Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.
We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!
So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Sunny Bonnell ask the question, "What's Your Rare Breed Virtue?"
Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:07 - What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?
4:12 - Sabotaged, Edgy, & Absurd
9:20 - Fan the Flame
12:25 - 7 Traits
15:16 - Nature or Nurture?
19:50 - Audacity Personified
25:20 - Go All In on Who You Are!
29:00 - Final Thoughts & Wrap
Links:
Website: https://rarebreedbook.com/
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnybonnell/
Transcript:
- [INTRO] Welcome to Skye Team's, People First with Morag Barrett.
- Sunny Bonnell is one half of the dynamic duo of the marketing and advertising firm, Motto, but she is also co-author of a phenomenal book called Rare Breeds. We're not talking cows and animals here. We're talking you and I, we are all rare breeds. We perhaps just don't know it. But the subtitle is what caught my attention. Rare Breeds, It's a Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous and Different. So I'm going to keep the alliteration going, Sunny. I'm looking forward to a delicious conversation with you about how we can all be defiant dangerous and different, and understanding the concept of rare breeds. But welcome to People First.
- Thank you for having me. What a wonderful introduction, thank you.
- I'll tell you. It was fun as I was starting to read the book. Before we dive into there, the inspiration and so on, as with all of my interviews, I want to start with your origin story. Because we're all on a leadership journey and it is rarely a straight path from A to B. So flashback, you're a wee girl. You're sitting in elementary school and the teacher goes, "Sunny, what do you want to be when you grow up?" What was your answer back then? What did you think you would be doing at this stage of your life?
- Veterinarian.
- Oh, correlation to rare breeds. We'll go back to it. So say more. Why did you want to be a vet?
- Well, I had a fondness for animals, all things big and small. And I used to study the encyclopedia and look up all of the animals and the breeds and I was really into it. And I had that answer from the time I was really, really young to the time I enrolled in college and that was the path I was going to be on. As a matter of fact, I dropped out of pre-vet. I was in pre-vet studying to and wanting to be a veterinarian and dropped out of college just about a year and a half in to start Motto with Ashley in my early 20s.
- But going from the science of animals to the art of creating brands and compelling non-vanilla, edgy, marketing collateral. Help me understand that pivot point.
- Well, I think that I, so I was moonlighting as a graphic designer on the side and hence my background here for those that can't see or those that are watching and can't see, I have a wall of guitars. So I was a musician from a very young age started playing guitar around the time I was eight years old, grew up around Bluegrass and gospel, cut my teeth on that, became a performing musician by the time I was 14 and had kind of gone down that trajectory as well. So I was doing music and interested in becoming a veterinarian, I think from a very young age. And then fast forward I'm into college, I'm still in a musicianship, I'm playing out, playing shows end up starting to design band posters and band covers for some of the albums and artwork, excuse me, some of the music we were doing and just fell in love with it and fell into it, really. I stumbled upon it. It was not something that I had a dream of becoming. I just started doing it as a hobby. And about a year after doing that, getting into pre-vet and just realizing that it was not for me and dropping out to start a branding agency. And looked around and said, "Well, maybe I've got a talent for this and I can do this." So, of course, I get Ashley out of college as well, and tell her she's coming with me and we're going to start this thing together. And that's exactly what we did. She was on track to be, I think, an English major into journalism. And I just believed that she could help me and we could do it together. So that's what we did.
- So tell me a little bit more about that 'cause at the beginning of the book you talk about how many times you were sabotaged, how many times you were fired for being edgy, the very reason you were hired in the first place, the number of times you were told that your ideas were absurd, or essentially just written off. So what helped you to stay in the game and continue to be the rebellious you that's upended the market?
- Yeah. I think that we, because we had never worked for another agency and we had never had any kind of roadmap prior to that, I believe that it gave us what we didn't realize, at the time but was a competitive edge. And we also did not like what we saw. So we looked around, again, keep in mind, this is 2005, we're in a very small Southern conservative town. There's only a few big players in our market, mostly advertising agencies, ran by the old guard. And here come these two women, these two young women, who audaciously believe that they can change the conversation from what brands sell to what they stand for and believe in. It's why we named our company Motto. And it's what we started out to want to do. We didn't know what that looked like. We just knew that what we saw around just looked a little bit homogenized a little bit vanilla, and we just thought audaciously we could do it ourselves, or maybe do it better. And immediately, we're met with doubt. You're too young. You're too broke. You're too inexperienced. You're too female to succeed in a world where at this point 60-ish admins are making the rules. And who do we think we are? We're outspoken. We have a lot of bravado. We may not know what we're doing but we look like we do or we believe that we do. That self-belief was very strong. But the truth behind it was that we had no money, nobody knew who we were, we were rubbing pennies together, we were in this small 14 by 14 room in a warehouse stowed away where nobody could find us. And the truth was that made the first year or two of running the business extremely difficult. And about, I'd say maybe 2007, we're starting to sort of believe that maybe everyone who is doubting us is right. We're looking at each other and we're going, "Do we really want to do this? "What were we thinking?" We were on track to do this. We had a clear path, being a veterinarian's kind of a sure thing. Why did we think this was a good idea? So we start self-doubting and believing that we're a little too rogue. And no one is taking kindly to that. Because we didn't realize at the time but I think we were seen as a threat. We didn't think of ourselves as that but I think we, in a room full of balloons, we're the sharp knives. And I think we just didn't realize that to them, they were like, "Who are these two young women "who are coming out and being extremely outspoken, "and now people are paying attention. "And even though they might be rubbing pennies together "they can take our business." So we have this pivotal moment where we have this difficult conversation where we're like, "We should just give up. "We're not making any money. "Nobody knows who we are. "Maybe everybody's right. "Maybe this is just, we're not cut out for this. "We're not cut out for e...
