Innovating Creativity: Advisors Excel

Creative Execution

In 2018, Marcus Rangel, executive creative director at Advisors Excel, took the company’s design department on an off-site retreat to The Pennant for burgers and pinball before breaking the group into teams to create promotional trailers on the fly.

“Five five-person teams had two hours to create a video, website and poster to submit to our judges, which included Cody Foster, one of our company’s co-founders,“ said Rangel. “Cody was impressed with the quality of work created and thought it would be cool to extend a similar opportunity to benefit a local nonprofit, so this year that’s what we’ve done.”

Doorstep and Let’s Help were the first recipients to benefit.

On a designated day, about 10 employees, including copy editors, account managers and community engagement staff, meet with the nonprofit to assess needs and execute strategy, creating concepts for marketing collateral, website development, video production and photography.

With built-in time and budget constraints, the nonprofit challenge sessions offer employees an opportunity to expand the scope of their work and put into practice some of the tips they have gleaned from the influential creative professionals Rangel regularly brings to Topeka for inspiration and skill enhancement.

David Franzke, digital art director, said, “Creativity often comes from limitations, and these small teams know they only have a few hours to produce something meaningful and useful for agencies that don’t have access to the resources we have.

“In addition to helping the agencies, it’s also great for our team members to get to know one another on a personal level, particularly people on the team you may not have worked with closely before.”

Creative Inspiration

Advisors Excel is an independent marketing organization that provides an extensive array of services to help independent financial professionals across the country build their practices. As the company continues to grow, the design department has also increased exponentially.

“We’re a much larger team now than when I started with the company 12 years ago, and sending a couple of people to a conference each year isn’t a model that works for us,” Rangel said. “Instead we ask our team
to tell us who they’d love to hear from in the design field and then we bring those individuals here so everyone can benefit.”

The first high-profile presenter Rangel enlisted was Aaron Draplin, a renowned designer from Portland, Oregon, whom Franzke likens to Jay-Z in the design world.

“When we announced at a department lunch that he was coming to Topeka, employees went crazy,” Rangel said. “Now there’s an expectation that you don’t want to miss the summer retreat. We tease up who’s coming to build excitement and anticipation.”

In 2019 alone, Advisors Excel brought in six speakers accomplished in photography, videography, illustration, and web and stop animation to infuse the team with creative energy and new insights. A videographer showed staff how to layer sound in videos, and an illustrator from Los Angeles, California shared his comic book text style.

“You can’t go to one of these industry speaker sessions here and not be inspired to do better and approach things differently based on what you’ve learned,” said Rangel. “We see teams gravitate toward implementing the new knowledge they’ve gained and start expanding what they’re capable of.”

Franzke said the culture encourages experimentation, something “that doesn’t often happen in companies unless you focus on it.”

Sean Kennedy, digital production artist at Advisors Excel, models the “squeeze the orange” t-shirt.

Creative Purpose

Marcus Rangel is attuned to creative nudgings, whether they come from the anecdotes of a presenter he admires or the former NextGen Chophouse that was the catalyst for the promotional trailer competition.

“I find inspiration in all sorts of things,” said Rangel. “I like Charlie Hustle shirts and PT’s Roasting Coffee Company, and they helped influence some of our ideas for AE swag and the shirts we’ve designed. David Callanan, one of our co-founders, once did a presentation with oranges and that led to our popular ‘squeeze the orange’ T-shirts.”

But clever slogans and fun packaging do more than instill company pride and boost camaraderie. AE employees contributed $2,500 in swag purchases in 2019 to take local schoolchildren shopping for shoes and apparel.

“The company and the community are very intertwined for us,” said Rangel. “Whether we’re working for a paying client or a nonprofit partner, we’re always looking for better ways to engage people, enhance our skills and upgrade our approaches.”