Start With A Win - The Ingredients for Creativity with Scott Landers

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

Whether you are fully aware that fonts are more than just options in your word processing software, or you had no idea that there is a company called Monotype that creates and distributes licenses for typefaces, this interview with Scott Landers, the company’s CEO, is just for you. In this episode of Start With a Win, Scott expands the understanding of how typefaces fuel creativity and help brands establish themselves in the market. Monotype is the world’s leading provider of typefaces, and their offerings and product reach are consistently expanding as technology continues to grow onward and upward. Scott provides a helpful illustration of everything you could have interacted with on a typical morning that contains a typeface created by Monotype. This example helps listeners recognize how influential Monotype is and all of the ways they have to adapt to innovations. When Monotype started, fonts were strictly for print. Eventually, they had to grow into typefaces for screens linked to printers, and in recent years they have grown to create fonts solely to be used and consumed on screens. This growth curve over the past several decades is quite steep. Despite this growth curve, they have excelled amidst the challenges. This success resulted due to close communication with their customers every step of the way. As a result, they remain ready to help individuals and brands express themselves through creativity centered around typefaces.Scott’s sage advice to creators trying to choose the right fonts—if the font is executed right, you won’t notice it. The font provides the body language and the tone of voice for the words on the page, so regard this process as half art and half science. Monotype has consultants on staff available to help businesses choose the right typefaces for their brand.  They recognize how integral this part of the process is to the brand’s identity for years to come. When it comes to leading through change, Scott says that the most important thing is to keep the customer at the center and give your employees more authority because if they know that you trust them to do the right thing, they will do the right thing.Connect with Scott:https://monotype.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-landers-96b3614 Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. Coming to you from Remax World Headquarters in Denver, Colorado, it's Adam Conto, CEO with Start With A Win. I'm actually not at Remax World Headquarters right now. I'm in the remote studio looking at producer Mark across the screen. How are you doing, buddy? Oh, I'm doing so good. Yeah, not in the studio yet, but man, when we get there, it's going to be a treat. We have a brand new studio to share with everybody when we open this thing up.

It's pretty cool. During the little period. Downtime. The downtime, we'll call it. We actually rebuilt a couple of our floors at Remax headquarters, and my studio was one of those. So Mark had a lot to do with that. It was really cool.

Top of the 12th floor. That's it. There you go. So we have a really interesting show today, Mark. I'm excited about this. A great business leader that has a very interesting business model that's been around for many, many years. Are you ready to jump into this? I'm ready. Let's do this. Let's do this. All right. So we have with us today, Scott Landers. He has been president and CEO of Monotype since January, 2016, after previously serving as a company COO and CFO. Wow. The whole C-suite here. This is interesting because with roots dating back to 1887, that's right, 1887, Monotype is a leader providing a leading provider of fonts. So, you know, type fonts to thousands of brands and millions of creative professionals around the

globe. So typefaces like Helvetica, Futura, I can't pronounce some of them, you know, Times New Roman, you all know that one, Ariel, things like that. All of these different types call Monotype Home. So their unique ability to combine technology, type, and expertise have allowed them to continue to thrive with one of the oldest industries on the planet. So this is really kind of an interesting conversation here. They've helped design the typefaces of Southwest Airlines, Toyota, Domino's, Alibaba, many more. So before that, Scott was VP of Global Finance at Pitney Bow Software, which is a $450 million division of Pitney Bow's. He's been a guest lecturer at Boston University and Boston College for several years and has coached over, get this, 1,500 Little League baseball games. So Scott,

happy to have you on the show. Welcome, my friend. Adam, it's so great to be here. I love the dancing in the beginning. I was this close to joining you. You know, I don't know why we started doing that, but it's stuck with us, unfortunately. But thank you for recognizing it. Hey, Scott, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so Scott Landers, CEO of Monotype. Again, it's great to be here. Yeah, so my background, I've been in the tech industry for about 25 years. Started with a company called MapInfo, joined there in 97.

Worked there for about 11, 12 years. Sought from about $60 million up to about $200 million. And then joined Monotype here back in 2007. And it's been a wonderful ride. Again, being able to see a company from about $100 million in revenue to grow in excess of $200 million. And just really been fortunate over my career to work at organizations where the folks around me have been so supportive in my own growth. Right. So I've been able to to move up the ladder, really, with just two companies and build build a really nice career. Wow. Well, congratulations. That's, you know, it's a lot of work to get to where you're at in a business. So kudos to you, my friend. Hey, can you tell us a little bit about your business?

You know, how do you describe Bonotype when people go, where do you work? I mean, it's kind of an interesting concept, isn't it? Yeah, sometimes it's hard at cocktail parties, but one of the ways to get folks, you know, head around it is to just go back and talk about what are the ingredients used in creativity, right? And as you know from your own business, if you think about your own brand, what can we use to express ourselves? A lot of times that will be images or video, and people may think about companies like Getty and Shutterstock. You may make choices around color, and that may be a company called Pantone. But then one of the great ingredients or assets that are out there are

fonts or typefaces, and that's where Monotype comes in. When I interviewed for the CFO job back in 2007, I think I was still a half hour into the job interview where I said, hold on, wait a second. Someone pays for fonts, right? Because I had actually been a user of fonts since the beginning of time, but I never had to pay for them. It's really interesting. Some of these art forms date back to 1887, and Monotype has become the leading provider of these typefaces. We are our customers. We have thousands of brands, millions of creative professionals, and actually billions of human beings through using their iPhones and their PCs are actually customers of Monotype. And what's really interesting about us is having ownership like rights or outright owning the world's most popular typefaces. So a lot of

people may not know who Monotype is, but they know what Helvetica is, Times New Roman, Ariel. And those fonts call Monotype, they call Monotype home. That's pretty cool because you can't look anywhere without seeing one of Monotype's products. It's amazing. It is. And so when I first joined Monotype, I was the chief financial officer. And we were public at the time and we used to do these investor meetings, which you may be used to as well. You can meet hundreds of people in a given day. One of the slides we put up that really got the company to resonate with investors was telling them, is you interact with Monotype's IP more than any other IP on the planet. Adam, I would

bet you today, before you got here, maybe you worked out and maybe you were wearing your athletic gear and the name of that company was using Monotypes fonts. Perhaps when you got ready, the packaging around your shampoo perhaps had our fonts on it. The credit card you used to buy your Starbucks could have had our font on it. The Starbucks could have had our font on it. What did you read to digest the news in the morning off of your phone or off of the newspaper? It very likely was using one of our typefaces. So when you show those images to folks, or we said to them, go out into Times Square and look around, how many times do you see text? It's probably a high likelihood that that text came from us. Unbelievable. And it's, it's

fascinating because, and I'm a huge fan of branding, you know, Remax is one of the most recognized brands in the world. And it's really important when you think about that, because those fonts that you are allowing people to license, utilize, whatever, everywhere, those are, you know, you said images. And that's how we perceive those in our brain. Those are comforting for us to see. And we recognize a, you know, some sort of a font as a company. You know, you talked about some of the businesses here. I mentioned them in the intro here that you guys created, you know, the fonts that you created for businesses like Southwest Airlines. Everybody knows what that looks like. It's incredible. So there's a lot

of evolution that's happened here. I want to take a step back in time. How do you take and continue to evolve a company that is about typeface, that is about fonts? I mean, where do you go next? How do you continue to build upon that success? Yeah. So the current incarnation of the company, it's been around since 1986. And back in 1986, we were part of a much bigger company. And there was an engineer who invented font scaling technology. Now today, when you go on your iPhone and you zoom in and that text redraws, and it's really clear at a very big size or a very small size, we take that for granted today. But in 1986, that was revolutionary. And we were fortunate enough to get that technology embedded into the laser printer. So now you could choose from any size font you wanted in your word processor.

So I like to joke around because I've got kids that are in college that says this is what allows them to cheat on their term paper by choosing font size 12.12345 to make it five pages instead of four and a half. But if I think about how we've evolved over time, it's really been a couple of things. It's been having deep relationships with our customers and then being able to innovate because monotype changed when the world around us changed. And it's actually something we've all lived through. So for the first 20 years of monotype's existence, we were primarily supporting desktop publishing in print, right? That's how we read and we consume things. In 2007, when I first joined as the CFO, obviously, you know, the screen technology was now coming out

in the iPhone. And we were able to take the technology that was in the printer and now bring it to the screen so that this art form, what we're really experts at, is how does this art form look beautiful no matter where it needs to go? Right. And so our business evolved from print into screen. thought about what's most important as an example to Rebax today is now that everybody's consuming digitally, how can we help the creators of content make the right font choice so that when you're engaging with folks a click at a time or a nanosecond at a time, it can be really relevant and productive. And so it's really just been keeping pace and having the combination of the fonts themselves, but the technology and the expertise to help our customers thrive in these new environments.

That's fascinating. I wish I'd listened to you before I wrote my last college paper, 12.12345. I'm going to tell my kids that. They're all in college right now, and they're, I got to write another half a page. No, you don't. I got a secret from Scott. So this is fascinating because this is one of the biggest challenges that people have of what font do I pick for my marketing, for my deliverables, things like that.

Do you have any recommendations yourself as the CEO of the company, an easy way or something to think about so you're not sitting there for hours looking at all the fonts? Is there a way to actually pick something that resonates quickly and easily? Or is it just go through the process and look at all of them? So if you think about it, if the font is done right, you don't notice it. There's so many talented graphic designers and creative professionals who do spend hours looking at it to make sure that the emotional connection of the company or of the actual acute message that you're looking to make in that advertisement,

really understanding what that is and making sure that the typeface matches. Imagine if Remax was in Comic Sans. It would totally get in the way. But when your customers are looking at Remax, you want it to be the body language and tone of voice for the words that are on the page. And so what our recommendation would be, and this is where some of our technology can help, is really getting, using artificial intelligence and getting into kind of the emotional connection that each one can make. But the advice would be is give your creative team the space in the room to go and really do that work. Oftentimes what companies will do is they'll work with our type designers and they will engage in that process if it's a major rebranding to help

them make that right choice. And what, you know what we oftentimes take for granted is it's not just the name of the company, but how does that dovetail and work with all of the product lines, all of the foreign languages, what you may be choosing for header text and body text? Are you going to use the same font for every environment or will print and digital be slightly different? And do you understand the reasons why that would be so? What I love about being the CEO of Monotype is you're really overseeing an organization that's half art, half science. And we can help bridge that gap with our people, but also with our technology as well. So we have a font platform

today called Monotype Fonts, which tries to bring a lot of this stuff, which could have taken weeks, and actually put the answers at our customers' fingertips with the click of a button. Awesome. Where can our listeners find this if they want to go out and research their future fonts? Yeah. So I would highly recommend they go to monotype.com. You'll find out a whole bunch about fonts and you can get yourself educated. You get yourself inspired as well. So monotype.com would be the place to go. Awesome. Scott, you're a great business leader. I've studied you a little bit and you have a really cool company and a great progressive product here. You've led your company through a lot of change. Are there a couple of key

aspects that you look for as a business leader when it comes to leading through change that you can share with our audience? Yeah. So as it relates to leading through change, I mean, I guess there's a couple of different things I would say. One is you got to keep your customer at the center, right? And the big transition for us at Monotype is the first 20 years, our fonts were primarily embedded in products you use. So we had 20 customers that were buying on behalf of billions of people. That shifted dramatically for us when we now moved to the creative side where folks like you were thinking about how does my website, my app, my digital ad look great. So we had to build the capability to

serve the customer at scale. And so for us, we were almost like a startup in a 25-year-old company. We hired our first product marketer, product management, and VP of marketing 25 years after the company was started. So there I would say is just keeping the customer at the center and building the tools within the company to make sure you can get that feedback as quickly as possible so it can inform your next move. I think the one other thing I would say is that one of the things I've learned as a CEO is you have a lot of bosses when you become CEO. You have your employees. You have your customers.

You have your partners. You have your board. You have your shareholders. The big thing that I found is bringing focus and alignment into each one of those stakeholder groups. The one thing I would share with you and your listeners that's been huge for us is when we went through all of this change, and then you go through a pandemic, we enlisted the help of our employees to solve this problem for us. And we created something called an employee experience team.

It was spearheaded by our HR VP, Michelle Kelly-Dynahue. And it's been transformational for me as a leader. And what we did is we use this group of thought leaders. I spent more time with them to get them to understand the why behind all the changes we were making. They then helped bridge that gap to the employees so that they could really connect to the work they were doing. And then we did it in reverse. When employees give feedback, this group is really the one who says, Scott, get your acting gear and go make these changes. Right. And so I'd be happy to offline if anyone ever has any questions, but, you know, giving your employees more authority, you know, to make the changes that they need in the business has been probably the single

biggest thing I've done. Great advice. Great leadership advice. Great business leader advice. Thank you, Scott. So Scott Landers, CEO of Monotype, I have a question for you that I ask all of our guests on the show. And we love these answers because these are little golden nuggets of how do I make myself better, happier, more successful each day? So Scott, how do you start your day with a win? So that's an easy one. I give myself one hour a day and the 23 hours are for everybody else, but really giving myself the time, putting it on the calendar. And for me, it's one hour of exercise and I am totally hooked on the Peloton. I me, it's one hour of exercise and I am totally hooked on the Peloton. I got a mug here from one of my co-workers for Christmas. It's been

life changer, right? And I got this thing before the pandemic, but obviously with the pandemic, it's been huge. I've converted a lot of folks. I think there's millions of people who have joined that revolution, but giving yourself the hour to clear your head, right? And so you can be better for everybody else, right? I think has been really a difference maker. Great advice. Thank you so much, Scott. Thanks for being on Start With A Win. Well, thanks so much. It's been a pleasure. And thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. If you'd like to ask Adam a question or tell us your Start With A Win story, give us a call and leave us a message at 888-581-4430.

Don't forget to go on to iTunes and subscribe. If you just listen to this show passively and whatnot, actually go in there and click that subscribe button because then you'll get notified every single time a new episode gets uploaded. And for more great content, head over to startwithwin.com. You can also find Adam on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, wherever you prefer to do your social mediaing. Adam will be there. And until next time, start with a win. 🎵