The First 17 Years: Mastering the art of creative discipline

Tiffany Sauder: When you decide to do something big or feel called to do something big, there's an expense that you don't understand that other people have to pay to. She didn't know what it was yet, but she was really trying to build something meaningful. 

Guest Voices: She just always had these big ideas. There was no fear, no hesitation at all. It was like, this is my moment. And I'm gonna take it. I don't know how long it can stay this bad, but it can't really get worse. These people, these voices, these experiences, they were my mentors. They are the people who help build and refine and grow me into the leader that I have the opportunity to sort of be today.

Tiffany Sauder: This is the first 17 years. Chapter three Marcia Stone, Marcia Stone is creative discipline. She worked with us at element three to really bring brand the art of storytelling, helping us extract from companies, what it was that they could offer the world, not in their products and services, but in helping them design their story and their culture in a way that we could take that to market.

Through that, that was how I got exposed. Even the idea that brand existed on the planet, it like makes me laugh that I didn't even really know what the word meant. And now it's probably the one thing as a marketer. I can most claim that I know how to do. I get a lot back from watching that person succeed.

Marcia Stone: So for me, it was a real gift to continue to be part of whether it was good or bad. And I stayed at element three until I retired from my professional career. I can't remember, but I think it went from five people all the way up to 80 people or something like that when I left. And it was the largest agency in Indianapolis, I felt like what I offered was part of the seed that created that opportunity for so many people and also so many clients and their brands, 

Tiffany Sauder: Marcia Stone worked at Element Three from 2007 to 2015.

In 2007, we were about $700,000 in revenue. So we weren't even a million dollars. It would be not until 2012, five years later that we had a million dollars. So you think somebody like Marcia, who was the north American creative director had worked on brands like Ikea and Mercedes-Benz and Archway cookies and Jeep and capital one.

And here she was at a place in her career. Where she somehow picked me to really impart what she had learned her whole career. When I say that Marcia is creative discipline, this is what I mean by that we would go into these companies and they would say to us, we've been around for 40 years and we've never been able to really articulate who it is that we are to the marketplace.

And she would go through this process of listening, of extracting of doing her own. Of being patient with her input process so that she didn't go in assuming anything was the answer. And I watched her be restrained and disciplined and trust her process so that her intuition and her creativity could be applied into the process while Marcia is a creative genius.

It was the process by which she put her mind. Through that made her available so that she could predictably be creative instead of it being this lightning in a bottle moment. And that completely changed my perspective and completely changed the way that I understood how to channel my learning and my way of engaging my mind.

Marcia Stone: Tiffany asked me the other day when I talked to her, she said, well, why did you press pause on your design career and come to element three? And I didn't feel that way at all. I felt like it was a turn, but it was a turn towards leaving something for the future. Knowing that I had eight to 10 years left, I wanted to do something that was going to continue on.

And I feel like element three. And Tiffany was that. So even though it wasn't a big corporation, this was a big thing to me. This was a big thing for my legacy. I wasn't biologically able to have children. And I love nurturing creativity and the creative process and, and creative people. And I, I know that my life mission is to help women and girls in this world.

So whether you're a biological mom or not, whether you're giving it to the next generation or you're giving it to someone your age, it doesn't matter. And one of the things I know it doesn't matter how big or small your gift is. It's the giving that's important. There 

Tiffany Sauder: was another aspect of my relationship with Marcia that I don't know that she knew was such an important part of it at the beginning.

And that is, that was, she was this strong accomplished professional woman. And I'd never honestly like been up close to one outside of when I worked at Eli Lilly and in my own life there weren't examples of professional women. I've said at other places on the podcast, like my grandmas were both stay at home.

Wives and moms. And while they did amazing job raising their families, they didn't have careers outside of the home. And my own mother didn't work outside of the home. In the traditional sense. She had a lot of creative things that she did, and she was a great partner with my dad. But at the end of the day, I didn't see her leave for work every day and come home.

And so that environment that I was beginning to step into. I needed to see a story where I could learn experientially from what did that look like? And I think I didn't totally realize at the time, but I was like scanning the planet for people that I could bring close. And I see this pattern now play out my life and I was only 26 or something like that when Margie and I.

but I see this now as like I learned so well by proximity and if I can just get myself there and I can see it and I can feel it, then I can learn it. And that was also the piece of Marcia. Was it? Wasn't just that she had all this advertising and marketing knowledge and could see a world I didn't even know existed, but it was also about getting close to this woman.

Was really in the last decade of her professional career and to have a chance to like sit and understand and learn from her as a woman. That was a really important part of my growth too. I was introduced to her through this guy, Tom, and he had gone to like a best places to work or like some like lunch and breakfasty kind of meet up jam.

And he had met her. He was like a bit of a, I think business partner kind of loosely in what we were starting to do at what was element three or kind of the precursor to element three. And we were really on this hunt for like who can help us figure this business. and Tom beeline to her got a little bit more Intel.

So he was like, Hey, I think you guys need to meet. And that was really the like original meeting of Marcia. And I, I don't remember much about that first meeting. I just remember that it always seemed like there was a clear next step. So at that time, I asked Marcia, will you mentor me? And I didn't really even know what that was gonna look like.

But what we did was every Friday afternoon we met in this like little village area. And I would bring to her every question I had from that week. And it could be like, Hey, what's an agency of record. Like, what does that mean? What's an insertion order. What are PMs colors? Like what are these terms?

Because I don't even, I don't even know them. Like help me. I grew up in the language of business. And so like the advertising words and how that lingo all worked and how that world worked. I didn't know. She oriented me to competitors. She just kinda helped me understand the lay of the land. And so for like six months I paid her.

Every week. And she would spend as much time with me as I wanted, but in true Marsa fashion, it was never like, she was just gonna tell me the answers. I always left with homework. I always left with like some challenging questions, some things to go do, some like things to make me better. She was like always been a teacher.

And so that period of time, those six months. . I mean, I probably got three years worth of information from her and it totally changed my trajectory. And I started to orient and understand the field of play that we were competing in. 

Marcia Stone: I first met Tiffany when I came to visit element three and it was Tiffany and Steven Nyla Neely who had allowed Tiffany to purchase their design business.

And I was meeting them and I was meeting her. And I had been approached by somebody to be the president of element three. And I had my own small design firm and I was not interested in being the president of element three, but I said, well, I'll come and meet the people and maybe we'll do some projects together.

And I remember this young, energetic baller coming at me going, hi, Marcia, you must be Marcia. And she almost blew me over. And I said, yes. And it was 

Tiffany Sauder: Tiffany. We were about two years into the journey when I met Marcia. And I think my title was like director of marketing or something like that. like, it was, I would say very loose, which I've learned is a very normal thing when companies are small and just forming and nobody's quite sure what you're building towards.

And we were in the process of changing the name. My dad and I had bought the company from the previous founders. They were husband and wife, and the name was Neely design. They were like Mr. And Mrs. Neely Neely design, and we changed the name to element three. And the three elements are story strategy and scorecard.

And while there's like a million things that have changed at element three in the last 17 years, the one thing that hasn't is that we've always been. Working to build value for the long term with clients, I have always been obsessed with building companies that were gonna last, that were gonna stay.

That had stories that had. Communities that they needed to build that had people that needed to grow it. Wasn't just gonna be about writing one marketing metric that was hot for a minute. It was always gonna be about building the brand. It was always gonna be about making sure we had the right strategy.

And it was always gonna be sure about measuring the output of what was happening. And I don't know, like while there's so few things in marketing that have staying power, it seems it's special to reflect on. That piece of us has been really true, even from like the first little cell of DNA that was formed, we needed to go through a name change.

And we were right in the thick of that when I met Marcia. And I mean, I still heard it see her as such a creative genius, but even getting her to weigh in as an outsider on the direction we were heading. I think wasn't early, not at just how much we trusted her mind from the beginning. 

Marcia Stone: It was about to be called element three.

They were asking me if I like the name and they talked to me about the three elements and what they meant. And I thought they explained it to me. I thought, you know, it makes a lot of sense to have business be part of the ethos of the agency, rather than just marketing, because it, it gives you a bigger seat at the table.

So I was impressed with the name and I think she had perhaps something to do with that. And I really liked Steve and. But I just didn't wanna be president of the agency. So later on, I get a phone call from the gentleman who approached me about coming and being president. And, and he said, we're trying to figure out who should be president of the people you met there, you know, or, or anybody who do you think should be president?

And I said, well, I don't know. But I think that young woman is very interesting and I really liked her energy and I maybe saw a little bit of myself. At a younger age in her that I was hungry for learning. I was hungry for growing. I was wanting opportunity and I perhaps felt. Hey, she deserves a shot. 

Tiffany Sauder: The way I remember it is that I reached out to my dad and we actually had a month at element three where our revenue was $0.

Ah, and I remember it being around that period of time. It's like a little sign that things aren't great. And some of it was that we'd like, pre-build so much work to try to make other months look good. And then all of a sudden it all catches up with you and you realize. Oh, there's nobody else to bill. We just need to do this work.

It was kind of a mess. gently speaking. And I remember reaching out to my dad and we met like halfway between he and I, and we had lunch and I was just like puking out all this stuff that I saw. And the way I remember it is he was like, well, it sounds like you have more ideas than anybody else on what to do.

Why don't you become president and. I don't really actually remember that moment being that like profound, I think, because it felt so incremental it was like, you know, would you like to be president of a trash heap? I don't know. Maybe not. so, you know, when peoples ask me, like, you know, what was it like to become president at the age of 26, 27?

It was like fairly uneventful because the thing that I was leading, I, it didn't have much form. I would say it didn't have much oxygen. And there was a lot of work that had to be done. And it was just kinda like one day after the next. So how do I take the thing I'm learning about marketing from Marcia?

The things I know to be true about business, cuz I've been around that for most of my life. And the third is how do I listen to my customers to understand what they want and where there's market opportunity? Because I didn't really have a legacy business I needed to protect. It was like, you know, what do we build?

What do you need? And those three ingredients were really how we got going. 

Marcia Stone: So it turned out. Then next time I saw her, she was president of element three and she called me up and she asked me, okay, I know you don't wanna come and work here, but would you like to coach me because I've got a finance background and I've worked at Lilly in a financial capacity, but never run a creative company.

And she's been able to weather so many storms. In the economy and with people and with clients, I mean, I've seen her gracefulness in all situations when we were going through the great recession in 2009, we had gone from, well, we were still just an infant agency. We had like 12 people we'd gone down to five people and it was very thin and it was very scary.

And I remember it was hard to get any clients to spend money. Clients were just downright saying nothing. We're doing nothing. And you know, Tiffany always has an aggressive growth plan and financial goals for the organization. So I remember coming into her office one day and saying, Tiffany, I don't think you can afford to pay me right now.

And she said, you're right. We probably can't. And I said, you don't want me to go away for a little while? And she said, well, that'd be great if you could afford. 

Tiffany Sauder: So the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009 came at a really vulnerable time for element three. We had enough inertia to have some oxygen, but we didn't have any reserves.

And I was still really inexperienced as a leader. So what we started to experience was that our clients just froze their spend and everybody was like, nice about it, which I've learned is a. You know where they're like, Hey, we really want to do marketing, but we're living in a world of uncertainty. So we don't feel like we can commit to anything certain.

And it just became this train that got slower and slower and slower and slower and slower until it finally just stopped. And so our clients were freezing their spend and I completely froze my decision making in January of 2009 was when I had our first daughter. And when you look back from December, 2007, until I think it was February, March of 2009, the NASDAQ lost 50% of its value.

And we lost right at 50% of our value as a company in that exact same stretch. And so I'm going through this. What's supposed to be a really special life changing moment. It's absolutely traumatic. My husband also is dealing with some really enormous business pressures as well. And we're a young couple at 29 years.

with this debt that my dad has taken. It was like crazy. There was debt to pay. We had very little income coming in and we were just swirling in uncertainty and we've always done open book financials at element three. Those are a lot easier to do. Open book financials is like every single month you published to the company, how the company's financially performing Jack stack wrote this book.

And in it, he called the great game of business. And in it, there's this amazing quote where he says there is no security and ignorance. And that quote gives me life. And I think that the biggest respect that you can give people is the truth. And it can be really forming as a leader when you realize the truth is bad news.

And so even through this season, we were doing open book financial. So Marcia was aware of what was happening in 2009. Marcia stepped back for nine to 12. Because we just couldn't afford to keep her on. In 2009, our revenue was $416,000. And that year as a business, we lost almost $275,000. So, I mean, on paper, we were essentially insolvent and it was the difference between one or two deals that I can remember going into that next year that I think were the difference between element three, continuing on, and us being forced to just pack up.

Marcia Stone: Then at one point they were like, yeah, you can come back now. So we had that kind of. Very easy going relationship. And you know, obviously not everybody could afford to do that, but I was in a place in my life and in my career that financially I wasn't a, a burden for me. And I wanted to support the organization long term if I could.

And certainly Tiffany, so that was scary for a lot of people. I think for me, I got to see her in the fire and I remember one day walking into her office and, and seeing her look out the window. She told me what she was thinking about was there's gotta be at least a million dollars of business waiting for me out there.

I just have to find it. She still had that optimism and it was like a challenge to her where most people would probably say, I can't do this. This is too hard. She was like, where is it? It's out there. I'm gonna find it. 

Tiffany Sauder: My mom and my dad played huge roles. In this part. There were two things. That my parents said over and over in this period of time, the first one is that my dad said, people give up too early.

They always give up too early, Tiffany. And they think that hard is the end, but hard is just hard. And he would tell me like, people just take, when things get difficult as a sign that it's not supposed to be. He's like everything that I have done in my life, there have been seasons where it felt like it was impossible.

And if you believe it's the end, it is the. But if you can put together just one more day, just one more day, just one more day, just one more day, the pressure starts to lessen and all of a sudden, it's not in this insolvent state anymore. And there were definitely weeks and months where the pressure and the fear was just unbearable.

And I had a decision to make every single day, if I was gonna try just one more day. And my field of view got really, really shallow on purpose. I couldn't. far because I didn't know if we would be able to survive that long, but I knew I could live 10 more hours, eight more hours, 12 more hours, you know, like not like actually stay alive, but the business I could go to work and I could do one more day and I could do one more day and I could do one more day and I would do my best to be true to my values and the business would continue or it wouldn't.

And. It was intense, really, really intense. And I, I think that, you know, I talked in the episode about my parents, about my dad's business acumen and also their love for like just hospitality and togetherness. My mom's support in that season. We could not afford like childcare full time. We just didn't have the money for it.

And so my mom would drive down and we live like an hour and 15 minutes away from them. Then she would come down and watch my baby. So that I 

Marcia Stone: could go face 

Tiffany Sauder: this lion and she loved me really selflessly through that season. She drove down here for over a year whenever I needed her. And I don't know that my heart could have survived without that.

Marcia Stone: I get a lot back from watching that person succeed. So for me, it was a real gift to continue to be part of whether it was good or bad. And I stayed at element three until I retired from my professional career. So that was really a blessing. And an honor for me to be able to finish up my time and, and have seen the growth, I think Tiffany was ready for a long time.

And I could tell because she exudes confidence much more than I do. I think. I would say she had her big lady shoes on and she was ready to roll. But I think when she knew she could synthesize, when she knew she could tap in, then she was ready. You know, when she recognizes that in herself. And I think the best thing a teacher can do is get out of the way at some point and let the student fly.

And the one thing that I hope I taught Tiffany was about thump. Thump is resonance. So thump is this when you put your hand against your chest and, and just hit it a little bit, and you feel that resonance in your chest, that brands that have thump, make their customers sit up and say, how did you know? I felt that way about life, about work, about myself, that there's something much deeper than a product you're selling.

It's much more about what's important to you as a person that a good brand will tap into. And so again, that's about really knowing your customer, but also knowing yourself as a brand and finding the Alliance between the two, the alignment 

Tiffany Sauder: I was thinking the other day about just mentoring and leadership.

And I realized that one of the things that mentor gets from the process is that the act of mentoring, the act of teaching. The act of sharing what life has taught you is really a process of redeeming those things that you went through that were just so hard. And I'm really grateful that Marcia, I fell at a time in Marcia's life, where she needed a place to redeem what life had taught her, because I had very little to offer her, but as I get to this.

Mid career let's call it. I've begun to understand the role the mentoring plays for the mentor a little bit more. And I'm just really grateful that I fell in a place where I could be the dry sponge and soak her up and really carry on the legacy of what life had taught her. And I feel a sense of responsibility to be a container for that as I work and build brands and build leaders and speak into others in my.

Now, what you're about to hear is a conversation between me and Marcia.

You knew when you went through your process, that your mind would show up for you. And it was this really strange, delicate balance. You trusted your brain would put it together. That when you got to the end, the story you trusted would be there. And professionally that's so scary because when it is just intuition, It feels like there's a fairy that lives inside of you that you hope like decides to come to dinner.

But when there was this process to say, like, when I expose my mind in a way that is structured and then let it be free, it then has all of the context it needs. And you had great discipline in saying like, not yet, not yet. Meaning it wasn't time to synthesize yet. And when your brain wants to. I saw that restraint where like physically you would hold your mind open of like, not yet, not yet.

And I think I learned that patience, that professional maturity of saying like, don't let your instincts take over because when you think, you know, you go into the research with a totally different mindset, 

Marcia Stone: you have to defer judgment for the creative process to happen. You have to, and your 

Tiffany Sauder: career had taught you.

That, that was an unbreakable principle by the time my professional life interacted with you. And so I think that taught me this. Like, again, I have learned not everybody can synthesize, not everybody can walk through the process and get to the end and not everybody can make sense of it. But when you can, knowing that there are some disciplines, some muscles that you have to build so that your magic can have context and it can have purpose.

You taught me. The other thing, I think that's interesting about you Marcia, is that you always invited children into your life. And that was a really, I think, formative experience for me to observe, even though it was non-traditional in the sense of the way that you guys had just youth and the vibrancy of children in your life, you always had a real compassion understanding, patience.

For that being an important part of my life. And I think like other women around you, I 

Marcia Stone: think for me, I was living in a little girl place for many years of my life. And it took me many years to realize that that to be vulnerable as a woman was really scary. And I went through a lot of years of not being very happy.

And not understanding why. And I decided I wanted to figure that out first for me, and also help others figure that out so that maybe it would be different in the future, especially for women and girls, that it would be okay to not always be strong and sometimes be strong, like to be able to be strong for others, to be a leader to say, I can do this.

I can figure this out to be C. But I'm still crying. And so I think there's that duality that women have, like you said, to be strong and to be soft and we're taught to be soft and we're taught to be meek and to sit back and that didn't feel like me. So to find myself and to say, I found myself and I find myself in others, I find myself in Tiffany.

I find myself in. To me. That is a really, it, it feeds me and it feels like who I am. 

Tiffany Sauder: I've learned on this journey of scared, confident. You just ended with like who I am. I don't know if this is specific to females. I just am a woman, so I can speak to it from that perspective. But it's so easy to become defined by the roles we play.

And there is this achieving, and I think that looks differently for other people for different people too. But in the professional setting, there's an enormous amount. Feedback that comes when you are achieving, that makes you think I must be on the right path if there's this many people clapping. And when you're not sure on the inside, like really, really why you exist, then I think that applause can take you in places that start to not fit who you 

Marcia Stone: are.

And I think that happened to me. In some degree where I found myself in such a big role, that it didn't feel like me at all. Cuz I'm very much an introvert. And so, you know, I think you asked me, why did you step back and come to element three? It didn't really feel like stepping back to me. It just felt like taking the next step.

That was more towards who I am. And so you said I'm a teacher. I wrote down synthesis slash teacher. That's who I. So I think it's very funny that you are also a teacher and a synthesizer. And I think we have a lot of similarities, 

Tiffany Sauder: but in that relationship I needed you, but you had to find me in a way that I didn't know myself.

You know, I wouldn't have had language to say I'm a synthesizer. I wouldn't have been able to present that to you as I stand in this moment and saying like my life's passion and purpose is to be for others. Part of my makeup is because you poured into me and I now have that to pour into others. And so the reciprocity that comes from it, but I also think what is so like you had the confidence and the power of one, and I think that it can be hard 

Marcia Stone: to pause and to invest in 

Tiffany Sauder: one person for a really long time.

And you walked beside me for almost 10 years and kind of knew when I was ready. But there were times when you were my security blanket, you know, and I was the leader, but you were my confidence. And to like accept that you were worthy of somebody's time for that period of time is really 

Marcia Stone: humbling. I was gonna say one thing, Tiffany, if I may, right now I'm teaching at fibers and textile art, but really I'm teaching self-confidence.

And, um, I often get students coming in and usually they're adult students and almost always, they wanna be instantly competent and I'll show them something and they'll want to do exactly that and they'll want it to look just like that. And if they aren't completely competent, they'll start to compare and despair, meaning look at the next person and say, oh, why isn't mine as good as theirs?

And I'll call 'em out on it and say, don't compare and despair. We all know how to do that. Right. I never saw you do that. I think that you have the kernel of something inside of you that says I'm gonna be okay, no matter what. And I think that's really important for a leader that in the middle of 2009, you could look out the window and say, I know there's enough money out there waiting for me to get us through.

That was another moment when I said, I think she's ready to do this with, or without me. And that's why it's like, I could go away at that point and it would be okay. Another little part of that. The trail that I've noticed of learning is you go from unconsciously incompetent. In other words, you don't even realize what you don't know.

And then someone starts to give you information and you become consciously incompetent. And that's the most painful part, because then you're like, oh my goodness, there's so much. I don't know. I'll never get it all and I'll never get it. Right. Then you become consciously compet. And you say, oh, now I can start to do this.

Oh, good. I'm a synthesizer. Yay. Then you become unconsciously competent, which is like the ultimate where it's in your body. You've taken it on. You don't even have to do tactical stuff up here anymore in your brain. You can just, it flows through you. And to me, that is, you caught me at that moment. I was unconsciously competent where you were at the moment.

Consciously incompetent. And you were like, this is freaking painful. How are you knowing how to do that? And I'm like, ha it's in my bones. I'm doing it. That's flowing through me. And you know, so I think that again, not comparing and despairing and saying, oh, look, she's done this for 40 years. She's great at this.

I suck, you know, we all go. And you either do one or two things. You either say I'm done and I quit right now. I'm not going any further, cuz I suck or you keep pounding at it and you did. You kept going and now you know who you are and now you're giving your gift to other people. And I think that's, you know, that fees me to know.

Tiffany's not just making marketing, which is great to make, but she's helping make people now 

Tiffany Sauder: Next time on the first 17 years, it just struck me like, okay, if we can fight through this, like it can't get worse. Chapter four, JR Sauder also known as the hubs. I have this lasting image. In my mind of Tiffany pregnant, it's just her sitting on the floor of the office.

And she's just saying like, it's so hard. This is the first 17 years of production in partnership with Share Your Genius.

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