What I Learned Working For An NHL Hockey Team

“I’m going to tell you three reasons to take this job” is how Aimee, the CMO of the Ottawa Senators started my job interview, “but I’m going to start with three reasons not to take this job.”

My favourite from the “nots” list: “You know that feeling in a lot of creative jobs where you work for weeks on something and when it launches, it feels like no one sees it? The opposite is true here.”

And oh boy, if you know anything about the r/OttawaSenators on Reddit, it would be seconds after we published something that it was dissected, edited or ripped to shreds.

I actually can’t remember which list that was on. It was amazing.

However, at the time, I didn’t realize that the actual truest part of that “not” wasn’t even the extreme visibility of the work, it was the fact that we never had weeks for anything. 

The Boiler Room

On my first day at the Sens, Aimee gave me the tour of the office (a windowless maze underneath the seats at the arena) and introduced me as the new Executive Creative Director. (I had negotiated the “Executive” part because I wanted the job to sound like a huge step up career-wise to everyone at my last job.)

For a hockey fan, touring this modest office of cubicles and memorabilia was a bit like touring Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Wondrous and a little intimidating.

The last stop on the tour was down a long hall, through a featureless door, to a room that housed the creative team I was to lead. 

Walking in, I was greeted with looks from people that would later become dear friends but at the time scared the shit out of me. 

This group of people was effortlessly blowing through work I didn’t understand. A two-inch-thick book of player’s statistics, print files for season’s tickets (for every seat and game), and a three page list of every promotion, theme night and sponsor ad that needed to be produced that week.

I remember it feeling like walking into a boiler room full of running machinery and being asked to stick my finger in it. 

It was insane.

I since haven’t seen a job that comes close to the sheer volume of design work that was produced in that room.

Most people don’t know that an NHL team designs almost all of its own ads - and also the ads for their sponsors. When you walk into an arena and see some elaborately branded drink-company fan zone, someone downstairs designed that. 

And every 80s Night hat, Country Night banner, or official player popcorn bucket that was on the docket was getting bumped by social media asks and quick mockups for upcoming sponsor meetings.

And amongst all that, giant, high-visibility campaigns like the whole season look and feel needed approval. 

The Perfect vs The Good

I’m sure I would have failed spectacularly at this job if it weren’t for Aimee. 

It’s hard to explain exactly what she’s like but it’s a mix of no-nonsense bluntness mixed with kid-on-Christmas excitement for creative work. Her first reaction was “I love it” as often as it was “This isn’t it”. 

There’s a lot of politics in a hockey team front office but Aimee created a wall around the creative work to shut all that out. She would give me frank, direct feedback and the agreement was she would deal with everyone else and I would deal with the creative team.

She would often say, “You’re the creative director, figure out how to get it done.” Which perfectly illustrates her attitude about work and the trust she had in me to do it. 

But it was in the middle of a ridiculous bottleneck of work that she said what I remember (and repeat) most: 

Don’t let perfect get in the way of good.

I, like many designers, have a tendency to compensate for uncertainty with trying to make something perfect before I show it. And we simply didn’t have time for that here. 

The Early Show

Aimee was clear on what she liked and didn't like. She was honest, and this created trust. So I started showing her my team’s work increasingly earlier in the process. And this saved incredible amounts of time.

Since I was able to get her to click (or unclick) with a concept early, we could spend the rest of the time refining instead of starting over.

Instead of showing her polished options, I would show her roughs and nine times out of ten she’d say “Yes! Go.”

On the tenth time, she’d say “I don’t like this” but it was just a rough so who cares? I was always thankful we hadn’t gone any further.

This became our rhythm: Show early, get direction, refine like hell. 

This worked especially well for the hundreds of little campaigns and was an important step to leaving room to take time on the larger big-ticket items.

My team was incredible, we produced ten years-worth of work in one season and it was among the best in the league.

Leading that team to produce like that was the best job I’ve ever done as a creative director. And I credit all of it to Aimee. 

The Trust Tax

Here’s the thing though. Showing work early to a client can be disastrous if you don’t set it up properly. And I’m not talking about the old “ok what I’m about to show you…” speech.

I’ve seen clients completely panic when they see unfinished work. As a creative, you’re not always aware how confusing rough concepts can be.

You have to build trust. Aimee did it for me but you can do it for your clients.

Here’s how:

Discovery Process - Get deep with your clients. Have a list of questions ready and truly try to understand their background.

Debriefing - They’ll tell you what they want you to make, but it’s your goal to find out what they want to achieve. Get to the “why” of the project before focusing on the “how”.

Research - Learn everything you can about them, their company, their industry, their competition, everything. Present this back to them. Make sure they see how much you care about getting this right. 

Your goal is to get your client to think “Ok.They get it.”

If you do enough of this groundwork before starting the creative work, they'll see and understand this is a process.

When you eventually show them that rough sketch, they won't see unfinished work - they'll see the beginning of the solution to their problem. And they'll be thrilled by it.

The One-Question Interview

Working Creative: How do you think you built trust in a creative partnership, and what advice would you give to other creative-leadership teams?

Aimee Zammit: I do think it's an iterative process that takes time--and takes being a little bit sneaky.  It's a thinking flip. Right now you might be thinking "If my work isn't polished and perfect how will my counterpart (client or stakeholder) ever understand the concept or appreciate the nuance of the design?".

This attitude tells me you're scared or you're arrogant. Maybe both.

Flip this narrative in your head. Start to think of this as actually weaning your counterpart off of perfect and polished to a place where they can understand the concept at 60% completion and then CONTRIBUTE TO IT through feedback to get it to 80% completion, then they've just done some big-time heavy lifting for you!

And they'll trust you to take it the rest of the way. Rinse and repeat for the design. That's the sneaky part. 

But the truth is, there’s a building phase.

Initially you’re likely have to start by taking everything to 90% perfection. Then slowly you can drop to 80%, 70%, 60%...you get the gist. And you should also tell them what you're doing. Be explicit about the weaning process.

When you feel you've established a rapport, say "I think next time I'll show you something that's a bit less finished so I can get your feedback earlier. It will be rough but I think you're good at understanding concepts and design and this way I can get feedback from you sooner and likely finish the project/campaign/brand (whatever!) faster." 

This might not be true but say it anyway. 

Eventually you will figure out where the baseline is for you and your counterpart. And it might even change project to project.

Here's the other piece of advice though that does go hand-in-hand with the theme of this conversation--I hired Martin because I knew he was good at his job. He wasn't a newb. He had an established career, a body of work, that I could see and evaluate. So from the get-go I knew that I was hiring someone who had the skills to deliver.

The earlier you are in your career, the longer it will take to build the trust needed to implement Good vs. Perfect. 

But it will come. Trust me. 

Bonus Question:

Working Creative: What do you imagine/picture/visualize when you hear the words “Working Creative”?

Aimee Zammit: I fucking love this title. I have worked with so many creatives that are so precious about their output. But this is work, baby. Someone is paying you for your creative output because they have real business objectives. If you want to produce work that is only curated by you and not influenced by outside objectives, that's called being an artist.  

The title Working Creative tells me you understand this. 

Further Reading

This strategy ties in very nicely with the concepts discussed in Over-Communicating the Process, Effective Thing #4 in The Five Most Effective Things I Learned to Get Work I Love. Got something due today? Don’t read this. Just get back to work. Got something due in a week? Give it a read. Then get back to work.

Parting Thought

I remember working at an agency where we had a client that “liked to be allowed in the kitchen” meaning that she wanted to see the process. This resulted in the agency making a series of milestone deadlines to show what they claimed was unfinished. This just added the stress and additional work of staging fake kitchens to the project.

This is not the way to do it.

Look at it this way instead: You would never enter the kitchen of a restaurant you don’t know but you would at an old friend’s house.

Aim to build that rapport with your client before they see anything. Make them feel like they’re in good hands. And who knows, maybe you’ll end up handing them a spoon.