Havoc Inspired

Leif Steiner is the Creative Director for Moxie Sozo, a 17 strong design agency based in Boulder, Colorado. Leif has infectious enthusiasm for the world of design and in this weeks episode he takes me through his career and direction his company is taking.

Leif Steiner – The Highlights

So what’s your job title?

Cat herder *laughs*, on the business card it says Creative Director, I actually own the agency but I don’t look at it that way, we have a very egalitarian kind of system here my job is to keep everyone heading in the same direction. Sometimes when you have 17 people in an office and 12 of them are full on creatives it’s like herding cats so I say Cat herder but I feel a more accurate title would be, bus driver of the gifted bus you know, I’ve got all the smart kids on the bus I’m just making sure we going in the right direction…

Can you tell me a bit about your company, how did you get started with that?

We are 10 years old and I worked for two other agencies before starting this and I had a lot of problem with the way a lot of design and advertising agencies were run and the biggest thing that I saw was a lot of agencies making decisions that benefitted them and not their clients. Financial decisions where they would recommend things to their clients that weren’t in their best interests but made the agencies lots of money.

I also have a very strong design background, I went to one of the best design programs in the country so what I saw was a lot of design work and a lot of creative work, in fact lets back up, if you assign a number 1 to very bad work and arbitrarily a number 10 to really really good work very few clients know anything past a 5. You can produce a 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and clients can see that they like the 4 better than the 3 but anything past a 5, clients tend not to be able to see the difference, well most agencies, their businesses and they’re running in such a way that they aim to do a 5.5 because anything past a 5 is just wasted time which is wasted money. For me having a strong dedication to exceptional work, in our office we’re always going for those 9’s and 10’s, even if the client doesn’t know anything past a 5…

… so I started Moxie Sozo with the full intent of being able to produce great work without being told by someone above me that we needed to stop, move on and hit the next project. Yes this is a business, yes we need to make pay-roll, pay our rent etc, but at the end of the day it more a collection of phenomenally talented creative people who all have that shared vision of doing more than just pumping out brochures for the local hospital etc and I think that’s the foundation for who we are and how we got started.

So you’ve told me a little bit about your business, day to day what are you personally doing there?

Putting out fires *laughs*, without exaggerating we tend to work 60 – 80 hours a week here so the day for me really is truly going from client to designer, from a meeting to a conference call. When it comes to actually having uninterrupted quiet time I don’t get that until 10, 11 o’clock at night or on the weekends. So my day to day activities consist of art directing everyone, having said that we have a phenomenally talented group of people here and so I could disappear for a month and I’d come back are the work would be great, so it’s more me just nudging things strategically in one direction or another but I’m not a micro-manager, I hire very good people who can manage themselves my job is more to make sure we’re all just heading in the right direction and overseeing from a more broad perspective.

What’s your greatest achievement?

… in 2005 hurricane Katrina struck the United States, New Orleans and it caused billions of dollars of damage, killed several thousand people and it was a catastrophic event on many, including political levels, so my greatest achievement so far I would say is after hurricane Katrina in our office we actually organised a world wide collaborative effort of designers and artists to design and donate limited edition series of posters, it was called the Hurricane Poster Project, we got about 180 people to do the posters, they were signed and number and they sent them to us, we sold them and we raised $50,000. All the money was donated to victims of the hurricane. $50,000 is a drop in the bucket but to me it was incredibly satisfying and very moving to get phone calls from people in the effected area. We had a article appear in the local news paper and that day we had so many phone calls, emails and letters from people thanking us for putting this together…

Where do you see yourself in the future?

We don’t have a 3 year plan to be twice the size or three times the size. We want to continue to grow in such a way that we can work with any client that we want to work with. Moving forward into the future, I want us to be a world class agency, I’d rather be 80 years old, well lets hope I make it to 80 years old, and broke and have created an amazing institution than to be 80 years old and rich and be irrelevant. That is for us the driving force and the path we’re on, putting together a world class agency and producing great work.

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