We recently connected with Tyler Anne Lowe and have shared our conversation below.

Tyler Anne, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

In late 2020, I was sitting in a coffee shop with my now business partner, Daniel. It was one of those funky kind of places with seriously strong coffee, eclectic food options, tiny uneven tables and squashed, mismatched chairs, and every single piece of wall covered by art-for-sale or vintage prints.

Back then, Daniel was a client of mine, and I was trying to convince him that leaving a stable job with good pay and benefits was a good idea. We had had many prior conversations, and in this latest round I was describing the kind of company I wanted to create and the results of some market research I had done.

A few years earlier, a foray into freelance work had, unexpectedly, turned into a good way to make a living as a creative professional. My hunch that I had skills that people would find valuable had borne out. But I was struggling with how to brand myself in a truly distinct way, that would set me apart, and also give me the kind of clients and projects I most wanted.

Branding my services as a creative professional was much more challenging than I had expected. I had dipped my toe in “trying to do anything for anybody” and quickly discovered that that did not work.I went home and cried myself to sleep out of frustration after networking happy hours, where I told people about my business and skill set and they told me I was sitting on top of a gold mine. I had to figure out my brand story.

Intuitively, I know that the right brand would be a valuable asset, that would help step away from working on un-creative projects that I got by being the lowest bidder.

I worked with business consultants, read marketing books, and took online courses. But it was a brilliant brand strategist named Andrea Shillington that helped me crack the code. We designed a survey to dial in what my customers wanted. I talked to a few dozen people in my target market (primarily, educators and policy influencers, people wanting to change hearts and minds). I reached out to people in my network I hadn’t spoken to in years. I cold emailed folks. I cornered the guy in my WeWork space. I was determined!

The survey included questions about online education and digital engagement. Ironically, I conducted it in February 2020.

Now, half a year later, I was still digesting and mulling over the results.

Andrea had pulled out a phrase that intrigued me, a theme she saw in the results from the survey. It wasn’t a phrase anyone had said directly, but it was the spirit of what they were getting at when they described both their biggest challenges and what the most valuable thing would be.

Over lattes, I mentioned this phrase in passing to Daniel. I was waxing eloquent about content creation opportunities, and touched on the customer and market research work as context for that work. The delivery of the phrase was sort of garbled.

Daniel, with the mind of a brilliant marketer, stopped me. “That’s the single most valuable brand asset I’ve heard from you.”

What was that phrase? Return on Ideas.

Since first uttered, the phrase “Return on Ideas” has haunted us. At first we weren’t sure how it would fit in. Would it be the name of a product time? A theme for our content marketing?

A play on “return on investment,” the concept “return on ideas” got to the core of the value we bring and the way we wanted to partner with clients. It spoke of our promise to our customers, and the challenges they face – how do you measure success in how well you’ve informed or persuaded someone else? What does a return look like? It got to the core of the value we bring and the way we wanted to partner with clients.

Many more conversations, and several months after that conversation at the coffee shop, Daniel did leave his job to co-found a new business, called Return on Ideas.

Tyler Anne, 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?

A play on “Return on Investment,” ROI helps ideas-oriented organizations communicate creatively and persuasively with their target audiences, helping them measure success along the way.

Our main service product is Cloud CMO, which gives our customers access to the strategic leadership of a liberty-minded Chief Marketing Officer able to draw upon a full-service team of marketing specialists at a fraction of the cost of a full-time CMO or marketing team.

We also have robust content production services, and run training and workshops around marketing, production and creativity.

Our logo is a conversation piece. It’s an abstract shape originally derived from the “R” (from “Return.”) Everyone sees something different in it and creates their own meaning from its abstract shape. I attach an image of our holiday gift from last year – a puzzle where I sketched out with some the objects from our running list of what people have told us our logo looks like. Daniel even wrote an article about it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danieltrichards_one-year-ago-today-tyler-and-i-launched-activity-6960009699039531008-OoQa?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

My professional skill set is a mix of creative director, producer, writer, program director, and “willing to do whatever it takes to figure it out and make it work.”

I specialize in designing innovative, high-quality digital learning content. I love transforming complex, dense educational material into simple, engaging, and persuasive videos. With my team, we thrive on tackling complex challenges and building systems to deliver value at scale. I’ve primarily produced animated short videos, but have some audio production and documentary experience thrown in for good measure.

I’m a behind-the-scenes sort of gal. I most enjoy designing systems to solve hard problems. I like taking people who, under most circumstances, would never work together (say, a professor and an illustrator) and using their divergent skill sets to make a media product that is both artful and informative.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

With a philosophy degree, all of my professional skills have been pretty much self-taught. I loved my time in the liberal arts, but faced a steep wakeup when it came to learning *any* professional skill set.

In June of 2011 I landed in Washington DC with a brand new degree in philosophy and the vague idea that I needed to go to law school to be able to make money someday. Getting a job in the first place was terrifying. Without marketable skills – or family connections – what were the options?

I spent a few years cursing my “non-practical” degree, and wondering what I would do with my life. I was gainfully employed as an assistant running academic programs – but I couldn’t figure out what direction to go or what the next step would be.

Fortunately, I talked to a few lawyers and learned that I did not in fact want to be a practicing attorney, so I never went to law school.

Over several years, I became an expert at the process of learning new professional skills. For a long time, that was my secret weapon: I would find a new skill, learn the theory, and cut my teeth on a hard new project. At the end of that process? Viola. A new marketable skill. (That’s how I became a producer.)

When I started working for myself, that escalated. There are so many things to *do* as a business owner, and for a time, I was bound and determined to learn all of them myself. This was initially rewarding, but ultimately unsatisfying. It was like running through mud – it took a lot of effort, and I didn’t move very quickly. After a while, the strategy and the habit of “just pile on another professional skill” stopped working. Burnout ensued.

To get to the next level, I had to learn something ephemeral: leadership. Letting go of everything myself. Asking for help. Delegating and relying on others to own and contribute in their own right. To this day, I have to fight the temptation to just “learn another skill” that will fix what’s wrong or get me where I want to go.

Ironically, this muscle of learning has been repurposed, as I learn how leadership is the most crucial skill of all.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

I used to confuse people by saying “I make videos but I don’t really make videos.” (no wonder I was hard pressed to find projects and client work that I wanted–I couldn’t even say what I did). I’m not a technical producer, but instead focus on strategy, management, and integrating different components into one process. This meant that whenever someone hired me to produce a video, I had to find vendors and partners who could film, edit, animate, illustrate, color correct, do sound design. You get the idea.

Luckily, I’m a huge nerd on process and workflow design.

As a bootstrapped company, I was always on a tight budget, and I prided myself on giving clients a good value.

I developed a great way of collaborating with my technical vendors to make custom-illustrated animated educational videos. My goal was to have a reliable network but to not be reliant on any one vendor.

My process was something like:
Determine scope of project, ideally client work in a batch
Develop creative concept, and direction for project
Finalize editorial goals and core concepts
Film a lot at one time (I’d hire the crew), at predetermined technical specs

Then, things got fun.

Finalize written narrative content of each video
Develop visual storyboards
Art test with illustrator
Batch illustration storyboards
Motion design for custom illustrations
Final QC and approvals.

There are more steps, but you get the idea. As I refined this process, I worked with a half-dozen or more vendors, and was able to get great results, high volume output, and surprising consistency in quality. Not bad for a “video gal who doesn’t actually make videos.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.returnonideas.co/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-lowe-b6489214/