We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jonny Cunningham. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jonny below.
Jonny, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Crazy stuff happening is almost as certain as death and taxes – it’s technically “unexpected” but something unexpected happening is to be expected and so can you share a crazy story with our readers
My background was design, presentation graphics, publications office management. I was happy to fly under the radar and help small businesses achieve their dream of getting a great look-n-feel to their logo, their brand, they external presentation to their customers. That’s where I thrived, but it’s a really, really hard thing to sell. Many business owners want to cut corners and do things themselves. I felt the weight of the ‘graphic designer’ world on my shoulders, trying to work convincingly enough to validate our existence as an industry. This is the upward climb I found myself challenged with to put enough contracts together to feed my family. We were barely making it with client work to support the growing needs of my wife and kids at around $50k annually. In my search for adding new clients and raising our baseline I offered to sub for a graphic designer who was going on maternity leave. Her job was to work for Berry Design, Crabapple GA. They had some amazing client contracts including but not limited to Popeyes Chicken n Biscuits, Outback Steakhouse, Dunkin’ (Bob Berry designed their most recent logo) and more. I was thrilled to be working on more high profile work, and yet just soaking in all I could learn during my short spell of working for Berry. I mentioned to the owner, Bob, that I’d had experience in putting small magazines together and showed him a few samples. He didn’t react much, but obviously – as I found out later – banked that small tidbit in his mind.
Fast forward a couple of months. My stint at Berry Design had come to an end, and I’d already been back to the grind on my own with building up my own client list. In mid-flow I get a call from Berry Design’s project coordinator and get asked to drop by to look at a catalog project they needed help with. Sounded great! I booked the time in my calendar and headed over to discover how I could help. In my head I was thinking like, “hmm… I’m probably hopping in on a multi-team member project, taking a template and just filling in the blanks… whatever, it will be great additional experience…”
My jaw hit the floor. The manager pulled me to her desk, showed me what they needed. Northwest Airlines (now owned and absorbed by Delta) needed help putting their next quarterly seat-back duty free catalog together. Berry Design had no time. They were totally wrapped up with too much other work.
Only God can work such a blessing and drop a major project like this into the mix! Wow. This was huge. I had a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions ranging from dread to excitement and back again. It’s not every day you go from helping a small town jewelry store with their logo and wall graphics to stepping into the airline industry!
As time went on, the crazy continued. I worked through the first catalog and it was a roaring success. I was asked to continue. During the build of the second catalog I found ways to improve the submission process as well as cut the file sizes in half or more, building efficiency and time savings into the process and adding value to the final output experience. I would find errors on some of the ads coming in (supplied by large international agencies) for cosmetic brands and other internationally recognized suppliers with major brand recognition. It involved connecting and coordinating with reps in france, italy, hong kong. At times I was the only one available to go ahead and make the corrections.
At the stage of the need for a 3rd catalog, Berry Design offered me the entire contract. They told me what they charged and it was a game changer. I was able to raise my fees and finally gain the worth I seemed to be able to be offering. This was a new level for me, and by God’s grace I was able to expand beyond Northwest Airlines.
After 6 years, I was working for two duty-free retailers who had contracts with Air Canada, Hong Kong Airlines, AЭROFLOT, Cathay Pacific, Sri Lankan Airlines, Air India, Philippine airlines and about a half dozen other smaller carriers. As a small business we soared to an income of over $200k annually. I hired 1099 help here and there, but the bulk was still inhouse. It really set the stage for the most rewarding experience building of my career.
With a strong sense of brand protection and individualism, the challenge was to work hard to protect each of these brands and work with them simultaneously. It’s what taught me much of what I now teach as a branding consultant to the companies I work for today. Obviously the airline industry moved away from printing a quarter of a million 200 page catalogs to a digital shopping experience, and the industry changed and over time led me down a different path. I’ll never forget what God did when he led me to Berry Design. Our family was able to afford to adopt our youngest son as a result of the stronger income, and we’re forever blessed on that account alone.
Jonny, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I personally became excited about design and the intricate aspects of art and branding for business through the inspiration gained from watching my dad. He cut his teeth working at a TV studio and had an affinity for clean and consistent art. I watched him and learned and developed my own love for the entire world of design. Owning our own business today, I never thought would be possible, but was largely shaped by the work ethic my dad had in being a sole operator.
Through the years our business has offered many layers of solutions for small businesses, and a good handful of corporations. Our abilities and capabilities can stretch to the very beginnings of web design, print design, brand development (logo design), and all the way through to marketing strategies, building brands, protecting brands, deploying visual consistency and so much more. On the fringe (but an exciting place for me), we can offer artistic renderings for architects, area planning sketches, developmental planning renderings, hand-drawn visualizations for new development, general business consulting, guest speaking at university level class tuition on any of these topics, project management of large scale signage and on-site branding, customer service strategy training for leadership and internal teams… the list goes on.
Where companies are struggling with consistency and internal culture/ownership of the brand, we can help solve that with a visual cohesiveness study and solutions proposal, as well as internal training of all levels of the team.
The company I have formed with the rock-solid constancy of my wife by my side is a collective of creatives that understand the creativity in every role. No one is an employee, but we are connected by contracted projects together. I tend to fall into the lead on most of them by default, but we can cover multiple avenues of solutions, including now interior design added to the list above. It’s an exciting development to see so much talent in the collective.
Can you talk to us about your experience with buying businesses?
I bought a small client list from a friend. He had served these clients well for a few years, and then was offered a full time position with one of them. The rest he did not want to leave abandoned, so after trying to ‘run’ his company for a year, I decided it would be better to pull them into my own company and serve them directly. We agreed to a rough value of the client work for the period of 24 months. That gave us an approximate value of the client list, which we then split into monthly payments of a pre-determined, consistent amount. I then payed him out of profits in order to satisfy the full value after an agreed schedule of payments.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
One of the things we have done is, although we started from the ground up – simply purchasing our equipment out of pocket and working out of the house to save office space costs, we have now been able to accelerate certain parts of the growing business by utilizing Square loans. Square is an online invoice processing firm. You can find their checkout tablets all over the country, especially in small coffee shops and market booth businesses especially. They are similar to Clover and a few others. After using their invoicing solution for a long time, they began to see the funds coming through our accounts and offered a flat fee loan – that doesn’t affect your credit at all. The loan is repaid automatically from a percentage of future sales. We’ve successfully utilized these funds to accomplish some exciting goals and get things moving a little faster than saving ahead of time (although, in a better scenario, I would still recommend saving rather than borrowing).
Contact Info:
- Website: artiscollective.com