Jay Borman + Sara Zimmermann
You guys started this agency DURING the pandemic. You were originally meeting to help cheer each other on in the job search.
Jay: Early on, we thought, “Let’s do some agency work just to get some freelance going while we find jobs.” And then the job market evaporated when COVID hit. So it was like, “I guess we’re doing this full time now.” We just started getting on the phone and getting ourselves out there. Grinding it out. Eventually we had a job come in, a small job for Woods Equipment Company. They wanted us to do some promotional stuff. That started building into other things because they had a good experience with us. Then we got a call from somebody that we reached out to, “Hey, this other agency is locked down because they’re in Seattle. Can you guys do this stuff?” They threw us a budget and we worked within it and started building that relationship. It’s been like that. A lot of the grind we were doing putting ourselves out there, eventually, when the need came up, people were reaching out to us. The last couple weeks we’ve been so busy we can barely keep up with it, it’s crazy. It’s definitely like, it rains, it pours.
Sara: Right, but then in a couple weeks, back to the grind. Calling people.
Jay: Probably. That’s the life of the agency. Hot or cold. I was always at start-ups before [my last gig, which was a bigger corporate creative team]. It’s not completely unfamiliar to be back in this world. It’s funny and a little scary sometimes. But then you just think, “This is up to us. So WE have to make this happen.”
Right, right. You guys are a little lucky cause you can hold each other accountable.
Sara: Two people make a lot of difference if you have a bad day.
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Jay: It’s funny, early on the CARES Act came out and there was all this help for small businesses. We started in January. The CARES Act really only applied to what business you did last year. We didn’t exist last year.
In Ohio, they didn’t do anything for freelancers.
Sara: Right.
Jay: NOTHING. We spent a good 40-50 hours talking to banks, talking to the SBA, talking to our congressman. Going down all these routes. The run around.
Jay: It just became very clear to us that nobody is coming.
Sara: Ever. Small businesses have to do it themselves.
Jay: Right! The moment we realized that and turned our energy around from trying to get that help, turned it into, “Go get jobs. Go get work.”
Jay: Benefits are starting to run out. The virus is at an all time high, nationwide. We’re hoping that [the government does] something. Even though we’re not directly benefiting from the CARES Act, we need the economy to be running so we can get work. I saw an interview the other day with the owner of Mikey’s Late Night Slice. He talked pretty openly on the news about his reliance on PPE and stuff like that. Sara and I were talking this morning, we need Mikey to have PPE. We need his employees earning money. Because the moment all that starts shutting down, the economy is going to collapse. We need it running. That’s the one thing that was very in my face. We work in design and arts. It’s not considered essential. It’s essential to us to making a living. There’s a little bit of a mental struggle. You know, watching landscapers, who are considered essential, working and us not working.
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Talking about the Black Lives Matter protests in Columbus…
Jay: Isn’t is just so bizarre though to watch the news and it’s here in Columbus? There was a time when things were boarded up and National Guard is on the street. Don’t we see this in the news from other countries?
And the National Guard felt completely unnecessary.
Jay: 100 percent. I will tell you that with everything going on and living so close to it, I was definitely uneasy.
Sara: There were a couple nights that I was like, “Is it safe? Should I be more prepared? Should I be packing a bag or having an exit strategy?”
Jay: There was one night that took everyone off guard. People were going around smashing windows and going into buildings and stuff. It was SO jarring, you know? And Sara and I, it was probably the second day, we were like, “We should drive down and see what’s going on.” So we drove, and how stupid! We were just rubbernecking!
Sara: Yeah, we thought we were going to be driving down the street just checking it out, right?
Jay: There were a lot of road blocks. We got funneled right near the main library, which was a staging ground for a lot of the protests. We found ourselves completely surrounded by people and cars in a gridlock situation. We did not belong there.
Sara: We didn’t have any signs, we were stuck in the middle of it. People were looking at us, wondering why we were there.
Jay: We just want to rubberneck and now we can’t get out of here! There was a lot of energy and enthusiasm around us and we weren’t in that mindframe. We were so embarrassed. We shouldn’t have been out there. The riot police were out, there was this threat of violence. We were stuck in the middle of something that we had no intention of being in.
Sara: We thought we were going to observe from afar. Nope.
Jay: It’s very interesting because… it’s a point in time. You want to see it. One early morning, early, when it was calm. I was out driving around with [my baby in the car] and I took my camera out. I took some photos of the National Guardsmen, with my interest in history, I want to document this. This is right here. I chit-chatted with them. It’s funny, they were all people who live in Columbus that got activated… It was a weird time. A lot of the history that I read is around the Vietnam war and it was really interesting to see that type of protest in modern times. Right in our front yard.
Yeah. Within the first day or two I had Neil Young’s song “Ohio” playing in my head on repeat. Hoping no one would get killed.
Jay: Some of it, it put it in a different context for me. When it’s happening versus reading about it forty or fifty years ago. Especially talking to those guardsmen. They’re just Columbus people that got called up to do their job. In the same way that the protesters were doing their thing. It’s just a collision course for confrontation.
Absolutely. Not enough information on either side.
Jay: TOTALLY. Not enough good information on either side. It’s scary to think too, how much false information is being propagated. Social media platforms are being used as news sources by so many people because they’re so lazy.
Or even somebody hears something but they don’t actually go check it out, and they post it. And it gets re-posted. But if you think about it, it’s the same thing that’s always been happening, just at a faster pace. Before, it was bad information by word of mouth.
Jay: It was one of those things, you could tell everyone was so pent up from the lockdown and staying home. There was a release.
I am surprised that the release was as peaceful as it was. On both sides.
Sara: I totally agree.
Makes you a little more optimistic about humanity.
Jay: Absolutely.
Sara: Right. It can be nonviolent…It was hard to see all the boarded up buildings along High Street. That was scary for me. How long is it going to be like this?
Jay: It is sad that things get taken to extremes really fast. Business owners had to [board up their windows]. It stinks…
The first morning after things started to erupt, you could see it was probably a very small amount of people doing damage. All throughout the city it was the same MO. It looked like one hammer strike to glass. One person with a hammer can do an awful lot of damage in a half hour, you know?
Who knows what side the person was even on, if they were “on a side”. Someone just wanting to create havoc.
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On how freelance and small business health insurance sucks…
Jay: One of the big things I’m struggling with is health insurance. Because I’ve got a one year old so I want to have the best health insurance possible. He’s getting check-ups and development help and all this stuff right? As we look at the availability of health insurance on the market, it all just sucks.
Oh yeah. I know it.
Jay: It’s terrible. What we had access to at [our old job] was pretty good. It’s just amazing [the difference]. You look at that whole market and why it is where it is and it’s clearly broken.
Sara: Clearly. We’re so far behind other countries.
Jay: So many of the other issues we have as a society in the US, financially or economically, it’s because big businesses are favored and the small businesses or individuals are just left behind.…I think I’ve heard that small businesses account for something like 60 million jobs. Which is a huge part of the US workforce. But no insurance provider wants to deal with all these little itty bitty. It’s just easier for them to deal with the big corporation.
Yeah, there’s no big money behind all of the small businesses so there’s no incentive for these big insurance companies. Making money is trumping the provision of their service…I’m paying these premiums for this thing that I haven’t used since the pandemic started. It’s so expensive!
Jay: It’s a rough situation. Even when my baby was born a year ago, I was at [my old gig] and I had that awesome [comparably] insurance. [My wife and I] still paid A LOT out of pocket. A lot. It just makes me wonder, how do people afford to have a kid? What if they don’t have insurance? I’m sure some of this stuff is so debilitating for people that they can’t recover.
Sara: Having no insurance is better than having a little insurance. With a little insurance you’re going to end up paying most of it. But if you have none, [you get some help.]
When you don’t have insurance there’s a different rate that you pay the doctor.
Jay: I remember those days. When my brother and I had Plan B Toys. 25 years old, going to the dentist, and they ask if I have any insurance and it’s like, “Nope. I can pay cash.” “How about $70?” I remember negotiating at the dentist.
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On creative industry recovery…
Sara: We’ve been seeing the same content. People are going to be forced to create content.…
We’ve heard of a couple [photo] shoots that have gone on. It’s totally a crawl.
Jay: The lockdown happened and it was going to be for two weeks. I remember thinking, “TWO WEEKS? We have to stay at our houses for two weeks? I don’t think I can do this.” Well, six months later, the entire country has changed their mindset. This isn’t a two week and then its fixed type thing. This is here so we have to figure out ways of doing things. Early on…there was that fear of “What’s going to happen?” The shock of any projects that we had, everything got pulled in one day. All of it. I think now people have started to really get their heads around it. Let’s get creative in how we can make something happen. Work is starting to open up a little bit because there is a bit more of a long term mindset. And a total acceptance of the current situation instead of that initial fear based reaction.
I can see that. I went through a mourning process for sure. For those big jobs that got killed. That’s where I see your partnership as being a huge benefit. You can hold each other up and hold each other accountable.
Jay: Totally. It’s been extremely helpful. [Pre-COVID,] we had just moved into this office and we were super happy. It was a place for us to come to even though we didn’t have any work right away. It was a place we could come bring our energy to do the outreach. Work on stuff, build the website. We even did a few projects for free just to get our wheels greased. Then when we lost access to this office [due to lockdown], we decided we can’t lose our efforts. The first couple days we didn’t do anything. Then Sara offered her dining room to convert into an office… From 12 to 5 every Monday through Friday we would meet and work on stuff. That gave us a schedule and something to do. It kept us working. Even if it was on nothing. One of the things that sprung out of it was making this little video series. A fiction series called “Outer Ruins”. We started making this little thing…it gave us something to do, something to work on.
Sara: We almost wore our costumes today. It was fun.
Jay: We would be outside filming, there would be people out, not very many, but people were cheering. I was riding my WWII motorcycle down the street and people were cheering because someone was out doing something! It was so crazy. We still don’t know what we’re going to do with it. What those personal projects did, it kept us engaged creatively. Then we landed a client and got a job, we were still going.
Sara: We still had work mentality.
Jay: You step away from it for a second and you’re like, “Oh my god I don’t even know where to start on this.”
Sara: I mean we got dressed, we usually got coffee. It was a crawl. But we made as much work as we possibly could. I would have lost my mind. I would have lost my mind in my own house for that long of time. This definitely kept me sane.
I did continue to do things creatively during those first weeks too. Even if it wasn’t photography. I would show up in my studio every single day. I still do. THAT part at least hasn’t been hard for me.
Sara: That’s awesome. Everyone is dealing with it differently for sure.
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On Merciful Thieves’ first experience working on a set with a crew in post-COVID…
Jay: We had to do a fairly substantial video shoot for a client a couple weeks ago. We had to adopt new COVID procedures. Keeping crews really small, wearing masks, taking temperatures, setting up a screening process. It worked. One of our talent showed up with a fever he didn’t know about. We were like, “We don’t know if you have COVID, we just know you have a fever and we can’t allow you on set.” I feel good that we set up those procedures, we followed the CDC and state of Ohio guidelines. It worked. Keeping people safe was our number one priority. And frankly, liability is a thing we have to worry about. Any freelancer has to. Are you liable? Are you doing something that is putting someone in a position that’s unsafe?
Sara: Everybody we had on set wore masks all day long. People we pretty compliant. There was one time where I had to remind someone, “Whoa, whoa, you’re off set.”
Jay: Everyone that we brought in was so happy to be working. So they were doing whatever it took. It was nice to get back into that. That was our first experience of doing a big shoot in post-COVID.
It probably helps that you guys are a smaller ship too. You’re not fitting the Titanic for a day cruise. You don’t have to answer to anyone but your clients.
Jay: That’s right. I think the clients that value us most see us as an augmentation to their team. We have the ability to scale based on the project. They love that because [they’re not locked into a certain dollar amount per project with us. We can scale based on their budget and needs.] It adds value for them.
Find Jay + Sara:
Jay’s Instagram
Sarah’s Instagram
Want to work with the Merciful Thieves creative agency? Email them.