Design, Resilience, and Good People: Sam Choi's Manual Labor Journey

Erik  08:04

we want to welcome all of our listeners to another episode of MRP, Minority Report podcast with Erik and Kerel. Each episode, we talk with real operators and leaders in media, tech and business and today, joining us is Samantha Choi who is the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of manual labor. Welcome, Sam. How are you?

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Sam Choi  08:25

I'm good. Thank you so much for having me, guys. This is exciting, and I'm ready to dig in. Oh,

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Erik  08:32

we're happy you're here. We're excited so much to talk about. I have so many questions, and I know Kerel has got several questions too, but at first, I want to recognize your background. I love your background. Tell us a little bit about how you put together your background.

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Sam Choi  08:49

Yeah, absolutely. So I was born in Korea. I am the youngest of three girls, so I was insanely spoiled, and took everything from my sisters. But when we were younger, my mom and dad were basically wanted to move to America. My mom was like, America is the land of opportunity. This is where I want my girls to grow up. And so we moved here when I was four. My sisters were seven and nine, and my dad was a professor in Korea, and so when we came here, none of us spoke English. We moved in with my aunt and her family in Harlem, and we just started living and my dad at the time, you know, he was he, while he taught in Korea, here he was taking jobs for whatever he could right dishwasher working in the back of the stores, stocking inventory. Essentially, those were manual labor jobs, and that was also the inspiration for the name of the company, because when I thought about launching in 2012 and thinking about what I wanted to name it, it's like nobody wants another name, name and name, right? I don't need to name the company after myself. It was what is the one true mission of why I am starting this, but also, like, what is memorable and what has heart. And so it was an homage to them. I wouldn't be here without them. None of us would. And the sacrifices that they made, in addition to, like, showing up for work and providing, you know, a roof and food and everything else, what my mom and dad really taught me was just the philosophy of showing up right, roll up your sleeves. It doesn't matter what you're doing. Have pride in what you're doing. Do it well and do it to the best of your ability. And so that was, I think, not only an inspiration for the name of the company, but how, how we run it, how we build it, and who we work with. That's

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Erik  10:50

great. Sam, thank you so much. And I think that's such a powerful story, and I love it, and it's, it's um, you can hear like the pride you have and how you describe it and and then I think also, you know, want to ask you a lot more about what you think it was like, you know, for your parents making that sacrifice and coming but I also want to ask you about a different background. I love the background behind you as well.

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Sam Choi  11:19

Literally,

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Erik  11:23

tell us about that, because for those of you that can't see it, and you're listening right now, but you'll be able to see it eventually. But tell us a little bit about it, I can tell you, put some thought and some work into it, and it's really cool. So tell us about how that came together.

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Sam Choi  11:37

Absolutely I mean, when so our studio is based in Brooklyn, and when we first moved in here, it's beautiful light. There's white walls, and it's like, how are we a creative agency with no visual inspiration? So one by one, we just started to collect art pieces from artists that we love, from different things that we thought were inspiring. And so with this, you know, this beautiful wall of inspiration started to come together. You can see ml, so our friend Noah created that it's all hammered nail and thread. You can see, say, Adams, who's a great friend of ours, and he's the Kool Aid. You can see the pencil, which is one of our senior designers painted that for us, Shepherd, Shepherd fairy. So we did a great project with studio number one at our 10th anniversary. This is one of my favorite things when we were trying to decide how we were going to celebrate like the I don't want to just create another big, expensive party, and thank everybody. Like, how do we get back? How do we give it the our anniversary that we've made it this far some meaning, and so it created this, what we call the ML love project. What I did was invite all of our because we had so many great partners that were artists and creatives. And we asked them, like, what does it, what does love mean to you? And how do you actually depict it visually? And, you know, as through art? And what we did was have everybody, 10 different designers. We had say, we had Jason main, who's one of Nike, you know, jump man's creative directors. Now, we had our own designers. I even designed my own stickers. So they use the word love, and that was the only direction that they had. And at we asked them to create these different stickers. So remember when we were growing up and you had those sticker sheets and you had all difference, and you peel them off. So we created these beautiful eight and a half by 11 sticker sheets. And so anyone who donated to either world central kitchen or ACLU, we sent them the sticker pack. And it was our way of giving back. You know, there was, at the time, there was so much, there still is tension and hardship and hate in the world. It was like, let's celebrate love, like we come to work and we love what we do, we have people around us that that love each other. And so we said, let's use that as a campaign. And we were able to raise, I think it was close to $35,000 just selling love. Oh,

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Erik  14:20

that's great. That's awesome. Oh,

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Sam Choi  14:22

and so then we became a partner, and that's they sent us that print, long story short, but yes, very

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Erik  14:29

nice.

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Sam Choi  14:30

And then that is from an artist Finch, so he does all these honey bears. But if I'll send you a close up, it's all different ones. And it's, it's basically celebrating this idea of like, be whichever bear you want. So you could see one that looks like a pride bear. There's another one that's like a bear on a skateboard. So it's all these different ones. You can see, like, there's an overarching theme around acceptance and and celebration of the individual here. That's

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Erik  15:00

great, Sam, I know, you know, and spending a little time sort of trying to get to know some of the story behind even the team in the teams at manual labor, that's also something that that sort of is woven into, sort of the fabric of your organization, your team members, right? I think about the imagery of your sort of zoom call, you know, and sort of like, you know, showcasing, you know, your your team members. Tell us a little bit about how and why that's important to have that in your company. Absolutely.

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Sam Choi  15:38

It starts with our mission statement. So it's our mission statement is do great work with good people. And what that means is, think about when you say somebody, we throw around the word great all the time. We're like, oh, meet him. He's great. Meet her. He's great. But when you say someone is good people, you understand the gravitas behind it. You know that it means they are vetted, that they will show up for you, that they are kind, kind of all of the criterias in as individuals that we can bestow on someone saying they're good people. So it starts with that, and then if we have good people around us, we can do great work, and there's a flywheel around that, right? So if we do great work, we'll attract good people, and whether that means team members or clients or partners. It's really about that is the baseline for how we show up. That's even how we decide who to work with. Right when we think about projects that we take on or clients that we meet, we have a short checklist of what that criteria is like, and it starts with, are they good people? Because we spent so much time at work, the last thing you want to do is hate who you do it with or do it for. So they have to be good people, you know. They have to we have to believe in the project or the product. We have to understand like, Are they good for manual labor. Is it, you know, will it add to our portfolio, or will it expand our knowledge base? Then do they have the budget? And then lastly, like, do we like each other? That kind of circles back to good people, but if they can check off three of the five, it's very simple, but it's also just how we keep ourselves inspired and happy. I think one of the most important things is liking the fact that you have to show up every day for a paycheck right now. Wouldn't it be a novel idea to actually like who you're doing it with?

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  17:35

Yeah, Sam, I love that, because you're just you know everything from what you have behind you on the walls there, to how you name the company, to the company culture, how you select your customers as well too, is all very intentional, right? And and I love that about what you all are doing there at manual labor. Now, if I if I have this correct, the company has been around for a little over 13 years now, right? Yeah, what? What was that? Can you take us back a little bit? What was that sort of pivotal moment, if you will, where you decided, okay, this, this is what I'm going to do. Like, what was that like? Take a walk us through that,

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Sam Choi  18:19

watching my parents start their own business when we were kids, I knew that there was a part of me that was always an entrepreneur. My path to kind of starting manual labor is not a straight line, you know, it's when I started. You know how they say, like, when you make a plan, that's when the universe kind of laughs at you growing up, I always knew I wanted to get into advertising. It's like, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go to Syracuse. I'm gonna, you know, get accepted at New House. And my path is, at one point, it was working for Christian Baumbach, like that was from 17 on. That was my plan. And then when I was at Syracuse, like, two years in, I was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. So, like, all of that got upended, and I ended up coming home from there. I had to just figure out, like, what to do. And I ended up working at Ralph Lauren as a designer and and so I was always in branding. I was always in design and storytelling. I say that working at Polo was kind of like branding boot camp, because you really got to understand what, how to build aspirational brands, how to build connections. And so from there, I had a couple different jobs at different fashion houses, understanding really like what lifestyle brands means. And so in 2011 it's like, I love what I do. I love the storytelling aspect of it. I love extracting sort of that why? And, you know, we call it the so what of brands and why they should exist, or why customers should spend in money and buy their products or services. But I was like, but I don't want to just do it for one person. I don't want to just do it for one company. I felt like there was a lot that I can do in terms of the skills and expertise I bring. So that's why I started manual labor, because I saw my parents do it. I saw how they were entrepreneurs, and how they were able to be their own bosses, but also build the type of it was a general store in your shell, but it's do what they wanted to do. And so I was, I was like, you know, it's a risk, but that's nobody else is going to bet on me, so I might as well bet on myself and start the company. Love that

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  20:38

gotta, gotta bet on yourself. Everyone has to, has to do that throughout their life. What is two part question for you? What is the toughest part about being a CEO and what is the most rewarding part about being a CEO?

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Sam Choi  20:57

The toughest part is the business of business. I mean, the it is hard to be a small business owner these days. I think the logistics between the the literal cost benefits, payroll, you know, just making those business decisions around when to cut, when to grow, you know, where to double down, that's hard, that is the choice I made. And so while it is hard, it is also my responsibility. The best part of my work is seeing how excited our team gets about what we've done, or a pitch that we've won, or something, just seeing the pure joy of anybody on our team. It, I think it's it's so rewarding, and it might not necessarily be because we've launched something huge, but it's just that they are sort of seeing their investment, right? It's not only manual labor, deciding to invest in our particular person, but they're investing back in us. I mean, they're deciding to choose. I'm going to spend this part of my career here. I'm going to spend these years here. It's, you know, it's like an NBA player, like you have your peak time where you're learning and growing, and you're like, Okay, I'm going to do it with the Knicks. Or I don't see a future here. I'm going to go to the Lakers, or whatever it is. And so I think I take that responsibility really seriously, because they are choosing to grow with manual labor. So to see them get excited about something like, that's it. That's all I need.

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Erik  22:35

That's great, Sam, I want to ask you about a podcast that you were on last year, which I thought was kind of interesting. And it was a podcast actually about non traditional family structures. Can you talk to us a little bit about sort of what you talked about on that pad, on that podcast, and kind of like, where that sort of fits into your life?

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Sam Choi  22:58

Well, it's so I grew up with a very sort of nuclear family by definition, my mom, my dad, our three sister or my myself and three girls, but when we moved in with my aunt and uncle there, so my uncle's Puerto Rican, my aunt is Korean. We grew up there, and I my first exposure to Easter was my uncle's mom. She made these giant Easter baskets, and I was like, I didn't know two foot chocolate bunnies existed. And so just the exposure and what it means and how you learn different cultures and things like that, I think was one aspect of family. The other side is my husband. And so he when he was younger, his parents got divorced. They married, they individually they got married to different people, and it was very different culturally too. And so, a stepfather was, you know, also. Now, the everyday. Father, right, the stepmother was also part of it and just. That everybody has on each other. I don't think it's about what whose blood Do you share? It's about who are you interacting with, what are you learning from? Not just, this is my blood father. This is my, you know, maternal, my mother. So these are the only people I learned from, or my only influences.

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Erik  24:22

That's great. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. That's pretty neat. And then also, I think what was interesting was sort of, you know, how you can find fulfillment, and, you know, being, you know, a great aunt and a great uncle and awesome sort of moments like that, take us, take us through that a little bit too.

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Sam Choi  24:43

You answered my question better than I did. So Todd and I met later in life, and so we decided not to have kids, and it was an interesting decision to make, because we what we realized was we didn't even really know each other before we decided to bring somebody else into the family. And so, you know, when we were like, Okay, we're just going to be fantastic aunts and uncles. Our responsibility is not to raise them to, you know, to feed them and clothe them, but to be that other set of we'll call them like parents, so to speak, that they can rely on, that they can trust. We get the luxury of taking them on really fun things or spoiling them and then giving them back, but just knowing that family is not limited to like again, like, this is my daughter. You know, our the responsibility we feel around being the aunt and uncle, being there whenever they want us, and sometimes, whether they don't want to have conversations with their own parents, or want feedback from us or advice, like being there for them is is incredibly rewarding. Our niece even works for us. So we saw her. She was an intern when she was at at Colgate, and then we learned very quickly, we're like, she's awesome, and so she's, you know, she's been working with us, and she got out of college, and that wasn't, you know, we didn't hire her out of sympathy. We hired her because we thought she was a great human being. But selfishly, I take so much pride in knowing that as much as you know, she's learning from us, we're also learning from her, because she's growing a career and she's bringing new ideas to us.

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Erik  26:26

That's fantastic. Thanks again for sharing that. It really resonated with me as we have, you know, aunt and uncle who are really, really influential in our kids lives, and what you just described absolutely hit right on the head, you know, for us. So thank you for sharing that with everyone. Yeah,

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Sam Choi  26:46

absolutely. I think even just, you know, there's more and more conversations around the stigma of having kids or not having kids. We joke. You know, manual labor is my second child. Our dog is our first. No manual labor came first. But what's nice is, I think there's more acceptance, or just less involvement around like, this is the way you have to live. This is the way you have to grow up, whether it's career paths that are not straight or personal ones, like there is despite the sort of craziness that's happening, as you know, around us, there's also, I think, more openness and acceptance of like, grow up to be whoever you want to be, and your definition of family is own is yours, nobody else's matters. Yep,

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Erik  27:40

thank you. I want to go back to your family. I want to go back to your parents. You know, came 1976 you spent 13 years, you know, building this, this company, all the time before that, what are some things that you got to sort of talk about with your parents as they so saw you grow in your career, or, you know how you've built your own company? What are some what are some things that you know now all these years later, are something that you guys talk about? My mom still doesn't

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Sam Choi  28:22

understand what I do. I i

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  28:26

I feel good that I'm not alone.

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Sam Choi  28:31

I mean, if I had a flower shop and I was like, Hey, Mom, I make these bouquets and I sell it for this price. It's a very tactical exchange. She could wrap her head around it. Now she's, she sort of understands, but again, like there is nothing tangible, especially coming from where she comes from, that she understands what we do, right? She knows that we help companies, and if I I'll say, show her like a campaign that is running digitally or out of home, like, she'll get that, she'll know that we create that. So I think there's a little bit of that that she understands, but just in terms of, like, an agency, a service, the like, specific outcomes. Like, here's a logo. She's like, okay, great. That's exciting. I'll see it on a nick Taylor's head, and as he's, you know, competing in a golf tournament. But she doesn't quite understand what it is. Um, my dad unfortunately passed in 2012 so he never got to see the birth of manual labor, or, like, you know, everything that it means to him or or their influence. But I know he's there. He gets it, probably more than my mom,

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  29:48

Sam, going back to sort of the business side, and even your day to day, like, what's what's like a personal KPI for you, what's something that you sort of like measure yourself against

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Sam Choi  30:03

that's a good question. I feel like I don't know if I have one. And what I mean by that is I can easily say, Hey, I'd love to split my work 5050, meaning vision is 50. And like working for manual labor is the other 50, but I don't know if there, yeah, there is no such thing. Same thing is, there's no such thing that is around, like work life balance, or at least for me, because again, like when you're an entrepreneur, when you own the business, it's really just about dials, like what you turn up and what you turn down, because there's, there is no specific math that equals 100 right? It's just hey, like this week, while I'm setting up for can, it's gonna be a hot 85% work and 15% like, I hope I can do like, 10 sit ups and walk 5000 steps this week, because my personal has to be dialed down a little bit. So I don't know if I have a specific thing that I would say, other than running a fifth marathon, that there's like a specific KPI that I can point to. Gotcha

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  31:18

what? What's something you wish you were better at

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Sam Choi  31:23

I wish I can learn faster. And the reason why I say that is because everything, the more you know, the more you know don't know. Right? Not to sound like the the PSA from NBC, but where? When I start reading more books, when I start listening to more podcasts, I just I realize how much information is out there. And I'm not just talking about, like, AI or where it's going. I'm even talking about, you know, there's this book called unreasonable hospitality. I just started picking it up. I'm fascinated by the idea of, like, what happens when you exceed customers expectations. It's rooted around the food and beverage information, but like, how that's going to apply to what we do as agency owners, as businesses, as people who are in the service industry. So I think, like, I start that, and I'm like, Oh my God, there's so much I don't know. Like, if I can from a robotic AI standpoint, like insert a chip and just download all the information I would just because I wish I can learn more, or have more time just to be smarter, to be more enlightened. I

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  32:35

hear you on that, and I'm going to stay on AI for a second, since you brought it up, but just for everyone listening. So Sam and I met a few months back and had a really good conversation. And one of the topics that I think we went pretty deep on, Sam was around AI, right? You, you shared a great prompt. You, I think you shared a couple of really great prompts with me one night, which I actually did a video on you. Can you share with the audience, like one of your favorite prompts, one of the prompts that helps you be productive or make decisions, so on and so forth? Because I think you have some really great ones, so I'd love to share them with our listeners. Thank

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Sam Choi  33:21

you. The one that you're referring to is just at the highest level. It's about compare and contrast, like so thinking about, again, the business decisions I need to make. And this is a very specific example, but I found it helpful. I was trying to decide between health insurance benefit packages for my team because the rates were going through the roof. And yes, I'm looking at two numbers and two, you know, spreadsheets in front of me, but it's like, I don't know the depth of my knowledge. And of like, making that decision was a little bit beyond me. I felt like I didn't have all the information. So I prompted Choi PT to say, like, okay, here are the different packages. Compare and contrast the differences against the fact that we are an agency at this size with this many employees, and tell me which one is better. Give me a comparison, but also justify it. And so giving AI that prompt to say, here's what I'm looking for, but also back it up with why you recommend this was super helpful. And, you know, at the end, they gave me a suggestion, but they were so blunt about it, because they were like the other one, basically doesn't care about you. But it was very helpful. So I think asking it to do some of the sort of deeper research and analysis at a level that and bring giving it back to you and in the way that you need to digest it is so super helpful. Because, again, like, I am not a lawyer, I am not HR, but I am the person that needs to make that just that decision. So that was super helpful. The other one that I have found, AI is very helpful for is just building frameworks. It is. We can spend hours trying to just think about like, what do I want to say? How do I want to say in what order? Giving it prompts around. Hey, this is my panel. These are the people. Here are the topics I want to hit. Give me a framework. It's not about copy pasting that. It's about giving you the structure and the architecture, so you can kind of fill in the blanks. And I have found those two prompts as the most helpful, just to get me started, as like a launch pad,

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Erik  35:34

super helpful. That's great. Sam. I want to get in a time machine here and go forward a little bit. So so I want to, I want to sort of think about, you know, Sam and manual labor and the teams, like, what? What are you excited about working on? And what do you want to maybe be working on? Fast forward five to seven years from now? What would that be? Ooh,

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Sam Choi  36:03

five to seven years from now, what I would love to be is the company that really practices design thinking. What I mean by that is the basic principle is, hey, I have a problem. I need you to solve this not Hey, Sam, manual labor. We're calling you up because we want you to build a chair for us. What I want someone to do, or a client to come to us and say, we've decided that the old way of sitting or organizing people is outdated. Can you solve this problem? And so having us come in, not only to sort of create something, but to strategically break it apart and say we are looking at something differently, we're going to approach it based on the process, working backwards from like, what problem are we solving? Now we need to make this thing so I want manual labor to be thought of as smart, strategic thinkers that are coming from outside the box, not creating the thing that is just being asked for. Very

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Erik  37:10

cool, very cool. I think it's gonna happen. I

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  37:13

can feel it. There you go.

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Sam Choi  37:15

Let's manifest it. That's

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Erik  37:17

right,

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  37:18

all right, Sam, I've got a I've got a two part question to close us out here. First part of the question is, what's a question you want us to ask our next guest? And then the last guest that we had on asked, What are the things you're going to do this year to make the world a better place?

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Sam Choi  37:42

Awesome. Okay. The answer to the first question is actually kind of similar to the one that's being asked of me. What does December, 31, 2028, look like that would be the question I would ask the next guest. I think it'll be in it sort of gives a little bit. Into their how they're coping with the next three years, but also like their vision and and hope, yep,

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Kerel Cooper (Zoom)  38:12

for

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Sam Choi  38:13

me for the next six months, or the second half of this year, the way I am, I've got sort of technical things in terms of how I'm making the world better in strategic things. The first thing is just finding more ways to support the the sort of the the things that need to be supported. So, for example, Trevor Project, right? Normally, we march. We participate in the Pride March every year. This year we couldn't do it, but what we did end up doing was building a campaign and asking people, ourselves included, to donate to the Trevor Project, because to be able to continue supporting the things that needs supporting, they do need funding. So thinking about the ways that we can take our expertise and our skills to support the way we can help is the very tactical sort of mission, right of what we're going to do strategically, I think what I looking at is just, how do we as people, continue spreading kindness, because it is one of the hardest things, I think, to hold on to, but probably one of the most rewarding. And so it for both myself as a human being, but also as our team, just showing and like Okay, a little bit of kindness and empathy and patience goes a long way. So the ripple effect of that whether it's a client that's overwhelmed, or husband, spouse, friend that might just need the time, I think making time and showing kindness is how we're going to, one by one, make the world a better place.

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Erik  40:06

That's great. Sam, we are super thrilled that you were able to join us, and we know you're extremely busy. So thank you for making some time to hang out with us. A lot of our listeners and viewers love to get in touch. Figure out how to follow you or stay in touch. What are some ways that they can do that? How can they find you?

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Sam Choi  40:23

Oh, they can definitely find me on LinkedIn. So it is Samantha Choi Cadley, so full name you can absolutely please DM me, reach out, and then on Instagram, you can find me as Sam Choi Cadley, as well as manual labor. It'll be rerouted towards me, I think it's manual labor. NYC,

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Erik  40:46

excellent. Sam, thank you so much. And thanks everyone for listening to another episode of MRP, Minority Report podcast with Erik and Kerel. You can find a whole lot more episodes, and wherever you find all of your audio and video, just look for the logo and thanks again. Thank you.

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