Customer engagement for Mad*Pow is not just a series of interactions with a brand. It’s more than that. It’s emotional.

Will Powley, along with Amy Cueva, launched Mad*Pow in 2000 with the goal of building a creative agency that offers value to large organizations by delivering high quality design and extraordinary client service at a competitive price.

Mad*Pow is a design agency that improves the experiences people have with technology, organizations and each other. The company has delivered digital solutions to fit the needs of businesses and organizations across a variety of industries over the last 15 years.

BusinessInterviews.com:  Can you tell our readers a bit about your unique approach which helps facilitate two-way client engagement?

Will: 

Creating and implementing a vision collaboratively, as strategic allies with our clients, allows us to provide insight and understanding early in our engagements and stay connected as advocates of an ideal, ongoing customer experience.

One of Mad*Pow’s biggest differentiators is our world-renowned, proprietary method for collaborative workshops and design studios. A Design Studio combines the iterative design process with the generation of numerous ideas for a solution with participants from various backgrounds. It includes frequent evaluation, rapid refinement, consolidation, and elimination of those ideas in a workshop setting.

BusinessInterviews.com:  Can you share some insights when it comes to bringing new life to an established brand?

Will:

Mad*Pow is always excited for opportunities to discover ways to engage our clients’ customers in new and refreshing ways. We approach customer engagement with sincerity. We aim to create lasting relationships between our clients and future customers; rich and loyal relationships that consist of mutual respect, attention, trust, and genuine affection — customer engagement for Mad*Pow is not just a series of interactions with a brand. It’s more than that. It’s emotional.

Leveraging in-depth knowledge and foundational research helps us to identify what motivates our client’s customer, what they desire, and what should happen next in their journey with a brand. We evaluate the complete ecosystem of our client’s products and services including “back stage” infrastructure, all with a focus to improve the quality of interactions people have with a brand. We observe and reflect with “a wide lens” and plan for the impact a solid, well-thought strategy will have on our clients’, and their customers’ lives.

BusinessInterviews.com:  In 2006, after six years of being in business, you set your sights on growing your revenue and headcount.  What changes did you make within the company to become more growth oriented?

Will:

The single most important change and decision my business partner, Amy Cueva, and I made was to add another owner and officer to our organization in 2006–Brad Honeyman.  He was a dear friend with an amazing mind for business and we were very happy that he decided to become our Chief Operating Officer and a part owner of our business. Amy and I understood how to sell professional services, staff projects and make money. But we had no idea how to create the tools necessary to forecast our revenue potential. Brad came with an MBA and a lot of business know-how that was more than vital for our growth. Brad came in and planned and directed all aspects of our organization’s operational initiatives. He helped us define short and long term financial and ops goals. He organized our finances and set us on a course for planned, stable and responsible growth.

If you are a small business owner, the most important advice I could ever give is to make sure you eventually have a leader within your organization that understands business, finance and most importantly, operations.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What are some trends in customer engagement that you’re excited about?

Will:

The most exciting thing going on right now is that Fortune 100s are starting to understand how important design is for business. The standard design process has been around for a long time. This process involves research, strategy, design, validation, iteration and development of concepts, and it can be used to not just design things, but design solutions that solve big business problems… like massive organizational change. Think of it this way… a large company may be preparing to transform their organization in a drastic way – but they may not have figured out the best way to communicate it to employees and the public. By performing laser-focused research with the key players of this large business decision and working collaboratively to build consensus on some corporate communication strategies through studio workshops, we can design messaging platforms, validate them with samples of the target audience and refine them until they are ready to roll out. That is the beauty of the design process – and it is absolutely glorious to see some of the world’s largest companies leveraging this process to solve some of their hardest issues.

BusinessInterviews.com:  Can you talk about the process of creating a work environment where motivated staff can flourish and succeed to their highest potential?

Will: 

Happy employees deliver high quality work for our clients. Work-life balance has become not only my mantra but also a beacon for how our company is run today. We are constantly trying to evolve our employees’ benefits packages to enable people to pursue passions outside of work (family, friends, hobbies, health, spirituality), while still allowing time to be ambitious and career-minded. The work environment is a critical component of this package. Each of our regional office locations have been carefully selected – each is in a diverse urban location with historical significance, close proximity to music and the arts, and surrounded by amazing places to eat. Most importantly, each location provides us access to a vital, incredible pool of local design talent.

At Mad*Pow, we strive to guide our employees towards an ideal work-life balance and it gives us great pleasure to be noticed for it. In 2013, Mad*Pow won Stay Work Play New Hampshire’s “Coolest Companies for Young Professionals” for our ability to implement strategies that attract and retain young employees in a fun, supportive work environment. In 2014, Mad*Pow was awarded 3^rd place in Business NH’s “Best Small Companies to Work For” competition which recognizes businesses that go out of their way to create fun and high-engagement workplaces for employees.

BusinessInterviews.com:  You’re an avid surfer.  Do you think that your passion for surfing influences your approach to leadership?

Will: 

Surfing is a very personal sport. It requires an individual to have incredible patience, strength, balance, confidence and a connection to their surroundings. All these things are reflections of the traits of a strong leader. I wouldn’t necessarily say one influences the other; it goes both ways. For me, mother ocean is the greatest psychotherapist on the planet – I can sit for hours staring at her blank horizon and self reflect on all the things that make me who I am – my family, my friends, my hobbies and interests, my spirituality, and sometimes my entrepreneurial drive. That is why surfing is so great. It’s not about waves or rides on waves, its about discovering who you are as a person and expressing that on the canvas that is the empty wall of water you are gliding upon.