Today we’d like to introduce you to Bryan Mann-Entzel.
Bryan, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Greater Thought was established during the first year of the pandemic. Our 3 principles had previously worked together and we decided to try our hand at building our agency–focused around the idea of a more mindful approach to marketing for our clients. Our name captures the idea of what we are going for.
Greater Thought is a strategic and creative agency for businesses looking for a comprehensive partner. When we begin work with someone, we are investing in a relationship with them. To say that this team cares about the people and the businesses we work with is not an exaggeration. There should be trust–we work hard to get to know the people and businesses we are working with. We are invested in helping our clients achieve their goals, and their success is our success. We also have a slight bend toward things that we feel accomplish the greater good in our community.
Supporting small businesses and non-profits, taking care of the environment, supporting diversity and inclusion, and telling the stories of our clients are at the core of our work. We believe that when you do things for the right reasons, and treat people right, put the right messaging and energy out there, the right things will naturally find you. Our 4 primary areas of focus include 1. The Service Industry & Retail, 2. Craft Industries & Consumer Packaging, Nonprofits, and the Education Industry.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Starting a new business from scratch is not easy. After all, starting, you don’t have much for cashflow, or clients. To make matters more complex, we are in an industry that is not easy to market. People don’t know what they don’t know. You need to establish visibility, trust, and affordability for those who might work with you, and the ability to deliver what is needed. The real savior for us was that we had a good number of people in our networks who either wanted to work with us or were interested in supporting us through word-of-mouth. Clearing that first point of vetting has helped us build momentum and from there, we have learned and evolved how we talk about our value proposition to be more effective from the very first steps.
A few decisions we made early on have also helped us remain more agile too. The fact that our team is 100% remote has enabled us to be a more efficient organization. Our clients have benefited from that too as we can offer our services at a rate that is more attainable in some cases. But when we look back, the idea of being fully remote might have been seen as absurd before the pandemic. The learnings that we all gained having gone through that, have diversified the working environment. We will have a physical office probably sooner than later, but it will be different than most–leaner and more innovative–as we look forward to creating more of a lab or workshop atmosphere as opposed to the traditional office model.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My background, as a creative sort of always seemed like the obvious path for me. I started college as a fine art major, eventually changing my degree to Art, Advertising/Design and I focused on design and illustration. I have worked across nearly all major disciplines including publication/journalism, higher-ed, corporate in-house, external agency, freelance, nonprofit, and now as an owner/entrepreneur.
I have the most background in branding and consumer packaging, but I chose to branch back out to take the things I learned in packaging and apply them to the broader marketing and advertising disciplines too. It was during my time working on brands like Best Buy, Geek Squad, and Oreo that I formulated my mental approach. Build a brand experience that is dimensional and submerges or surrounds the viewer. Oreo is the perfect example to use for this example because we experience the brand on so many levels. You taste, touch, and smell the brand, there is a ritual associated with enjoying an Oreo. For many, it also has fond ties back to family or friends–maybe a grandparent… and the brand is recognized nearly worldwide. But what makes up Oreo? The cookie visual, the milk, the blue background with that soft light source.
The puffy dimensional logo and the soft pastel creme colors. Even the clover texture on the cookie is an attribute of the brand. I like to take stock of these things, and then figure out how to clarify and amplify the brand elements to create a bigger experience. How would the brand look on a truck? What about a larger-than-life trade show graphic? What would Oreo look like if it were part of Alice in Wonderland or Beetlejuice… those start to paint a mental image. It is this approach that I lean hard into when we start work with a new client. How can we create something big and ownable even for a small client, that creates a space that is deep enough and wide enough to be unique and ownable in their own space?
I have been fortunate to have worked on a vast range of big and small brands already in my career. I have also had some amazing mentors throughout the years. I bring this up because, I also believe in mentoring, and being mentored at all stages of our lives. I am a life-long learner. I believe that if we put ourselves on the shelf and say “I’ve learned everything I need”, then we have set our expiration and you begin to become outdated. I have to keep learning. That might not mean the same thing to me as to someone else, but my bag of tricks is always evolving. I push myself to learn new software from time to time. And I am always looking for up-and-coming trends to leverage into my work. We also can’t be too big or too proud to learn from those around us. Age, rank, and title aside, I can teach and be taught to even in my current role.
More important than all of it though… I still love to create. I don’t always get the same amount of time to do it as I used to. Sometimes I have to work harder to get into that deeply creative mind-space. But in the end, I still love to create and in doing it, I am still telling stories, through a range of visual tools.
What are your plans for the future?
I look forward to growing this company into something that honestly resembles a place I spent some of my best professional years. The idea is, to assemble some of the best minds and to foster a culture of respect, creativity, and discovery so that we can all create new things that don’t exist today. That idea of a creative lab or a place to be your most creative as you work on solving problems for clients is really about as close to perfect as it can get while doing work in my mind.
But we are not going to rush to do that either. Our growth has to happen organically to not lose ourselves in the momentum. I want to make sure that as the team grows, we retain the humble roots we have today, and that the team learns why we do things the way we do. That might sound hugely philosophical but it has to feel like us in 2 years or 10 years too.
Contact Info:
- Website: greater-thought.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greaterthought.mn/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greaterthought.mn
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/greaterthought/
