Method Five Labs: the Pursuit of Beauty in Business

As a kid, I never wanted to be a fireman or a policeman. I wanted to be one of two things:

President of the United States of America...or an ad copywriter.

As I grew older I always thought it was influence that was thematically united in these two aspirations. But as I've matured in my career, I've found a higher central thread that drove even 12 year old me: creating a more beautiful world for people. I poured over magazine advertisements and clipped and saved them. I remember being captivated by the ads.

I read books on ad agencies like BBDO. When I finished college, the first place I headed was to the desk of the worldwide creative director of global ad powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi. I risked being apprehended by security in a high-tech building in lower Manhattan. I scored a lunch with that creative director but had already been hired by a boutique Madison Avenue agency.

One thing I now realize looking back is that when I landed the job on Madison Avenue, it was full of chances to work for business icons and influence people. But it wasn't enough. After four years I left to build a tech-enabled mutual fund. From there, built a consumer products company and that is when I got my first taste of what I'm doing now.

The company went absolutely viral in 2010 netting millions of views in the press. My partners parlayed it into steps up in their ad agency careers. However, I was hooked on the thrill of building a beautiful business and putting beauty out in the world for people to interact with.

I'll fast-forward past some successes and talk about what drives us at Method Five Labs.

Namely, my failures.

Method Five is a venture studio driven by the realizations of my past mistakes, and a burning desire to avoid them in the future. To build and sustain beauty in the world, you must have sustainable and profitable businesses. To press out sustainable businesses at scale, you must have systems. Hello Rewind? We didn't have a system to respond to the deluge of orders and it quickly became a point of stress. I started a farm-to-table venture after Hello Rewind and that had its own systems problem: namely, I didn't have a system that would have stopped me from starting it in the first place.

It is with those learnings, that I and some talented teammates built M5 to create scalable beauty on systems.

Method Five was built based on these five systems:

Method One - Insights & Architecture / a design-thinking based approach that allows us to understand the markets and companies within which they operate, and then to capture and manage a company's innovation portfolio.

Method Two - Adaptive Production / a scientific approach to detailing the things you must do to build successful physical and digital products. This includes tools like "Environmental Use Statements" where you describe how someone will think and feel when using a product.

Method Three - Talent Leverage / People are at the center in the third method. I've driven millions in value at a high ROI by having the right people, in the right seats, doing the right things with extreme, outcome-driven clarity.

Method Four - Content Systems / Every brand and every person needs scalable content. We don't launch anything without its sustainable content system. We have a library of tools and templates to drive excellent content.

Method Five - Data & Analytics / You can't measure without data. Yet so many people ignore the data right at their fingertips. I've seen the power of a good aggregated dashboard. In fact, it saved a multi-million dollar company I was running.

Build, Measure, Learn...Consider

Think of these methods as build, measure, learn...with the added loop of "consider". So much respect is due to Eric Ries for his work on Lean Startup. We have found high value in adding this extra hitch of using data and design thinking to consider. The Adaptive Production, Talent Leverage, and Content Systems? Those are all about building. Measure, Learn, and Consider (working on a whitepaper for this) is what really sets a business apart and keeps it there.

From time to time, we'll release posts like this detailing some of our processes and providing resources as well. Subscribe to be notified.

All subs get access to key templates like the one below. We use these in our everyday work and we are happy to share them with the world.

Cheers,

Todd and the Method Five Team