"Any entrepreneur today—regardless of the industry or sector into which they are entering, should plan on facing customers who are more harried, pressed for time, and whose highly valuable attention is being fought over by other competitors—oftentimes quite aggressively."
Tom Briggs is a leader of award-winning strategic marketing, design, and communications teams with nearly 20 years of strategic brand experience. With collaboration experience spanning Global Fortune 50 to early-stage startups, Tom is the founder of epigraph—an independent [design + innovation + brand] collective. Tom is an advocate for enlightened, values-conscious organizations and teams. Passionate about cultivating high-performance, disruptive, egalitarian, transformational teams. Frequently found in the company of strategic design thinkers, creatives, futurists, academics, researchers, and early-stage investors.
Fueled by curiosity and the gritty pursuit of the greater human good, Tom is also an internationally cited [social media + brand] researcher, Center for Creative Leadership graduate, and advocate for classical, humanities-rooted education.
Check out more interviews with entrepreneurs here.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET FEATURED?
All interviews are 100% FREE OF CHARGE
Table of Contents
Thank you for joining us today. Please introduce yourself to our readers. They want to know you, some of the background story to bring some context to your interview.
Tom Briggs: Hello. My name is Tom Briggs and my experience includes nearly 20 years in a diverse range of roles at strategic marketing and design agencies. Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to collaborate with clients ranging in scale from Global Fortune 50 to early-stage startups. I started my career as a copywriter and thought I would go into public relations or journalism, but after exposure to design and advertising, knew that was where I was supposed to be. Over time, I’ve worked with world-class creative directors, art directors, and account strategists and perfected my approach to those strategic disciplines. Working on small, agile teams, enabled me to have the good fortune to wear multiple hats and nurture a diverse perspective on creative strategy and execution.
I spend my time now mentoring at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator NYC—New York’s largest Y-Combinator-style early-stage tech startup incubator. When not working, I enjoy distance running and spending time in the outdoors with my wife and two boys.
You are a successful entrepreneur, so we’d like your view point, do you believe entrepreneurs are born or made? Explain.
Tom Briggs: Great question. My dad is an entrepreneur of over 30 years, and in full transparency, for a long time, this deterred me from taking on the role. Seeing firsthand the blood, sweat, and sacrifice that go into launching and sustaining a successful venture was daunting. But in time, the entrepreneur tendency emerged unbidden and relentless. I found myself drawn to a unique idea that was to be my personal dent in the universe. So, I guess for me, it was a matter of being, with apologies to Lady Gaga, “born this way”.
If you were asked to describe yourself as an entrepreneur in a few words, what would you say?
Tom Briggs: Efficient, rooted, and pragmatic. As an enneagram 5 (“the investigator”), there’s nothing I like more than learning new things, building novel frameworks, and forging unique connections. This is probably why I’ve always found the creative and design community to be so fascinating and the main reason I founded a design and brand innovation consultancy.
Nothing makes me more stoked than forging a far-flung connection. Questions like: “What lessons can Tesla draw upon in 2021 from the space race of the 1960s?” fascinate me and are going to be—in my mind—key to evolving the human collective in order to address some of our most daunting challenges.
Tell us about what your company does and how did it change over the years?
Tom Briggs: epigraph is a design and branding consultancy dedicated to mining the lessons of the past in order to forge a better future for humanity. We help disrupted and highly disruptive organizations identify and draw upon the unchanging rules of humanity in order to achieve greater success in their marketplace and achieve clarity. Through a mix of brand coaching, design principles, and values-rooted practices, we help organizations identify their north stars and then act upon them consistently while achieving buy-in throughout the entire organization. As an example, we look at what Tony Hsieh was able to achieve with Zappos. Their values remained the same from their earliest days to post-acquisition by Amazon. That’s remarkable and something to celebrate. When an organization is able to achieve that type of consistency, it can’t help but break out. In our digital day and age where everything feels too transient and vaporous, I think deep down we’re all hungry for deep, unchanging principles that were true 10,00 years ago and will be true 10,00 years from now.
Our north star from the very beginning was our belief in humanity. There’s this line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of “The Gulag Archipelago” that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being. We believe that while that is true and it moves around, there will always be that sliver of good, and at the end of the day that will win out. That’s probably more philosophy and existentialism than you usually get in your interviews, but it’s core to who we are and what we stand for.
Thank you for all that. Now for the main focus of this interview. With close to 11.000 new businesses registered daily in the US, what must an entrepreneur assume when starting a business?
Tom Briggs: Any entrepreneur today—regardless of the industry or sector into which they are entering, should plan on facing customers who are more harried, pressed for time, and whose highly valuable attention is being fought over by other competitors—oftentimes quite aggressively. This is true, regardless of whether they are planning on offering goods or services. In light of this, you need to recognize and respect that the audiences you are hoping to reach may not be paying their fullest attention to you and your offering, and that in order to break through into their conscious awareness, you will need to notable, consistent, aligned with their values and remarkable—otherwise, you’re going to get lost in the daily noise and hubbub that they face every day.
Did you make any wrong assumptions before starting a business that you ended up paying dearly for?
Tom Briggs: Yes, before I became a founder, I underestimated the continuous amount of relentless self-promotion required. There’s this inherent feeling—spoken or unspoken—that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. It’s a completely natural assumption that comes from being so intimate with the thing that you’re building.
Everyone thinks that their baby is beautiful and glorious and special and that everyone’s going to want to kiss and hold it. Particularly, if you’re looking to start a movement like we are with epigraph, it feels like a calling. You have this sense that once people hear about the vision, they’re going to be as excited as you are and want to hand you giant stacks of money. The lesson that that doesn’t happen is what came slowly for me. While I wouldn’t say I “paid dearly”, I would say that shifting to a position where I gave selling the due attention it demands took a while.
If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what advice would you give yourself and why? Explain
Tom Briggs: Steel yourself for the grind. Everything takes longer than you think it will. Be in the game for the long haul and don’t give up. Draw inspiration from those who have gone before and pushed the boulder up the hill relentlessly for years before they broke through in their industries. Seek out the fun and enjoyment while you can and celebrate the small victories along the way. The road is long, but rest assured that there are fellow travelers in a similar phase with whom you can commiserate, share battle stories and generally rally with.
What is the worst advice you received regarding running a business and what lesson would you like others to learn from your experience?
Tom Briggs: Take out business loans and operate from a leveraged position.
I’ve always been a huge fan of bootstrapping (and in full transparency, the creative and brand-building space lends itself to low capital expenditure). That being said, I knew from day 1 that I wanted epigraph to be self-sustaining. I know guys who have cashed out 401(k)s or taken a second line of credit on the house. Those weren’t places I wanted to go, even if it meant starting a bit slower as compared to if we had a cash infusion.
My rule for myself (enforced by my CFO) was that if I was going to invest in the business, that dollar would need to be earned by the business. As we built our reputation and identity in our field, the flywheel got spinning and we were able to increase our operating expenses and invest in self-promotion and reputation-building activities, but it did cause that initial early incubation period to start a bit slower than I would have preferred. That said, a slower spin-up allowed me extra time for testing and refining our service offering, messaging, and marketplace positioning—forcing us to effectively eat our own dog food.
In the long run, a slow spin-up provided a better alternative than a sugar-rush cash infusion. Establishing the concept of culture mining in the brand space felt like a significant game-changer. Deep down, I recognized that our service offering and approach were new and substantially distinctive in our space, and a slow start forced me to really wrap my head around how best to articulate this.
Additionally, being a fully remote organization born in the fires of the pandemic enabled us to avoid paying a commercial lease. While this requires additional creative thinking around how to build a cohesive team and establish a strong, unified, and vibrant culture at a distance, not writing a rent check every month gave us some very useful freedom in our headspace.
In your opinion, how has COVID-19 changed what entrepreneurs should assume before starting a business? What hasn’t changed?
Tom Briggs: Assume that your employees and clients are going to want to work and collaborate remotely from anywhere and everywhere in the world. The idea of consistently going to a single place dedicated to work is dead. Your employee base and potential clients are now located around the world—spanning timezones, cultures, nations, and languages. The world is smaller than ever and the opportunity for businesses has never been greater.
What’s unchanged? We’re all still just humans desiring human connection. Whether in Boston or Bangalore, we are all just human beings trying to provide for ourselves and our families with the work of our hands and minds. Once you internalize that deep sense of human connection, it becomes easier to seamlessly transact business across borders.
What is a common myth about entrepreneurship that aspiring entrepreneurs and would-be business owners believe in? What advice would you give them?
Tom Briggs: You can grasp and fully understand your potential customers and target marketplace without first doing extensive research and talking to a lot of actual human beings. (As opposed to trusting impersonal industry reports, numbers, and statistics.) Talking with (and really listening to) your potential customers is your most vital source of valuable information. Your goal should be to collect as broad and diverse of a sample size as you can. Ages, genders, locations, everything. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know deep in your soul when your sample size is truly sufficiently wide and deep.
Ensure that when you are asking questions (good, deep, well-formulated, and well-thought-out questions) that you are then leaning in and truly internalizing and documenting the response—and that’s the ENTIRE response, not just that which affirms your preconceived notions or the line being held by the broader industry consensus. Then, listen to what they’re NOT saying, as this is just as important as hearing what they ARE actually saying. Read between the lines and feel the pain points. Remember what Ford said about the Model T, if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have just asked for a better, faster horse.
What traits, qualities, and assumptions do you believe are most important to have before starting a business?
Tom Briggs: – Traits: Persistence; Yes, it always comes up when you’re talking with anyone starting a business, but because it is so damn central. You’re going to pass through these brutal times where it feels like you’re purely grinding it out (or maybe even slamming your head repeatedly against a brick wall). That’s a natural part of the equation. My dad’s an executive coach and leadership consultant and he has this saying that “leadership is learning to love the uphill”. Before I started this journey with epigraph, I heard that line and it just rolled off my brain. Now that I’ve been walking the journey for a couple of years, there’s a deeper, profound truth contained in that statement than I ever saw before I dove into the journey of bringing a new venture into the world.
– Qualities: Irrational confidence. All entrepreneurs have it. If you haven’t first completely and honestly convinced yourself that you are the best thing since sliced bread and that the world should bow down before your incandescent brilliance, then how the heck are you going to convince everyone else of the fact. There’s something to be said for leading with boldness and demonstrating outward confidence even when inside, you’re racked with self-doubt or fear.
– Assumptions: It’s going to suck at times. Hopefully, less than it doesn’t suck. You’re gonna wrestle with self-doubt, conflict, friction, emotional turbulence. Just accept that and know that the road ahead is going to be profoundly unfun at times. Don’t let it eat you up and make you a cynical jerk, but be realistic about the way in which things happen in this world.
How can aspiring leaders prepare themselves for the future challenges of entrepreneurship? Are there any books, websites, or even movies to learn from?
Tom Briggs: First, I’m a huge fan of reading and you’ll always find at least one book on my bedside table—usually a larger stack. Readers are leaders. Plain and simple. For me, audiobooks are the best and most efficient way to work more books into my busy life. I’m a long-distance distance runner, and the time that I’m out running is a great time to put on an audiobook and make good use of that time. Small aside here, running is a great add-on for anyone founding a business. A great de-stressor. Nice time to think and process through business challenges. So many great benefits.
For me, there’s something about being in motion that just helps me to absorb a book faster. (I log what I’m listening to on Strava) Our local library system here is really strong, and they have tons of audiobooks available for download, which makes it affordable. Topically, I range pretty far and wide on what types of books I read. You never know where you’re going to find inspiration as a business founder. If you stick to all the usual non-fiction business books, you’re going to end up thinking the same way that everyone else does. I prefer going off the beaten path. There are some thinkers like Ryan Holiday whose book recommendations I trust. This has led me to a lot more well-written biographies and books that unpack and delve into history. A really great way to draw upon the best lessons of history.
You have shared quite a bit of your wisdom and our readers thank you for your generosity but would also love to know: If you could choose any job other than being an entrepreneur, what would it be?
Tom Briggs: Likely some sort of spirituality researcher. Our established conceptions of the spiritual dimensions of life are so limited and hamstrung by our past and entrenched western ways of thinking. There are heaps of accusations flying around by entrenched interests in this space and a surging desire to identify and pin blame on why we humans are currently so unhappy, unfulfilled, anxious, depressed, and dissatisfied. In any case, I think that equipping fellow humans to deal with felt spiritual hunger could be really interesting.
Thank you so much for your time, I believe I speak for all of our readers when I say that this has been incredibly insightful. We do have one more question: If you could add anyone to Mount Rushmore, but not a politician, who would it be; why?
Tom Briggs: Fred Rogers. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who contributed more to the human condition and the next generations of humans.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Tom Briggs for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Tom Briggs or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
