moved to Utah to work as an advertising professional. I never came here to go out and get clients on my own. We came here together to have a lifestyle decision, and we went into business together. I don't know what my career would have been if we had separated and tried to do it all separately, if it would have worked as well. Twenty years, a lot's changed in 20 years.
Honey: I mean, you're clearly, when I listen to you talk, and what you're fighting for is to get it right so you can do the best job for the client. So obviously, the passion for the work is there.
Robin: Yeah. It's just that people in ... People in sophisticated cities and marketing situations understand that you have to bear it all to get a good solution. And people in less sophisticated situations and markets think that they can read the press release to you, and you're going to be able to come up with a great solution to solve their business problem that they haven't wanted to tell you what it was.
Honey: Solved on their own. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Robin: And so that happens a lot. We have people ... "What are you trying to do?" "Well, everything's amazingly great." "Well, okay. So what's your problem?" "We don't have any problems." "Okay, then ..."
Blaine: "Why are you here?"
Honey: "Why are we talking?"
Robin: "Why are you here?"
Honey: "Did you want to buy me lunch?"
Robin: Right? And often, people at the end ... Often people, when they do get through the process of really saying what's happening, they will say, "I had no idea it was going to be like this. I had no idea that I was going to bear the soul of everything I've done." "Well, you have to tell the truth for us to fix it."
Honey: Right.
Blaine: Absolutely.
Robin: And so that's my job. And I think that being partners in this business has been a part of that job. We've also heard a lot about other husband-wife partners in our area doing this business. We hear about them all the time. People tell us about other husband-wife partners.
Blaine: Oh, dear. They usually tell the choice stories, don't they?
Honey: I hope they didn't say anything about us.
Blaine: Nah. Nobody knows us.
Honey: There you go.
Robin: Because there's that dynamic. You're a husband-wife. They're a husband-wife. And so you wonder ... I didn't wonder it at first because I wasn't paying attention to what anyone else is doing, but over time I started to wonder if people in the market started equating their experience with one husband-wife team with another. They thought that the dynamic of the marriage and the business would be the same because maybe they hadn't seen that animal before.
Robin: And our dynamic is a lot different than the other husband-wife teams in our market. And we've recently started to think that maybe we've been a little bit shortchanged by people thinking we're just like them. And we're nothing like them in how we work or anything that we produce.
Robin: We get along great, but we each bring it. And that means that sometimes we don't agree about what needs to be done. There's that constant push-pull in strategy and creative that there has to be for things to work out great. We don't just hang back and relax. We're here to do good work.
Blaine: Finally, we are here and we are talking to the legendary Jim Whitney and Robin Whitney of Whitney Advertising in Park City, Utah. Our first favorite couple in the Couple Co Hall of Fame.
Robin: Yay.
Blaine: We have an important question.
Robin: We're honored.
Blaine: Thank you.
Honey: No, we're honored.
Blaine: What is the first question? Do you have a question before that first one? I know you wanted to like throw some stuff out.
Honey: No. Let's get it rolling, and then ruin it.
Blaine: How the hell did you two meet?
Robin: Oh my goodness. I've said to myself, I'm going to try to sound like have a really good voice instead of my scratchy, Midwest voice. So it's going to start out sexy and then it's going to turn into.
Honey: We'll pitch you down.
Robin: We worked together. Doesn't everyone meet at work? We met at both of our first jobs out of college in a big agency in New York City.
Honey: I didn't realize it was your first job out of college.
Robin: It was my first and his first too.
Jim: Both, yeah.
Honey: Wow.
Robin: We worked in completely different departments. It was a really big company. There was a big active social scene and everyone was always partying around all the time. But we just worked together. We didn't party around all the time together. We worked together for probably a year.
Jim: Oh yeah. At least before we really ever really met.
Robin: Yes. I mean, he was just this blonde art director who worked on a couple of different accounts.
Honey: So you were just kind of in the same. So he was on the art directing side and you ...
Robin: At the time, I was ... At the time that we first met, it was my first job in advertising. So I was in the traffic department, about to be promoted into account management.
Honey: Whoa. Whoa.
Jim: Right.
Robin: So I was a traffic on his account. I was really so ambitious about my career that I was probably the worst traffic person ever. So he does tell a story about how he would call me to get templates or something, and I would hesitate to even take the time to bring them to him. I would tell them where they were. Go get them yourself.
Honey: My future husband.
Robin: I really had no idea.
Jim: The biggest account at that agency was a (bleep) tobacco.
Honey: Big account.
Robin: Why would you say that?
Jim: Because it's a fact. It's all right.
Robin: This is a fact we try not to talk about.
Jim: Why?
Robin: Because it's ...
Jim: Advertising. So we did a lot of outdoor. You can edit that.
Robin: We can be subpoenaed.
Jim: So we did a lot of outdoor advertising back then. There were a lot of 30 sheets and 14 by 48's.
Robin: I know what those are.
Jim: Somebody said we need to do this outdoor board. So call that Robin over in traffic and get her to bring you the template. So I call her on her extension. I say, "I need that template for the 30 sheet." She goes, "It's hanging on Bobby's wall. Just go get it."
Robin: I'm sure I didn't say it quite like that.
Jim: Just like that. That was basically our first interaction.
Robin: So proving that you really might know the love of your life right now and you might not know it.
Jim: Yeah. It's true.
Honey: Fair enough.
Jim: You maybe had already met.
Robin: Always wear clean underwear. You never know.
Jim: So it wasn't until we had a mutual friend who was having her 30th birthday party. The two of us were like 23. So she was 30. Oh man. Wow.
Robin: She's old.
Jim: Birthday party. Yeah. We went separately with different groups of people, and it was flat out across the room eye contact. Spent literally the whole evening at this birthday party in a corner just talking to each other like this close together.
Robin: It was amazing. I really felt like ... I look at that as the night I met him, even though I had known him for a year.
Honey: Right.
Blaine: It was social. There was the agency business in the middle of it.
Robin: Yeah. He just really was extremely attractive.
Blaine: Might I say he still is. Might I also add, something we didn't point out, we have two advertising mucky-mucks from Park City here. They're both wearing designer eye glasses and they're both wearing black shirts.
Honey: I have on a black shirt. I was trying to measure up.
Blaine: We're fitting the stereotype. So anyway, if I recall correctly that you had a ...
Honey: Stipulation.
Blaine: Rule. A rule about ...
Robin: I was dating someone else. I didn't show up to the party with a bunch of people. I came alone. I didn't have any friends at the office that I hung around with very much. So I decided to go. As we were leaving that party, the group of people who Jim was with was a number of young women, and they called a cab and sort of pushed me into it and sent me on my way.
Blaine: Slammed the door and said, "See you later."
Robin: I didn't date anyone at work. I was never going to date anyone at work. But I was curious and interested. So I invited him out to lunch, which I was going to pay for so that I could decide if there was any real potential or if that was just one night's insanity. We had a nice lunch, and at the end of the lunch I said, "Yes, I would date you if you worked somewhere else." Luckily ...
Jim: “Policy: I won't date a coworker.”
Robin: Luckily, he went and got a job somewhere else right away.
Jim: Luckily, I was already looking for another job.
Honey: Oh, okay. I was going to say, Wow you must have just known.
Blaine: Motivation.
Jim: Didn't abandon my career.
Robin: How long was it since the time I told you to get another job that I would date you if you got another job?
Jim: It was probably a month.
Robin: A month.
Jim: Yeah. Three or four weeks.
Robin: Then we started dating. Yeah.
Honey: How long were you guys dating before it was like, "Yeah. This is just a forever."
Robin: Oh, no. No, no, no. I relentlessly pursued him. I invited him on every date I possibly could think of that he could not resist going on. I was definitely the pursuer.
Jim: She was dating another person.
Robin: I was dating another person.
Jim: I was too.
Robin: Yeah.
Jim: So all you knew ... Robin was very mysterious. Clearly people in the office who understood that I was maybe having a lunch with Robin were dumbfounded that this could even possibly be taken place. Because she was dating a very wealthy man and ...
Robin: It's true.
Jim: Very wealthy man, foreigner.
Blaine: You become a kept woman? Was that your plan?
Robin: If you're really cute in New York, there is a period of time when it's really hard not to think about what opportunities might be up.
Honey: I was never cute enough when I was in New York.
Blaine: Jim, did you find that to be true?
Jim: I was never cute enough. It was really tentative at first. But Robin would call, and she's say, "I've got a bottle of champagne and I'm going to meet you on the benches in front of the Natural History Museum." Because I lived on 80th and Amsterdam, right by the ... "Can you meet me there? I'll be there in 20 minutes." I would say, "Okay. I'll be there." So we would meet and ...
Robin: Or I've got tickets for Bowie.
Jim: Yeah.
Robin: Do you want to go? You know what, I feel like buying ... I feel like eating a whole lot of shrimp at that great place on Central Park West, do you want to go?
Jim: Of course I would say yes. But this persona that she had, she was still, at that time, dating this very, very wealthy man. She had great clothes and everything. Partly because of that.
Blaine: You can't see the faces that Robin's making.
Jim: I always just thought ... My whole point of view was I kind of had this girl I was dating, and it was just like totally she's messing with me. This is going no where. This is never going to work. I don't know why she's messing around with this Podunk kid from Utah. But one day it's going to end in a tragic ...
Honey: Blaze.
Jim: Final ... Yeah, one giant swoop and it'll be over. So I never allowed myself ... Early on, I didn't get too committed to it.
Robin: Yeah.
Jim: She would call me up and say, "I got tickets to the B-52s on the Pier, you want to go?"
Honey: I'd say yes.
Jim: Okay.
Blaine: Why not?
Honey: So what turned the corner?
Robin: Well, after a bunch of months of really doing everything I could to get his interest and get him to want to go out with me and spend time with me, I decided that it's true. I have a rich boyfriend and I have all kinds of other things going on. So I should just give up. Why am I doing this? So I kind of gave up. I decided I would just follow my own trajectory. Around that same time, Jim decided that maybe he should pay more attention to this girl who was interested in him.
Honey: Is it because she backed off?
Jim: Totally.
Blaine: Yeah, we all know how that works.
Jim: Reverse psychology.
Honey: We know that exactly.
Blaine: Yes. So what we need to do then is fast forward to your blazing careers in advertising, which I know were both stellar. You end up deciding you're going to open your own advertising agency, is that the deal?
Honey: So you did New York then you were in LA.
Robin: We both worked separately, and then we moved to LA and we worked separately. So we had worked separately and pretty much matched each other's advancement and salaries and everything the whole way. We were equal the whole way. Then we were in LA and we had child. We were both ...
Blaine: You were married, right?
Robin: We got married and we had a child. We were both really type A personalities, just working like crazy. It occurred to us that we needed to change our lives. So we decided to drop out. I mean, before we ever worked together, we kind of threw our fates together even beyond our marriage and children. We decided to drop out and move to one of our hometowns. Mine was Cleveland, his was Park City, and we picked Park City. So we moved ...
Robin: ... Park City and we picked Park City. We moved without jobs, without anything to Park City. We just sort of left our house behind and came here in search of the life we wanted to lead.
Blaine: I need to ask a question, how on earth did you decide Park City over Cleveland?
Jim: Yeah, go figure.
Robin: My mother still wonders that, and you know, the truth is, is that there's probably about 10000 times more business in Cleveland than in Park City, which we also failed to completely understand at the time. We came to Park City, and that was really, we didn't have jobs, we had nothing. We had a Mustang and a baby, family here, and we just came. We rented a house. We said, we'll be here in six weeks. We went back and quit jobs, and Jim at that point had his own business.
Honey: Wow.
Robin: He just left it and I left, I quit my job and we just came.
Blaine: You quit your own job?
Jim: Well, no, I actually had basically gone freelance, and so I had a couple of clients that were real steady, and then a lot of little project things. I talked to those couple of clients, and they all said, "Heck, I don't see why we can't do this by dial up." I didn't leave my business, no, my whole plan was just to work from here instead of there.
Robin: And it worked, he did keep those clients. But, so we came together, and we were here for a couple of years, we were probably here for a couple of years before we actually went into business together. I mean, Jim was then still, he had his own business in LA. So it was logical that he would start a business here, and I knew a lot about how it all worked, of course, but we would never work together. I started some crazy wholesale clothing business. I mean, I start, and I had another baby, and we were just sort of moving along.
Robin: Then Jim said at one point, "I think that if we partnered together, it could be really good ...
Honey: And what did you say?
Robin: ... I think we could make money and I think it could be really good." I said, "Oh, that's so corny, a husband, like darn." I was really skeptical. You never saw that in New York, you never saw that in LA, that was corny. He said, "Well, there's a lot of people in Utah who have had longterm agencies that are husband and wife, and right here in the town we live in, and we're in Utah now, that's not cony anymore." I was persuaded, and I think we went out. I was kind of persuaded that that would work.
Robin: We went out and got our first client, who I believe our first client we had together was Bill di Pasquale. And it really worked, it really did make sense, because we had so much experience, we were bringing together all sides of the whole equation. It was a unique thing to be able to offer, and it was immediately a whole different income equation. When Jim was doing the art direction and design, it was one part of equation, but when you added into it my whole skills set, you had a full agency services that we were able to provide.
Robin: It really made a big difference. We started getting more clients and growing, and we each majored in ... I think we would say we would each major and minor in some clients. We both had our, it was our company, but he would major in some clients and I would major in other clients. We often didn't know about what each other was doing with our individual clients.
Blaine: How did you get clients?
Jim: Almost entirely word of mouth.
Blaine: I'm familiar with that.
Jim: When we first moved here, we had a young child, three year old and so I did a lot of cold calling and a lot of knocking on doors, and that's how we first originally got into Marker Ski Bindings. But once it started to just sort of pick up, it was all word of mouth. Somebody would say, "Oh, I was talking to so and so that you've been doing work for."
Honey: What was the biggest challenge at least in the beginning of figuring out how to work together without making each other nuts?
Robin: I don't know that that was ever the challenge.
Honey: Really?
Robin: Well, I think that we came here and we did this because we really, it was lifestyle driven. We came here because we had a child and we were looking for a way to make this all work. We brought with us a whole lot of experience. We've met a lot of people who said, "I wish I could go live and sit in my house and work on the projects you do, and make a bunch of money like you are doing it." And we say, "Well, yeah, fly around at all hours totally inconveniencing yourself for 20 years, and you get to do that too."
Honey: They can be as glamorous as you are.
Robin: Yeah, so we came here to do that.
Honey: Yeah.
Robin: Part of the priority was always our whole family. I mean, if we wanted to make a bunch of money and work on a bunch of accounts, we would have stayed in New York and LA. This is not the hotbed of creativity and profit. It's Park City, Utah. We had for years, we built our business, and we had breakfast with our children every day. We had dinner with our children every night. We worked round the clock at all hours, but part of the whole purpose of it, and part of us throwing our careers in together was the day we moved here.
Robin: If we had wanted to, we'd completely changed our values then. Of course, we were trying to make everything work. We were trying to, and so we were grateful. I know I was grateful for everything Jim did for our family, as a father, as a family member, as much as my partner in this business. Everything he did, I was completely grateful for, because it wasn't just business and family, it was all blended into one. At any moment, the fire was, you put out a fire at your business, you put out a fire at your home.
Robin: It just became this completely different schedule lifestyle. We were just trying to do the best we could with everything, and so I don't know that we ever had conflicts about how to do the things that we were doing.
Jim: Not really, I mean mostly because I came from the art direction creative side and Robin's real background was client services, account management. So it was very [symbiotical 00:18:07] in that, so any time we would disagree was really much just like you would with anybody in an agency, in a real agency environment. The creatives are fighting for this, and the account people might be fighting for that.
Blaine: You weren't having creative arguments, you were having more procedural business arguments?
Robin: Sometimes, the biggest arguments we have are creative arguments, and about really the nature of the work. Is it good enough? Is it on strategy? Have we tried hard enough? Have we pushed ourselves hard enough? That's the thing we argue about the most. But we don't argue about how we do it, because I have specifically after all these years never learned how to use any of the design software. I've never even tried. I have stayed out of his tuff.
Honey: Yeah.
Robin: I don't, if someone said, "Retouch this." I couldn't. There's hardly any people who do what I do for this long who haven't played around and don't know how to do those things, but I don't and I never have tried. So every time he does anything, I am profoundly grateful 'cause I haven't a clue. So if I need something art-related, I don't try to create it myself, I ask him for it.
Robin: I think that's been a part of it. We've stayed off each other's tuff completely, so that we're not second guessing each other about it, and so we're completely grateful for what the other one does, because we're completely helpless without the other one, in certain areas of our business.
Blaine: I feel like that's ...
Honey: That's brilliant.
Blaine: ... it's got to be an object lesson for any couple that wants to start a business together on how to make it work, is just do not know how to do the other one's job.
Jim: Right, right.
Honey: And respect that the other person does.
Blaine: Yeah.
Jim: Right.
Robin: We have tried to say that to people. It's very difficult. I mean, some people are shocked that I have not learned how to use Photoshop, but I haven't.
Blaine: I haven't.
Honey: He doesn't know how to use Photoshop, illustrate and design.
Blaine: Thank you.
Robin: That seems like it's ...
Jim: And I really want nothing to do with Microsoft Excel at all.
Honey: Well, right, my least favorite program.
Robin: It seems that that division of labor has helped.
Blaine: Yeah.
Honey: Yeah.
Jim: Yeah, I mean, I can't really say this, but I think a lot of couples go into business let's say they're going to make T-shirts or widgets or something, and they somehow kind of have the same job. But they're going to tandem up, and that's I think, would be really difficult. We had 15 years, 20 years of experience in big agencies doing our jobs separately from each other, and so when we started our company together, it was like, "Okay, yeah, you're still doing your job, and I'm still doing my job, and that we're relatively very separate." As time's going on, we've blended that a lot more, Robin writes a lot more copy than she did in the beginning, body copy, and the creative has become more blended.
Honey: Evolved.
Robin: We've become a creative team over time, which has just been natural and not we needed to, it worked, we produced great stuff. I think if we were to go back to the big city, and we went as a creative team now, I think we'd be pretty good. The other thing that I think is I see all the time is that a lot of couples in business, it's one of their profession, and then the other one joins them.
Jim: Oh, yes.
Robin: So there's like the real professional and then the person who's joined and is learning, but has never really done it. I think that's what people expect when they see a husband-wife, that one of them has the credentials and the pedigree, and the other one is just sort of glomming on. They usually think it's ...
Robin: One is just sort of glomming on, and they usually think it's the wife.
Honey: I was going to ask you, knowing the kind of person you are, but has anybody made that mistake and treated you like you're the wife?
Robin: Everyone. Everyone makes that mistake pretty much, and they don't make that mistake for long.
Jim: Not for very long. Yeah. No.
Blaine: Having known you for the short time I've known you, I know what a horrible mistake that would be.
Robin: Well, they do ...
Robin: And they naturally are mistaken, and the thing about it is is that they're mistake becomes evident very quickly because my job is what happens at our meetings. My job is in that conference room. After we leave them and go to do our assignment, Jim does so much of the heavy lifting as any art director in the studio of our agency does. He runs that studio, and those deadlines get met, and everything gets produced.
Robin: But at that first meeting, when the pointed questions are asking, when all the things are being talked about that we need to do a good job, that's me. I'm argumentative. I sometimes wonder ... I will question them. I'll do all the things you need to do to really get the right answers, and that's not what you expect if you think that this is the guy's wife who's just part of the business. Right?
Honey: Helping.
Jim: Yeah. It only takes 10 minutes for them to realize that that's not the case.
Robin: Helping.
Honey: Yeah. I'm watching Jim. I'm watching your face. Do you just let them run down that rabbit hole and ruin themselves?
Jim: Sometimes, yeah. You know what? I've gotten to the point where ... I mean, we walk into a meeting, and I have so much faith and understanding of what Robin is about to do in terms of running this meeting, and trying to get to the bottom of what they're looking for, particularly when we're working on a bigger branding-type project, that a lot of times I forget, and it doesn't even occur to me that this is how this is going to go, and Robin's in charge.
Jim: Especially in those first meetings, largely what I do is I listen, and take notes, and just kind of absorb it all while she's talking, and she's drawing them out about where they want to be, what their point is. "What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are?" And so a lot of the time, I just listen and take it all in because, yeah, then I am the ... a lot of the time, when we leave there, then it is going to be my task to start putting that down on paper, and it's easier for me to just wait, and listen, and watch.
Blaine: To flip this around for a second because have there been times when ... The question was have there been times where they underestimate you because you're the wife, Robin, because you're obviously not the wife, Jim? Have there been times where people thought that, your clients thought, "Well, he's the man. He's ..."
Robin: And just talk to you?
Blaine: Yeah.
Robin: Oh.
Jim: Yes. There are a lot of times, but again, it only lasts for about five minutes before they-
Blaine: Before they get straightened out?
Jim: Before they--
Honey: The hammer comes down.
Jim: Yeah. Over the years, we've done several situations where, particularly men ... and largely a lot of these clients are men ... and, yeah, they just keep making eye contact with me, and they keep kind of talking to me. And then finally, at a certain point, they start to go, "Yeah, wait. He's just sitting there. He's not saying a whole lot, and Robin is complete dominating this conversation."
Robin: Because that's my role, to do that then. But I do ... I've always been a feminist. I went to New York alone. I have made my own great career alone. And I have wondered a number of times in the last 20 years we've been in business together, how much a role it plays or doesn't play in the pointed, pressing, challenging questions I ask people, that my husband's in the room. I sometimes wonder if I were just a woman, a part of team alone ... I'm not saying the questions I ask are unpleasant. I'm just saying I really ask questions, and I really get answers, and it's a little uncomfortable most of the time.
Blaine: They're what we call the hard questions.
Robin: I ask the hard questions, but my husband's always in the room. And so when we first started this business here in Utah, which is a very conservative state, with the very first clients we had, I felt clearly that that allowed me to say things I might not have been otherwise able to say 20 years ago in a conservative state. The presence of my husband in the room allowed me to be able to say something, which in a New York conference room, wouldn't even-
Jim: They wouldn't think twice.
Robin: But here, maybe. And I haven't thought about that in a while, but I definitely used to feel that way. Jim is ... If there's ever a good cop, bad cop on our team, he's good cop. I'm bad cop. I mean, he's got that reassuring smile and presence. I'm asking these questions that are annoying. We know, both of us, that if I don't get the answers to those questions, we are never going to be able to do our job and help these people ever, ever, ever. And so I have to keep going, as uncomfortable and difficult as it is. And so here's this woman asking all these questions and challenging everything with this handsome, mild-mannered, smiling husband there.
Robin: In 20 years ago, it let it work. I don't really know if I would have ... I never moved to Utah to work as an advertising professional. I never came here to go out and get clients on my own. We came here together to have a lifestyle decision, and we went into business together. I don't know what my career would have been if we had separated and tried to do it all separately, if it would have worked as well. Twenty years, a lot's changed in 20 years.
Honey: I mean, you're clearly, when I listen to you talk, and what you're fighting for is to get it right so you can do the best job for the client. So obviously, the passion for the work is there.
Robin: Yeah. It's just that people in ... People in sophisticated cities and marketing situations understand that you have to bear it all to get a good solution. And people in less sophisticated situations and markets think that they can read the press release to you, and you're going to be able to come up with a great solution to solve their business problem that they haven't wanted to tell you what it was.
Honey: Solved on their own. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Robin: And so that happens a lot. We have people ... "What are you trying to do?" "Well, everything's amazingly great." "Well, okay. So what's your problem?" "We don't have any problems." "Okay, then ..."
Blaine: "Why are you here?"
Honey: "Why are we talking?"
Robin: "Why are you here?"
Honey: "Did you want to buy me lunch?"
Robin: Right? And often, people at the end ... Often people, when they do get through the process of really saying what's happening, they will say, "I had no idea it was going to be like this. I had no idea that I was going to bear the soul of everything I've done." "Well, you have to tell the truth for us to fix it."
Honey: Right.
Blaine: Absolutely.
Robin: And so that's my job. And I think that being partners in this business has been a part of that job. We've also heard a lot about other husband-wife partners in our area doing this business. We hear about them all the time. People tell us about other husband-wife partners.
Blaine: Oh, dear. They usually tell the choice stories, don't they?
Honey: I hope they didn't say anything about us.
Blaine: Nah. Nobody knows us.
Honey: There you go.
Robin: Because there's that dynamic. You're a husband-wife. They're a husband-wife. And so you wonder ... I didn't wonder it at first because I wasn't paying attention to what anyone else is doing, but over time I started to wonder if people in the market started equating their experience with one husband-wife team with another. They thought that the dynamic of the marriage and the business would be the same because maybe they hadn't seen that animal before.
Robin: And our dynamic is a lot different than the other husband-wife teams in our market. And we've recently started to think that maybe we've been a little bit shortchanged by people thinking we're just like them. And we're nothing like them in how we work or anything that we produce.
Robin: We get along great, but we each bring it. And that means that sometimes we don't agree about what needs to be done. There's that constant push-pull in strategy and creative that there has to be for things to work out great. We don't just hang back and relax. We're here to do good work.
