With Father's Day around the corner, I have the opportunity share some insight from DJ Haddad, CEO/Founder of Hadded & Partners and father of four.
I don’t think my father “dispensed wisdom” in the traditional sense but I learned a lot by watching and working with him over the summers. I wasn’t familiar with the term “Entrepreneur” until my late 20s, but I suppose that’s what he was. (Although, by this definition every Lebanese-American is probably an entrepreneur, I challenge you to find one of us with just a single job or business.) He taught history for a while, he owned an arcade for a brief stint (I was pretty amazing at Street Fighter II back in the day because of this.), and he owned a Pawnshop for decades; this is how most people knew Dave.
Working along side of him at the Pawnshop was an invaluable experience, even if I didn’t realize it until adulthood. Of all the lessons, I think the biggest was in dealing with people. Pawnshops attract an eclectic group of people on a daily basis; wealthy clientele, poor clientele, people who just made fortunes, people who just lost them, criminals looking to sell items, cops that are looking for those items; it was impossible to guess who would walk in the door the next minute and what their story might be. This environment taught you to think quickly, but it also forced me to learn empathy: for example, one day I sold an engagement ring to a nervous and ecstatic guy, and then the very next day I had to switch gears and tell a despondent woman that her engagement diamond was fake (Her friend dragged her in there and said, “See, I told you that guy was no good”. The girl with the ring was too upset to reply.)
My father was adept at navigating all of these scenarios and the personalities that accompanied them, but more than that he was empathetic and respectful to everyone, regardless of their background or current situation. Watching this in action helped prepare me well for a high-speed agency lifestyle where I am constantly communicating and having to shift gears between designers, developers, project managers, writers, clients, etc.
REMOTE WORK – A ‘TREND’ HERE TO STAY
(Haddad & Partners has been a fully-remote, global creative agency since 2007.)
To be honest, I didn’t really “choose” a remote workforce. I also never planned on having 4 kids but that's another story. Remote work was something our company fell into and we inadvertently discovered the benefits (and the disadvantages, of course). The core group of Haddad & Partners met at another agency in NYC. After leaving that agency we all moved out of the city and back to our respective countries/states. I happened to land a client that required help so I reached out to the colleagues with whom I had the best professional chemistry with. That first project grew into 2 projects and eventually my 3 colleagues turned into 65.
Below are some of the benefits, I’ve seen over my past 13 years running my remote creative shop:
- Playing the time-zones
Because we were originally scattered across 4 different timezones (now 6), this was the first benefit we realized. I would kick off an animated banner project at 12PM EST, hand it off to our Lead designer in Australia (4PM EST), who would then hand it off to our lead Animator in the UK in his morning (4AM EST). By the time I got online at 9AM EST, the project would be 90% done and ready for me to review. This is a project that would take our former agency at least 3 days to complete, and we would turn it around in 1 night.
This sort of efficiency is difficult to scale, but allowing team leaders to build up their own local teams has allowed us to do so better than any other company I have seen.
Of course, this means a lot of early morning or late night phone calls for our employees on East Coast Time, but its part of our lifestyle by now and in the end, it allows us a lot of flexibility during the day.
- Higher productivity
Once you get over the initial learning curve of self-motivation (My #1 tip: Get dressed like you have a meeting.), you will find that you can be significantly more productive when you take away the daily commute, extraneous meetings, water-cooler chit-chat, etc. When I first started H&P, I found that I could do in 6 hours, what used to take me 8.
- Less overhead
One of the most obvious benefits was a reduced overhead. Our former agency was paying about $10k in midtown rent which required a cleaning person, a front-desk admin, not to mention physical web-servers and IT staff to maintain them. Going remote and moving to the cloud saved us significates amounts of money which allowed us to reduce our hourly rates. We still spend money on travel expenses since we try to meet in person a few times a year, but these costs are still low compared to traditional on-site overhead.
But the most important benefit as a father of 4 kids under the age of 10 is…
#1 Flexibility
I always tell people that my remote job allows me a lot of flexibility, and no flexibility at the same time. I have 4 kids (ages 4 to 11), and sure, I rarely miss a kid’s event at school and am almost always home for dinnertime, but then I am back online around 9:30/10:00 each night to finish up the day’s tasks. There is a whole second shift of Moms and Dads at H&P who jump on Teams late at night after getting their kids to bed; we work together on projects and commiserate with each other about how impossible bedtime is getting.
If I am being honest, I have been dragged to some pretty painful Pre-K sing-a-longs and “parades” that I would happily trade in a good old fashioned Grand Central Happy Hour but then I see the army of parents walking to and from the train station each morning and late into the evening, and am reminded how fortunate I am to see my kids as much as I do.
There are challenges to working from home for sure. Marissa Mayer from Yahoo hit the nail on the head a few years ago (much to the ire of the internet) with collaboration and innovation being one of the key challenges to remote work; there is still no substitute to having 3 creative minds work out a problem over coffee and bagels at a whiteboarding session. This is an ongoing work in progress for us and, to-date, the best solution we have found is to find and hire people who can fit within, and amplify, the team’s chemistry. I believe this has been the number one secret to our success as a remote agency, we have an amazing chemistry together; this is a good thing to have at a physical office, but a priceless thing to have at a remote company.
When this is all over (which I hope is soon) some agencies will go back to the “old” way of doing things. Aside from the ones I mentioned above, another reason is that there are a lot of big egos in the agency world and working from home or the local coffee shop, while managing people remotely, is completely void of ego. But, I have to believe that this experience will soften up those companies with the hardest of remote working policies. Moving forward I would not be surprised if everyone has at least a couple of work-at-home days backed into their week (hopefully the kids will be back in school by then.)
BIO
With a degree in Illustration, DJ Haddad graduated from Parsons School of Design back in the dark ages of 1999 when a 'cloud' was condensation and “working from home” was nothing but a European myth. This being the apex of our first tech boom, DJ's love of art and hand-drawn illustration was shamelessly won over by the excessiveness and vibrancy of NYCs well-paying, yet short-lived, dot com scene. Teaching himself the basics of Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver in 4 caffeine-fueled days and nights, our hero landed himself the illustrious job of creating animated GIF banners for one of the many internet start-ups he bounced in and out of over the next couple of years. Sensing the end of the party, DJ made the eventual leap to safety where he joined Euro RSCG and the financially unflappable world of Pharmaceutical advertising.
Not one to sit idle, at age 24 DJ left with a partner to form a small interactive agency called Creative Priority which eventually grew to 35 people over the next 5 years. Here, he worked diligently with little or no sleep on such brands as Citigroup, ING Direct, Novartis and many others. It was at this agency where the relationships were forged that make up the core of his Direct Response-focused creative shop today: Haddad & Partners.
In 2006 he left the agency he co-founded to freelance at various agencies across NYC. After a successful freelance run, our vagabond with a Vaio eventually had enough direct client work to hire back the majority of his old digital team, which was now scattered across 5 different time zones. Since its inception 13 years ago, Haddad & Partners, based in Fairfield, CT, has grown to 65+ people. With their heads in the clouds, now both literally and figuratively, they collaborate internationally on such brands as Microsoft, Capital One, Citibank, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Sallie Mae, HBO and Thompson Reuters.
DJ used to enjoy movies and art galleries, but the whole “baby thing” has been a real hardship to his social calendar and Netflix queue. He now spends the majority of his “spare” time with his wife, 4 kids and dog in Fairfield, Connecticut. 2 of the 4 kids are currently undergoing intense Photoshop and HTML5 training as a means to assist in the family business while simultaneously skirting international child labor laws; the results, so far, have been disappointing
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