Erin: I think it's the 21st, but in that area. Yeah.

Chris Herman: So, you crossed over the 12-year line with me. And now we're in year 13. And Darinda, you're approaching the seven-year marker because you started in 2019.

Darinda: Yes. Tax day.

Chris Herman: Was it tax day?

Darinda: It was tax day.

Chris Herman: Oh, very special. Perfect and appropriate. And the reason that I wanted you both to be the first guests of the new season is as a gigantic thank you and appreciation to both of you for what you've both contributed to our shared effort here. Over the course of 12 plus and 7 plus years, both of you have seen a significant amount of up and down in our business and a significant amount of emotional highs and lows. And through all of that, you've always been there. You've always been here with me, us together. And I've always during that time considered the two of you the backbone of the agency and you are and you will continue to be and I love you both and I thank you both for everything that you've done.

Darinda: You're welcome.

Erin: Thank you.

Chris Herman: That's how I want to start. Erin has seen a little bit more. Erin came on in the first decade of the Herman experience when we were Herman Advertising in our first office in the PB building. That's where we were when you started, Suite 340, right? And you've watched us, you've been able to see us go from—even at that time we were still doing a lot of newspaper.

Erin: Oh my god, so much newspaper. Kind of miss them.

Chris Herman: Right. And then attempting to get into digital. We had a serious cast of characters over the time as we got into digital and began to embrace and understand and to some degree do quite well with digital. I don't think we were ever like amazing at it. I think we all know that. But we definitely gave it a real good run for a long period of time. And you've been able to see us from 340 to the expansion into the other offices to the hurricane. We had a hurricane 9 or 10 years ago. And we had to depart our building and work remotely. We drove all the way to New Orleans to keep operations going.

Erin: Yeah. The Great Herman Caravan.

Chris Herman: Yeah, we did a gigantic caravan. God bless my wife, she was pregnant at the time. It was a tough ride. But we got back and we kept the business alive through that period of time. And then we designed the new space. That's when Darinda, you ultimately joined when we were fully operational in the big beautiful new space. And then COVID and the chip crisis happened and we had to wind it back. Fast forward to now, here we are and we're back on the ramp up right now, which is really nice. Darinda, you came on and you started off with co-op and media billing and assistance and what have you and you've learned. Erin obviously came on as a graphic designer and has ultimately become our director and brand director over the period of 12 plus years.

Erin: Mhm.

Chris Herman: And Darinda has risen from an entry-level position in the agency, came in with your crafty ability, right? And slowly worked your way all the way through to the process where now—I do get a chuckle. I've not said this to you. I get a chuckle every time I see your signature which I think you have titled yourself Chief Executive Marketing Director of the Universe. Something like that. That's hysterical.

Erin: The Supreme Leader.

Chris Herman: Yes, Supreme Leader.

Darinda: So, honestly, it was a bet because I went out with my friends for our birthdays. We were talking about the bar that we go to, the bartender was like, "You know, I see you girls come in every so often and you could tell like you're not the regular folks that come in here. Like you ladies are professional. You can tell that each and one of you have upper level jobs." So my friend was explaining like what we do. We have a friend that's a doctor, the other two are nurses, one's a paralegal, I'm in advertising. But then I was like, I can't just go around saying client manager. So I'm like, I got to think of something. And they're like, "Oh, chief executive marketer." And I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to do that." So they were like, "Oh, you know what? You should change your email and see if anybody noticed. See if your boss noticed." And I'm like, "I'm going to do that," and I changed it and you never said anything. So I'm like he probably never even reads anything.

Chris Herman: Well, I can't say how long I've noticed. But I've known about it for a pretty significant time and I get a good laugh about it every time and I think should I say something? I'm like, no, not yet. I'm just going to let it roll. So now I'm just letting you know that yes I do know that you are the Chief Executive Marketing Director of the Universe. So, if anybody's watching, hopefully somebody will be watching our first episode here, most of our clients know that Darinda, you are the primary interfacing Chief Marketing Director for the agency.

Erin: And the universe.

Chris Herman: Of the universe. And Erin is—you guys are like this, just a tight team. So, anybody that works with us knows that everything goes into Darinda and Erin, and Erin gets it done in 18 seconds. Now, Erin's got a run for her money because Matias is on board now, and he's an 18-second guy as well. I'm not sure if his wife likes that, but he's got really cool glasses.

Darinda: He does. He's got the coolest glasses, right?

Chris Herman: But to the point is that you guys are the team that gets everything in, turned around quickly, and back out to the clients. And I know they appreciate it. There's no client that I ever meet that doesn't say anything but Darinda's the best director of international marketing ever in the whole universe. And everybody that works with Erin is like, "Man, she's fast." So you make us all look good and you uphold the Herman Way. Doing our very best to deliver on what we say we're going to do on time, quickly, professional and right. Nine point nine nine times out of ten. That's what we're about. And the two of you do an amazing job in making that happen year after year after year. Good times, bad times. So again, thank you so much. Greatly appreciated.

Erin: You're welcome.

Darinda: You're welcome.

Chris Herman: That was Erin's quiet voice. And when we get together, we have a good time. And it's nice that we now have this place to get together. We're working remotely. Yes, we now have the office operating here out of 1145 Oyster Wood. And we have all of our gear. But as a company, we're working remotely and have been since COVID.

Darinda: Yes. And it's honestly more productive when we're in our home offices than we are in a communal office because when we were in the communal office like Erin and I would be like, "Oh yeah, and this happened," and it's like, "Oh, it's lunchtime, let's go to lunch," and then, "Oh, it's time to go home. Bye."

Erin: I love rolling out of bed, walking 10 feet and there's my desk.

Chris Herman: Same. I think that it has been, not just for us but for many businesses throughout the world, COVID gave us all the ability to work differently and to work more efficiently and effectively. And it's been nothing but positive for us. We get together here from time to time, just sit down, regroup. It's more about connecting as humans than it is big meetings. I love that everybody has the same flexibility that I do in terms of working. To be able to set your own timelines. If you have something that comes up in the day that needs to be taken care of, you just take care of it. There's no more of that sitting in the car driving to work.

Darinda: Oh god, I miss that.

Chris Herman: No, it's just made life a lot better in a lot of ways.

Erin: Yeah, it has. It really has. And as long as we have Wi-Fi and power, we can be anywhere.

Chris Herman: Yes. And our clients know that and they don't care. I used to worry like, "Oh, what will they think? We don't have a big office to have meetings at anymore." I mean, we have an office, but we don't do that that often. The whole world is operating online and we're able to too. I don't see the need for moving people back into the workplace. For us, no need.

Erin: Yeah. I mean, all our clients are across the country. Why do we need to be all in the same space, right?

Darinda: If you're in Canada, we're here. Someone else is in Guatemala because we do have that situation. As long as the work's getting done, doesn't matter where you are.

Chris Herman: Right. Yes, we have the majority of our team here in Florida across South Florida. Our Media Director is in Guatemala, right? Our CFO is in Oklahoma. There are times during the year that I go to Russia and I'm still able to operate and work almost at full capacity with a time change. So, that's just the beautiful thing about what we do.

Darinda: I still volunteer for the office in the Maldives.

Chris Herman: We're working on it. Whenever you want to open that.

Erin: I'm here for Florence.

Chris Herman: Florence. Okay. So, Italy, Maldives.

Erin: I just want to be up in my snowy mountain lair skiing every day.

Chris Herman: Enjoy that. I think I was surprised to even know that you liked skiing that much. I didn't know that until recently. You grew up skiing?

Erin: My parents started me skiing at three and a half or four. Yes, and I just took an immediate liking to it. I loved it.

Chris Herman: Do you have pictures?

Erin: I don't know if I have any from that age. I have more from my teenage years. Because, it's funny, I was thinking about this the other day. In my elementary school in New Jersey, we had an after-school ski program. On a Wednesday afternoon, a big bus would show up and we drove to Vernon Valley Great Gorge. Then we would night ski from 5:00 until 8:30 then you get back on the bus and your parents pick you up. Just the very fact that—you raise kids and you're trying to determine when's the right time to let them go. I think we were in fourth and fifth grade going up in the dark skiing like lunatics.

Darinda: Yeah. I don't think you do that now.

Chris Herman: It was a different time, though, right? No helmets.

Erin: No helmets. No. It was the 80s. You wore jeans, a ski jacket, a hat, maybe some goggles and that's kind of how you did it. Fall on your face, never see you again.

Chris Herman: But I did. I took a real liking to it and then I got into ski racing and that sort of dictated almost everything in life. The only schools that I applied to in college were, "Can I get on the ski team?" So I ended up in Colorado. And then fast forward to this past Christmas break and seeing Vienna who used to snowboard and now she's skiing and embracing it and loving it. And then watching the two kids get up and get out and very naturally be out skiing. I had a couple teary moments. It was very emotionally overwhelming to watch and to notice little characteristics in them.

Darinda: Like a duck to water.

Chris Herman: Yeah. Genetics. I think so. They speak two languages. That's because of Vienna, right? Of course. So circling back to the way we're able to work and being able to have these experiences and do that stuff has really changed everything for the better. We've been able to grow. We've been adding new team members.

Darinda: So, I was planning my trip in 2023 and we needed someone freelance. So, Jessica came on as freelance and then she joined full-time last June. But Matias became on full-time in July?

Erin: Yeah. Just this past summer.

Chris Herman: It's interesting how the business model changed based on COVID and the setbacks we faced. We shrunk down to super tiny and then as it was like, "Okay, how do we start growing?" we went about it completely different. We used to run an ad and hire somebody. Now we've been able to through our relationships find good people, offer them a freelance opportunity until we grow enough to bring them in full-time.

Darinda: I think it's nice to see how people work and if it doesn't work out, it's okay, they were only a freelancer. That's better than hiring someone full-time and then they just suck or something.

Chris Herman: Yeah. We've been able to bring people in slowly and organically. It's been wonderful. We've been able to bring Jessica back in, Matias, Jeff. We've got Richard on deck and we're able to continue doing that. It's just such a better fit.

Darinda: And it's great to have quality folks to work with, not only just professionally but personally. You can tell they're really passionate about what they do. Working with Matias has been really great. Working with Jeff has been really great. It's definitely taken a load of stress off of my plate.

Chris Herman: Well, it's been helpful. This is our 20th year, and we're rebuilding and growing and getting to see the fruits of our labor and also the character and strength that we were able to develop through challenging times. We've moved past that and we've been able to attract the right type of people and repurpose ourselves into the agency that we want to be.

Darinda: And definitely help us focus on our strengths because like you mentioned, digital was not necessarily our strongest. We can do it, but it's not the strongest thing we do. Our branding is phenomenal.

Erin: We're creative people at our core.

Chris Herman: Yeah. Our creative work is amazing and to have our clients know the look is always going to be solid. I definitely take pride in knowing that when we put our foot out there, it's our best foot forward and our clients have that confidence in us.

Erin: Especially with everything so digital, having that creative touch is much more important than it used to be.

Darinda: Oh, yes. We're not cookie cutter.

Chris Herman: Especially in an age of AI. But having a creative overall—everybody here is creative that we have now. I think it's important to share with our viewers that is the defining characteristic of all of us at this point in time. We're all creative people first. We all had the desire to create and we're seeking a business outlet where we're able to do that. That's what drew me into advertising when I first started. It was all about how can I take what creative abilities I have and put them into work in a business setting. And that was fundamentally what the agency was about for the first 5 to 10 years because that's when digital marketing really started to come in. Of course, I felt that we needed to wrap our arms around that. We worked really hard at it. I think overall through the years we did a solidly good job as a digital agency. We were never great for two primary reasons. Number one, it was never in our DNA. We didn't love it the same way that the next generation of shops that were solely digital marketing agencies did. Thank God we found good partners over the years to be able to slowly offboard all of that work and still be able to deliver it to our clients with good results, but it was just never 100% our thing. And there's nothing worse than feeling like you have to apologize to a client like, "Oh god, we [ __ ] that up." [cite: 621, 625, 626, 627, 628, 630, 631, 632, 633, 634, 635, 636, 637, 638, 640, 641, 645, 646, 647, 648, 649, 650, 651, 652, 653, 654, 655, 656, 658, 659, 662, 665, 666, 667, 668, 670, 672, 673, 674, 675, 676, 677, 678, 680, 681, 682, 683, 684, 686, 687, 690, 691, 692, 693, 694]

Darinda: Because with digital, it's like a never-ending landscape of potential potholes, right? And it's always changing.

Erin: It's not fun for me at least. It's just a bunch of sizes and coding.

Chris Herman: Well, we have collectively communicated as an agency: "Okay, what do we want to position ourselves to be?" So what is that right now? We're a branding and marketing agency. When we talk about branding, we help businesses identify and create and communicate their brand story. What do they stand for? The vast majority of our clients are retail automotive dealers. We're able to help dealers be themselves and who they are. Our graphic design capabilities, our video production, all of our creative output, that's the main day-to-day work that we do. We have partner digital companies, and we will work with whoever the digital agency is at any dealership. We're known for being very flexible with that. We're very involved in helping to drive the marketing strategy, we're just no longer the hands-on. Which is such a better fit for all of us. As we've grown and added new people, our people are all geared towards helping us do what we do best, which is the branding, the creative, the month in month out work, which very few people still do and very few people, if any, can do.

Darinda: Yes.

Chris Herman: We've been through waves. AI is a wave and we will embrace that to the best of our ability because we still offer a service that our dealer clients need, want, and appreciate. And they get it with a lot extra. A client of the Herman Agency knows they're going to have all of their creative planned well in advance. It's going to be executed correctly on time. It's going to be legal, compliant, and co-opable. And it comes with all of the additional years of experience that we have in doing it all. If a client just hired us for graphic design, they know that they can talk to us about any aspect of retail automotive and we're right there.

Erin: It's different.

Chris Herman: No, we're not green. Not at all. And it's exciting because now we've been able to earn some business outside of retail automotive. We've got all of our new websites live: HermanAgency.com. 12 Grove Productions, which is our production division for video, audio, and podcast production. Now we are relaunching On Deck, which has its own website. And many of our other affiliate creative things such as the Lords of Rock. Like I was talking to Jeff the other day, all of this stuff falls under the umbrella of what we do and all of you have been there to help participate in it.

Erin: I made all the marketing materials. All of the look, feel, and design for that.

Darinda: Merch. That was my job.

Chris Herman: Exactly. We got a show coming up. Next week we've got the whole agency coming back to get together. So many wonderful things going on right now. I feel very appreciative to the two of you that we're able to still work, that collectively our efforts have been able to extend out to new people that have been able to come in and participate in what we're doing.

Darinda: Definitely. We have a very solid crew right now, which is great.

Chris Herman: It's so funny, NADA is coming up. I'll go and everyone's always like, "Are you going to get any clients out at NADA?" I don't know if I've ever picked up a client out there. I'm not there to pick up clients. I go there to learn, see what's going on in our industry, and meet the people that we know. We work with everybody from Autotrader to Cars.com, Dealer.com—all these companies. I always want to make sure that we're leaving a good taste in their mouths for working with us. We're not everybody's cup of tea, right?

Darinda: We have a great client base at this point in time. Our clients, most of them have been with us for a long time. I feel like they appreciate what we're doing for them and how we operate.

Chris Herman: I know we're valued. Collectively. The "we," not the royal "we."

Darinda: I don't even know what the royal "we" means.

Erin: It's how like monarchy would say, "We appreciate you being here," but "we" means me.

Chris Herman: So, now we've clarified that. Do we make mistakes? Yeah, sure we do. Everybody in this agency knows that we've stood up, written checks to make things right. It's just the way that we do it and that's how we'll always do it.

Darinda: We do it with integrity, which is not always a common business practice. But for sure we do everything with integrity and honesty which is very important in business.

Chris Herman: Well that feels like a nice place to tie it up. What do you think, Erin?

Erin: Honesty, integrity, creativity, the Herman Way. I'm going to concur with that. We've been laughing lately—I don't know where this "Herman Way" came from, but sometimes I'll be like, "Just figure it out. That's the Herman Way."

Chris Herman: That's the next merch drop. "Just figure it out. The Herman Way." And then arrows pointing in all different directions. We are a very structured-unstructured organization. It's like a big jungle gym. There's a structure, but how you play inside of that structure is completely up to you.

Erin: Some of the best creativity is in the box.

Chris Herman: Darinda, Erin, thank you both. I love you both.

Darinda: We love you.

Chris Herman: We have been through a lot together. We will continue to do a lot of great things together. So, with that, I think we'll wrap it up and say bye-bye for now.

Darinda: So long. Farewell.

Chris Herman: What is that? The Sound of Music. That's the only musical I like.

Darinda: Really? There's so—Little Shop of Horrors, Sweeney Todd, Hamilton.

Chris Herman: Nope. Never even seen it. No interest. I really like The Sound of Music. It is really cool how they did the shot of her in the hills with a helicopter. Say good night, Erin.

Erin: Good night, Erin.

Chris Herman: Say good night, Chris.

Erin: Good night, Chris.

Chris Herman: Say good night. Good night, Erin. Good night, Darinda. All right. Thanks, everybody. Bye.