Ian Bowles – inquisitive learner & video agency cofounder

NOTES

Recorded at Kiln SLC in the Bastille Meeting Room

Book Recommendations: Project Hail Mary: A Novel by Andy Weir; The Wright Brothers by David McCullough; Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

A Young Ian Bowles on the Front Row of a Jimmy Eat World Concert in 1999

SUMMARY

The podcast features an interview between Kyle Knowles and Ian Bowles, a co-founder and partner at Gantry, a design and video production agency. Ian has worked in marketing and agencies for 18 years.

Ian attributes Gantry’s success over 7+ years (when most agencies fail in the first 5 years) to the balanced partnership between him, Benjamin Moffat, and Kory Fenton. Each partner contributes unique strengths. They have also built a strong culture and focus on quality work over quantity of projects.

Gantry specializes in animation, motion graphics, 3D, and live action for clients like Adobe and Microsoft. Ian wears many hats from manager to project manager, director, writer, animator, and designer. He most enjoys debuting their work and seeing clients’ happy reactions.

Their typical video production process includes: defining objectives, scripting, visual style exploration, animatic with temporary voiceover, animation with professional VO talent, music and post-production. Videos are usually 60-90 seconds long, the sweet spot for audience retention.

Gantry uses Adobe Creative Cloud apps, Cinema 4D, Dropbox, Slack, and TeamGantt. They collaborate closely, with multiple designers working in shared files. Recently some artists have switched from Macs to PCs for improved 3D rendering speed.

Looking back, Ian switched from engineering to marketing and graphic design in college. His first job after college lasted 10 years before he pursued an MBA. Soon after starting the program, his employer went under, so Ian and partners launched Gantry. The MBA developed Ian’s analytical thinking which helps run Gantry.

Ian attributes beating failure odds to their culture, work/life balance, and choosing quality clients and projects. In 10 years, he hopes Gantry continues improving and satisfying work with a good team. He feared healthcare costs, cashflow, and lacking skills when starting out. His wife provides great support.

Ian loves animation reveals and clients’ happy reactions. He says the initial scripting stage brings the most challenges collaborating with clients. Overall he enjoys guiding projects, understanding clients’ objectives, and simplifying complexity.

In summary, Ian emphasizes the importance of collaboration, culture, quality over quantity, learning, and work/life balance in building a lasting agency.

Provided by Rev.com

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money Podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships, from startups to stay ups, to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and future entrepreneurs to just start.
My name is Kyle Knowles and I’m just trying to make some cool content on a Wednesday night at Kiln, that’s K-I-L-N.com, if you want to check it out. K-I-L-N as in numero uno in coworking space.
So tonight we’re in the Bastille meeting room. Today’s guest is Ian Bowles, who has been in the marketing agency world for nearly 18 years.
Ian earned a degree in marketing communications with a minor in graphic design from BYU. He then returned to school after working full-time for 10 years to get his MBA from Utah Valley University.
Shortly after starting his MBA program, he had the opportunity to be a co-founder of Gantry with two partners, Benjamin Moffat and Kory Fenton.
Gantry is a design, motion and video production agency. Clients include Adobe and Microsoft. Gantry prides itself on turning complexity into simplicity, specializing in cel-style animation, 2D motion graphics, 3D animation and live action shots… live action shoots, that is.
Ian works as a manager, project manager, director, editor, writer, and sometimes animator and designer at Gantry. He lives in Layton, Utah, with his wife and four children.
Ian, welcome to the Maker Manager Money Podcast.

Ian Bowles:
I am so excited to be here, this is great. Such a lovely introduction.

Kyle Knowles:
Sorry I messed it up a little bit, but we’re going to roll with it.

Ian Bowles:
It’s going to be the only mess-up of the entire night, I assure you.

Kyle Knowles:
The only mess-up, yes, I hope so. So I’ve heard, Ian, that 80% of businesses close down within the first five years. Gantry has been in business for over seven years now. What do you attribute to beating those business odds?

Ian Bowles:
First off, I mean the people I work with are fantastic. Ben and Kory each bring a strength to our partnership.
You had Ben on, and I think he mentioned this, but all three of us are just equal partners and we each bring this… I refer to it as a three-legged stool a little bit, that we each kind of stabilize what we bring to the table.
And I think one of the results of that is the culture we’ve created, in finding a good balance of why we do what we do to… discovering. Why we’re doing it is always an evolving thing for us anyway, and how we do it is creating… I feel really dumb now… Creating a culture.
We really strive to create a culture that is a place that we would want to work because we do work there. We’re not just managers, we’re in the weeds. We are doing everything with our team members, so.

Kyle Knowles:
It sounds like it with the list of different jobs that you do, it sounds like There’s nothing you don’t do.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, yeah. I don’t do QuickBooks, Ben takes care of that and a lot of the business development, but I am in a really fun position where I spend some of my time in production with Kory and he is just such a phenomenal designer. And a work ethic like no one I’ve ever known and really ambitious about every project we do. And Ben, who is the most personable, approachable human being you’ll ever meet.
And I’m in the middle, doing some production and some business development, some strategy, some writing, all of those different things that are necessary for an agency to stay afloat.
I kind of get to help out with all those things. So that’s fun. I really like what I do.

Kyle Knowles:
Is there a favorite thing that you get to do?

Ian Bowles:
My favorite thing, which is something I’ve had… If we go back to core memories of work, was back on the first project I worked on with you back at the previous agency I was at. And we showed you the video we were working on and those are my favorite things… I love showing a client the work and watching on the Zoom call, when we’re like, “Okay, let’s show it.”
We hit play and we are not looking at the work. We’re looking at the Zoom call, watching their faces, and knowing that we’ve solved a problem that they’ve hired us to solve, is insanely satisfying for me.
I don’t get as caught up in the details of like, oh, do I like this style better? I do have an opinion about those things, but at the end of the day, if we’ve solved a problem for somebody, I find that very satisfying.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really cool. So doing the work, making something and then debuting it.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, yeah. And then having that reaction be like, “Oh my gosh. Yes, you guys nailed it.” And we’ve structured ourselves, our process, so that we can get to that point as often as possible. That when we’re showing them a version that we call it Approvable V1, we expect that there’ll be feedback to it.
But they’ve seen it in the pitch, in the script, in the storyboards, in the style comps, in the animatic, all the way through. And so when the first time they see it all put together… it’s not like a half-baked, kind of like, “This’ll eventually be…” We get to show them something that’s ready to go, just about, and that’s just a really exciting process.

Kyle Knowles:
So what is the process from cradle-to-grave then, walk me through your process at Gantry?

Ian Bowles:
Yeah. We get started… Our cradle starts just at any part of the process. Sometimes people come to us and say, “I need a video,” and then they explain what they want to do and we say, “You don’t need a video, you should do something else.”
We focus on video but we try not to fall victim to the, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. So we’ll tell people, “Maybe a video is not the right thing, but let’s assume it is the right thing.”
We’ll work out what they want to accomplish with the video. We’ll work through a script, or a concept and then a script. It just depends on who the client is and how out there they’re willing to be, and how much freedom we have.
Sometimes people come to us with a script already half-baked and we kind of wordsmith it and fix it.
We always try to be… Our motto is collaborative, not combative, because we have strong opinions about things. We don’t shy away from telling people, “Hey we think there might be a better way to do this.”
So we get the script, we work on a visual direction… This is one of the team’s favorite parts of the process. We set everybody loose and say, “Here’s the parameters. Here’s the brief. Go nuts, what should this look like?”
And we then present anywhere from three to five to seven different visual directions for a project and so any one of these could be the final project… be the final visual language for this. From there, once we get approval on that, we… I think I skipped over the scripting process.

Kyle Knowles:
When you present that, is that in storyboard? Is there a script, or what does it look like?

Ian Bowles:
That’s one of the things we have to tell people is “Hey, this is not necessarily one-to-one with the script. This is just…” we let everybody loose because oftentimes the script is still being finalized. While we’re doing that, we try to cascade those so it doesn’t take six months to do one of these things.
Usually our process is eight to 12 weeks just depending on the intensity of the video, the length and all that kind of thing, and the style and what-have-you.
So we’ve got the script baked, we’re working on the visual style comps, we present that to them. They usually pick one, or they Frankenstein a couple that’s pretty common, they’re like, “Hey I really love the typography here but can we go with the color scheme here and these characters,” or whatever that might be. From there we move into animatic where I get to go record a scratch track.

Kyle Knowles:
You do the voiceover?

Ian Bowles:
I usually do the voiceovers, much to my coworkers dismay, they get to listen to me all day while they’re animating… Maybe that’s why they don’t like me, I think.
So we’ll do a scratch track, and usually we will do an animatic over a storyboard. I like an animatic, which is just still frames set to a scratch temporary voiceover track so that everyone understands, here’s the timing of this, here’s how long we’re spending on everything. Oh wow, that sentence, even though it looks the same length as this other sentence, takes a long time to say properly. And it’s too long, we need to shorten that up. Let’s reword that.
It reveals holes in the script, it reveals holes where a storyboard might not. On a storyboard, you’ve just got to paragraph of text underneath there and then when you get to it you realize, that’s way too long to be sitting on that. No one wants to watch that, you’re losing their interest.
So we’ll do that animatic, and we’ll show that to the client. That’ll either be sort of full art boards or sometimes just sketches. It really depends on the client and the relationship we have with them, how much they trust us and we trust them, to go to bat for it.
We’ll do maybe a round or two of that, make sure that it’s good. That last round of feedback ideally is like, “Great, we will worry about that in animation. Trust us, that’ll be fine,” and then we go into animation.
Everyone puts their headphones on. I usually direct the voiceover sessions with… We hire professional VO talent because it just makes a world of difference. We’ll direct them and cut it down to exactly what we want and then we usually animate to that.
Some people like to animate first and then have a voiceover go to picture. But for most of the videos that we do, it’s just really nice to let the voiceover artist kind of find their stride. And oftentimes we’re still making little tweaks here and there to that, along the way.
And then the team animates for a week and a half, two weeks, just off and on, we’ve usually got four or five projects active in the house at any one time. And we work pretty collaboratively on that in ways that I know other agencies don’t. When people come and work with us, it’s a little bit of a shock to like, “Oh, you guys are in each other’s files constantly,” and we’re constantly working on different pieces of it and stitching it back together at the end of the day.
We add the music, and show it to the client and ideally they love it and they have very little changes, and then we purchase the music or purchase the stock if there’s any stock in there, and do any color correction and ship it on out the door.
Most of the stuff we do ends up on the web or social media. Some of it ends up on broadcast but not a ton. That’s not definitely not our focus and most people know us… The people who know us, the people come back to us, they know us for those things. Sometimes they end up at events, sometimes it’s in-store or something like that, but mostly it’s online. So, that’s the process.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s a really cool process. What are some of the tools that you’re using day in and day out? When you say people come work with us and they’re in the files and stuff, what are some of the applications that you use?

Ian Bowles:
We’re Creative suite people, it’s just the default for everybody and that’s great, everybody kind of knows it. And we’re a Cinema 4D shop. It’s not something I touch, but the people who do the 3D at the shop, Cinema 4D and for those really interested, we use an OctaneRender engine.
We’ve played around with Redshift a little bit but Octane’s kind of where we are right now. We are sort of switching over to PC slowly because Apple’s decided they don’t want to support professional 3D people, unfortunately.
I’m still on a Mac. [inaudible 00:11:33], Premiere and Audition and After Effects and Illustrator, those are my happy places. After Effects is kind of 90% of our projects That’s where they’re going to get rendered out of final, is as out of After Effects. We’ll pull all of our 3D in there. We’ve got some pretty solid workflows and the team works together really well to understand, “Okay, we’re going to all work on this root timeline. Here’s the audio, I’m going to take up to frame 432, you take 433 and on. I’m going to overlap and mine is going to reveal away, so your layer will be under mine and then you just keep going.”
So it’s just a conversation like that and we build our own language of how we talk about things and After Effects is the glue that puts everything back together. So some of it’s animated in After Effects and some of it’s animated in Cinema 4D, but that’s where it all sticks together.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. I’m sorry to geek out a little bit longer, but what other applications for project management or communication, all that kind of stuff, do you use?

Ian Bowles:
We are a pandemic adopter of Slack. We used to all be on just iMessages because we were all on Macs before that anyway. But then with the pandemic we’re like, all right Slack, we need to have a little bit more robust than just our iMessages.
For project management, we use TeamGantt… We’ve been using that for about four years now, I think. We’d looked and we were pretty extensive about trying to find something that fit the needs of what we wanted. And I know we just scratched the surface about what can be done with the software.
There’s so many great project management softwares, and it’s got so many great features that I know I don’t use. It’s got a couple that I wish it had still, but as far as, primarily we’re doing that to measure out how long we think the project’s going to take, we can create a Gantt chart that we can share with the clients and so they like that. Or export in Excel to share with them depending on how they want to see that.
We track our hours with that as well. We are, I think relatively unique… Maybe not, I can’t really… I’ve worked at two agencies my entire life, one of which I started. So I definitely recognize a gap in my knowledge there, but I feel like we’re unique in that we don’t harp on our employees for the hours that they’re spending on something.
We know we meet every day, we talk about, okay, who’s working on what? And we just have a vibe for that. We have them track hours for the sake of knowing next time we bid a project, did we take a bath on that, or was that okay?
Which my business professors are probably freaking out about that if they’re listening to this. But we keep an eye on it, and we know an estimate. We tell people, “Hey, we’re thinking this will probably take you two days to do,” but if it takes you two and a half, we’re not going to sweat about it. We’re just assuming that you learned something from it and you were working from it, then cool, we consider that a win.
Yeah, so TeamGantt. We just have Squarespace for our website. We originally were going to build a WordPress thing and then paid first… We’re going to go month to month on Squarespace and seven years later, we’re like, okay, no, we’re paying for it annually, that’s fine. Because web isn’t really what we focus on. We’re not a website, we don’t do apps.
When we started the company we said, “Hey we really like doing video. We like doing animation, we like doing motion graphics.” That evolved into doing 3D. We like shooting stuff every once in a while, live action, but web and apps were just not interesting to us. And if we could make a living not doing those then we would do that.
I think that’s most of the tools we use, I mean Ben uses QuickBooks online begrudgingly, but it just seems to be the best big-kids software that we’re using for that which is probably for the best.

Kyle Knowles:
And so no PowerPoints, no keynotes?

Ian Bowles:
Really try to avoid doing them. I don’t mind doing them, I’m going to say that. On the record, I just said that. I don’t mind doing them. They can be frustrating not because of the art, not because of the software to do them. We usually just design them in Illustrator or Photoshop and bring it over. It’s more that the process, for the level of PowerPoint that’s going to be really interesting, that CEO keynote presentation.
You’re working with CEOs and sometimes they have so many things on their plate that the PowerPoint presentation is the last thing on their radar, and so you end up with late changes and they don’t get to give their input until much later.
So that can be frustrating, and so we try to limit those. They can sometimes cause teams to tune out a little bit and not enjoy those. We try to find that balance of finding projects that are interesting, but also profitable enough to be worth doing and find that balance of the things we say yes to.

Kyle Knowles:
So I’m going to geek out just a little bit more and then I want to go back to your process. Hardware… So I know video files and these kinds of things can be pretty gigantic. What kind of hardware do you have to manage all that and what’s your mode of file management and all that?

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, we do have a pretty ancient NAS that’s in the office that we do store some footage on, but for the most part, the second we shoot something… That’s where we really have the big files. The big files that are not… 3D sequences are going to be image sequences. So the individual files are not that big but the bulk of them add up to a lot and those are easy to manage on Dropbox.
Dropbox is what we use for our file storage, for our server, so to speak. For big pieces of footage, we are on an unlimited plan on Dropbox and so we just throw them up there sometimes.
But some of the team will, instead of having to sync that down and such, we’ll have a couple extra hard drives sitting around. We’ll archive stuff on hard drives. The second we shoot something, we pull it onto two hard drives that we bought at different times from different manufacturers, or if it’s the same manufacturer from different retailers. So they’re not in the same batch so that we don’t have two hard drives fail us at the same time.
So we’ll have a couple hard drives with the footage on there. We try to make those identical and everybody who plugs them in knows, don’t mess with everything on there. Save everything else on Dropbox, and that’s where we kind of run things from.
And because we’re so collaborative, that usually takes people a little bit when they start working with us, “No, we expect your working files to be up there. Just work in Dropbox, have it synced, have the folder synced locally.” The files are too big to be streaming like some people do, and some people can do on Dropbox. Ours, they’re usually a couple gigs sometimes and so they have to be synced locally on the machine. But yeah, we make it work. Does that answer your question?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, it does. Totally. Back to the process. So I am a new client or I want to be a new client with you, what are some recommendations you can give to people that work with a company like Gantry and they want to get a video done? Give me some bullet-point recommendations of what a company needs to do to work well with a video agency?

Ian Bowles:
Okay, okay. Things that I wish some of our clients knew better, is the amount of work that it’s going to take on their end, especially if they want something done quickly. Okay, we can do it quicker, but you’re going to have to turn around very quickly, same-day feedback on things, which means within their organization they might have to reorganize how they’re getting approvals or gets to have a say on it. So that’s one thing.
I think knowing what you want to accomplish and trusting the professionals that you’re hiring. That sounds very self-serving of me, but there’s definitely times of finding that balance between giving clients what they want and what they actually need. Sometimes those are the same things, sometimes those are very different things.
Yeah, I think if you’re going to work with a… work with somebody whose work you like. Come with examples of their work… flattery works amazingly on designers. You just tell them, “Oh I love this piece that you guys did, can you do something along that line for me?” Or you can bring something that’s from another agency or just something you’ve seen online, something you’ve seen on TV, like, “I loved this spot. Can we do something that feels like this?”
Those are very, very helpful for us anyway to gauge how much time we’re going to need to spend on this, how intense the process will be and then therefore to bid it accordingly.
If you have a budget, just tell us. Oftentimes what happens is, we’ll have this initial kickoff meeting, they’ll explain what they want. Maybe if they don’t have samples, we just start spinning like okay, we do the shoot, we do a motion control camera, we could do blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so we come back to them with a budget and say, “Okay, here’s what we think it’s going to be.” They’re like, “Oh, that’s twice as much as we were hoping to spend.” And that’s just a little frustrating to say, “Oh well, if you told us that, we could have worked backwards and said, ‘Cool, here’s what we’ll do.’”
And nine times out of 10, we are cramming more work into that than they’re paying us for just because we like what we do, and we don’t like putting out subpar work, so we’re always going to make it nice.
So yeah, I think just having a good idea of what you want and if you don’t, being okay in saying that, I guess. Saying, “Hey, I’m not sure what I want.”
And then sometimes that happens, we will come back and say well okay, out of this gallery that runs a whole range of production values and styles and voices, what speaks to you? What seems like the closest to what you’re imagining? So we can go through that process with them but if they kind of know what they’re looking for that’s always really helpful.

Kyle Knowles:
All right, thanks for the tips. I’m getting free advice tonight.

Ian Bowles:
Yes. It’s worth what you’re paying for it, I’m going to tell you that right now.

Kyle Knowles:
So when you look at the whole process that you have to go through, what is the most difficult part of the process with your clients, meaning that’s the biggest roadblock?

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, I don’t know if there is any single one. Some projects it’s surprising that like hey, this is… Getting the script nailed down, that’s probably the most consistent fighting against a good friend of mine who is a copywriter. He calls them their binky words, the things that the CEO just needs to hear inside in the voiceover script to feel comfortable.
And then calls the buzzwords that when they get down into the deep terminology about the integrated turnkey cloud, multi-cloud database solution, he just calls that gack. He’s like, that’s just gack, nobody cares, nobody wants to listen to that.
Now granted, there’s videos where people do care, and we do those videos too, we do the videos that are deep dives into the technology and that’s fine too. But for those higher level ones, getting them to focus on saying no, getting them to say, what is it that you want people to take away from this? Because if you add more they’re not going to take away that main thing, that key walkaway from the video. You get one, maybe two, that’s what they’re going to remember and what do you want that to be? And really reinforcing that.
So that can be sometimes difficult just depending on the client. Getting them to bite on an interesting style and not go with the safe one. We’ve been known to… “We’re not going to show them this really, really safe one because they’ll pick it, and it’s not as good as if they picked some of these other ones.” And if that sometimes ends up being… not that we withhold it from them forever, but once they’ve seen it, “Here was a safe one that we had, we’re really glad you went with the not safe one.” The one that’s going to get noticed, the one that’s going to be memorable.
It’s not just that it’s not safe for the sake of doing something different, but something that will be memorable and serve their purpose. Again, they hire us to solve a problem and regardless of how cool a video looks, if it doesn’t solve the problem, then we didn’t do our job right.

Kyle Knowles:
Was that Todd that you were referring to as a copywriter?

Ian Bowles:
That was not Todd, that was actually a different copywriter. We work with a couple, that’s one position that we don’t ever hire on permanently for. We like having a different variety of voices to tap into for the right project. That copywriter is actually my buddy Steven Winston, he’s based in New York and he’s currently working at MRM//McCann, I believe. He’s worked all over the place… He’s had some Super Bowl commercials and things like that.
Cool dude, I went to school with him. He was in that marketing communications creative track where you get a minor in graphic design or become a copywriter and he was a copywriter dude.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. In the process you listed a whole bunch of different titles that you take on. What do you think your superpower is in this process?

Ian Bowles:
I think project direction and being a client whisperer, a little bit. I talk too much in meetings but sometimes I talk the right amount in meetings. And really dive in and understand what the client’s looking for both on a messaging level, but also on a what is their product, what is it doing?
I’ve been working with tech companies for my whole career and so I’ve got enough knowledge to be dangerous on when it was first virtualization and then cloud and then CASB and these different technologies and then Bitcoin there for a little bit, or blockchain for a little bit and then that kind of went away.
Thankfully not one of our clients needed us to do anything with NFTs, but just being able to dive… I really enjoy diving in and especially if I’m going to conduct an interview, or if I’m helping to write the script. To be able to speak to that intelligently rather than just, “I think this sounds better,” but to say, “Hey, this is going to support your initiatives and your messaging objectives better,” and to be able to objectively spell that out why to somebody. I think that’s hopefully a superpower.

Kyle Knowles:
I know Ben and you’ve talked about this, but as what Gantry does, taking something complex and simplifying it because I think that’s part of your superpower too. I’ve seen that in action.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, I mean that’s part of it, in order to do that you have to understand it, otherwise you’re just chopping limbs off of a tree and not really understanding why you’re trying to make it the shape that you are.
If you understand, okay, well this one we can get rid of this or we can hint at this in this line of the script, and then we still have it covered. We’re still hinting at it, but we don’t have to explicitly spell it out. And that every decision you are making is then in support of that brief, or of that problem that you’re trying to solve. I think that’s really important.
Everyone loses sight of that every once in a while, you just get really excited about a design and then we look at it we’re like, “Oh, that’s really cool, but is it doing what it needs to do?” No. But did it help propel the project along and get us to where we needed to go? Okay, great. It’s time to murder that baby, just throw it out. It’s not serving us anymore but it did get us to where we needed to go to.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. I think the quality of the outcome is tied to the quality of questions that are asked too in those discovery meetings, so.

Ian Bowles:
I do love when I get a, “Oh, that’s a really great question.” Oh my god, you’re good.

Kyle Knowles:
You’re on the right track.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah. It’s like if you’re playing a video game and you don’t find any enemies, you’re probably not going the right direction. You don’t find any questions, any like, “Oh yeah, I haven’t thought about that yet,” then maybe you’re not asking the right questions.

Kyle Knowles:
So people would be surprised about the number of hours that go into even a 60-second spot. Probably even more time goes into a 60-second 2nd spot than a five-minute spot. I’m guessing.

Ian Bowles:
It can. It can, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
So can you give a rough estimate, if you think about it, let’s just say you’re going to do the whole thing on your own. You’re going to write, you’re going to shoot, you’re going to edit, you’re going to add motion effects, whatever. For a 60-second spot, that’s going to be on the web, it’s some kind of product launch, how many hours, as a rough estimate, that would go into a 60-second spot?

Ian Bowles:
That number is unfortunately incredibly wide… a wide range. It could be as little as 40 hours of one person working on it.

Kyle Knowles:
It doesn’t sound like a little.

Ian Bowles:
Okay, I guess that’s maybe-

Kyle Knowles:
40 hours for 60 seconds?

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, that’s true.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s a lot, yeah.

Ian Bowles:
If it’s a live action, if it’s talking head and a little bit of B-roll and we’re just editing that together, we’re putting together a story and maybe the interview was only 20 minutes long, so I don’t have three hours of footage to go through. Something like that, with a little bumper on the beginning, bumper on the end. That could be the shoot day plus another day editing and finalizing. So two and a half days, let’s say.
Some of our more advanced projects that have 3D and a script and sound design or anything to do with rotoscoping or post-production effects, visual effects, something like that, those can get up to 300, 400 man-hours on the thing, when all is said and done, and it takes some time.
So an analogy I like to give to our customers when they ask, once we’ve established a budget… We like to work on a project-to-project basis, that’s how we get our value I feel like, is we sell our value as we are a partner with you. We’re not focusing on the nitty-gritty of, “Well, we’ve billed you this many hours.”
We do keep track of that so we can tell them, “Hey, we’re out of scope now.” But when they say, “Hey, we’re making this longer now.” I say, “Okay, well it’s how much design-jam are we spreading over time-toast?” How thin are we layering that? If you’ve got a whole loaf of bread right there and we’ve got a teaspoon of jam, it’s going to be pretty darn thin on there and the quality’s not going to be there. It’s not going to be a very enjoyable experience, but when we get that ratio right, it’s really nice

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the length of video that you mostly produce?

Ian Bowles:
90 seconds.

Kyle Knowles:
90 seconds?

Ian Bowles:
Yep, that’s the sweet spot. I mean, I really like the clients who say, “Nope, we want this to be 60.” All right, let’s do this.

Kyle Knowles:
Because It’s a challenge?

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a lot harder to make something that fits within the… It’s an additional parameter to stick to, but creativity needs constraints. You have to have something to push against in order to produce your best work. I’m a firm believer of that.
A lot of our clients go, “I want this three to five-minute video,” and we’re like, “No, you don’t. Nobody wants to watch that.” There’s very few cases where I’m like, “Okay. No, that warrants a three to five-minute video.” We will almost always try to push them towards a 60 to 90-second video, and 90 seconds is a good compromise.
And I think if you call people on it, “Well, when was the last time you watched a five-minute video in this subject?” They’re like, “I don’t.” Okay, your audience is the same. They’re not going to watch this if it’s five minutes long, unless It’s really, really, really compelling content.
So just in general, 90 seconds is what we’ll tell people is the sweet spot in attention. Our reel is never longer than that. Our reels usually try to be a minute, when we’re trying to show off ourselves. We try to follow our own advice and keep it short, sweet, leave them wanting a little bit more, wanting to call us and work with us. So yeah, that’s 90 seconds

Kyle Knowles:
That’s interesting because Instagram Reels, I think the limit is 90 seconds and YouTube shorts, I believe the limit is 60 seconds.

Ian Bowles:
And that’s something as that short-form video has become more and more popular, we will get more and more saying, “We need to keep it to 60.” We’re like, “All right, that’s great.”
And it’s not like, “Oh, it becomes so much easier for us because we’re getting out of 30 seconds of animation.” It’s like, no, it’s just as hard to cram more stuff into that 60 seconds and say all the things they want to but still have it be enjoyable and memorable and accomplish their goals.

Kyle Knowles:
And how many times do you deliver vertical video of what you produce?

Ian Bowles:
More and more, lately. A lot of the stuff we do that is that, it’s more technical, it’s more explainery. I don’t think they’re getting a lot of traction on Instagram and things like that.
But sometimes some of the things we do that are a little more consumer-facing, almost always we’ll do vertical. And then we’ve done projects where it’s like okay, vertical first. We know that the primary medium for this is going to be Instagram stories or something like that. TikTok… Yeah, so we’ll do it vertical first and then build out the 16:9 version of it, if need be.
There’s been some that we just never have, it’s like, yep, they would rather us spend the money or spend the time making that vertical one better than carving off some of that time in order to reformat it to something horizontal, if they know that that’s what they need. Which is great, if they know what they need then that means we can focus on that rather than delivering 14 different formats and sizes that may or may not get used.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. So Ian, what is your journey from before going to school, marketing communications, minoring in graphic design, to sitting here today?

Ian Bowles:
A lot of bad choices. I was an engineering major, my freshman year. I volunteered on the dorm council. I was like, I want to make signs for events, I don’t know why. And I was like, this is fun, and then I switched-

Kyle Knowles:
By hand or-

Ian Bowles:
No, I would take Calvin and Hobbes comics and change the words on them and they’d put them up in the bathroom stall, so people would read those for events that were coming up. Or helped out with just different initiatives to get people to come to the events that the dorm council was putting on.
I volunteered for the first half of first semester, and then the second semester, I was in the dorm council as part of the class and I’m like, this is fun, this is cool.
And so then I switched to a marketing communications major and I didn’t know anything about design. I was not the kid who doodled, or was an amazing illustrator and artist at all. I’m still terrible. My storyboards and ideas are always in really poorly-drawn stick figures.
I started volunteering actually at the Student Life Organization at BYU. They had a volunteer coordinator who would teach you how to just use Illustrator to make posters, for the different clubs would come to the design center and say, “Hey, we need a poster for this,” “We need a flyer for this.”
So I made that my job, was I would go there every day before my actual job and spend an hour and a half and then I got into the program, loved it. Did the creative track where we had just 12 of us that were in this pretty intense advertising-driven, had some great professors, loved it, had a minor in graphic design.
Met one of my favorite professors of all time… Brent Barson, if you’re ever listening to this, Hi. And ended up getting a job where he worked at, my first big-kid job, at an agency in Sandy where I stayed for 10 years.
I was looking for something to push me, at that point. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, I might’ve wanted to get out of the industry. So I found an MBA program that was very convenient for me, in that it was literally… We were meeting two minutes from my house, so it wasn’t going to add anything to my commute. I had four kids at the time, all very young. So I didn’t want to spend any more time away from home than I already was.
And then about 12 weeks into that program, I got told that we were losing our jobs in six weeks because the agency was going to close down. So Ben and I went up to my office and said, “Okay, we always joked that if this place went out of business, we were going to start our own shop and now it’s happening.”
We reached out to Kory and said, “Hey, we’re going to start our own shop. Do you want to join?” He’s like, “Yeah, I don’t like having a steady paycheck, let’s do this… Health insurance? What’s that?”
And so I was doing that MBA while we were starting Gantry and closing up at that other agency. We worked there for another six weeks while we were going to school… Well, I was going to school starting Gantry and working full-time still. It was a tough six weeks and yeah, I really liked my MBA program.
I’ve said this to a lot of people, but there was nothing in the program that I couldn’t have gotten from TED Talks and reading books and online articles and things like that. But I know myself, and I know I wouldn’t have done it.
I was 10 years into that job and I hadn’t progressed, I’d stopped progressing. I needed some accountability for myself, and I just knew that I wasn’t very good at sticking to things like that. So I signed up for that program and really enjoyed it.
It really forced me to work with people that maybe I wouldn’t have chosen to work with, work on problems that I wouldn’t have worked on. And I really appreciated that in a much different way than my undergrad. Recognized some of the flaws in the way that I approached my undergrad education, of thinking I’m the smartest person in the room and I know all this stuff, I just got to get the grade, I got to just do this.
Getting an MBA is not, “Oh, and now you have an MBA and you can put that on your LinkedIn and that means you’re qualified to do whatever job.” It just is an opportunity to push yourself and grow and learn things that you otherwise wouldn’t learn.
And I really liked that. I think it really opened up… reignited a love of learning, and of learning different things and pushing myself to read things that maybe aren’t as interesting to me on their face value.
So it served us really well at Gantry for me to have that experience. Just bringing a little bit different perspective to the table. I mean, it was serving me already as soon as I started, it was serving me really well at the other agency.
Just, I would go to my boss the next day and say, “Hey, we should change this up how we do this,” or a class on management and how to manage people and it was instantly applicable and so therefore I paid attention a lot better.
And when people are like, “Oh, the teacher’s going to let us out early. Great.” I’m like, “No, I’m paying for this. I want to stay here. I’ve already committed to this. Let’s do this. I want to learn as much as possible while we’re here.”
Yeah, that’s how I ended up here, I guess. I got to work with you at Merritt and also at the agency I was at and now at Gantry, and that’s been a lot of fun.
I mentioned to you earlier, one of my core memories of my career is that first video we did together and sitting up in the… We were like, “Let’s go sit…” not in the conference room, “Let’s put on the big TV and let’s go sit on the couches and watch this and show Kyle.” And you were just like, “That was awesome. That was so awesome.” I love that.
That’s still just… I think about that and it makes me happy. And we got to go do a bunch of more fun projects after that. That was really cool and maybe got you in trouble a little bit by going and filming in the plant there at Merritt.
But I like how that… I’m just going on a tangent here, I really loved how I can see that influence and this has happened with a couple of different clients. When we do a project that pushes a brand and makes it better, and then I get to see our work reflected back in the future work that their internal team does or that their other vendors do… Because we’re usually small potatoes for any of these big clients and they’ve got a couple of different vendors that they use for these things… to see our work being referenced or the things that we designed or phrases that we came up with or taglines.
Usually it’s the visuals, that’s where I think things really sing for us. That’s really satisfying, it’s one of those other favorite things. Back to that question that you asked earlier, to see our work mirrored back to us in other things that they’re doing is really cool.

Kyle Knowles:
I agree. I think that would be very satisfying to produce something and then show it to someone and for them to go, “That was awesome.” Yeah. So when you’re talking about doing an MBA, what’s the number one thing that you learned from your MBA that you use day in and day out at Gantry?

Ian Bowles:
Just an analytical mindset and approach to evaluating how I think about things, would probably be the most tangible. I mean my MBA now, it was December of 2017. Do you remember anything about December 2017 at this point? Nothing. Nothing.
So it’s been a minute since that’s passed. So the individual pieces of knowledge, the individual pieces of what we talked about in our accounting and our finance class or things like that, I don’t remember all those details.
But when I get back into them, I kind of like, all right, right, this is how I think about this. So just being able to think more critically and analytically about problems is probably the thing that still sticks with me after five, six years now almost, of being done with it.
Still have some fun connections from that class too. Some friends that I made that I keep in contact with professionally, and keep an eye on what they’re doing. But I think yeah, just the different mindset of how to approach problems is definitely the thing that I remember most.

Kyle Knowles:
That makes sense too, especially as you’re doing more artistic work to move into more of that. So we talk about a maker, right? You were doing a lot of making probably in design and everything when you were at Verite, and so maybe that MBA moved you more into that manager kind of mindset. Looking at numbers more than just being creative and making things all day.

Ian Bowles:
[inaudible 00:42:26] talked about the unconscious incompetence. I was probably rising to the level of my incompetence there at Verite in terms of, I was doing a lot of managing. Kory says, “Oh yeah, Ian was my boss at Verite.” I’m like, “I wasn’t your boss. Steve was your boss,” We love Steve and we still keep in great contact with him.
But I kind of took on this manager role and this art director role at Verite, at the previous agency that I was at. And that’s probably what drove me to go, okay, maybe I should look into this and get some actual experience doing this instead of just making it up as I go.”
Which is again that mindset, that mentality that I had as an undergrad, I’m like, I’m just going to figure it out. I don’t care what these people say, they don’t know anything. And then going, maybe I do want to know what other people think, maybe I do want to understand that a little bit better.
Yeah, getting that out of an MBA and understanding that management… I’ve lost my train of thought here on where we were going, but-

Kyle Knowles:
Maybe going from maker to manager, that transition.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, yeah. Sorry, that’s what we were going for.

Kyle Knowles:
And then focus on money too, right? Maker, manager, money.

Ian Bowles:
That’s very much that progression, maker, manager… So I was managing things from that perspective of the art and the people but not the, let’s keep track of the dollars and the hours and all of those things.
And that’s definitely been helpful as we’ve thought about how we approach pricing, how we approach the projects that we are going to take, understanding our cashflow, understanding, okay, can we do this? Is this going to work out? Is this not a good idea?
Those things… That transition is very much that progression of, I was very much a maker, started to dabble into manager, MBA was very helpful in expanding some of those ways of thinking about managing people and projects. And then starting Gantry, being very, very concerned with money and going, okay, can I support a family doing this? Can the three of us all support our own individual families doing this and it’s worked out so far.
I don’t know if I really added any insight to your question there other than, yep, I did make that transition, and now I probably spend anywhere between 20 and 40% of my time, making and then the other 60 to 80%, managing and meeting with the other two partners and making those strategic decisions about what we want to do.
I really enjoy that It’s fun. I think partly because of the subject matter and partly because of the people I do it with.

Kyle Knowles:
They’re not here to defend themselves, but what do you think the percentages are for Ben and for Kory?

Ian Bowles:
Of?

Kyle Knowles:
Maker and manager?

Ian Bowles:
Oh, Kory would most likely be happy to be a 10:90, 10% manager in terms of managing the business, and then 10% managing our employees and art directing and 80%. That guy just put some headphones on him, let him design.
He’s very much… We sometimes have a meeting with a new client, he’s like, “Do I need to be on this? Can I just keep working?” We’re like, “Yeah, it’s fine.” If we know that we’re under a deadline or something like that. We’ve got that flexibility.
Ben, he’s 90% manager, 10% maker at Gantry. That guy is super creative and super fun and is in a band, and all that other stuff.

Kyle Knowles:
He writes music.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, and he is very creative. He’s not moving pixels around, but he and I will sit down and hash through a script together if I’m working on something or he’s like, “I know you’re busy, I’m going to take a stab at this.” And he does a great job of like, “Oh wow, you really thought about this in a different way than I would’ve,” and we’ll come together with our two scripts and then hash it out and make the version that we want to send to the client. So that’s probably about the mix, and I’m kind of in that middle ground there.

Kyle Knowles:
I feel like you and Kory might be the Beastie Boys, and Ben might be Rick Rubin.

Ian Bowles:
I don’t know who Rick Rubin is.

Kyle Knowles:
He’s the producer guy. He has a book called Creativity or Create… He has a big, long beard, and he doesn’t wear shoes. He’s that guy. He’s produced a bunch of bands. He brought Aerosmith, Run-DMC. He’s that guy.

Ian Bowles:
That name sounds familiar, but I was going to be just brutally honest when I don’t know something, hopefully.

Kyle Knowles:
I feel like he probably brings the best out of everyone. Just being there, being present.

Ian Bowles:
Oh, yeah. First time you meet Ben Moffat, you’re like this guy is not for real. This is such a charade, he’s just so full of it. And then you’re like, oh no, he’s not. It’s genuinely him.

Kyle Knowles:
This is who he is.

Ian Bowles:
And then you meet his mom and you’re like, oh this makes a lot of sense. Okay, okay.
I love Ben’s parents, both of them. His mom, his stepdad and his dad. I don’t know his stepmom very well, but they’re all amazing people and it’s always fun to see… Oh, that’s where you came from. Okay, okay,

Kyle Knowles:
This makes sense.

Ian Bowles:
This makes sense now. Yeah, and like I said, Kory is just a phenomenally talented designer and a seriously hard worker. He’s the one that’s like, “Okay, Kory’s not here today, so do you think we can go home early?” Dad, can we leave?

Kyle Knowles:
He sets the standard. Yeah.

Ian Bowles:
It’s very inspiring. You go, cool, let’s come to work. And we play hard too, but we come to work. Nobody likes a meeting at five o’clock on a Friday and he’s the same way, but if we need to do it, we’ll do it. And all of our clients are like, “No one’s working, what are you doing?” But we are, so that’s how we roll.

Kyle Knowles:
What is the… I don’t know… 10-year target or goal? Where are you headed as a company, Gantry, what do you want to see in the next 10 years?

Ian Bowles:
We are always striving to just get better at the work that we do and be more and more satisfied with the work that we’re doing. So the 10-year goal, A, I don’t know that we really, really have a solid one, but I think maybe we’ll grow a little bit but in the service of… We got asked one time, “Well, how do you guys decide when to hire?”
And we could take on more projects, we could say yes to more things and hire more junior designers, and just keep them busy on projects that really won’t ever see the website. They’re necessary, they’re good projects, but they’re not fun, they’re not glamorous.
But we don’t want to do that, we’d rather hire people and train them up to be just really solid animators, really solid designers. So we’ll grow in the interest of getting better at our work. So maybe we’ll hire somebody who’s better at something that we’re not good at yet.
But I think yeah, the end goal is just to love what we do, keep a good balance, keep our employees happy, keep a culture where people can see themselves lasting for a long time. I know a lot of agencies it’s kind of two, three years, then you’re scratching for something new. We’ve had our first two employees who have been with us for over six years each now. And I think that speaks to hopefully a little bit about the culture and how we take care of them. So I think just more of that.
I don’t have a grand vision of oh, we’re going to grow and we’re going to be the biggest motion graphics agency in Salt Lake or in the West or anything like that. We just want to do cool work, stuff that I can show my mom and she goes, “Oh, that’s neat. That’s cool.” That’s always nice.
A lot of times we’re doing stuff that’s so technical that, oh it looks pretty, but I have no idea what’s going on. But when we get to do those more fun ones, that’s always nice and to be able to show it and share it with other people and have them appreciate it too. So we’re always still just finding our stride, I think always.

Kyle Knowles:
What was your biggest fear going into business for yourself?

Ian Bowles:
Oh my gosh, so many. I remember distinctly spending a couple of Friday nights figuring out health insurance because we like, okay, well the three of us are going to start, we’re going to go do health insurance on the open marketplace. Can we afford that? Oh my gosh, this is expensive.
Up until recently was my second biggest… I’m on my wife’s insurance now, she’s got a full-time job… but single biggest expense, besides our mortgage, was the health insurance premium every month. So that was scary from a financial… which is indicative of the financial strain. Okay, is this going to work?
We knew that we had some momentum when we started Gantry. We knew that we had some clients who would no longer have their agency that they relied on for the type of work that we were doing, because we worked at that agency and it was not going to be around anymore. So we knew that.
But just all of the little things that you don’t think about that, well, I would get in my head and worry about, what about invoicing? What about taxes? What about office space?
And I would always take a step back, and my partners also were just really helpful with this and my wife was very helpful with this, okay, we’re not the first people to do this. Lots of people have been doing this for a long time. Lots of people that I don’t understand how they’re in business, are doing this for a long time.
You’re going to be okay, you’re going to figure it out and if you don’t, well go get a job, that’s fine. If in six months this doesn’t work out, we will go start over and do something else, or get a job somewhere doing what you know how to do.
Yeah, I personally worried about my contribution. I knew what Ben was going to add to this, I knew what Kory was going to add to this, but what was I going to add? Was what I do valuable enough to be in the room with those two?
Because I knew I’ve never been the best designer. I’ve always said, even at Verite, I’m not the best designer, but I make our designers better. But that doesn’t always apply to Kory. He’s so talented already. I think we collaborate really well.
But that was definitely one of my concerns is, what’s my role going to be in this and what I’m going to bring to the table and this still work out? And thankfully it has for the last seven-and-a-half years that we’ve leaned on each other’s strengths to propel the company forward.

Kyle Knowles:
Talk to me for a minute about having a supportive life partner and what that means to being an entrepreneur?

Ian Bowles:
Oh, it’s a great gig, if you can get it. All three of us married up, I think. Me, I know I did, but all three of us admit to that.
But yeah, my wife Shannon’s super, super supportive. She was always worried if I was going to start my own shop that I would work too much. But thankfully some of the things we learned from the previous agencies is the value that we placed on our work-life balance, and yeah, she’s a sounding board. She’s incredibly patient when I’m at home but lost in thought and spinning out about something at work.
Yeah, I could not do without her, that’s for sure. And it’s been a fun change of pace for me to be more supportive of her. She’s getting her master’s in blended learning… I’m not sure the actual major… but she’s getting her master’s right now. She’s almost done with it, and so it’s been fun to be supportive of her in her career.
She’s gone back to work full-time and take on the additional… The division of labor of the household responsibilities, taking a more active role in those. So it’s tough, but yeah, it’s really great to know we have each other’s backs in pushing each other forward.

Kyle Knowles:
All right, now it’s time for our lightning round of questions. You probably heard all of these and this is going to be very easy for you, but what’s your favorite candy bar?

Ian Bowles:
Caramello.

Kyle Knowles:
Interesting choice.

Ian Bowles:
Oh, it’s so good.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s Cadbury, right?

Ian Bowles:
Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Is it always available?

Ian Bowles:
Most supermarkets have it. Those Caramello eggs at Easter time though, those are far superior to the regular Cadbury eggs. Those are so good. I don’t eat as many [inaudible 00:55:22]. That’s my favorite.

Kyle Knowles:
I’m getting a Caramello next time I go to the grocery store. A favorite musical artist?

Ian Bowles:
I am unapologetically in love with Jimmy Eat World, absolute favorite band. I’ve seen them a bunch of times.

Kyle Knowles:
Did you see them recently? Because they just came-

Ian Bowles:
Oh yeah, yeah. No, I took my older two kids to that at the complex. Great show. Learned about some new bands there, Middle Kids and Manchester Orchestra.

Kyle Knowles:
We went to Middle Kids, that’s why we went. We were there.

Ian Bowles:
You were there.

Kyle Knowles:
It was so hot in there.

Ian Bowles:
Oh my gosh.

Kyle Knowles:
We were in the entryway because there was more air right there. And then we actually went by the T-shirts for a while. So we saw Middle Kids and what was the…

Ian Bowles:
Manchester Orchestra.

Kyle Knowles:
Manchester Orchestra, my daughter wanted to see them. And we left before Jimmy Eat World. I love Jimmy Eat World, but we were just so hot.

Ian Bowles:
I thought it was great there. I was like, wow, the industrial fan here is really cranking. If you were underneath that, it was not bad.

Kyle Knowles:
I love the complex [inaudible 00:56:20].

Ian Bowles:
That was my first time there. I’ve seen Jimmy… The first time I saw them was in 1998 in a little tiny venue in Portland where I grew up. And recently a friend’s brother… My friend who was with me, his brother, stumbled upon somebody recorded the show on a 1998 camcorder, the whole thing. And you can see us in the front row standing there, a young 17-year-old Ian with hair, just rocking out.
And we’d always talked about how amazing that concert was, and we’re like, “Did we just misremember that? Was that just like we’re piping it up in our mind?” And I’m like, “Nope,” I’ve gone back and rewatched the whole concert. I’m like this is such a good concert.

Kyle Knowles:
Is it on YouTube then?

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, it’s on YouTube.

Kyle Knowles:
We’re going to include the link in the show notes.

Ian Bowles:
The 1998 La Luna, Jimmy Eat World, I’ll point out where I am. And yeah, I’ve seen him a couple of times coming through, that was my high school music and loved it. And when I got to BYU, if I was wearing their shirt, they’re like, “Are you from Arizona?” I’m like, “No, from Oregon.” I knew about him before that.” But yeah, just great music, great rock and roll.

Kyle Knowles:
I love his white Fender that he plays. He’s got his signature Fender that he plays.

Ian Bowles:
I’m too busy looking at his hair. I don’t even look at his guitar, I look at his hair. I’m like, how? How is it you have such amazing hair doing this for 30 years.

Kyle Knowles:
Did you see them when they came with Third Eye Blind at the USANA.

Ian Bowles:
I didn’t go to that show. I didn’t go to that show.

Kyle Knowles:
I saw that whole thing. What was interesting about them to me, was that they came out and I was just like, these guys just look like dads.

Ian Bowles:
They totally do.

Kyle Knowles:
Because meanwhile Stephan Jenkins from Third Eye Blind, he comes out, he’s got big boots on, leather pants, all this stuff. These guys came out, they were all dressed from the Gap.

Ian Bowles:
They’re just relatable dudes.

Kyle Knowles:
Old Navy, the Gap, I don’t know where they get their clothes, but they just look like middle-aged dudes. Then they come out and they rock.

Ian Bowles:
They’re just middle-aged dudes who just love playing together.

Kyle Knowles:
They’re so good though.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, I love seeing them live. They’re fun.

Kyle Knowles:
I like that answer. Favorite cereal?

Ian Bowles:
Probably Lucky Charms. It’s so good.

Kyle Knowles:
Good choice.

Ian Bowles:
My wife one time got me just the bag of all marshmallows off the line. It’s so good.

Kyle Knowles:
You can do that?

Ian Bowles:
Oh yeah, it was like some company. But they sell just a full-on giant bag of marshmallows, if those are considered marshmallows, but those.

Kyle Knowles:
So do they hire people to just pick out the marshmallows and they bag them? What happens-

Ian Bowles:
No, they were slightly different shapes and colors and stuff, but they were the same stuff. So it’s just a bag of that. You can buy it… You can go look it up, Lucky Charms, marshmallows.

Kyle Knowles:
Did you put milk on it? Did you eat it like cereal?

Ian Bowles:
I would just enrich my mix of Lucky Charms with the marshmallows to create a more optimal ratio. Or my second favorite cereal is one part Cinnamon Toast Crunch, four parts, Rice Chex.

Kyle Knowles:
That’d be interesting.

Ian Bowles:
Getting really, really nerding out here on breakfast cereal, but yeah

Kyle Knowles:
I’m going to try that.

Ian Bowles:
Okay. It’s good. It’s just enough sweet to feel like, ooh this is nice, but also it’s Rice Chex, so it kind of feels adult.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. I like it. You’ve already answered this. Mac or PC? You have a Mac.

Ian Bowles:
I’m A Mac guy. I’ve been a Mac guy… Went from Commodore 64 to a Mac when I was in sixth grade and never looked back. I always had a Mac.

Kyle Knowles:
Once you go Mac, you never go back.

Ian Bowles:
Kory will have to… He disagrees. He hates it.

Kyle Knowles:
Is he moving to PC?

Ian Bowles:
He’s on a PC. He’s been on PC for a couple of months now and then he went back home and was working on it. But he’s got it all formatted so that he’s like, “I only work on this one PC so I don’t need to learn PC, I can make this as Mac-like as possible.”

Kyle Knowles:
The quick keys and stuff.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, hot keys and all that stuff.

Kyle Knowles:
So all the Adobe suite [inaudible 00:59:59].

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, that stuff stays the same but yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
A lot of people I’ve heard are doing that because of the speed and the memory you can get for so much less money than a Mac or what again is the reason for-

Ian Bowles:
For us it’s the 3D, it’s the render engine. All of the Adobe stuff, it’s totally fine. Adobe works great. Mac, PC, don’t have a problem with it. I mean I work on a 2016… not 2016. 2020… I’ve had that computer for a year, 2022, 16-inch MacBook Pro. As far as encoding H.264 video, it just screams, it’s great.
The thing that we use PC for is our rendering and when we use Octane, there’s, some graphics card voodoo that we were all limited on how far we could upgrade everything and the whole shop… Nobody upgrade past this point because past this point our external graphics cards wouldn’t be supported in order to render. And the internal ones can on some of them, like Nvidia versus AMD or something like that.
Again, I don’t know all the details but that was a limitation and PC just it opens up a lot more doors. There’s, in that regard, far fewer compatibility issues. So we were kind of hamstringed for a while waiting to see if Apple would release the Mac Studio and that came out.
We’re like, oh maybe this will be the solution to it. And it just wasn’t quite beefy enough to do the things that we needed to do for renders. And we didn’t like the idea of being reliant on a render farm to do a lot of the work we do. So that’s why we moved to PC.
The modeling and the building out of our scenes, we can do just without the external GPUs for the most part, but to actually get down and render it with any sort of reasonable timeframe that was in hours and not weeks spawned the move to PC. We had one of our team members go to PC, year and a half, two years ago, and then Kory just switched over a couple of months ago.

Kyle Knowles:
So what’s the speed savings like, is something that would take four hours is now something on hour?

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, I mean it’s more that now we can upgrade our stuff. The systems that we had were pretty fast. I think we used 1080i’s as our original graphics cards that we were using. So some of these renders… and it depends, sometimes it’s like, oh yeah, this is rendering twice as fast on the PC or twice as fast, really not just on the PC, on the graphics cards that we have in the PC. Versus the Mac is not doing as well, or there’s some different components of the engine.
The denoising I know is one that, hey, on the Mac it just doesn’t work. It just balloons exponentially the time. A frame that should take three minutes normally, or it takes three minutes on the PC, was taking 30 minutes on the Mac just because of compatibility issues. I think more than CPU or more than processor strength in the GPU, I should say. It was just a compatibility issue.
So that’s where we’re at. So depending on the render engine that you’re on, your mileage may vary, but for us, it’s the right choice right now, so.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, Google or Microsoft.

Ian Bowles:
I hate both of them so much. You work in Microsoft and you try to move a table inside of a Microsoft Word document… I like Microsoft because I have a file, I like having a file. I hate when someone sends me a link to a Google doc then I’m like, okay, well now I have it, but if I’m offline, I can’t get to that. And I realize I’m offline less and less these days, but.
So there’s strengths in both. I do like the active collaboration you can do on Google Docs and we have some Google Docs that we use vital for our business for bidding stuff out. We have a template that we use to bid stuff out and that’s just this archival, it’s online, I can get to it from anywhere.
But for sitting down and writing, Word is fine. Although I guess I do both, whatever strikes my fancy that day.

Kyle Knowles:
So you have both, what do you use for email?

Ian Bowles:
Email, I’m using Google? Yeah, email We’re using Google and Google Calendar. I’m convinced that no one at Google or Apple has a family calendar and syncs it that way, to add… I could go off on a pet peeve of mine about calendars and how somebody needs to fix it. And maybe I need to be the person who goes and says, “Here’s how we’re going to fix this.”
But yeah, we use Google Calendars and I just use the default, mail client, usually on the Mac, it suits me well.
I’m terrible about setting meetings. So if you’ve ever been a victim of me sending the meeting invite and then me sending the follow-up meeting invite to say, “Sorry that was the wrong year. Let me correct that. I apologize.”
Ben’s usually the one who handles that and knows that I’m terrible at it for some reason. Just something about my brain does not want to schedule things correctly for the correct time zone, or year, or day, for that matter.

Kyle Knowles:
Dogs or cats?

Ian Bowles:
Dogs. Have you ever been a dog’s favorite person? It’s amazing. We got our first dog, technically we had a puppy for a couple of weeks when my second oldest was just a baby, and that didn’t work out so we got rid of that puppy. B
But we got a pandemic dog, we’re at least her third home. She was like 18 months old when we got her. My wife picked her out, and I’m her favorite person. Her name’s Lola and I love that stupid dog. She’s great.
So yeah, I love having a dog. They’re so much fun, so much affection, so much fun. She’s a great size. We can play with her but everybody can pick her up if we need to. She’s not like a giant lumbering beast that’s going to be imposing, so.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis.

Ian Bowles:
Yeah, between those two, Phantom. I’m a child of the ’80s and man those early ’90s that was just everywhere. I remember my parents got to see it when it came through and I was so jealous. But we’d listen to the music in our car and stuff, but Hamilton also loved that.
I like some musical theater. I did some in high school. I did a community play a couple of years ago and that was super fun. I got to play Potiphar in Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat, and my two oldest kids were in that with me. Yeah, lots of fun.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the book that you recommend the most to people?

Ian Bowles:
I’m going to give you three. Fiction… Go read Project Hail Mary. Don’t even worry about looking anything up about it, just go read it. It’s fantastic. If you’re not a reader, get the audiobook. The audiobook is also fantastic. I recently did that with my kids. We did a big old loop through San Francisco and did the redwoods and family reunion and all that stuff.
And so I’d already read it, but I’m like we’re going to do the audiobook of this, and I was really worried that they would not like it, “Dad, that’s so lame.” But after the first chapter, “Okay, let’s listen to another chapter.” “Okay, let’s listen to another chapter.” Fantastic book. I think it’s entrepreneurial as well. It is about problem solving, it’s about figuring things out with limited information. A fantastic book by Andy Weir, the guy who wrote The Martian, which is also one of my favorite books.
Second book, I like to recommend to people is the Wright Brothers autobiography by McCullough. Just again, problem solving. Those two are fascinating. Just the way that these two bicycle repair engineers did what no other government agency sponsored… Langley Air Force Base named after a guy who was trying to do what the Wright brothers did and didn’t ever do it, but we named an Air Force base after him. Whereas the Wright brothers just figured it out, and their scientific method and the way they worked together and collaborated, is just super inspiring.
And then the third book I’d recommend, nonfiction… and that was nonfiction, the autobiography… I really like Mindset by Dweck. I found that very informative on myself. I know that I’m sometimes a very fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. And now I’m really mindful of when someone says… When a teacher says, “Oh, your kid’s so smart.”
I’m like, “Don’t say it like that, they worked really hard.” That’s what I really care about. I tell my kids that, I’m like, “It’s not that you’re smart, it’s that you worked hard. That’s what I care about. I care about the effort. I care about how hard you’re working to do the thing you’re doing.”
To understand that talent isn’t this magic thing that you either have or you don’t and you can’t increase. But you can start out anywhere and just work at it. And anybody who’s at the top of their field right now, started where you are right now at some point in time.
So I really like that, the potential that provides or the possibility of like, “Yeah, you can go do anything. You can’t do everything, but you can go do anything.” So I like that one. A couple of other books that I like that I got, again from my MBA that one of my professors just had a book list at the end of the semester.
He was like, “Here’s my book list. I think everybody should read these.” And I’ve been slowly working through those. Made to Stick, or… Let’s see, The Advantage and… Crap, his last name starts with an L. I can’t remember what his last name is… But really good about managing teams and about… So I like to read things like that every once in a while just to push myself.
I get sucked into reading fun fiction novels, I like Jack Reacher novels. They’re my current binge thing that I’m doing right now. But yeah, I do enjoy reading a lot more than I used to. I have my wife to thank for that. She pushed me into reading after we were married. She read the first chapter of Harry Potter to me out loud.
I hadn’t read a book since I don’t know when and she’s like, “I’m going to read this to you. You’re going to like it.” And I was like, “Okay, give me that book.” And I read the rest of them that were all out at the time.
And so that’s another thing that I owe to my wife is my affection for reading now, which I definitely did not have through high school and college and thereafter, so.

Kyle Knowles:
Thank you for answering those questions. Links to those books and some summaries of those books will be added to the books section at mmmpod.net, Maker Manager Money website.
And thank you so much for being here tonight, Ian. It’s been so fun talking to you. I’ve loved learning so many things about you and your process at Gantry. Just geeking out on all kinds of things. I’ve been looking forward to this interview for a long time now. So thank you for being here.

Ian Bowles:
You’re very welcome. I’m so honored to be on the list of people [inaudible 01:10:51] when I listen to some of these other episodes.
This is really good. These guys are really accomplished, I’m just running a small company. So it’s an honor and I always love chatting with you. So thanks so much.

Kyle Knowles:
Go ahead and talk.

Ian Bowles:
For breakfast this morning… I skipped breakfast, which is what every person… I ask when we’re filming. I go, “Hey, what did you have for breakfast?” And they say, “Oh, I didn’t have breakfast.”

Ian Bowles:
A lot of people skip breakfast.

Ian Bowles:
And then they stop talking I’m like, well, okay fine. “What did you do last night?” “Nothing.” I’m like, “I’m striking out on questions to ask you so that you will talk appropriately.”

Kyle Knowles:
Do you need a facial wipe?

Ian Bowles:
Sure, I’m not going to shy away from one.

Kyle Knowles:
These are Burts Bees facial wipes. And I just feel like… It’s just all the setting up was a little intense.

Ian Bowles:
Let’s just start not shiny.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, I have to plug… Look all this product placement. Burts Bees facial wipes.

Ian Bowles:

It’s really fun to look at it after you finished wiping your face.
See all that stuff. That’s been on there all day, all day.