Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of insideoutside.io, a provider of research events and consulting services that helps innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is George Brooks. George is the founder of Crema, which is a digital product agency based out of Kansas City. So right here in the Midwest, welcome to the show. George Brooks: Thanks, Brian. Its's good to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well I'm excited to have you on. A couple of reasons. One, you are also a podcast host like me. Your podcast is called Option Five. You talk a lot about product development and that, close to the core of all the stuff that we talk about here at Inside Outside Innovation, when it comes to what does it take to work and live in this new world of change and disruption.George Brooks: Yeah. Thank you very much. I'm excited. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about Crema. How'd you go about forming this company and tell us a little bit about what you do. George Brooks: My background is in design. So, I started as a design agency first, and really that was as a freelance designer going out on my own. And we talk about when sometimes entrepreneurship innovation happens because you have this dream and this vision, and sometimes you're just pushed off a cliff and you have to figure it out as you fall down. And mine was being pushed off a cliff. My oldest daughter was in the hospital for the first seven months of her life and I couldn't be at work. I couldn't be at the agency that I was at. I needed to be there. She was super critical. And so, I left that job and started freelance design about 10 years ago. Well, actually gosh, 12 years ago now. And the story used to be 10 years, right? Time has passed. Brian Ardinger: And Coronavirus adds another three years for this last six months. George Brooks: I know. So true. So, I started freelance designing. I don't have any business background. So about two years into that, my best friend and I had always dreamed about doing a business together. And I said, I think I accidentally started a business. And it looks like this agency work, doing a lot of design work for other agencies, and for developers and entrepreneurs. Can you make sure that I'm actually paying my taxes and doing all the things that I should be doing? And so, he was finishing up his MBA and so Dan and I joined together about 10 years ago and Crema is about 10 and a half years old.What we do today has changed since the beginning. We're now a full-service digital product agency. So, we do everything from user experience, design and consulting, strategic direction workshops, coaching, agile process training, all the way through. I have almost 40 full time employees now and focusing on actually providing full-stack product teams. So, design development, test engineering, product management, and we deploy those now, used to be a lot of startups and early stage companies. Almost all the work that we do now is with large enterprise innovation teams around the world. A lot of fun. Brian Ardinger : Well, we seem to have a very similar background, 8 or 10, 12 years ago I started in the startup world and started the Nmotion startup accelerator and starting early stage teams, helping them get up and going and that, but starting these things in the Midwest is a little bit different. So, I want to talk a little bit about what has the evolution been like and what have you seen starting and building companies here in the Midwest, espec