Artisan Creative’s Katty Douraghy: A Decade Ahead of the WFH Trend

Intro  0:04 

Welcome to The Future Is Borderless podcast with David Nilssen, we feature top entrepreneurs and thought leaders from around the world, those who bring a global mindset and a unique perspective to their life and business. Now, let’s get started with the show.

David Nilssen  0:23 

Hi, David Nilssen here I am the host of this podcast. And the idea behind The Future Is Borderless is to connect with business leaders from around the world those that I think that encapsulate what I refer to as a borderless mindset. And the purpose is to share ideas, new innovations, and even best practices, all things that should help us grow in both our personal professional lives and ultimately continue to thrive in a rapidly changing world. Now this episode is brought to you by Doxa Talent. Doxa helps businesses to source full time highly skilled workers from all over the world. And as a result, the companies can scale faster increase margin and improve culture and they provide everything from accountants to sales development reps, virtual assistants, even software engineers, and their customers are everything from a publicly traded company to a local small business. But if you want to learn more about how to grow your business with offshore talent, simply visit doxatalent.com. All right, well, let’s get on with the show. I’m excited for today. My guest is Katty Douraghy. She is a entrepreneur and author, she hosts a podcast, and she’s the president of Artisan Creative which is a staffing and recruiting agency based out of Los Angeles. And they primarily focus on digital creative and marketing talent. We originally had a chance to connect to the entrepreneurs organization where she spent a lot of time investing in the membership as a form and retreat facilitator and really working to help these entrepreneurs become a better version of themselves. She also recently published her memoir, The Butterfly Years, which details her own journey through grief and ultimately how she moved towards hope and then finally to growth. And our mission has been to sort of demystify grief and create a space where everyone can talk about that without feeling judged or that they have to get over it in some sort of time period. She’s also lived in lots of international cities like San Francisco, London and Tehran, which means that she is definitely lived a borderless life. So with all of that, Katty, welcome to the show.

Katty Douraghy  2:21 

Thank you so much. And great recap of me. Thank you. Appreciate it.

David Nilssen  2:29 

Oh, good. Well, I’m glad I did it justice. But I thought maybe the best place for us to start was just to give our listeners a baseline for who you are, and what you do. And in your bio, obviously mentioned that your business is Artisan Creative and that is in the staffing recruiting world, primarily focused towards creative and marketing services, or talent, I should say. But maybe you could just sort of share us with us a little bit more about what it is that you do. And more importantly, what’s the core problem that you’re solving for your customers?

Katty Douraghy  2:57 

Yeah, absolutely. We always talk about it with my team, that what we do is change people’s lives. We are really bringing an opportunity for a new role to someone. And we don’t know the backstory for them, they may have been jobless for a while, this may be the right opportunity for them to step into a progression in their career. So really what we do and what we want to just keep in mind and talk about it on a daily basis, internally is how can we create impact in other people’s lives. So for our clients, it may be to create that impact where they can elevate their own careers by having a very successful team, or they can make sure that they delivering their projects on time. And for our candidates is, as a job, whether it’s a short-term job, because they’re in between assignments, or it’s the next right thing for them in their lives. That’s really what I think the crux of what it is that we do is just really helping them create that impact for themselves, which really makes it be so special to come to work every day or wake up every day. Because there’s a bigger purpose behind it.

David Nilssen  4:12 

Yeah, I love how you speak to both sides. Like it’s funny when you talk to somebody, like, what do you do? Well, I sell this widget or I provide this service. But in your world, you have really two customers, right? You have the talent, and then you have the businesses that are looking and you’re trying to sort of bring those two together. So I love how you speak to both sides of that.

Katty Douraghy  4:31 

Oh, absolutely. It’s a match. It has to be a dance between both sides, otherwise, it’s not going to work.

David Nilssen  4:37 

Yeah. And is your model. Are you a recruiting firm that is earning a placement by creating that right match or are you hiring these people directly and leasing them to these organizations? What’s the model?

Katty Douraghy  4:50 

It’s a little bit of both. So on the short-term staffing side, that talent is our W2 employee, but on the direct hire side then we are sourcing and finding that candidate to be placed for the client. So it’s a little bit of depending on kind of what the client’s needs are. And sometimes it’s project-based. Sometimes it’s neither of those two scenarios. It’s only a short-term project where our client needs a team, but they need it for a finite period of time. And they really need us to step in and project manage it for them, they don’t, they may not have the internal teams to do that. So it’s really kind of hitting them at each prong of whatever their needs are. So we’re pretty, pretty flexible in that that we can kind of just fit into whatever mold it is that the client is looking for.

David Nilssen  5:41 

Yeah, and why the niche focused on creative, like marketing and creative, like, how did you decide that that was where you guys wanted to really focus your time and energy.

Katty Douraghy  5:51 

So creative is fun, you’ve been around creatives, it’s not the same day, any day, every day it changes, and we just really have always loved being around creative. So I call myself a creative groupie, I’m not a creative. I want to be but I’m not. However, the energy that creatives have the way they look at the world, the way they look at a problem and are able to see solutions where maybe other people don’t. It’s just so energizing, and so inspiring. So that’s really how it started. It was initially it just seemed like the niche that worked for us. But as time has developed, and as we’ve grown, as the industry has grown, right, the creative industry, when we first started 27 years ago was very different than it is today. It was based up and exacto knives and desktop publishing was just coming to be. And now it’s just such a beautiful molding of technology and creative and marketing. And the whole thing is just so fluid. It’s really a beautiful thing to be a part of.

David Nilssen  7:10 

Yep. And how is it evolving? I mean, right now, I mean, we all know that there’s a talent shortage, the cost of finding good talent is continuing to rise. And then there’s been, I would think to the traditional recruiting model, there’s been some disruption along the way with global talent, right? There’s the Fivers and the Upwork of the world, and then even the Doxas of the world, like, how is that impacting your business? And like, how are you guys adapting or evolving as the world does?

Katty Douraghy  7:37 

Yeah, great question. So our focus has always been to find the hard-to-find candidates. And the Upwork and the Fivers for people who are looking for a quick brochure design and or a logo design, people will go to those resources, because that’s really all they need. And they will come to us because that resource isn’t going to be a problem-solving resource for them. And they really need someone to either be with them, not necessarily physically, but to be with them as part of their team to help problem solve and to help them create. So Doxa is a great, great resource for that. So if somebody is looking for teams that aren’t necessarily here, and they’re borderless, and they can be anywhere, then as you know, I’m a big fan of Doxa, myself, then that’s a great resource to go to. But for people who are really looking to have somebody maybe be more local for them, or at this point, so we have clients that are more hybrid in their environments. So majority of the time is remote, but they’re still looking for people to be in house for ideation or for connection. And that ends up being the right solution.

David Nilssen  8:59 

Yeah, I think that’s fair. I always tell people that I’ll the fractional work out there, but being in a remote environment is great for productivity sometimes can be harder for collaboration and creative services, one of those places that I think it’s harder to move that offshore, because that like in-person collaboration, and that just sort of the nuances, the way that they work can be very, very impactful. It’s funny, it seems to me that a creative services continue to be in high demand simply because everything is moving online or has moved online. And now there’s like this heavy emphasis on aesthetics and usability. And can you talk to me a little bit about how the demand landscape has shifted and like, what are the roles that you’re seeing that are in higher demand today than maybe were previously?

Katty Douraghy  9:53 

Yeah, absolutely. So you’re right in terms of just overall user experience, there’s a big demand in not only user experience, but customer experience, employee experience, both for internal communications as well as external communications. And we’re also seeing a big shift. Not that it hasn’t always been there, but really a bigger focus on the partnership between creative and marketing. There’s what we were previously looking as a separate marketing entity, let’s say SEO, it’s not a separate marketing entity anymore. SEO and creative, the two have to dance together. Otherwise, it ends up being siloed, and probably not as impactful. So the collaboration piece that you talk about is really critical. But it doesn’t have to always be together in person. There’s certainly a lot of collaboration tools out there to be able to utilize. I don’t know if you know this, but my company’s been remote for 12 years. So when we first went borderless, people were like, are you sure? Like, are you crazy? Are you guys going out of business? Why are you not having an office? Like, well, with the type of work we do, my team, our team didn’t really need to have an office, they were spending more time in LA traffic than they were in the office.

David Nilssen  11:29 

Yeah, that’s so funny. I remember, my first trip to the Philippines, I remember, I was only going I want to say maybe 15 kilometers. So 11 miles, give or take. And it took over an hour for me to get there because the traffic was so ridiculous. And I found one of my workers was traveling three hours a day for an eight-hour job. And I thought there has to be a better way that famous line, but that’s amazing. So you guys have been remote since basically, over a decade. The tools have advanced a lot today. And it’s not as difficult today. Like why did you decide to do that, though? I mean, at that time that wasn’t popular. So like, what was the catalyst behind that decision?

Katty Douraghy  12:11 

Several things, actually. One was the economic crisis. Yeah, this was 2008 2009. So actually, maybe it’s been more than 12 years, 13 years, and the building that we were in, we had been in one office complex for 14 years. And they sold that building. They sold the building and we needed to leave the space. So we went into a temporary space. A sublease. Sorry, I couldn’t think of the word, a sublease. And while we were in the sublease, two of our team members came and shared that they were going to be having babies. They were pregnant, both of them at the same time. And that they really wanted to come back to work, they really wanted to come back to Artisan. But they didn’t want to come back in person. And at the time, we had already been experimenting with two of our long term team members who were working remotely. You’re absolutely right. Technology was not what it is today. Yeah, faxing job orders back and forth to each other. Oh, my gosh. But what really supported us, we used bullhorn as an applicant tracking system and bullhorn at the time, had just gone cloud-based. And the minute that it did, it really just opened up the opportunity for us to not be tied into a physical location. So the economic crisis, team members having babies but still wanting to work for us, which was a really wonderful that they wanted to come back. And advances of technology just kind of just really made us look around and say, okay, we already have for people who are remote, two more people want to go remote, doesn’t make sense now that we no longer have our office space? To look for something new? Or should we try this remote thing? So it was a temporary? It was temporary experiment actually which we never looked back. Here we are.

David Nilssen  14:13 

Clearly, it’s worked out. It’s interesting, because I have two businesses, both of them are completely remote. And as I watched this struggle between should I be a remote operation? Should I call everyone back? Should I be a hybrid? I’ve been grateful that we just decided to lean into the remote strategies. We don’t have to worry about the office space, people get to live the life that they want. But it does have unique challenges. I think we have an opportunity obviously, the sort of local recruiting or I would say talent moat is gone, we can now recruit anywhere we want to. So from an execution from a talent acquisition standpoint, it’s better. But for collaborative purposes, it can be more challenging and so I’m just curious, how do you guys solve for that in your own business?

Katty Douraghy  14:58 

Yeah, both collaboration standpoint as well, I would say also, from a culture standpoint, we have to work harder in making sure that we have and maintain culture. So with my internal team, obviously we collaborate on Zoom, we have Slack, we have you just Trello, we have a lot of variety of tools that we utilize to make sure that we’re speaking and connecting and talking to one another. But we also make a point of bringing people together. We’re just planning out our holiday events now for the team. It’s like, okay, well, everybody’s going to be flying in. We just got to really work at that, really sticking to and living and really operationalizing our core values, I think has been an important thing for us is making sure that when we say enthusiasm, and life and work is one of our core values, how is that showing up? All right, so when we talk about open communication as being a core value, how are we embodying that on a daily basis? So it’s really being intentional about that. When you’re in the office, you’re in the office, you naturally have water cooler conversations, you naturally will just get up and go to lunch together. And it just doesn’t happen like that in the virtual space. So we’ve just got to really work at it.

David Nilssen  16:26 

Yeah, it’s funny, we actually talking about training the other day, and that is a place where you also have to really work hard because most businesses when they hire new people, they’re like, okay, day one, here’s all the things you need to know from HR perspective. Now sit next to Katty and watch her for the next two weeks and learn through osmosis. And that’s the training plan, right? That doesn’t work in a virtual world. So there are lots of places where the greater efficiency is needed, but I’m going to use that more going forward, because I think you’re right culture is something that you have to be very intentional about in a remote world.

Katty Douraghy  17:00 

And on the printing side, too, it’s one thing to sit next to someone for eight hours, you cannot be on screen for eight hours, right? It doesn’t work. So just chunking it up and people learn differently. So really being able to figure out what their learning style is and being able to work backwards into that is also really important.

David Nilssen  17:25 

Yeah, Zoom fatigue is officially a physical condition now, so we got to watch out for that. All right, well, let’s talk about your memoir, The Butterfly Years. I’d love if you could maybe share what inspired you to put pen to paper and what was the whole like purpose behind writing this book?

Katty Douraghy  17:47 

Yeah, happy to. So for the audience out there, it has nothing to do with recruitment. Completely, something totally different. But it has everything to do with recruitment, because has everything to do with me and just I was not able to show up in my 100% business leader place because I had so much turmoil happening personally. And I really needed a way to figure out how to deal with that. So to give a little bit of a backstory I had, in 2011, I lost my stepmother and my father and my mother within a four-month period. And that followed two years later, I lost a cousin and an uncle. And then a year later, I lost my stepdad. So in a short period of time, some really important people to me had passed away. And I was having a hard time dealing with it, having a hard time talking about it, and just spent a lot of time I think, just for myself judging myself, like was I grieving too much? Was I not grieving enough? Was I talking about it, just the societal implications on the right amount of time to grieve is a very interesting thing to navigate. And as you said, I’m multicultural. And so that also kind of added to it because in one culture, how grief is dealt with is very different than the Eastern culture and the Western culture is just very, very different. So I started writing a really just from a self-improvement, self-healing place, because I needed to just get my thoughts out, but I didn’t really want to burden other people with it. So I started journaling. And one thing after another just going to lead to this thing of realizing that as a society, we just don’t talk about death and grief enough and I think so many of us, myself included, it was easier to kind of sweep it under the rug and just let it sit there and not deal with it. it. But that growth didn’t really come from that. And healing didn’t come from that. So that’s really what was the impetus of writing the book is, it was purely initially just a personal journey for myself, wouldn’t say a selfish route. But it was just something to help me deal with whatever it was. But as I started dealing with it, I realized, oh my god, like in our communities, we don’t talk about it, in work, we don’t talk about it. If everyone says our work culture says, when you get bereavement pay for three days, or you have bereavement time off for three days, that took more than three years, not three days. So that really was the impetus of it is can we create a space where we can have conversations about loss, and not feel that we need to rush through it, to feel judged about it, but also to recognize that we have to somehow learn to live with it, because we do need to still show up to work every day, we do still need to lead our organizations and our companies and empower our employees. Yeah, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t stay in bed all day long, right, I still have a business to run. There’s lives, I want to impact both my team as well as other people. So just having to figure it out for myself, how to learn to live with it. That’s what was the impetus of the book. But then I created the journal because I realized, from whatever I had learned, if that could help another person figure it out for themselves, it has to be a personal journey. What was right for me can’t necessarily be right for you or for anybody else. But hopefully, within the tools that I learned, people can figure it out for themselves.

David Nilssen  21:56 

And the book is not when you talk about it as for your journey, it was related to you at a tremendous amount of loss within a short period of time. But loss is not just about death. Right? So this is relevant to people that are going through different types of greifs, death, divorce, accidents, things of that nature, correct?

Katty Douraghy  22:14 

Yeah, absolutely. My story is about death. But loss comes in many shapes, especially, how it could end the topic that we’re talking about work and job search. Every rejection is a loss moment. Yeah, there’s a grief every time somebody gets a note from a, from an application they sent in, or every time somebody has lost a job or been fired, or like go or downsized or whatever, these things impact us in profound ways. So if it can help people, then that’s really the goal.

David Nilssen  22:56 

Yeah, it dawned on me, when we first started, I asked you, what is it that you do? What problem are you solving? You said changing people’s lives? And it does feel like this is highly connected with that purpose? It’s to try and help people change their life, get it back on track. Tell me why. Why do you think I mean, in the work that you’ve done, the people you’ve talked to, why do you think it is that we struggle with talking about grief? I come from a background. I mean, you do as well, these peer-to-peer networks, right? Business leaders that are sharing experiences. And those are both personal and professional, as we are sort of navigating through life trying to be a great leader, a great family member, or a good community participant. But why is it so hard to talk about the things that we’re really struggling with personally?

Katty Douraghy  23:48 

I can just share really, just from my experience, I don’t know why other people have hesitancy. For me, I think I was raised in a particular way that I just didn’t need to show other people what I was struggling with, for other people, everything was going to be fine, but behind closed doors, chaos could be going on. And that’s just the nature of the household that was raised in. And so it was very hard to be able to actually stand in front of someone and say, you know what, I’m actually not feeling great today. But also realizing that not too many people want to hear that, it’s a heavy burden to put on a lot of people. But it’s, I think, so critical to be able to create a space for some people to just be, we don’t maybe know what to say, but that’s okay. Just say I don’t know what to say, but I’ll just be there for you and I’ll just be there with you. But I also think that from a society’s perspective, we’d like things to be in a pretty blue box with a bowl on top with, like a period at the end of it. We’d like to see things finish and with loss and death and grief, sometimes there is no period at the end. We don’t suddenly heal from it. We just learn to live with it, is a hard thing for I think a lot of people too.

David Nilssen  25:23 

Yeah, well, this podcast is about you, not me, but I will share that I went through some painful experiences my life and I remember at one point speaking to a therapist, and she said, look, you can’t solve it or make it go away. You just have to accept it. And sometimes just accepting it is enough, it’ll always be sort of there, doesn’t disappear.

Katty Douraghy  25:48 

Also, I think for that, David, I add one more thing is, for me, what’s really been helpful is to accept that those loved ones are not coming back. But I also have kind of taken it upon myself as my obligation to make them live on through my experiences. I am a constant refer to the people who have passed away, like things remind me of them. And I talk about it say this reminds me of my uncle. This reminds me of my cousins, I say their names, I honor them. And last year, just because it’s that time of the year right now. Last year, a friend sent me a whole package of how to do a Day of the Dead. Off Randa, which I had never done before. And I had so much fun just creating an altar, putting people’s pictures up, serving them coffee in the morning, and little Sherry in the afternoon. I like rituals. And I think rituals for me bring my loved ones back. They keep their memory alive. And that’s been an important thing personally. For some other people, they don’t want to look at anybody’s pictures anymore. They don’t want to nickname their names. And if that’s the right thing for them, then that’s the right thing for them. I don’t profess that what I do is right for everybody else, it was just right for me.

David Nilssen  27:19 

No, I think that’s okay, though. But ultimately, giving people a space to sort of sit in it and work through it is the intention, not the prescription on how to deal with it? Well, I want to talk about a little bit about family, I want to transition to family businesses and working with partnerships. But yours is interesting, because you’re now I think, really solely driving Artisan Creative but at one point, you and your husband were both in the business. Is that right? Yes, give us a little understanding, I can see you’re smiling. Give us a little understanding of what that sort of backstory looks like, what was it like working with your spouse?

Katty Douraghy  28:07 

It’s funny, we’re talking about a borderless talent here and being borderless. And I would say that working with my spouse, there had to be a lot of boundaries. There were a lot borders. We had to make sure we had, it’s interesting in that we could talk about work all day long. And it was very important to put parameters in place not to do that, because it’s so easy that it permeates everything and calls at all times. And so I will just never forget in the beginning, there would be no, when we hadn’t established borders. Jimmy would say something as I was about to fall asleep. And he would say, and he would like get it off his chest, it was something I had just that he had remembered. He would say it then he would just like, drift off to sleep. And for me instead that it would be like, oh my god, like I’ve forgotten to do that. And it would keep me up all night. Because my responsibility strength would kick in. So we just had to kind of guidelines, after this time, we just won’t go into business mode. Every once in a while, of course we would have to but as as a rule. So for me, it was the elevator door. This is back when we had an office, the elevator door would open and I would step into it in the morning. And I would put aside my huts, my spouse, and I would look at him as a business partner. And in the evening when we would go home that elevator door would open I would step out of the elevator and I would say okay, now back to like this is my husband, because in the beginning I would call him like I would call him hunny in front of the team. That didn’t work out really well. Yeah, so boundaries, definition of rules, I would say it’s really, really important, especially if it’s a heated conversation about something that we are not agreeing upon. It was very important for me to pay attention and be intentional as to who is it that was talking to me? Was it my spouse? Or was it my business partner? It lands differently? I’m sure people who’ve been in heated conversations with their loved ones can attest too.

David Nilssen  30:41 

Yeah, that’s funny in most businesses, I’ll speak from my own experience, I started a business in 2003. And a few of the first hires that you make are people that you know, either from family or from your community or what have you. And so there’s these complex relationships that exist in nearly every business. And even if you don’t start that way, just by being in the same world with these people over and over and over again, you develop relationships. And so I think your feedback is fair, given any type of relationship, but it is interesting, like, how do you turn off that hat when you’re with your partner 24/7? That seems very difficult to do. So it’s good that you guys were able to. Katty, just a couple last questions for you. I know we’re getting close to the end of our time. We talked a little bit about peer-to-peer networks are from time to time, I’ve had people from EO and YPO on this stage, obviously, you and I are both very involved in the Entrepreneurs Organization and you led the my EO Committee, which was, I always say it’s a user-generated platform for members to create learning opportunities. You do facilitated forum and forum trainings and forum retreats around the world, you obviously have a lot going on, why do you give so much time to that organization?

Katty Douraghy  32:04 

Yeah, so many people ask me that question. Because you’re right. Like, I have my hands on many, many different things. But EO has been the one that’s been the constant for me, even before I was a member and my husband Jimmy joined EO first. And I could see in the beginning, I could really see how he was kind of spreading his wings and how he because of being around other peers, and because of the parameters that we have in place, and how we communicate with each other, the small group sessions that with the peer groups or the session forums or we get into, I could really see him just grow. And I wanted that for myself. So I became involved with it, and then later joined it as a member. But the reason I put in so much into it is because I get a lot more out of it. Even this morning, there was a session on my EO session on improving your LinkedIn profile, something that you would think that we all do on a regular basis anyway. But I walked away with two incredible nuggets, not for me only, but also for my team, that I’m like, you know what, these little nuggets in EO are just brought to us, we don’t even have to go out there and seek them out. This is what the organization provides, which is really, really exciting. And from a personal, very selfish place, EO really gave me a voice. Before EO, I would never ever want to be the face of anything or the front lines of anything. I was always the operational person behind the scenes. And just volunteering has really pushed me in the front. I realized that actually, I’m not only comfortable with it, I like it. So it’s given me a voice that I didn’t realize that I had. A lifer when it comes to that.

David Nilssen  34:09 

All right, well, before we close, maybe you could share, just curious, what’s something that you’re really excited about today? What’s something that you’re learning or trying to sort of improve on or evolve about yourself?

Katty Douraghy  34:23 

A couple things. One, kind of going back to walking away with little nuggets at every EO events. I was at an EO event called Alchemy a few weeks ago and one of the speakers a creative, somebody who worked for the Walt Disney Imagineering company and actually was hired by Walt Disney. So this gentleman was maybe in his 90s his name is Bob Ger. And he said a blank piece of paper excites some and scares others. So what I could have walked away with, with that, is I want to make sure that I have a blank piece of paper all the time, because a blank piece of paper actually excites me quite a bit. So to be able to look at the future of work, as you mentioned earlier, so much is changing within our industries. What does that look like, next year, five years down the road? 10 years down the road? What does that look like for talent acquisition? Where are we coming from? Where are we going? So that part of it is really, really exciting. And I’m looking forward to kind of just looking into this next year and charting out on this blank piece of paper with the future. And then on a personal level, really excited about the opportunity to hopefully maybe do some retreats, I don’t call them grief retreats, but grief gatherings, to bring people together and create a space for people to really have a conversation with one another, with others who know what they’re going through. And so that’s going to on the horizon, hopefully for next year. That excites me.

David Nilssen  36:07 

More work aligned with your purpose. So we’ll leave it there. Well, we’ve been listening to Katty Douraghy, the president of Artisan Creative and the author of The Butterfly Years. If you have not read it, it is available on Amazon and we’ll put the link in the show notes. But Katty, where can people go to learn more about the work that you’re doing at Artisan?

Katty Douraghy  36:26 

Artisancreative.com is our website or on LinkedIn Artisan Creative. Anything that you want to know about resources, how to find talent, interviewing best skills, all of those things are on our blog, and The Butterfly Years is on butterflyyears.com.

David Nilssen  36:46 

Awesome. All right. Well, thanks again for being on the show today.

Katty Douraghy  36:50 

Thank you, David.

Outro  36:53 

Thank you for listening to The Future Is Borderless podcast with David Nilssen. Be sure to click subscribe to future episodes so you can hear from more top entrepreneurs and thought leaders, and we’ll see you again next time.