Untold Truths About Ideas, Branding, Web Design by Love and Money Agency Founder Charl Rodney Laubscher

In this interview series by Website Planet, I talk to executives from the best digital companies, who share their stories, tips and perspectives on what it really takes to create a successful website and online business.

A deep dive into decades of hands-on experience and technical expertise to learn untold truths and practical advice that will immediately help you build and grow your website.

Our guest today is Charl Rodney Laubscher, Founder and Managing Director at Love and Money Agency Lty Ptd.

Love and Money (LaM) is building digital brands for SMBs and startups (including some of the biggest brands in Australia and the world). They are also partnering with social enterprises through their +Venture program. Among their clients and collaborators there are names like Pepsico, Polaroid, coles, Westpac and more.

Before starting LaM, Charl has worked in branding and advertising for Interbrand, DDB and TBWA and some more while being a columnist on feminist issues for The New Zealand Herald.

Key topics we discussed:

• The two problems with “world-changing ideas”
• Perfection paralysis
• Maximising Room for Magic
• Common mistakes all his clients are making
• The one truth of marketing
• How AI could impact creative jobs

To start, tell us briefly about you. What is your current role at your company, and what are the measurable achievements you are most proud of?

My role has changed a lot over the 12 years I’ve had LaM, but much more so over the last two. They say that one of the great privileges about being a founder is that while you start out doing everything yourself, as you grow you get to hire people who are better at parts of your job than you are. I couldn’t agree more.

One of the proudest moments of my career was hiring my good friend Danny Pemberton to take over as Creative Director at the end of 2021. Danny and I have collaborated for years; we’ve worked on projects together, and he was my client for the Polaroid rebrand in 2017. But we actually met at university, where he beat me at literally every single subject.

Danny’s been able to bring focus and clarity to the role of CRD, not just for our clients, but for our team. His mentorship to the team is phenomenal. And while those achievements are his, not mine, the thing I’m proudest of is creating a company that’s created space for him to do his thing.

My role as Managing Director is now looking after growing the company more broadly, and also building our product company (ToolKit™) and our small stable of +Venture companies (Fluff and now Telepathic Instruments.)

♻️ Fluff: responsible, ethical, green beauty products
Fluff sells casual cosmetics that are good for the skin, for thoughts, and for the planet. For those who believe the world needs fewer products that are qualitative, responsible and transparent in their messaging.

Fluff’s products are all:

• 100% Vegan (No Lanolin, No Beeswax, No Wool, No Carmine)
• 0% Palm-Oil (Sourcing traceable natural alternatives or RSPO),
• Packed using refillable & recyclable materials

As we continue to grow, I’m spending less time thinking about any individual project or client, and more time thinking about how to build creative companies: businesses with creative problem-solving and original ideas at their core.

While I never really saw myself as a graphic designer, this is the kind of design I can see myself doing for years to come.

What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers? What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?

We see two major challenges over and over again with our clients:

1. Having an idea that “has ideas.”

Ideas that people understand intuitively, can interpret in their own way, and want to take on as their own. Once you have this locked in, everything else becomes easier: decisions are almost already made by the time you get to them. Everyone — from our clients to their partners to their customers — can be on the same page without having to check.

The breakthrough for this came from digging into the epistemology of ideas: years of research led me to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and iterating on the theory to understand how brands work in a digital economy. It’s what we talk about when we say “Brands are Memes”, and it’s a talk Danny, Adnanan and I have given all over the world, including at ConFig and BNCF2023.

2. Creating a brand clients can actually use

The second major challenge is creating a brand clients can actually use. Too often we brand designers have these “world-changing ideas”, everyone gets really excited, and then we hand over a PDF with some rules about how not to use the logo and… nothing really changes.

The website has your colours and typefaces, but none of the ideas and insights that drove the brand forward. We’ve been trying to fix that problem for years for our clients, and that’s what led us to developing our own handover product: ToolKit™.

“We received brand PDFs from all over the world. Some in Spanish, Italian, English, Bahasa … So many colour palettes, so many pages, pretty much every Dinamo typeface,”
Patrick Brien, Product Director

“It looks great – looks exactly how a brand book should be handed over, and I specifically love the fact that I don’t have to send a lot of different files… I think it gives a way better understanding of the brand overall, than just having the PDF,”
Giulia Boccali, ToolKit™ Beta Participant

What do you think makes your company stand out? What are you most proud of?

From day one we’ve had the belief that brand and digital go hand in hand. So our process and our projects have the two woven tightly together. We think both disciplines have so much to learn from each other, and we’re learning more every day.

And really, that’s what I’m most proud of; first and foremost we think of ourselves as a “learning organisation” — a team of people always willing to admit that we’ve got a long way to go, and a lot to learn. That while we’ll always strive for excellence, to assume perfection is possible is to be a slave to arrogance and ignorance. So rather than striving to be perfect, we strive to be better.

As we say: Beta Today, Better Tomorrow.

From your experience, what are the most important things to build a highly successful website and online business? Please explain each in detail.

We think of websites being One Trick Ponies: don’t try and rethink everything from first principles, but don’t run out everything by the numbers, either. Pick one thing that you’re going to do that’s gonna blow your user’s mind, and then invest 80% of your energy into that. Anything more and it starts turning into a circus: fun for a second, but mostly exhausting and not something you need to see more than once.

If there were one part of the website development process you would have spent 50% more time on, what would it be and why? What made you realize the importance of this step?ws

Setting up an Atomic Design System that is both comprehensive and flexible. The truth is that while every brand (and website) is different, they’re usually made up of the same component parts. And with digital in particular there’s a recongnised, tested set of standards that work across devices, industries, and audiences (we call this Best Practise™). So we work to the assumption that we’re working with variables, not first principles, for 80% of our work. This makes us infinitely faster and more efficient when it comes to rolling out websites across a range of slices and devices.

But the crucial thing is what you do with the time you buy yourself in working this way. For us, that’s spending every extra moment we get on tipping “the Love” back into the 20% of that web experience that’s going to really make a difference. That’s going to elevate the brand or the user experience into something truly special. So we spend 80% of our time getting those interactions or elements or slices or moments just right.

We call it “Maximising Room for Magic.”

What’s the one key lesson you’ve learned about building a website and business that you wish you knew when you started? What’s the story behind this realization?

That brand has more to learn from digital than digital has to learn from brand. I have a branding and advertising background, so I thought I was gonna teach the world of digital a thing or two about how brands work. Turns out that the process of building digital products had far more interesting things to say about how to build a brand that can properly interact with its users in a digital environment.

In your opinion, which aspect of running a website tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?

Launch!

Humans suck at not leaving things to the last minute. So nobody has time until you’ve run out of time to change anything.

Can I give an example? Every website project I’ve ever worked on. Including my own.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen people making when building their website and online business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Thinking that anything they do — their brand, their website, their business — isn’t a constant project. Online businesses (and the brands and websites that they use to communicate with their customers) require constant iteration. It’s a build, measure, learn cycle of iteration that never stops.

Far as I can see, there are three reasons for this:

1. Human fallibility: if you’re doing anything new, you by definition don’t quite know what you’re doing, and thinking you’ve got it right the first time is a recipe for disaster.
2. Darwinian evolution: in an environment where things are changing, you need to evolve in order to survive, let alone thrive.
3. Entropy: everything in the universe deteriorates, and so even if all you want to do is keep things the way they were, you need to put work in. It’s like tending a garden. As ever, the problem is the opportunity; if you put the work in consistently you’ll beat just about everyone else in the market, because you can bet they won’t.

Is there any advice you’ve received in your career that you now wish you never followed? What happened?

Yes. One of my early bosses — a man I looked up to a lot — told me our job was to be the smartest guy in the room. My young ego loved that.

Took me years to figure out that if you’re the smartest person in the room you’re in the wrong room.

What strategy has been particularly effective in growing your website audience this year?

James Hilton once told me that the best business strategy in this business was doing great work consistently. I think every other strategy that you employ can elevate or accelerate this, but it won’t replace it. You can have the slickest funnel in the world but if you can’t hold on to your clients, it’ll all fall apart soon enough.

If I asked you to share the key ingredient in your “secret sauce” for inbound marketing, what would it be?

Hahahaha, it’s inbound! It’s as much a secret to me as anyone. There’s only so much you can do to engineer it.

Work hard and be nice to people. Word gets around. And be good enough that you’re in a position to take advantage to the right opportunity when it comes along.

Based on your experiences, what trends and technologies are currently underestimated or overlooked, but can significantly impact your industry? How are you going to adapt?

I don’t think anyone’s suffering from underestimating how much of an impact emergent technologies are going to have on this business right now. But for what it’s worth I think the impact of AI, self-serve design and low/no-code are going to have less of an impact in the short-term and more of an impact in the long-term than most people think.

We’re already bored of GPT’s tone of voice and tired of the look of Mid Journey and DALL•E. Humans recognise patterns super quickly. But the ways that we make money — by charging clients a lot of money to “roll out” work that’s hard and technical — is being eaten up in the background. We’re adapting by constantly experimenting, and trying to be as objective as we can about where we actually bring value to the equation, rather than just acting like the Luddites who wanted to smash the looms.

My hot take is the technology we’re building isn’t on the path to replace original thinking. So long as we keep refining our job titles, creative people like us will have plenty to do for as far as I can see. But then, I can only see so far.