Craig Andrews 00:07

Okay. Today I have an exciting conversation with Julia Hwang. We've been talking in the green room. I've got so many questions that I've decided to wait to get her on because she's dropped some bombs I'm really intrigued by. Julia is the founder and CEO of Intertrend communications. She brings more than 35 years of experience as a leading voice in Asian culture, both as the leader of her own creative agency, as the founder of numerous entrepreneurial ventures and as the promoter of a cultural and artistic events and initiatives, as a speaker and recognized voice in the communications industry and as a committed contributor to numerous nonprofit associations. Julia, welcome.

Julia Huang       00:58

Thank you for having.

Craig Andrews 01:01

You know, I thought I knew where to start and you just kept dropping know. And so I think we're just going to have a fascinating discussion here today. And first thing, the question I asked you, let's get a little bit about where you came from. So you said that you're Taiwanese American, but you weren't raised in Taiwan and you weren't raised in America.

Julia Huang       01:27

No, I'm Taiwanese American. I was actually born and raised in Japan. Went back to Taiwan for college and then went to graduate school in Carolina. Getting around.

Craig Andrews 01:44

Wow. Okay, so let's go from the back forward. So where'd you go to graduate school?

Julia Huang       01:50

Chapel Hill. Tar Heel.

Craig Andrews 01:53

Yep. I won't hold that against you. I went to state, but beautiful campus. Very good.

Craig Andrews 02:03

Mean Japan's. Not exactly a normal place for Chinese Taiwanese to move to. Japan's not very popular.

Julia Huang       02:14

Well, as a matter of fact. But if you look at the Taiwanese diaspora, really a lot of immigration happened in Japan and the United States. A lot of Taiwanese because of what was happening around that people, a lot of Taiwanese went to Japan and a lot of Taiwanese came to the United States as well. Probably in my parents generation, more Taiwanese went to Japan, more so than the and you know, it was because of if you look at the modern history, chinese modern history as well as the Taiwanese modern history, japan was actually a place that a lot of diaspora happened.

Craig Andrews 03:06

Interesting. And for those that aren't following what's diaspora?

Julia Huang       03:12

So basically a lot of Taiwanese were displaced and had to immigrate to different places in Japan and America were a lot of destination for a lot of Taiwanese were those two countries, especially Japan actually.

Craig Andrews 03:34

Really? Now what part of Japan did you live in?

Julia Huang       03:37

Yokohama.

Craig Andrews 03:38

Yokohama.

Julia Huang       03:40

Big port city. As well as a big American navy town.

Craig Andrews 03:49

Yeah, up in the Tokyo area. Okay. Very nice. And so then you moved back to go to university in Taiwan. Taiwan, okay. Wow. And where'd you study?

Julia Huang       04:04

I was in western language literature, which I'm a little bit embarrassed to say because when I was in Japan, I went to international school. It was a French missionary school, but it was an English based school, so my English was more proficient than normal Taiwanese students. And so I picked the easy way out in terms of selecting a major that I thought I could.

Craig Andrews 04:33

Yeah, fascinating. Okay, and so then you went to graduate school in Chapel Hill and now you're in.

Julia Huang       04:46

So graduate school at Chapel Hill actually took me career wise to New York, and I worked in New York for a management consulting firm for a while and then got recruited by a client and moved to Los Angeles.

Craig Andrews 05:03

Okay.

Julia Huang       05:04

Yeah.

Craig Andrews 05:05

And you said that your business started as kind of a fluke.

Julia Huang       05:11

So the venture capital company that I was working for, which was the client, which was a Japanese client, it's going to be a long story, but I'm going to make it very short. So we had this opportunity in terms of we basically were having dinner with one of the lawyers for an airline company, and that airline just bought a route to Asia, and they had the most robust route to Asia. And then we were having a good time. It was a social dinner. And then the CEO of that airline said, we don't have Asians on our airplane. Why do you think there are no Asian passengers on our airplane? We have the best route. I was drinking too much maybe, and I just said that's because your service really sucks. No Asian passengers will take your implant because the food sucks, the service is bad, blah blah, blah blah blah, end of story. Dinner ended three weeks later. I get a call from their CMO and he says, I heard you had some opinion about our airline. And of course at that time I was already sober, so I just kind of dialed back, oh no, that's not what I meant. But for some reason, the CMO thought I was working for an advertising agency. And then he said, no, we want you to come and tell us what to do. And so I went to talk to my boss, the owner of the management well, a venture capital management consulting firm, and I said, hey, there's this opportunity. What do you think we should do? He said, he's an entrepreneur himself. So he said, oh, you should just go and pitch it. So we went to pitch the account and got the account. So it was all accidental in terms of, okay, we now have a business, let's set ourselves up as an advertising agency. So very accidental in some ways, but an opportunity, a great opportunity, just really dropped on our lap. On us, though.

Craig Andrews 07:45

That's just amazing. It's obviously tough thing to teach in business school. Go out to an event, get drunk and say something, don't do it.

Julia Huang       07:57

Yeah, it could have gone the other way. But I think and Craig, I know that you say this a lot of times is that you have to be lucky to be successful in business. But basically I also tell people that, but don't squander that luck when that luck presents itself, you just have to take it and run with it.

Craig Andrews 08:27

Yeah, that's really tough because sometimes our minds are a little bit closed to the opportunities that are laid before us.

Julia Huang       08:42

We also kind of self constrain ourselves because I never worked for an advertising agency. So under normal circumstances I think I would have thought that I have no experience whatsoever, maybe this is not the route to take it. But I was naive in a sense that I thought, well, we could do this, we'll figure it out.

Craig Andrews 09:07

Yeah, that's awesome. And so then what was the path beyond there? So you got started, you started.

Julia Huang       09:16

Yes, we got this really a very prestigious airline business which the airline doesn't exist anymore. As you know, the airline business went through so many of these mergers and acquisitions, so the brand doesn't exist anymore. And then we had it for a while and then their agency, their so called General market Agency reached out to us and said, we have a telecommunication company that wants to target the Asian American market, would you be interested in helping us? And so basically they introduced us to this telecommunication company that started with a small budget and in three years so in essence what happened was we went from being a $500,000 sales company, in three years we became $5 million because of this snowball effect airline company introducing us to telecommunication company. And those two industry at that time had big budgets. So again, I think we just took advantage of the opportunities that were presented to us and then run with it.

Craig Andrews 10:51

Wow. And so you were telling me the story we all love to hear is things just grew, grew, grew, grew, and life was good. But that's not the truth.

Julia Huang       11:03

No. So in some ways in our space

Julia Huang       11:12

we were celebrating success and then one day we had a little bit of difference in terms of the telecommunication brand, not wanting to focus on the brand. They were very tactical in nature. And if you recall, those were the days that most of the telecommunication telephone companies were talking about. Twenty nine cents per minute to Japan, nineteen cents to Taiwan, twenty five cents to Korea. So that was basically the focus. And we really had some disagreement in terms of talking to the client and saying that brand is still very important in this community. Yes, discounts are very important, deals are very important, but in the end, branding is very important. And then I was young, I just said I'm just going to resign the account. Because there weren't a lot of telephone companies, telephone brands at that time, and not many agencies with the telecommunication expertise. I thought that our phones will ring off the hook next day after we resign. It took us ten years to get another telecommunication company back.

Craig Andrews 12:37

Oh my good years.

Julia Huang       12:39

Ten years. And then because of fact that the brand, the telephone company that we resigned constituted such a big ratio of our business. We based for five years, we basically hired for this brand. We set up all the infrastructures to service this account. Right. And then overnight, I said we could get another one and resign, and we didn't get another comparable account for ten years, so it was tough. I think I was talking to you about that at the green Room. But eventually we had to lay off people because most of the hiring and most of the infrastructure were done for this particular brand that we had to start to lay off people. And I always did it on Fridays. Friday lunch. I took people out for Friday lunch and said, we have to let you go. It was almost one month of lunches laying people off. So to this day at our company, when I casually say, oh, it's Friday, let's go out to lunch, you could tell that the paleness of the blood goes out of because they've heard so much about these Friday lunches that they thought something was going to happen. So to this day, I don't invite anyone in the office for lunches on Friday. So it took us ten years, but that also taught us another it was really a lesson learned for me in terms of not as a company, not to really put everything in one account. Like the diversity of the portfolio, of the healthiness of your business became very important to us.

Craig Andrews 14:49

Yeah. So do you think there's a day coming when you can invite people to lunch again on Fridays?

Julia Huang       14:58

I think really actually, I can now, but it's almost like a running joke that, oh, my God, if she invites you to lunch on Fridays, it's not good that I just stopped doing that. It took us ten years to get back a comparable account, but we really were able to start to diversify our portfolio in terms of getting more industry clients and accounts. So we became much healthier as a company in terms of how we look at how we manage client businesses.

Craig Andrews 15:43

That's good. That's encouraging.

Craig Andrews 15:49

If you could go back, if you could go back in time when you resigned that account with what you know now, would you still resign that account, or would you have held on to it?

Julia Huang       16:04

It's easy to say it now, but that one month that I was having lunches on Fridays, I probably didn't think so. But now, looking back and like you said, knowing what we know now, I think I would have I think it wouldn't have been healthy to in some ways, I think that we would have lost that account one way or the other, and we would have been equally unprepared. So it turned out to be a good thing.

Craig Andrews 16:43

Yeah. And I don't know if I'd want to wait ten years to learn that lesson. I think that's a good lesson.

Julia Huang       16:53

No kidding. No kidding. But we were lucky in a sense that during that ten years, even though we didn't get the same comparable account in that industry, we were able to get most of the top three industry like finance, automotive. We were able to have partnership with one of the top three brands in those industries. And I think that it was probably because we were really hungry in terms of getting back on our.

Craig Andrews 17:38

So. You know, obviously there was the popular, you know, where Don Draper looks like he's passing a kidney stone and then comes out with this magical idea that saves the company. So from your perspective, is life like Mad Men or is it different?

Julia Huang       17:58

No, the Mad Men is know, I think a lot of my agency, friends gets triggered when they watch Mad Men, much like a lot of restauranteurs get triggered watching Bears. It's very similar in terms of how campaigns are developed and the internal conflict that sometimes you face and sometimes you're not as lucky as we are with our clients in terms of partnership. I think the world has changed. Advertising world has changed quite a bit, to be truthful. Now, the touch point that you can reach the consumers are so and you know, this is that it's not just TV. It's not just print. It's everything. Every touch point, the events, the digital, the social, the holistic way of looking at a brand that even the clients are looking at agencies in a different way.

Craig Andrews 19:04

Yeah. So what do you think the future holds? And let me narrow that down a little bit.

Craig Andrews 19:16

There's a lot of debate about what's going on in the economy right now, but I think what is not debate is a lot of people are scared. And so as a business owner that's facing this economy, what are you doing and what would be your advice to others?

Julia Huang       19:33

It's so interesting because the last couple of well, I would say last several months, people have been asking about, know, being an entrepreneur. And Craig, I know that you feel the same way as well, is that we're constantly on recession exercise mode. I mean, I think in the 30 years that we have been in business, there has never been a year that we haven't been in that exercise mode that recession is going to come. Even in the best of times, advertising business is such a volatile business that we have to really look at businesses in a different way. And I think that when I talk about diversifying a portfolio, it's not just looking at the advertising business. As you mentioned in the introduction, we have intertrend communication with an advertising agency, but it is one that is deep rooted passion for uplifting the Asian American community and the community that we were in. And from that very core build on that passion, we started an intertrend imprint Lab, which is a venture incubator, which is supportive hub that spots, backs and mentors creative startups. And so that's kind of diversifying our portfolio so that as a company, we're not relying solely on the advertising business and then therefore, solely on our client business. And that probably stems from the fear that you mentioned, is that we can't just be looking at our business as an advertising agency. We have to really diversify our portfolio as well.

Craig Andrews 21:30

Well, I like what you said there, where you're constantly having to live as if a recession is about to come, and that keeps you sharp, that keeps you on point. And unfortunately, I think a lot of businesses, they've over enjoyed the benefits of an economy that's grown strongly for a very long time, and so it'll be an interesting path forward. Well, Julie, this has just been absolutely fascinating. What an amazing journey you've taken and just how you've taken that little bit of luck, but grit and determination. Thank you for sharing your lessons here on Leaders and legacies. How can people reach you if they want to reach out to you?

Julia Huang       22:19

Well, they can definitely reach me through our website, intertrend.com. And if someone reaches me through that web website, it will definitely come to me.