A Conversation with Lisa Slagle, Creative Director
Cultivating creativity professionally since 2012
Lisa Slagle is the founder of WHEELIE, a Montana-based boutique agency specializing in creative content and strategy. As an avid mountain biker and snowboarder, Slagle brings inspiration, ethics, and lessons from the trails to her work. Her team has put together campaigns using video, the written word, and music for organizations like The North Face, Outdoor Women’s Alliance, The Whitefish Trail, and more.
Lisa interviewed me late last year for her podcast, Outside By Design, so it was my turn to get behind the questions. She shares thoughtful answers about starting her company at the age of 22, the characteristics of a good boss and workplace, her growth as a creative person, and, one of my favorite topics, rejecting the capitalistic mindset.
How do you describe your job to people?
I suppose by craft I’m a creative director. However, I also have owned a creative agency for 12 years. Those are the two ways I identify professionally. The job has evolved over the years. When we were smaller, I creative-directed every project. That involved coming up with the scope, the strategy, a creative direction, working within budgets, and then managing, if not doing, quite a bit of the production. Now I’m in more of a CEO role, which involves making sure that everyone in my company (6 to 10 employees, depending on the season) has enough work and that we’re making clients happy.
What was your path to WHEELIE? What were you doing before?
I went to college for fine arts and creative writing, but I gained quite a bit of experience working in bike shops. That’s where I learned how to explain complicated concepts, like what’s the difference between a $2,000 road bike and a $10,000 road bike? And what experience does that get you? It made me really good at sales, reading an audience, and deciding if I needed to talk about technical features or the feeling of freedom. I also was an in-house designer at a few huge outdoor chains. I was a photo editor at Backcountry.com for a year. I worked on an asphalt crew. I was a snowboard instructor for many years. What felt the best for me was prioritizing snowboarding. I thought I wanted to focus on snowboarding competitively. So I started freelancing by night as a means of prioritizing it. After one season of comps, I decided that I never wanted to turn snowboarding into work. That made the decision to focus on a computer job super clear.
Check out some of the amazing projects Lisa has led at wheeliecreative.com.
What’s the breadth of your work?
The breadth of our work is pretty remarkable. It’s easier to say what we don’t do, and what we don’t do is traditional PR and paid advertising. We don’t do media buying. I guess the easiest way to say it is we focus on human-centered work. So anything that is going to help a human navigate the natural world. We have 30 projects at once on our roster. Some are small, some are big.
We primarily focus on outdoor—people who are inspired by nature, people who have deep connections to the land and conservation, and people who embrace interconnectedness of all living things. Sometimes that’s an outdoor-focused brand, or sometimes non-outdoor brands hire us to connect with a more outdoor-minded audience. One of our most fun clients happens to be a credit union. While banking isn’t inherently outdoorsy, everyone who plays outside needs a place to grow their money.
What kind of projects make you go “I’m so glad this is my job”?
I started WHEELIE when I was 22, and I’ve had it for 12 years. It’s a job that I’ve literally grown up with. The company has grown. The brand has grown. I have grown. I am so very different of a human being than I was when I was a 22-year-old punk with a snowboard. I think there is a lot of depth and softness to me that isn’t necessarily expressed in the WHEELIE brand. But I have enjoyed a slower pace and the more connective projects lately. After working with hundreds, if not thousands, of brands, I’ve enjoyed focusing on how people experience their workplaces and how different companies run. It’s like I have an inside look at what it means to be a person in the workplace. I think that being able to instigate some change in the American workplace might be turning into my life’s work.
An interesting fact is that humans spend 1/3 of their lives at work, 1/3 of their lives sleeping, and 1/3 of their lives elsewhere. Think about that. You only spend 30 percent of your life not working and not sleeping. You spend half of your waking life at work. However, the average human, spends 13.5 years watching TV. There’s not a lot out there right now on how to support people at work, so I’m building a really kick ass solution for getting people some skills in the workplace. Like how to negotiate for a raise, how to handle conflicts with co-workers, how to turn receiving feedback into a superpower. Various training topics like that could make people’s work life much happier. We’re in the building phase, and it’s a massive industry-wide collaboration. I’m thrilled, so stay tuned.
Want to work as a creative in the action sports industry? Wheelhouse Workshops, presented by WHEELIE, is “a space where women can play with a camera, lug gear around, and get the shot with help from the pros.”
What are your thoughts on our creativity being linked to our worth?
First of all, I invite everyone to take some time to ponder their relationship with money—if you’re uncomfortable speaking about money, if you don’t look at your bank account, if you obsess over your bank account. The fact that a bank account says something about your worth is a very fucked up capitalist way of thinking. Really, you’re worth everything just for being a human. You deserve a beautiful life just for existing. In our society, too much of our worth is tied up in our paychecks. However, I love talking about money. I have a super positive relationship with money, and it’s a zone I’m incredibly comfortable in. Instead of thinking “What am I worth?” or “What is my work worth?”, we should flip it. Instead, you say to the client, “What are you trying to accomplish and what is that worth to you?” That’s the mindset shift that needs to happen across the entire industry. It’s also silly in the creative industry to say this is my hourly rate. Because then you’re actually punished for how efficient you are at your job. If something takes you 10 hours, you’re paid more than if it takes you one hour. Because frankly, if you can say something in fewer words, that’s a million times more powerful. That’s really tight, refined, skilled writing. That’s what that is.
What are some other things you want to challenge around money and our capitalistic society?
The main book I recommend people read is called the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. But in conclusion, all money decisions are emotional. Some people want to have their house paid off because they like the idea of not having a mortgage. Some people like to have a lot of cash in the bank. Some people like to have their money working for them. And there are many reasons based on your experience as a human. There’s a lot of deep work to do around that relationship to money and why certain things feel better than others. But at the end of the day, money is an emotional decision, so just embrace that and own it. I don’t think that money needs to be taboo because it’s a tool. It’s not you; it’s a tool.
I have a lot to say about capitalism. I’ve worked with so many businesses and brands, and the thing I’m thinking about lately is: Is it possible to be a capitalist and a feminist? Is it possible to be a capitalist and a naturalist? And then why do we use terms like a corporate ladder when we’re talking about business? Why don’t we talk about rings on a tree? Instead of talking about a well-oiled machine, can we talk about a thriving biodiverse ecosystem? Why do we say that? Those are very masculine-based phrases created by those who started capitalism. We spend so much time in nature in the outdoor industry. Why aren’t we bringing these lessons from trees into the workplace? Capitalism also has this thing with sacrificing your body. How often do we hold it when we need to go to a meeting? We don’t do that in the rest of our life. We’re taught as a little kid in a classroom that you have to ask to go to the bathroom. I just wish more workplaces honored that we have bodies, that we’re women with bodies, that we produce different energy during different times of the month. I always joke that at work our mirrors are hung lower on the walls, and we have a much warmer office, lots of blankets everywhere, and emergency hair tie buckets. It’s a joke that goes so deep. We also started a policy “work where you want” based on finding inspiration from the landscape. Some people like coming to the office, some people like working from home. I try to give people the space to embrace the fact that we’re all humans.
Follow Lisa (@lisa_by_design) and WHEELIE (@wheeliecreative) on Instagram.
What kind of boss do you think you are? Or what kind of boss do you want to be?
I’m really big into leadership training. An employee and I are in the process of completing this collective leadership certification from Circles International. The whole thing is about operating from an ideology of co-creation, bringing your whole self to work, and raising the collective energy in the workplace. I found this through researching the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California. It’s not your typical leadership training, but I do believe strongly in not having aggressive hierarchy. If anything, my employees are probably like, “Can we go back to work now? You’re distracting us.” I think it’s remarkably important to bring your whole self to work and as a leader, be imperfect, apologize, communicate using I statements. Rather than “Are you going to hit the deadline?”, I like to say “I’m feeling a little worried about this, what do you think? I feel concerned because this project is a big deal and I need to know that the deadline is going to get met.” It seems a little silly to center yourself, but it helps to be super human and collaborative. The more I can stay out of their way, the better. I try to be a consistent and solid and stable force in the company. I’m not super reactive. I just try to provide a safe atmosphere for people to grow. You can’t grow when you’re scared. Corporations operate from such a fear-based place often. That’s antithetical to the type of agency that we are.
Going back to something you said earlier: Who are you now, and what helped you form these ideas?
I’m writing a book about this. It’s largely a memoir, but it’s also kind of like a business book for women. I think my superpower is vision. I’m good at predicting an effect or an impact of an action. That’s critical to strong creative direction. But I started this company from a bit of a selfish place of wanting to snowboard all the time and knowing how to talk to customers. All my dirtbag friends became marketing managers at outdoor brands. It all started from this deeply organic lifestyle of mountain biking and snowboarding, living a life that I love, meeting amazing people along the way, and being interested in them and what they do and how they experience the world. And mainly, being really curious. I think curiosity is one of my core values, as well as growth. I’m just constantly looking to grow professionally, personally, and relationally. My story arc has been just this beautiful flow state version of exploring the world; playing hard; embracing the people, places, and experiences; and bringing those feelings into creative work. The thing that gets me the most fired up now is elevating others, but also teaching others how to elevate themselves in the workplace.
What is something creative that you still want to explore?
Oh goodness. Everything. But right now, the process of writing a book and exploring self publishing versus getting a publisher. That is going to be learning in itself. I love the written word. It’s one of my favorite mediums. I also love the constant challenge of video because it takes everything and puts it into a narrative story arc. I love the implicit and the undercurrent of messaging that gets to surface through video. For me, I think I will always be creating in some capacity forever.
Before you go…
Bookmark: The freelancer’s guide to taking vacation time (Freelancer’s Union, written by yours truly)
Register: How to Pitch Outdoor Publications (Heather Balogh Rochfort)
Read: What Ramona Quimby Taught Me about Taking Up Space (Renée Watson for Portland Monthly)
I really enjoyed reading this edition, especially the part around rejecting the capitalistic mindset. Definitely an interesting perspective/topic I’m curious to hear more about, including from the viewpoint of entrepreneurs. Also adding Psychology of Money to my reading list!