Ryan Short | Photograph by Adam Williams
Overview: Ryan Short co-founded CivicBrand with his wife Banner during shaky economic times and a pivotal family moment in 2008. He talks with Adam Williams about making such bold and unconventional decisions.
They also talk about CivicBrand’s pioneering work in city branding and placemaking, and the “locals first” approach that is about helping communities to become the best version of themselves.
Among other things, like the values of travel, parenting teenage sons, fishing and getting people to fall in love with the outdoors.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio in Salida, Colo., and can be listened to on-demand via khen.org.
Ryan Short & CivicBrand
Website: civicbrand.com
Podcast: civicbrand.com/podcast
Instagram: instagram.com/civicbrand
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/civic-brand
Facebook: facebook.com/CivicBrand
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
[Intro music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (00:15): Welcome to We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream, a conversational podcast of community, humanness, and well-being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I’m Adam Williams.
Today, I’m talking with Ryan Short. Ryan co-founded CivicBrand with his wife Banner many years ago. We talk about it being 15 years ago in the conversation, but I realized after the fact, it’s actually reaching 16 years right now as this episode is released. CivicBrand is an innovative city branding and placemaking agency.
In fact, I’d even say a pioneering agency that focuses on helping communities become the best version of themselves. And they do this with a thoughtful locals-first approach, which I think all of us living here in the Arkansas Valley can appreciate.
(01:01): I like to think that that community focused on connection and civic pride is something that CivicBrand and Looking Upstream have in common. In fact, Ryan had me on his CivicBrand podcast called Eyes On The Street to talk about community storytelling last year, because we do share those interests.
But Ryan and CivicBrand do their work nationwide, which means he travels the country quite a bit. And when the opportunity arises, like on a recent work/play trip to Alaska, he gets to enjoy the intersection of purposeful work, travel, family, and their shared love of fishing and spending time in the wild.
(01:37): So I ask Ryan about that Alaska experience and that intersection of his life’s priorities. We talk about the values of travel and what we teach our sons, we each have two, about life through travel. We talk about placemaking, like what is it, and how place shapes all of us?
And we talk about cultivating fulfillment in life and making bold, unconventional decisions when the moment calls for it, like when Ryan and Banner founded CivicBrand in 2008 under shaky economic circumstances and during a pivotal time in their household. Ryan shares why they went for it when most others would’ve let the decisive moment pass by.
(02:17): The Looking Upstream podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority. As with every Looking Upstream episode, show notes with photos, links, and a transcript of the conversation are published at wearechaffeepod.com. Okay, here is Ryan Short.
[transition music, guitar instrumental]
Adam Williams (02:46): So you recently were in Alaska and I saw photos and videos that you were posting online from that. And I’ve got to say I’ve never gotten out into Alaska. I’ve always gotten hung up at the airport on my way through.
Ryan Short (02:58): Okay.
Adam Williams (02:59): And obviously, I’ve seen photos and things from the places, but yours and I think glacier, the water, everything looks so beautiful and amazing. I want to hear about that experience for you.
Ryan Short (03:11): Yeah. I mean, it was incredible. I mean, the pictures you’re talking about was probably half from a work trip and then half from my wife and kids came up on the tail end of a work trip and we turned it into a family thing. But I had been to Alaska one time before and it was as part of a cruise with my wife’s family.
And it was nice, but I felt like I was next to Alaska and you’d get to go on shore for a couple hours and then get ushered back to the boat and you are surrounded by other cruisers at the time. And so it was cool, but I was just so yearning to like, “I want to get into Alaska. I want to see Alaska.”
(03:50): So yeah, with work, we had the opportunity to go up there. We’re doing a project with the Mat-Su Valley, which is, it’s a borough, but that’s what they call their counties in Alaska.
Adam Williams (03:50): Okay.
Ryan Short (04:01): It’s basically a county branding project. And so on those types of projects, our first trip is always just to get immersed in the place and see all the things that there are to see and do all the things that there are to do. And so our team got to go land a helicopter on a glacier and drink literally from like little pool, this most amazing… It looks like Gatorade, like this fake blue water.
Adam Williams (04:26): It was so blue. That was part of what stood out to me.
Ryan Short (04:29): Yeah. I mean, it was wild. I had seen pictures of that and assumed that it was a little photoshopped.
Adam Williams (04:34): To enhance it.
Ryan Short (04:35): Yeah. But it’s not. I mean, it literally looked like Windex. It was wild. And you just land on the glacier and we’re like, “Is this safe? Should we even be a walking on the…” But yeah. Alaska is a pretty special place. It’s so massive. I think that’s the biggest takeaway for me is… And that’s even our project, what we’re tasked with is the challenge of how do you make it digestible for someone planning a visit there or a trip there because people think like, “Yeah, we’ll fly into Anchorage, we’ll run up to Denali, and then we’ll go down to Seward and see…”
And it’s like, what you just described would be like saying, “Yeah, let’s go to California for vacation.” Well, you don’t say that. You say a city or Southern California at least. You’re not like, “Yeah, we’ll run up to San Francisco and then down to LA. And so I think the size and scale just contributes, I think, to the epicness of Alaska.
Adam Williams (05:30): For sure.
Ryan Short (05:30): Yeah.
Adam Williams (05:31): It’s interesting the way you described almost voyeurism of Alaska from the cruise ship. It’s like, I don’t get to actually touch this thing and get out and experience the wild of it. And it is epically wild, isn’t it?
Ryan Short (05:43): Yeah.
Adam Williams (05:43): I think, is it physically somewhere around a third or so the size of the lower 48? I mean, it’s massive.
Ryan Short (05:51): It’s massive. Yeah. And I don’t know exactly, but our whole world view of how we view the world is so skewed because we’re used to looking at flat print maps. And so even just the fact that, “Oh yeah, it’s round. Russia is right there.” It’s actually wrapped up. And when you think of like, when you’d fly back, you feel like you’re going out of the way. But it’s like, well no, that’s actually, if you look at a globe, that’s the most direct route. So yeah, there’s a lot of just interesting things about its orientation and how it’s turned. You think it’s turned… I don’t know. It’s just weird. Because I think our brains are so…
Adam Williams (06:25): Linear in that way.
Ryan Short (06:27): Yeah. The map we had hanging on our classrooms in school back in the day.
Adam Williams (06:30): The reason I’ve passed through the airport up there every time I have, maybe a few or a handful of times, was to go to Asia. And it might’ve been on a latitude similar to wherever I was in the lower 48, but we’re going up through there, for the reasons that you’re saying and the curvature and the way that efficiently actually works. And it is amazing. The reason I wanted to start with Alaska besides my own curiosity and wanting to hear something of your travel story is because I feel like that represents a combination of some key things that seem like they’re pretty important to you, maybe the priorities for you.
(07:09): You mentioned work. I want to get into that. I’m really curious about what it is you do with branding, placemaking. But your family also got to join you at some point on this trip. So there’s travel, there’s your work, there’s family, and all of you fish, and that became part of this amazing trip as well. I wonder how you feel about the intersection of so much that matters to you with something like that.
Ryan Short (07:35): Yeah. Obviously those are the biggest things, work and family. And I think, for me at least… And I think both my wife and I have just tried to be super intentional about everything that we can control to a degree and making sure that those things aren’t separate things. So my wife and I, we started our company together. We work together. So we’re together. I know some couples are like, “Oh, we could never do that. That doesn’t work for us.”
But work, we work together. So we’re together all day and then we’re parents together with our kids and then we go out together. I mean, immediately family and work is already intertwined just because we work together. But I think also trying to do work that is fun. And if you’re going to be at work, let’s try to make it at least a little bit of fun. And yeah. We get to work with places, which is a big part of the whole thing of what we do. And being able to experience different places. I love being able to bring my kids along. I mean, I think that’s the biggest thing in a kid’s life is just like, everything that they see, it just expands their horizon of what’s possible.
(08:49): I mean, there’s so many kids out there that… My kids, I’ll be the first to tell you, they’re so spoiled. They’ve been a ton of great places. And there’s a ton of kids that they just haven’t ever left the town that they grew up in. And I think that’s so valuable to just making you a more empathetic person, making you [inaudible 00:09:09] a better person. It’s like the more you can see, the more places you can see, the more types of people you can see, I think is not just fun. It’s super, super necessary for us to just be better people.
Adam Williams (09:21): I agree. And that is also a philosophy in our household. And thankfully, we’re able to travel with our two sons. You also have two sons or teenagers. Mine are slightly younger with only one having made it to teen years so far. And all the travel that we’ve gotten to do with a very similar mindset. It’s to not have out there and other be so foreign, but to bring it in closer and get to have experiences.
And then often, if we’re watching TV shows or we’re watching movies, to be able to point out, “Oh, this is set in Paris,” or this is set in whatever country or whatever city that we’ve been to, even in the US as well. You can’t take away those memories. You’ve been there, you have that connection. Now you feel a little bit more invested in the place, I think.
Ryan Short (10:06): Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I think you realize… I know I was just talking about how big Alaska is. But I think you also start to realize how small the world is too. It’s like, “Yeah, we’re just over here. We’re just in a different spot where these people are pretty normal people.” Even when you go to… I mean, I haven’t done as much traveling overseas as a lot of people.
And so a lot of my travel has been in the States and Alaska and a little bit in the UK. But yeah. I think you just start to get that… The world shrinks a little bit the more you travel. And it doesn’t seem crazy that I was in Alaska, and then the next week, I was in New Hampshire for a work project. Some people are like, “Oh my God, that seems crazy.” And it’s like, yeah. Well, it’s one plane ride no matter what.
Adam Williams (10:54): It sets such a tone and it is a modeling of it for your boys to be like, this is normal in our lives to go experience what other people are doing and living, and find the common ground in that. It’s not all just differences. We get a chance to learn those. But I think, more importantly, just like with conversations like this, if you actually spend time with people, you get a chance to figure out what you have in common when you might not think you did.
Ryan Short (11:17): Yeah. For sure. So the work we do is with cities, it’s with places and destinations. And I think one thing that we even see when we go talk to cities, there’s a couple of themes that always come up, and that’s one, they definitely think that their problems and challenges are so unique to them. They’re like, “Well, we’ve got this parking problem downtown.” And you’re like, “Every city does.” If you don’t have a parking problem, you have other problems. Or they think they have a housing problem. It’s like, you do. In a lot of communities like ours here, it’s worse than in a lot of places. But every place is struggling with those things.
(11:51): And I think cities and people also do themselves a disservice when they’re like, you start to cite an example or maybe something I could learn from another place, and it’s like, “Well, we’re not that.” I think here in mountain towns, we’d like to… If you start talking to somebody about a solution to a community problem, you’re saying, “Well, in Breckenridge…” they’re like, “Well, we’re not Breckenridge. We don’t want to be Breckenridge.” And it’s like, we know. Point taken. But it doesn’t mean there’s not something you could learn about a way they approach something.
(12:19): And so I think, yeah, just people, cities, places. We should be able to learn from people from a lot of different places and not just say, “Well, they’re different. They’re not us.” I get that in the civic world and city planning world, like Americans, we don’t love the European examples. You’re talking to somebody about bike infrastructure and you show them pictures of Amsterdam. It’s like, “Well, we’re not Amsterdam.” But they don’t realize-
Adam Williams (12:19): And don’t want to be.
Ryan Short (12:48): Right. Yeah. And they don’t want to be. But they also probably don’t realize that Amsterdam in the seventies was full of cars and traffic and pollution. And they made conscious value-based choices. So I think seeing those things and being open to what can I learn from somebody that’s different, a place that’s different? And I think it’s fine even when you don’t like the place or you don’t like the person.
Adam Williams (13:08): We tend to be this way as individuals too, where we say, “No, no, no. My issues, only I am feeling this. Only I am going through this. You don’t understand.” And then again, when we make connection and we learn we’re actually part of a bigger web of commonality.
Ryan Short (13:23): Yeah.
Adam Williams (13:23): And it’s interesting. I was listening to a podcast this morning. It was Adam Grant’s podcast and he was talking with David Dunning. If people are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it’s the tendency to be overly confident about our ignorance, to be unaware, to be ignorant of how ignorant we are on things. And this exact example was brought up. When people try to tell you what you maybe need to work on, “No, no, no, that’s not me.”
But they can identify the exact same thing in somebody else and then separate themselves somehow. I want to go more directly into CivicBrand. You mentioned that you started this company with your wife, Banner, 15 years ago, and it’s about branding, it’s about placemaking. I’m curious about, in particular, the word placemaking. What does that mean?
Ryan Short (14:11): Yeah. I guess first, just started with place. And this is something that I didn’t even know when we started our company. I learned it as we went along just naturally. It’s just how important your physical surroundings, the place that you’re in, shapes who you are as a person, how happy you are, how healthy you are, your relationships. So much of that is dictated by the place that you’re in.
And I think when we look at… I think it’s very easy for a lot of our population, you can live in a nice house and it’s air-conditioned, and you can walk to your garage and get in your car, which is air-conditioned and sit in traffic for an hour and then get into your office, which is air-conditioned, and then go into your cubicle and work and then drive home.
(15:05): And so in that setting, it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of unhappy people. You’re isolated. You’re by yourself. You’re never actually outside. You’re in a house and then into a car, into another building and back into the car, into another building. And so I think just that idea, that place shapes you. And whether that’s your building that we’re in, your car, your town, your country, all of those things shape how happy, healthy you are. So placemaking, and some of the work that we do is how can we make these places better? How can we make them to where it helps people be happier, healthier, have more civic pride, have more connection with their neighbors?
(15:49): And I think that’s where some of the… We’re not architects. We’re not urban planners. Our work definitely crosses over into that and we work with a lot of those folks. But we’re a little bit more on the brand and identity side of that world and activating public spaces and doing those things.
But all with the same intent of just like an architect, just trying to think about how people walk through a building and experience. They are thinking about mental health and air quality and a lot of different nuanced things to design a building. We’re wanting to think about the same thing of a place and whether that’s a district, a town, a borough. So yeah, that’s kind of the, I guess, not short answer, the medium, long answer.
Adam Williams (16:30): I’ve long been fascinated by this. If somebody grows up outdoors, they grow up out in the mountains, in a rural town, an area where we live, you’re going to have a very different filter on the world than if you grow up in a congested suburb in a massive sprawling city area somewhere, or in the city where maybe you have mass transit, maybe you live in a neighborhood that’s rough in that city. Now you have a food desert. Now you have danger. All of these things shape so much about who we are, what we prioritize, how we experience the world, how we maybe view others who are coming from these other places that maybe we don’t understand. It’s fascinating.
(17:11): Is there something that you have learned about the people and the ways that they’ve been shaped or the lenses that they use in this kind of conversation with you?
Ryan Short (17:19): Yeah. I think literally just yesterday, my wife and I were driving back into town and we were just talking about… I can’t remember why it came up. We were talking about kind of like in the environment, kind of environmental politics and why some people are very pro-environment and that matters to them. That’s a big part of their life. And why other parties aren’t?
And we came down to this realization that it’s so much about just your proximity to it. It’s not that people in some part of the country are politically don’t care about the environment. In my example, I just gave, and that’s actually why I gave that car example, is, in that example, that person that goes from air-conditioned space to air-conditioned space, they’re so insulated from the outdoors that they’re probably less likely to be an environmentalist.
(18:09): And it’s not because of any character flaw of them or they just don’t care or they’re greedy or selfish. It’s just that they don’t experience it. They don’t feel it. They don’t feel when it’s hotter than normal. They don’t smell smoke when there’s a forest fire. They don’t notice that the river is higher or lower. They don’t notice all of those things. And those that live in a place where you do see those things. And I mean where we are, I feel like we’re sort of on the front lines. And when we stood on that glacier in Alaska, we literally, I felt like we’re on the absolute front line of climate change, because literally watching the glaciers melt. Right?
(18:43): And so it’s just about like, place can also insulate you from everything, and that shapes your politics, that shapes everything. And so I would say that person that sits in that car and makes that commute, I would say they don’t care less about the environment, they just haven’t had an opportunity to experience it.
Adam Williams (19:02): Yeah. When we talk about environmental matters, one of the things that comes up often is that if we get more people out to hike or to camp or to fish or experience something that is new and maybe they don’t have access to if they’re living deep into an urban environment, well then what we’re doing is creating an interest in preserving, in caring and protecting. But there’s also then the risk that balances that, which is, if we get too many people out there, then we also are putting it all at risk.
Ryan Short (19:35): 100%. Yeah. I think that’s something that I personally even wrestled with. But I guess where I landed on that is, we have to just acknowledge that, okay, we’re humans. By being, we’re kind of a problem. We’re sort of a cancer to the earth. But if we are going to be here and continue to be here, we need to just make the best of it. And so I think if you start with that attitude, then I think those opportunities are like, yeah, let’s bring more people into the outdoors, let’s bring more people into recreation so that they experience it, so that they fall in love with it, so that they then want to protect it.
(20:15): That’s, to me, the only path forward. Because the alternative is just, well, let’s just get rid of people then. And I don’t think we’re at that stage yet, hopefully. So to me, you mentioned that we like, my family, well, it’s fish. I think fishing is the same way. With most fly fishing, it’s like catch and release. And most people that are into fly fishing are pretty environmentally conscious, very delicate with how you handle the trout and keep them wet and release them.
(20:45): But I think, to fall in love with that, you have to take kids fishing and you got to let them probably squeeze a stoker, trout a little too hard and be a little rough with them and drop them, but it’s so that they can learn, and so that they can fall in love with fishing, so that they can then protect it, and then they can… Because if they don’t ever hold that fish and they don’t ever see beauty in it, then why were they going to care about protecting a river? Why are they going to care about anything related to that?
Adam Williams (21:15): Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk about more deeply, I guess, into what it is you do with CivicBrand. Maybe I’m mistaken. In my mind, what you’re talking about for boosting, let’s say, image… Well, actually, I’ll let you define how all this works in your work. But in my mind, it was probably tourism bureaus. It was maybe, depending on the size of city, the chamber of commerce, who was charged with that responsibility of wanting to promote the town. What is it that you are actually doing, and is it a pioneering sort of agency that you run? Is this common? And I just did not know that there were people like you out here doing this for all this time.
Ryan Short (21:57): Yeah. So I think the simplest way to say what we do, it’s like, we are a design and engagement consultant for cities and places. And there’s definitely more of us than there were even 10 years ago, but there’s not many. There’s a lot of branding firms that, they’re ad agencies and they do hotel campaigns and restaurants, and they’ll dip their toe into branding a destination, but that’s not what we are. We just work with places. And we really founded the company on… There’s a quote by a person named Jane Jacobs. She was an activist in New York City. In a urban planning world, she’s cited a lot. And the quote is, “Cities can provide something for everybody only because and only when they’re created by everybody.”
(22:46): And so we use that as our mission. And so because of that, we start everything with public engagement, and starting with the people that are there, the locals. And I am the biggest homer for locals and support local and local businesses to where even when we are hired to do a tourism campaign, that is, the client might even think this is all about how do we just get more visitors here? How do we just fill up hotels? Our process starts with, well, how does that benefit the locals? What is the local story? Because when you visit a place, you’re not just going to see their buildings and their attractions. You’re going to somebody’s home, you’re going to somebody’s place and you’re going to experience it.
(23:33): And I think best case scenario, you go home not just with a souvenir, but you go home with a value, and you take something that you carry with you. And so just like how, I guess, with my fishing example of, I’m going to let a kid come, squeeze a stoker fish a little too tightly, but he’s going to fall in love with fishing and want to protect fish the rest of his life. Let’s have a visitor come to our town. Yeah, they’re going to walk in the street and be a bumbling tourist a bit. But man, is there value that we as locals here have that they can take home with them and make their place better? And we’ve now influenced their whole…
(24:08): So we do engagement. It’s a huge part of what we do to understand what is this place’s values. And every place is different. The Mat-Su Valley in Alaska, we’re not just doing the cool helicopter rides in glacier, we’re talking to businesses, we’re talking to the tribal leaders up there of like, what is this place? Why does it matter to you? Why do you choose to be here? What are the values? And then how can we weave that into something that’s beneficial? How can tourism work for you and benefit you? How can we improve this place so that people see your values when they walk through the street and experience them? So it starts with engagement, but then comes out the other end as design, placemaking, messaging, marketing, sometimes.
Adam Williams (24:51): You travel the whole country doing this, so you get a chance to see a lot of different cities, and I think of varying sizes probably. Right?
Ryan Short (24:59): Yeah.
Adam Williams (25:00): Is there something in common? If we go back to those pain points and where people think it’s only us that is struggling with this, parking or whatever, is there something in common that you see or patterns of what it is the way people want their city to be? What is it they want to demonstrate as values, and welcome from tourists with values that they maybe want to have be part of it?
Ryan Short (25:22): Yeah. I think the challenging or unfortunate part is we want the best of both worlds with a lot of things. Most places want all the benefits of tourism and visitors and-
Adam Williams (25:35): The money.
Ryan Short (25:35): … the money and economics. But we don’t want the people. Right? So could we have both of those things? So I mean, we even see that here. When it’s a shoulder season and it’s really slow, it’s like, people get a little nervous and it’s like, “Man, I hope things pick up. It’s pretty slow.” And then as soon as it picks up, it’s like, “Ugh, tourists are here.”
And so I think a lot of places… This is a seasonal community. Tourism is seasonal here. But there’s a lot of places that, even if it’s not a tourist town, they’re maybe not on seasonal highs and lows, they’re on economic highs and lows. Maybe they were a factory town and they were booming. And then now, that factory has gone away and now they’re struggling. And so it’s like, they want that back. But then as soon as it’s back, they’re complaining about the traffic or something.
(26:24): And so I think that’s a very just common thread is, we all want to be the last one in to a place. We’re attracted to a place that’s vibrant and has things going on. But then as soon as we’re there, we want to close the door. It’s a very, I guess, American thing. Why, I guess, we’re trying to build a wall around our country is we love it. We want to be here. We like the opportunity. Most of us came from descendants of Europe and other places. But now that we’re here, we want to stop that. So I think that’s just… I wouldn’t even say it’s American. It’s probably just a very human trait.
Adam Williams (26:58): It probably is. It’s just America happens to be a country and a young enough one that the history of so many people… Well, the melting pot idea is people are coming from so many places, it’s very easy to, again, use the word other, to otherize everybody and say, “No, no, no. Your people, your kind, your ethnicity, your language, your whatever, we don’t want that here because I got in the door. I’m the last one.” So I want to find out how you got into this work. How you ended up founding this agency, this company with your wife, again, 15 years? You were doing some career work before this, I think, right?
Ryan Short (27:38): Yeah. So I graduated college probably about… I’m 44. So 20 plus, 22 years ago, probably. Worked in the music industry a little bit like small record label. Thought that that’s what I wanted to do. Had a job that, at the time, was the best job that I had. And then my wife and I were married. And so when we started the company, it was 2008, and she was pregnant with our first child.
The country was heading into a recession. Layoffs were already starting to happen. And like I said, at the time, I was employed and my wife’s about to have a baby. And so she’s at least not going to be working for a couple months. And for some reason, we thought it was a good idea for me to quit my job and we’ll start an agency that we had no experience doing.
(28:33): And we just used… When she was pregnant, we didn’t go out at night. We just sat at home and we wrote a business plan together just for fun, not even really taking it that seriously that we would do it. And so yeah, it’s one of those things that are like hindsight. It’s like, “What were we thinking? Why would we have started a business at that time? It seems like the worst time.”
But when we started it, it was more of just a branding and design company, like a lot of design agencies. It wasn’t CivicBrand day one. We started the company. We started the agency. What we were really good at is user experience. But when people hear user experience, they’re typically talking about how someone uses an app or a website, that level of design.
(29:19): It was just the two of us. For the first several months, it was just me because she was home with a baby. And then she started working and it was just us and we hired our first employee, hired our second employees, just growing. We were getting good at user experience and working with businesses. We had some architect clients that we did their branding, their user experience. And they were like, “Man, we really like the way you think about things.
The way you approach user experience, I think, would really benefit these projects we’re working on.” And that was our first segue into place, because these architect firms, they were doing downtown master plans, comprehensive plans. And they saw in us the way we thought about how a user uses a website. We were starting to think about how a user experiences a city, walks through a building, and how we engage those people to understand where are their pain points and how can we make it better.
(30:12): So we slowly just started helping them with those projects. And so user experience became engagement. I was just talking about public engagement. That’s really all user experience is, is engaging the user, asking them where their pain points are, what matter to them, what are they trying to do, and then designing a solution. And so we still just do that.
We just do it for cities and places. Instead of helping a company sell more on their website, we help places be better. And so through those years, it was a mix where half the work was that traditional branding stuff, half was place-based, and then it was an evolution to where we’re now. Now it’s all CivicBrand 100%. Everything is cities, everything is place.
Adam Williams (30:51): Was it an extraordinary leap for the two of you to have the courage to start this new thing? You said you weren’t taking it seriously. But I wonder if that was a matter of fear about the leap or it was something else about going into this new path that, as it turns out, you’ve been very successful with and it’s grown, and here you are, 15 years and counting.
Ryan Short (31:17): Yeah. Yeah. I think some of it is like, we were just young and naive. And so we were probably too confident in ourselves. And I think there was a moment where I was like, “Well, if it doesn’t work, I could always just go get a job somewhere.” I could always fall back on. I could always do something else. Even though it was 2008 recession and people were getting laid off, I feel like maybe I was overly confident about that.
But I feel like that is a trait or thing that we look back constantly and we view… I think there’s so many moments in people’s lives where it’s like, not only did they make a singular decision that really changes the trajectory of their life, but they made it in a really specific window of time that… I don’t think we could have done it any earlier.
(32:05): And I think if we had waited any later, I don’t think we could have done it. We made a decision at a really specific moment. I think some people are paralyzed with the fear of making a decision, so they wait. Even decision to have a kid. Most people are like, “Well, I want to have my finances in order. I want to know that I’ll be a good parent.”
And so I think, sometimes, they wait. And it’s like, well, no one knows how to do any of that until you do it. So yeah, we just made the decision to try it. And I think even when we tried it, it was, maybe if this doesn’t work in a few months, we’ll change it. And now here we are 15 years later and it’s still going good.
Adam Williams (32:41): Did either of your parents say, what are you doing?
Ryan Short (32:44): My mom, for sure, did. My mom is a retired now school teacher. So it was like, not in the business world. Everything was about… My mom doesn’t like change. If I move her couch, she doesn’t like that her couch got moved. She likes things the same way. So yeah. She’s like, same job entire career, same district entire career, couldn’t imagine doing anything different. Whereas I and my wife, we like change. While we’ve done what we’ve done for 15 years, the company’s changed. It’s evolved over time. We’ve evolved over time. We’ve changed a lot. The work I’m doing now, it’s the same company, but it is different than when we started.
(33:26): And so I think we like that change and embrace it. And that led to, well, we’re not worried about doing something totally different. But her parents, they were entrepreneurs, so I think they saw the value of that. Her parents also worked together, and that was really rewarding for them. And so I think they saw the opportunity for us to do a similar thing in our own thing.
Adam Williams (33:51): In your twenties is a great time to be willing to test that water, right? Because the older we get, I think, the more entrenched we are in the conventions we’ve established for ourselves, yeah, it probably gets scarier to say, “Well, let me take this big leap just of my own volition.” You have to lose a job or have economics or something force you to make a change at that point in your life just out of mere survival.
Ryan Short (34:15): Yeah. Yeah. I think the fact that we had our first child on the way, in hindsight, sounds like a scary time to do it. But to that point, it was the best time because if I had said, “Well, let’s have the baby. Let’s wait four or five years.” Well now, they’re about to go to school. And where we live, we’re going to want to make sure we’re in a neighborhood that has a certain school. And so I might be in a job to where like, “Well, I can’t risk changing this job, because then I can’t afford to live in this neighborhood.” And so you just get locked in.
(34:45): And I think that’s where, tying this all back to the place aspect, I think people get locked in to their place, and they don’t realize how much power they have to change their place or to just change things. A funny example that my wife and I talk about when our oldest son, Andrew, when he was… When a kid transitions from a crib to a big kid bed that they can just get out of, he didn’t realize that he could get out. He was used to being in his crib.
And then we got him the big kid bed, and he would wake up and just stay in the bed. And then he didn’t realize like… After a few weeks, he did very quickly. But at first, the first couple of weeks or nights, he would just stay in there, and it was like, “Wait, I can get up? I can go grab that toy that’s across the room?” It just didn’t click.
(35:36): And I think, getting back to that, people do get paralyzed or they get stuck in their situation. And I think that’s how people get stuck in a job they don’t like in a town they don’t really care about, and they just stay there forever because they think they can’t get out of it. But it’s like, “No, wait, that’s just a fabricated thing.”
Adam Williams (35:55): It’s the expectations of everybody around us too, right? And what we think society thinks we’re supposed to do. We’re all keeping ourselves, in a sense, imprisoned in whatever we think that lane, those conventional grooves are.
Ryan Short (36:07): Yeah.
Adam Williams (36:08): It’s funny you mentioned the baby toddler shift. With our older boy, who’s almost 14, that’s when we knew we needed to get him a toddler bed was one night after putting him to bed in a crib, he showed up in the living room and we both just looked at each other with jaws dropped because we didn’t know how could he have done that until we went and cracked open the door after we put him back in bed and watched and he’d climb out at the corner over and over and over and over.
Ryan Short (36:33): Yeah.
Adam Williams (36:34): Yeah. It’s funny to, I guess, the different ways that we all experience that confidence building thing of, what am I capable of? What can I do and survive and move forward with? Another example, I guess, for me as I’m listening to you and I’m thinking about not only my life, but I suppose especially with my wife and with our family, what are some of those pivotal moments where we’ve made decisions that would’ve been scary, that our parents certainly would’ve coached us against doing? I walked away from a job, the best paying job I’d ever had, when my wife had just given birth to our second son.
(37:13): He’s six weeks old. She’s on maternity leave, earning 60% of her pay. I did not have another job. But it was emotionally enough years of what was going on in that job, I needed to leave. And for the health of me and the family needed me to leave. It was such a confidence builder to know that we can do hard things and we can go against the grain, and not only survive, but thrive even more because of it.
Ryan Short (37:40): Yeah. I guess, you asked about those moments, those different moments in your life. And my wife and I, just the other night, we celebrated our 20th anniversary. So we’ve been married 20 years. And so we did a little one night getaway and we’re driving back reminiscing on life and stuff. And we actually were doing just that. We were going through like, what are those key decisions? And there’s literally six moments that we made a decision. And like I said before, it’s not just that we made that decision, it’s that we made it in that moment. And I think if we had done it earlier or later, it wouldn’t have worked.
(38:14): And it probably started with the moment I asked her out the first time. If I’d waited, might’ve been too long. And then the moment to start a business together. The moment to move to Salida. The moment to all these different key things that I think if we had tried to do it any other time, things would be really, really different. And I don’t know, maybe that’s scary, maybe that’s luck, I don’t know. But I guess, for me at least, it’s like, I think people don’t probably realize how much control or power that they actually have.
Adam Williams (38:56): I’ve come to believe those things are possible because each time we’ve done it, it’s worked okay. We’ve landed on our feet. And it proves further that we can do these hard things, make these difficult decisions.
Ryan Short (39:08): Yeah. And I think it’s too… I remember a couple moments in time where it’s the same thing, where it’s like, I made the decision to do the thing that I wanted to do, and I was just confident enough that, “Well, I’ll figure out how to make it work later. I know this is something I want to do in my life. So I’m just going to do it and I’ll figure out how to make it work” as opposed to, “Let me figure out how to make it work and then I’ll do it.” I think it’s like building the airplane while you’re flying it kind of thing. It’s just like a leap of faith, I guess. You do it and then you figure it out later how to make it work.
Adam Williams (39:41): For most decisions in life, I don’t know if there’s any other way to do it. You mentioned parenting and, “Oh, I don’t know if I’ll be a good parent.” You’re not going to know. And we might not know until the kids are in their twenties and we start hearing, getting our grade reports back from them on things that did not come up in conversation when they were younger.
Ryan Short (39:58): Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a lot of ways in which I think we’ve naturally been good parents, and I think there’s a lot of ways in which we naturally haven’t been. And we learn from those and have to sometimes apologize to the oldest. Just say, “Sorry. We were new when we started with you. Maybe we’ll do better with your brother,” kind of thing. But yeah, you just figure it out. I didn’t know how to run a company when I started a company, but you don’t know how to do anything until you do it.
Adam Williams (40:23): I think one of the key things for us as parents, one of the things I’m really leaning on, is that we do apologize. We do set our egos aside and listen to them and have conversations in which we give the kids space to share their voice. And you can share that however it comes out. Your anger’s allowed. You can even cuss at me if that’s going to help.
Because I want them to know that they can trust that I will hear, and then apologize as needed, make amends as needed, change behaviors as needed. And I don’t recall that being part of my childhood. So I sure lean on that, hoping, okay, I’m sure I’m making mistakes all the time. But I do hope that when it comes time that, let’s say when they’re 25, 30, 35 and they come to me saying, “This thing has really stuck in my mind,” they can know that I will listen and apologize and make amends as needed.
Ryan Short (41:13): Yeah. For sure. I think that’s a lesson that my wife and I, we’re actively learning that one. We haven’t fully learned that, but I feel like, just even in the last year and a half, honestly, we’ve apologized to our kids like, “Hey, we came on a little hard when you did X, and maybe we shouldn’t have reacted that way. Here’s why. And we understand how you felt.” Yeah. I mean, I think that’s huge in not just parenting, but just any relationships, like your friends, coworkers, is allowing to, yeah, you can be wrong and apologize.
Adam Williams (41:53): I think that your grandfather, you’ve mentioned, was an influence for you in being willing to take leaps and start your business and things like that. I like the fact that there’s that family connection and that inspiration in someone’s life. And I don’t want to go by this. I had meant to ask about him a little bit ago. I don’t want to go by without giving him that respect of whatever you have to share.
Ryan Short (42:20): Yeah. I mean, I mentioned my mom before. She was a schoolteacher. My mom was a single mom. So she raised me. But I was definitely not ever missing out on a dad or a father figure because I had a lot of really important people in my life. And my grandfather was one of them. I had some uncles that were really instrumental in that. So I don’t ever share that as a sob story of like, “Oh, raised by a single mom.” It was like, I had a great childhood. It was great. But yeah, my grandfather was awesome. I mean, he was a really amazing person. And he was also awesome because my grandmother was awesome, which is a thing. I think that is a pretty common thread in a lot of things.
(43:03): It’s like, I’m sitting here talking to you about our company, but it’s like, our company is what it is because of my wife too. And probably, just as much if not more, but he was like a father figure. I looked up to him. Super important part of my life. He worked really hard, was really big about planning for the future and all that stuff. And when he retired, he got Alzheimer’s and passed away, really early, really quick.
And that was a big… I guess that’s something I learned directly from him. It was like indirectly. I was like, man, he worked his whole career. And he was an amazing father, amazing grandfather. But there’s a ton of things I think that he wanted to do, that they wanted to do in retirement and travel that they just never got to do. It was just cut short.
(43:50): And so that was probably, not the biggest thing I learned from him, because I learned a ton of things from him, but that was a thing that I learned from him or just his experience was like, “Man, I don’t want to put anything off that I want to do because I don’t know if I’ll ever have a chance to do it.” And so I guess, back to that, just making decisions really confidently at certain moments. “Let’s start a business. Let’s do this. Let’s go here. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’ll figure it out because I want to do it.” That, I think, influenced or gave me the confidence to do it was like, well, because you might not have a chance to do it.
(44:24): So it’s like, if I said traveling is important to me so I’m going to work real hard and travel when I’m retired. Well, what if I die next year and I don’t get to travel? Well, if travel’s important to me, can I bake that into my job? Can I make that an important part? So that’s the part that, I think, is the common thread and goes back to those like, decide what you want to do and then just figure it out how to make it work. Because if you just put it off, who knows? Nobody knows.
Adam Williams (44:52): It’s interesting how much collectively we fear death yet live as if we are given tomorrow. Rather than saying, “This thing, I’m afraid of it because it’s going to be the end of everything. Let me live fully.” We don’t do that. We live with these, I would say, hollow or false notions that life is stable, that your job is forever, that your income is forever, that your health is forever. How old was he when he died?
Ryan Short (45:22): Oh, man. My wife will correct me because she’s good at numbers and dates than I. He was…
Adam Williams (45:29): Well, are we just saying in seventies, sixties?
Ryan Short (45:34): I forget that I’m 44. And so I think of everybody as the age they were when I was a kid. So I am so bad at age. But he was a very… My mom had me when she was 19. And her parents were pretty young when they had her. So I mean, he was a young grandfather. He wasn’t like…
Adam Williams (45:51): How old were you when he died?
Ryan Short (45:54): I was 30, maybe.
Adam Williams (45:57): Okay.
Ryan Short (45:58): Yeah.
Adam Williams (45:58): So you got a good amount of time with him at least.
Ryan Short (46:00): Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I was the oldest grandkid. And my mom had me really young. And so I had a lot of time with him for sure. There’s some other cousins never really knew him, or they only knew him when he had Alzheimer’s, that kind of thing. So I really did get to know. He was young, but our family was young, and my mom was young. So I remember going to his 50th birthday party, which sounds crazy. Because I’m going to be 50-
Adam Williams (46:31): Yeah, yeah. Soon enough.
Ryan Short (46:33): … in five years. And that sounds weird to have grandkids at a 50th birthday party to me. But yeah, he was young. But I mean, he retired. So he was old enough to retire.
Adam Williams (46:43): Maybe at a time when retiring was younger than what it feels like it can be now.
Ryan Short (46:46): Yeah. I mean, I feel like I don’t know that we’ll ever retire. Will we ever be able to retire? Just have to keep doing this. But…
Adam Williams (46:52): I think we feel like we are looking at life and structuring life in a way that if you can pursue things that are of real interest, real passion even, then maybe it’s not about wanting to get away from that. It’s not putting in 40, 45, 50 years of something that I hate, 40, 50, 60 hours a week, so that one day when I’m in my sixties, I can start living life. We’re like, “Well, how do we shape life in a way that we want it to be now?”
Ryan Short (47:19): 100%.
Adam Williams (47:20): And so that if I want to still podcast when I’m 90, I get to do it.
Ryan Short (47:24): Yeah.
Adam Williams (47:25): I want to do it, I’ll do it.
Ryan Short (47:26): Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And I think that’s the thing that I see… I mean, we’re so fortunate to live here in Chaffee County and Salida that, I mean, I’ll see a friend come up and visit me and they go fly fishing, and that’s like their one trip of the year and their one day to fish on that trip. And so it’s like, man, well, I really hope they catch something.
But it’s like, for me, it’s like, “Well, yeah, if we didn’t, I’ll just fish tomorrow or next week or try it again, or yeah, the river was high.” The more you can intertwine the things that you value and care about now day to day, I think the better.
(48:04): And I remember when we first had kids… I think when you first have kids, you get shaken up a little bit because you get a little freaked out. You have all this extra responsibility. I remember, for the first few years of that, almost being a little paralyzed of worrying about like what if I die, what will they do, to where now, I try to definitely live to where like, yeah, I don’t want to die tomorrow, but if I died tomorrow, we had good times and we did stuff. I don’t know. Yeah. I definitely agree with what you’re saying though.
Adam Williams (48:34): You will have spent all of the years to that point, having instilled in them and modeling for them the courage to start your own company, to be self reliant in that sense, to be creative, to be open to experiences and travel and all these sorts of values that… I think you and I have so much in common. We’re of comparable age. Our kids are as well. We believe in the values of travel and the education that comes with it. All of these factors that I think we’re in tune with.
Ryan Short (49:05): Yeah. And I think the only asterisk I put on it, or just point of clarification is, I feel super lucky to have a job that I love and that I get to do, that I get to travel with, and that I get to turn into a half work, half fishing trip. That’s pretty awesome.
But I think that seeing my kids go through school, and people start talking about career day and college days and things like that at school, I think it’s a really good thing that we tell kids do what you love, find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life kind of saying. But I also get a little nervous about not wanting to put this pressure that you have to get your fulfillment out of your job. Because I think that’s a whole extra thing that leads to a lot of people being unhappy is they aren’t happy with their job.
(49:57): And I think if you can be happy from your job, that’s great, but I don’t think you should get your fulfillment in life from your job. You might have a job that it simply affords you to do the things that you want to do. I definitely don’t like the idea of like suffer through a job you hate till you retire and then do the fun things.
But if you have a job now, it’s not the most glamorous job that you’re going to want to come on a podcast and talk about, and it’s just a job, and it is what it is. I get nervous that, I don’t want people to feel like, oh, that’s not a good enough job, or they need to quit that job and find some passion project job. I think some jobs can be just a job. And if it takes care of your family and affords you to do the things that you love now, that’s the same thing to me, that you’ve nailed it at the same time.
Adam Williams (50:43): It’s a well-rounded look, and it creates another viable option for our kids to believe in. Because they might grow up to think, “Well, I’m doing it wrong if I’m unhappy with my work. I’m supposed to be happy with my work.” Contrary, I think, to maybe what is a more traditional view too, is, you’re not supposed to be happy with your work. Suck it up. Don’t bother to find something you’re happy with because that’s life. Life is difficult for 40 or 50 years until you get to be happy. So I think it’s that middle ground where we create that sense of, it all works and you can create how you want this to be, but it’s also okay if you just need to do the practical job while pursuing interests outside of it. And over time, by the way, things can evolve-
Ryan Short (51:27): Sure.
Adam Williams (51:27): … and you can shape them.
Ryan Short (51:29): Yeah. Yeah. I like my job, but I also would retire tomorrow if I could. And I would do other things. My work is fulfilling, but I don’t get my fulfillment in life from my job. That’s the travel and my kids and my wife and fishing and just doing other things that if I can weave those things into my job, that’s better, but that’s not coming from my job. But I also recognize, by working hard, my job affords us to do the things we do. And yeah. Because I think some people also… Social media is pretty glamorous, right? You mentioned you saw the Alaska pictures. It is awesome. It is fun. We’re super lucky.
(52:14): I also acknowledge I probably post more on social media than the average 44-year-old guy. But I think that’s just because I feel like I’m surrounded by beautiful things and I want to share them, whether that’s fishing or my kids or work. But it’s also tough. There’s parts of that Alaska trip that are a slog, and we’re like, 24 hours of daylight up there, and we’re running meetings and tired. But the Instagram pictures look pretty fun. Right?
Adam Williams (52:39): Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan Short (52:40): So I think there’s also that asterisked imbalance, that it’s still tough. Everything’s tough. Every job is tough.
Adam Williams (52:46): That’s a good point. And I’m glad that, at least over time, I’ve cultivated this willingness to be happy for somebody when I see that they’re in a cool place and doing a cool thing. And in part, because I know that I have also had those opportunities and I will have more of them. But for some others, as we know, social media can be that trap where everybody else has the good life and I don’t. What’s going wrong here? Because it is such an edited version of what we share.
Ryan Short (53:10): Yeah. I mean, I do worry about that. I mean, everybody has their own relationship with social media. And yeah, there’s some people that it’s not healthy for. But like I said, I think I’ve just… In my mind, yeah, I feel like I’m surrounded by beautiful things. I want to take pictures of them. I want to share them. And sometimes, it’s just for me, to look back on, get the memory of. And I get that that doesn’t work for some people. I do worry sometimes, does it make other people feel like, “Oh man, they’re there. They’re there.” I get that. But…
Adam Williams (53:45): We can’t manage everybody else’s emotions either, though. We all need to be able to deal with looking at somebody’s something in their life and not get hung up on the grass is greener, they’ve got it luckier bit. We never know what level of work went into creating that opportunity for that career or whatever it is.
(54:05): I want to thank you for being here. And I also want to, I think, give kudos to you and Banner for the work that you do. I think it’s really cool and fascinating from a strategic and creative place and that you get to wrap, travel into it, and sometimes, bring your kids with you on those trips. And yeah, again, Alaska serves as a point in this story of so many things that are of interest to you, and I really appreciate what I get to see there. So thanks for coming on and talking about it.
Ryan Short (54:30): Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. And thanks for doing what you do with this podcast. Because, I mean, that’s how we first connected, right? It was like, the work that we do is about telling the story of places. And that’s exactly what you’re doing, is telling the story of places through individual people’s stories.
And I think, yeah, everybody is part of the story of a place whether you’re born here, you’ve been here a day, whatever. If you’re here, you’re part of the story. So I appreciate the work that you guys are doing. So thanks for having me on.
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Adam Williams (55:13): Thanks for listening to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream podcast. I hope that our conversation here today sparked curiosity for you. And if so, you can learn more in this episodes’ show notes at wearechaffeepod.com.
If you have comments or know someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I should consider talking with on the podcast, you can email me directly at adam@wearechaffeepod.com. I also invite you to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever platform you use that has that functionality.
(55:43): I also welcome your telling others about the Looking Upstream podcast. Help us to keep growing community and connection through conversation. Once again, I’m Adam Williams, host, producer and photographer. Jon Pray is engineer and producer. Thank you to KHEN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado, and to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment, and to Lisa Martin, community advocacy coordinator for the We Are Chaffee storytelling initiative.
(56:09): The Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with the Chaffee County Department of Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Office of Health Equity.
You can learn more about the Looking Upstream podcast at wearechaffeepod.com and on Instagram @wearechaffeepod. You also can learn more about the overall We Are Chaffee storytelling initiative at wearechaffee.org. Till the next episode, as we say at We Are Chaffee, share stories, make change.
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