Your Life After Tech

Ep 008: Jeff Kim - A Lifetime in Various Types of Design

• Life After Tech • Season 1 • Episode 8

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Jeff Kim is a tech and design expert with decades of experience. His life took some wild turns after being laid off in October 2023. Join Jeff in the warm nostalgia of CorelDRAW and QuarkXPress, shifting into web design, and then years of UX work. 

After researching and rejecting a franchise opportunity, Jeff and his wife launched Minneapolis Sign Design, diving into the world of vehicle graphics and signage. The couple brought their years of entrepreneurship and business acumen skills into play, and recently opened the doors of a 5,000 square foot shop.

DesignMSD.com
Jeff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/msd-tnt/

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Debbie:

Welcome to the your Life After Tech podcast. This is Episode 8. I'm Debbie Levitt. Don't forget to check out our lifeaftertechinfo multiverse, including our book, discord, community coaching and more, because you might be done with tech. Tech might be done with you. Or you're thinking about adding non-tech work to your tech career, or you're thinking about adding non-tech work to your tech career? Today's guest is Jeff Kim, j-e-f-f-k-i-m, and he's from designmsd. com. We'll be talking about his journey through a little bit of life, as well as some tech work, and ultimately landing in running his own business with his wife in design and applying graphics to vehicles. So let's get to know Jeff.

Jeff:

Okay, well, thanks for having me. My name is Jeff Kim. A little bit about me Adopted from Korea at age three to a Minnesota family and then grew up in Aberdeen South Dakota, a town of 20,000 people where I was the only Asian Actually there's one other Asian and they kept mixing up our names and we looked at nothing alike, mixing up our names and we looked at nothing alike. Anyway, um, at about 19 I walked into a dakota silkscreen and they do, you know, custom jackets and t-shirts and things like that, and I wanted some taekwondo jackets for the club at where I was the instructor. For those that don't know Taekwondo, it's like Korean karate. But that's where I first entered tech and entered design. Because he showed me some ideas for my Taekwondo jackets and I thought they sucked. And so I saw a computer hey, can I sit down and show you what I'm thinking? And I did and he gave me a job.

Jeff:

So at age 19 I was working at a silkscreen place, loved it, got to do some design. This was CorelDRAW 1, so that got me into design, really loved it. And then, from there, ended up in college at St Cloud State University, and Motley Crue sings about it. So it's a pretty fun college and ended up at the college newspaper where I was the ad director and as the ad director I learned QuarkXPress and the Mac and I got to hire and fire people at age 22. And from there went to the local newspaper, the St Cloud Times, which is owned by Gannett and USA Today, and that is where I saw my very first wireframe. So that was in 1996, 28 years ago, and that kind of got me into the world of design technology, software and loved it.

Debbie:

Awesome, what an amazing journey. So that's almost like it's not the end of your story by far. So from there you started working in tech. Tell us more about the types of roles that you've had since 1996 and QuarkXPress.

Jeff:

Yeah, I don't know if it's that interesting, but I think when I think of tech I think of website design and for me my first official website that actually got paid for was working for Grant Thornton, which is an accounting firm in downtown Minneapolis in 1999. So that was what 25 years ago and coincidentally that's also when I designed my first bus wrap, and I guess that will come into play later as we talk more about what I'm doing now. But that's also where I met my mentor, tony Harris, big guy, awesome guy, and he kind of defined the word charisma. I've never really met anybody like him before and he would always tell us stories, great storyteller, and one of them was how he was a bodyguard for Prince, so he had some fun stories about that.

Jeff:

From there I found a company called Magenic and Magenic is a local IT custom software development company, mostly Microsoft Stack. They had about 1,000 employees, eight offices around the country and one in the Philippines, and I was lucky enough they sent me to the Philippines to help manage their 100 consultants. So I highly recommend the Philippines because I got to go scuba diving every weekend. So I was at Magenic for 12 years and while I was at Magenic worked with some great clients in the UX field Charles Schwab, wells Fargo, ernst Young, even Ferrari. I would go out to their offices in New York. So it was a lot of fun and I guess I would have stayed at Mugenic and UX because the people were fantastic, the leadership was fantastic, until they sold to a big consulting firm I think they have 300,000 employees, this consulting firm and everyone just hated it. So everybody bailed, and I always think of Titanic when everyone jumps off the sinking ship, and I always remember that one scene when the guy bounces off the propeller. Well, that's kind of what we felt like. Everybody bailed, me included. They just took what was a fantastic company of a thousand employees and just turned us all into a bunch of numbers.

Jeff:

After Magenic, I ended up with some ad agencies and then my last ad agency was a place called V-Shift in New York City, in Koreatown. So my wife and I would go out there a couple times a month and she would get her hair cut. We would enjoy all the Korean food. By the way, my wife is also an adopted Korean and then I laid off. So this was October of 2023. I got an email from HR saying, hey, let's schedule this call for this afternoon I go shit this afternoon.

Debbie:

That's not a lot of notice.

Jeff:

None, none at all. And I go crap and showed it to my wife and she's like, got this worried, look on her face Because you know, at this time you know they were that was the highest seller that I've had so far. And so that was kind of like, hey, this is it. But I got the email showed to her and, sure enough, got on the phone and we're gonna let you go as of now. I go really. And then you know they let some other people go at the same time and it's like, wow, um. So that's when I really started feeling where I didn't have any control. You know, it's like outside factors and and I was doing a great job. They said my performance was awesome. I was doing a lot of work for charles schwab, um, and they loved my work and and so it wasn't that it was just a financial thing, and so, yeah, they let go about six of us, I think.

Debbie:

So, anyway, that's kind of the trigger to set me off to leave tech. Yeah, that's unfortunately too common, and we're speaking in November 2024, so that layoff was about 13 months ago. So when did you start thinking maybe I'm done with tech, or maybe tech is done with me. Maybe I should move into something else?

Jeff:

Well, I didn't start thinking about it till that email. I didn't start thinking about it until that email because I thought I liked the UX world and tech and I thought I liked just staying in that realm because I was comfortable, I was good at it and I still enjoyed doing it. A couple of things I didn't enjoy and then they kind of stood out to me more as I was reevaluating life. I just remember, especially after COVID, I enjoyed the people interactions. So a lot of the workshops that I would help lead, you know, to gather requirements, things like that. You know you're in a room full of people and you would do.

Jeff:

You know your sticky notes and your real whiteboards, not mural or anything like that real whiteboards, lots of sticky notes and a lot of back and forth where you can read people's body languages. If somebody's not speaking up, you can like look at them and say what do you have to say a little bit harder to do on on video calls, I think. And so after COVID pretty much everything went to video, as most people know, and we started to lose that interaction and I didn't realize how much I missed that until I'm sitting on, you know, sometimes five hour phone calls, sometimes eight hour phone calls, and it's just like God. There's got to be more to life than this. You know, I don't know if God put us on this planet to. You know, sit on a zoom call for eight hours and bang your forehead on the desk, but anyway. So started thinking about that more and figured I wasn't necessarily done with tech, but it just made me start looking at it differently.

Debbie:

Yeah. So then, how did you get started on your new path, or new old path, as it may be?

Jeff:

Well, not really old path, it is definitely new. Um so, in February of this year God, that wasn't even that long ago, was it?

Debbie:

So what's, it?

Jeff:

November. Yeah, so nine months ago, I guess we could have had a baby. Um, nine months ago, uh, we had an Airbnb in Vegas because we wanted to get away from Minnesota winters by the way, we live in Minneapolis Um. So we were at a. We rented Airbnb for a month, had all of our kids come in, had a nice little pool and a little seven-hole putting green in the back Really nice place. Oh, by the way, if you are in Vegas, you have to try the cup of bread at Rise and Shine.

Jeff:

Anyway, so we were looking at businesses to buy because we had just sold our business January 1. And that was an event rental business where we did the big tables, tense chairs for large corporate events Very successful. My wife has been in that industry since age nine and I married into it and so we were able to get out of it and we were looking at our next adventure. So while in Vegas, she was looking at various websites for businesses for sale, franchises for sale, that kind of thing, and she found a sign company in Minnesota. So we looked at that and then we actually made a few visits to the place, probably out there three times, and one of the times we got to kind of watch the day in the life of you know the owners and what they did with the sign making and things like that, and they didn't really think about signs before, and so we found we really enjoyed it and we made an offer.

Jeff:

They were also selling their building at the same time as, like, a 15 000 square foot building, um. So we made an offer on that too and things fell through. It didn't work but, um, we got to realizing that we like the idea of a sign company because it takes advantage of my creativity. Um, I like the idea of being able to see something come to life, something tangible, whereas in the digital world it's all kind of fleeting. You know here, one second gone, the next second. And we also knew, in the new business we had a good idea of what we didn't want because of our event business and we knew we didn't want something so seasonal. My wife would have to hire, you know, 20 college kids every summer and you know that comes with its own pros and cons and just kind of gets old, and events in Minnesota go way down when it's, you know, 20 below zero.

Debbie:

So we knew we didn't want something to do with it. Fewer tent rentals.

Jeff:

Yes, yes, we knew we didn't want to deal with you know the general public as much. We always found in our event rental business working with companies and corporations. It's much easier than working with their bridezilla and a wedding and families not communicating with each other, or one person's yelling at us to do it this way and then another person the mother-in-law's yelling at us to do it another way, and it's like who do you listen to? So we knew we wanted to work more with business business and that's why this sign company appealed to us. This is getting a little long-winded.

Debbie:

But anyway. So we like signs. I'm enjoying it.

Jeff:

And so then we started looking at signed franchises after the first deal fell through, and so my wife, kim suggested SpeedPro and for those of you that don't know SpeedPro, they are a signed franchise that specializes in large format printing and vehicle wraps, and they have 150 locations around the country and we went pretty far down that path. You know, becoming a franchise, we get the franchise fees. You have a tech fee, you have a marketing fee and then you have your royalties on your monthly sales and well, that's all well and good. For folks that may not know about business, it's a lot of hand-holding, and so as we got further down that process, we've got to learn that you know what we know enough about business that we probably wouldn't need them after a year. And so you know what? I think we can do this on our own, and so they awarded us the franchise. And then they sent this big, huge contract and my wife looked at the contract a little closer and there are all of these clauses like you're committed for 10 years and it automatically renews. If you want to get out of it earlier, you have to pay three years of royalties up front, and then they own your clients, they own your equipment and all this stuff, and it's like, oh man, I don't know if this is for us. So we decided to do our own thing.

Jeff:

But here's a funny side note the franchise operator who's in charge of opening up all the locations around the country. They awarded us the Minneapolis Territory which was great because there's four other Speed Pros in the Twin Cities area and so they gave us the Minneapolis Territory and so he came in I think he's from Tennessee. We flew in and he looked at a space with us, with us, and before he got there, we were, you know, talking to our broker and their broker. And our broker made sure okay, make sure you don't look or sound too interested in this, right, your typical negotiating strategy. So, okay, makes sense. This guy comes in, looks at the space in front of their broker oh, this place is perfect for you guys, it's got everything you need, it's got all the space, it's all climate controlled and he was like so excited we're just looking at him going, you know, like this, it's like, um, but anyway, funny story, we did end up with the space.

Jeff:

So that's where we are now but not with the franchise not with the franchise, but we ended up with the space and we did learn a few things from going through that process of the franchise, because they had a very formal vetting process, which is good, like all franchisors should do, you know, looked at financials, looked at our potential and all that stuff, and we had to meet with, you know, the CEOs and all this stuff, um, but yeah, like I said, when it come to, when it came down to literally, we were about ready to sign the contract and pay them all this money, um, at $180,000 just to get started with them, plus the $50,000 franchise fee just to get started. Um, and so the missing piece to get back to that was we didn't know the equipment. We knew business, we knew how to get customers, we knew how to manage staff, we knew operations. Actually, I should say my wife knows all that stuff. I don't know any of that. My wife is great. So we didn't know the equipment. We didn't know, you know, some of the materials and installation techniques when it comes to wrapping a car or putting up a, you know, 20 foot mural.

Jeff:

So in swoops, chris, so crisper, shout out to crisper from gsg. He actually sells all of the equipment to the speed pros and he actually provides a. He also provides all the training of the equipment to the Speed Pros and all the other printing companies in our area. I was like holy crap. So he came in, we had coffee with him, saved the day, because that was our missing piece. We knew everything else I mean, my wife knew everything else but we didn't know the equipment. And so he came in and assured us that he can sell us equipment for a lot better price than you know startup package and that he can provide a training. Great. So that was the deal for us to come up with. Minneapolis Sign Design.

Debbie:

Yeah, designmsdcom, which we'll have in the show notes. So when did you officially open the doors?

Jeff:

Well, we started selling way before, because that was one of the things that we learned going through that franchise process is to start selling before you open the doors, because it's not like a McDonald's you don't open the doors and everybody is waiting at the door. So we started selling before that. I started joining business networking groups, reactivated LinkedIn. My wife Kim started contacting all the people she knew from the rental business and the rental industry, so we had a few projects already going, and then I worked with local SpeedPro to do some van wraps before our doors opened, and so that worked out really well. And then we opened up our doors 30 days ago. Wow.

Jeff:

So we moved our 5 000 square foot space um october 15 ish congratulations yeah, thanks, it's been a lot of fun setting it up and finding used furniture on Facebook Marketplace.

Debbie:

Oh my gosh, that's a separate podcast. I think I wanted to ask if this business for you and or your wife, if it matches any of your core personal qualities or your personality traits core personal qualities or your personality traits.

Jeff:

Yes, I think the biggest one is just that creative bone in my body that I started, you know, at age 19 in that silk screen shop in Cork Express. So I get to use that. I also think it just kind of gets me off my butt. You know, with technology, most cases, you know you're sitting at the desk, you know all day long pounding on the keyboard, moving the mouse around, playing with pixels, and so it just gets me out and about about. You know, yesterday I was on site at a business putting up you know window, film, window, perf, this kind that you can look out of but you can't really see in. It's got some nice big, bold designs on it. So I was out there. You know putting that on is a little cold, but again gets me off my butt.

Jeff:

I've already lost 10 pounds since we've opened up. I'm jealous. I've already lost 10 pounds since we've opened up, I'm jealous, yeah. And so I guess the other personality trait is I just love learning something new. I mean, I'd never wrapped a car before. You know, I took a car wrapping class that the same Chris Berg recommended and took a car wrapping class. Shout out to Ken Burns. He was awesome, showed us all how to wrap cars. And then I took another class in Chicago learning how to apply window film, learning how to apply floor graphics, learning how to apply stuff on cinder block. So eventually I want to do a big outside mural on our cinder block, on the outside of our building and for those that wonder if they want to do something like that, what's really great is that permitting is a lot easier for your city because it's considered temporary not permanent Nice.

Jeff:

Yep, something to know. So yeah, thanks, I to know.

Debbie:

So yeah, thanks. I like that, thinking about the arc of kind of shifting from some of those traditional consulting and tech jobs into more of the sole proprietor or couple proprietor type of business. Is there any mistake or regret or something you wish you could do over?

Jeff:

Yes, I've done it sooner. You know I shouldn't have waited for an outside trigger, you know, like being laid off. But the thing is is that I didn't know I wanted a sign shop, you know. So it kind of took that outside influence to help that. But I mean, you know I'm 52 and it would have been cool to have started this sign shop. You know 42.

Debbie:

So got it start sooner. It's at almost. Almost everybody I've interviewed so far has said the same thing yeah.

Jeff:

Well, they always say too, you know, what do you like about retirement? I wish I would have did it earlier, you know. I mean, I don't want to have lots of money when I'm 85 years old and it's hard for me to walk up steps in Italy or something you know like. I'd rather do mini retirement getaways now.

Debbie:

That makes sense. Yeah, plan those things early. So hopefully we've got listeners who might be considering leaving tech or maybe adding non-tech work to the tech career they're trying to keep going. What advice would you give to them?

Jeff:

I would say, to find balance. I don't think it's leave tech or add tech. I think it's balance because you are in tech for a reason, so there's no reason to give it up 100%, and I just think you'd be surprised. You know how your tech skills, you know, will transfer to something else. I think it comes down to at least for me anyway problem solving, and I know it's kind of cliche, but so I guess.

Jeff:

An example I have is when I was running a workshop in Connecticut. It was for a company that handles relocation for their employees, for, like, employees of Microsoft, google, you're looking at the problem and trying to narrow it down because there's all sorts of them, and then you're trying to come up with solutions you know, based on your experience and based on you know best practices, based on you know what you think will work best for people you know using or interacting with a site like this, because a site had to have notifications, keep track of tasks with a site like this, because the site had to have notifications, keep track of tasks, it also had to know when to offer Spanish speaking classes to spouses when you're relocating to a new country. So pretty sophisticated technology behind it. And I guess, if you translate something like that, you know, in a problem solving. You know, I was working on a van wrap a couple weeks ago and I was explaining to them that well, let's think about how people are gonna, you know, look at your van, they're probably gonna see it cruising down the highway 70 miles an hour.

Jeff:

So maybe we don't want to have six bullets on there talking about your different services. Let's concentrate on your brand, elevating that. We came up with a tagline that said um, award-winning remodeling. So let's, let's focus on that and make that, you know, more pronounced, instead of trying to list out all your services, because it's not a brochure. You know, brochures, people have time to just kind of sit there and you, you know, digest it and, you know, think about it.

Jeff:

But don't have that with their mobile build. So again, I think tech skills can translate real well into other things.

Debbie:

Yeah it comes back to, especially for those of us coming from creative work or design or UX and things like that. So much of it, I think, comes back to problem finding and problem solving. Exactly yeah, so we are wrapping up and I always like to ask how people can get in touch with you, follow you, do business with you. Where can we connect with you?

Jeff:

Well, it's funny because I'm also. I just got awarded to be on a reality show competition. Yeah, it's called the blocks b-l-o-x and it's on amazon prime. I think this is their ninth season or some of that so I'll be in oklahoma in february talking about you know, our sign company and things like that, because they call it the largest competition reality show on the planet for startups.

Debbie:

So I don't know what comes out.

Jeff:

Yeah, but I'll be filming in February, but otherwise our website's the best design. Msdcom, and you can follow me on LinkedIn, jeff Kim.

Debbie:

So that's where I ran into you. Um well, well, great, um so, uh, any last words for our listeners.

Jeff:

Well, that's pretty open-ended question. Why not? Well, that's a pretty open-ended question, why not? I guess, if you know, no matter what you decide to do, or if you're on the fence on something, just do it. There's something on I don't know where, but for the first six months of doing anything new, you're going to be horrible at it.

Jeff:

Whether it's a new job, new skill, whatever, just do it and keep pushing through and you'll be glad you did.

Debbie:

Excellent, Jeff. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Jeff:

Yeah, thank you.

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