Part 7 of 9 in a series about ZENTX’s history and values

It’s right in our company tagline: “Big ideas, big solutions.” So what does that mean? For us, it’s an invitation. We want to hear your big ideas — for branded offices, custom displays, whatever you need. The big ideas are what we love about this business. The more out-of-the-box, the better!

And, no matter how unusual our customers’ ideas have been, we’ve been able to tackle them. That’s what the “big solutions” is about. Just scroll through our portfolio: there’s everything from shipping-containers-turned-bars to parade floats and public art projects.

But of course, doing creative work includes more than just the cool pictures of the finished product. There’s a lot of time and effort behind turning big ideas into big solutions.

That’s what our founder Mike’s here to talk about today. He’d tell you that doing creative work is one of his favorite things about this company. So there’s nobody better to explain what creativity means to him and to the rest of us at ZENTX.

Having Fun with Creative Work

Mike: You lose sight of how cool the stuff is that we’re able to work on. You have all these great ideas and that’s the fun part to come up with. It’s fun to sell it, it’s fun to close it, it’s fun to land a $100,000 project or whatever. But then you have to do it. You have to figure it out, and there’s a lot of steps in between.

So you’re halfway through and you are tired of that project, most of the time. It’s just kinda the truth, right? And then when it’s done you’re like, “I never want to see that thing again.” [laughs]

Oversized beer tap handle that ZENTX installed above the door of a local brewery

But, then when you go back, and you’ve been done with it a couple of months and you go visit that customer and you see it and you’re like, “Man, we did that,” — that’s pretty amazing. And we have all the people here who know how to put that together.  We mighta not known when we first did it, but we figured it out. And there hasn’t been anything that we haven’t been able to figure out yet. 

You know, you talk about it with the guys here and the excitement is like, “Water tower? D’you say water tower? We could use this and we could band it with this and weld steel and [etc.]”  And you get all excited, and then take a step back, and it’s so fun to come up with those ideas. It’s a weird business.

You know, most of the people here are creative. Even the, you know, salespeople, and things like that. I think it is kinda the nature of creative type of people — and we want creative people, no matter what position they’re in. If they’re answering the phone or if they’re in the back running the CNC, we want creative people. And creative people don’t like the same things all the time. We love to create and invent things that have never been done before.