At Funday, “Not Being Loud Doesn’t Stop You from Being Brilliant”
When Funday’s CEO Jeff Dack told me, “agencies don’t have to be extroverted”, I was keen to find out more about what he meant. Typically, you’d expect a leader to be the loudest voice in the room, but for Jeff, who oversees the fully-remote independent agency with employees working across the US, Canada and even as far as Armenia, brilliance isn’t recognised as the person who can raise their voice the most.
Instead, it’s a “team of brilliant introverts” that make up the agency – people who prefer to work remotely, collaborating via screens rather than face-to-face – creating work for clients whose businesses span “cream cheese to crypto”.
Funday has operated on a remote working basis since its inception in 2019, offering value for money for its clients, and a flexible approach for its employees - whom it invests in heavily. Built on trust, good vibes and collaboration, LBB’s Abi Lightfoot caught up with Jeff to learn more.
LBB> Firstly tell us more about Funday’s remote working set up - where are its employees based?
Jeff> Funday is a North American creative agency – we service marketing clients in a variety of sectors, from cream cheese to crypto, across Canada and the USA. We offer a fully remote environment (‘work from wherever’) and our team members reside in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, New York, Miami and areas around those cities. We also have a team in Armenia – our awesome production team – who are happy to work upside down and ensure that they are operating in North American time zones. As far as we’re concerned, as long as you have a steady wifi connection, and you’re amazing at what you do, you can work at Funday.
LBB> In a nutshell, what do you believe are the strengths of your remote working model?
Jeff> The agency business is also a personal one. But let’s start with the business… For our clients, working remotely enables us to offer significant value for money. Our overhead costs and margin realities are to their benefit. Without a lobby to pay for, we can invest in people, and those people, our experienced team of multi-hyphenates, empower us to be able to deliver more for our clients. In a world where a CMO has to rationalise why they have chosen to work with one agency over another, being able to build out a longer list of deliverables, at the level of quality we deliver at, goes a long way.
Now, on the personal side, (I’m generalising here) but we are a team of brilliant introverts who have chosen to work 100% remotely. It suits our team’s lifestyle, working style, and allows us to be at our best, solving, strategising, creating and producing awesome campaigns and branding projects for our clients. The team runs on vibes, and is that much more comfortable performing tasks over screens rather than in rooms. To each, their own, right? This is the way this group works best. When people feel safe, supported and situated, they can trust each other, they roll up their sleeves and get into it together, as teams and with clients, and it shows in the final product.
LBB> Funday was founded in 2019, the year before the global pandemic made many companies turn to remote working who hadn’t considered it before – did being established as ‘remote’ already help you during this period?
Jeff> Absolutely. Especially because the team has worked this way for years… and while Funday, as it’s known today, started in 2019, many of our team members have been finishing each others’ sentences for years – the better part of a decade. That experience is important because they’ve learned best practices – everything from how to pitch effectively over screens, to how to engage in creative development, client strategy sessions, group standups, all of it. As Lady Gaga says: “We were born this way”.
LBB> More broadly, how do you come together as an agency to take a project from an initial idea, to the final product?
Jeff> How the sausage gets made is a whole article to itself, but being remote, independent and all about fun, doesn’t mean we aren’t without process. We have our ways of working, but it’s in the service of what we create. So, from a project perspective what that means is we don’t count hours. We aren’t lawyers. Whether it takes an hour, a day, a week to solve the problem with brilliant, creative solutions doesn’t matter. What matters is what comes out the other end to ensure our clients are achieving their marketing objectives.
We often tout our ‘big agency experience, boutique vibes’ approach. The vibes show up in our attitude, ethos and style. The big agency experience is valuable in knowing what it takes to achieve X. We know that to do X well, we need to assemble team Y and give them brief Z. If those pieces are in place, the project runs smoothly and clients get the work product they need and, more often than not, execution that goes well beyond expectations.
LBB> You said that “agencies don’t have to be extroverted”, can you expand on what you mean by this?
Jeff> Agencies I grew up in were full of bravado. Lots of big personalities. Folks who wanted to be seen and heard. And to a degree some of that plays really well in a business like ours. But it’s not the only way. Being quiet, or better yet, not being loud, doesn’t stop you from being brilliant. It takes all types of people to do what we do. Some people get their energy from being around others, and for some, it can be a drain. We are an enthusiastic, creative, eclectic squad of problem solvers who simply prefer to collaborate over screens.
LBB> Do you believe that remote working is the future for agencies?
Jeff> I believe that everybody’s business is different and requires a different approach to be optimised. There is no one way to work, and ultimately we all create our own futures. From a personal perspective, being an observational learner, had I not been exposed to awesome people of different backgrounds and skillsets doing awesome work, in-person, as a young advertising practitioner, I’m not sure I would understand what it takes to be awesome. But that’s me, and at this stage in my career, working remotely works for me because of my family, the ability to be at home, drive the kids to school etc.
I also believe the future for agencies will never be set, and will always evolve as long as agencies are led by people who are part dreamers, part pragmatists. Those people will constantly shapeshift, and accordingly, so will the agency organisations they lead.
LBB> How does Funday help to build relationships between its employees, despite not working together in person? Are there any social events or activities on offer?
Jeff> The name of the company says it all – we believe there is real value in having fun and we do our best to propagate this ethos into everything we do. For our team that means on-screen games, quizzes, memes, gifs… lots of gifs… celebrations, our unofficial mascot Ramy B, really any reason to encourage participation. We do this through scheduled events like our weekly standups and other meetings, and then the rest of it is impromptu based on how busy people are. Also, our Fun Truck newsletter is a great resource for this, serving up a shipment of weekly trends, to ensure we all know about the latest, greatest happenings in culture. Overall, the idea is to replicate the agency kitchenette, the gathering spot for good times, but to do so online.
LBB> We’re hearing so much about mergers and acquisitions by huge holding companies. In that context, how does your remote-friendly, independent model help you to thrive and keep creating great work?
Jeff> I got started in this wacky business back in 2000 and mergers and acquisitions have always been a thing. It gets loud when mega mergers happen, but it’s simply the reality of our world. More of a distraction than anything.
For Funday, being remote offers our clients the value they need, and provides us the work life integration and lifestyle we’re looking for. Being independent gives us the freedom to make choices that align with our ethos. But let’s not pretend it’s easy. We work hard at this and take a lot of pride in it. When it comes to the work product, we trade on quality and I would suggest that the Omnicom IPG merger isn’t really about that, it’s about driving efficiencies, and for them that makes sense. For us, as long as we are having fun making quality things with quality people for quality people, we believe our clients’ businesses will continue to thrive and so will ours.
