Timm Chuisano (00:00):

Do I talk about protein bars? Do I talk about sushi? Do I talk about just job stuff? And that turned into vlogging, which turned into, I blinked, and all of a sudden I was in the process of firing myself and kind of starting all over again at 47.

Ross Borden (00:16):

This is creator, the podcast for Matador Network. I’m your host, Ross Borden, and I believe creators are the future of all global advertising. So join me as I sit down with top creators to hear about how they got started, the challenges they’ve overcome, and the tips you need to become a full-time creator. All right, welcome back to another episode of Creator the podcast. Today we have Tim Ano from one of my favorite creators and someone I discovered very early on, on TikTok, making really, really innovative content very consistently. Tim, welcome to the pod.

Timm Chuisano (00:54):

How are you doing, Ross? Thanks. Dropping me on, brother.

Ross Borden (00:57):

So tell us where you are at the moment, and for those who don’t follow you on social, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Timm Chuisano (01:05):

The first part’s an easy answer. I’m in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and I’m sitting in my home office, which I’m now doing for the first time in 14 years. The Journey corporate dude really had a relatively normal-ish career, I’ll say. I wanted to be in production, I wanted to be in sports, I wanted to be in marketing, bobbed around a little bit over 20 plus years in the corporate space. Last 11 years, I was at basically what everyone would know as the cable company, charter communications, which depending on what city you live in, would be known as spectrum to you. And I oversaw a team of 240 individuals spread out across the country. My team was the reason why you would see small businesses on tv, the car commercial, the new restaurant in town. All of a sudden it goes from an Apple spot to come on down to Bob’s Toyota.

(02:04):

My team was the reason why Bob’s Toyota had a commercial. It’s just been part of a cable advertising game forever. And they brought me in 2013 to try to help reinvent this space. And then in 2020 started making tiktoks because I thought this is an interesting tool for a couple different reasons. One, I thought that from a workflow perspective, especially considering I was running a large team that was producing 20,000 pieces of creative annually, something that is going to be able to capture, edit, end post all in one workflow, even if it’s not broadcast quality, what can I learn from that? And so let me play around with it. And then also from a self-expression perspective, at least to a certain extent, now being 47 years old, I was one of the first probably million people to download Instagram, if not in a smaller pile than that, but never had creator aspirations, so to speak, outside of I’ll write some stuff here and there and it never goes anywhere. Or I’ll make a video that’s unnecessarily overproduced as a recap of a family trip kind of thing. But TikTok gave a new opportunity for theater to literally be not a single human being that knew who I was or what I was up to. I just started playing around in it. And relatively early on, I started to get a sense that there might be an interest in somebody bringing perspective from the other side of the corporate ladder, so to speak, someone

(03:41):

That’s in it that’s doing it. And once I realized that I didn’t really have to niche myself and that I almost had too many niches, I was like, do I talk about protein bars? Do I talk about sushi? Do I talk about just job stuff? Then I was like, I don’t have time to really even think about it. I’m just going to talk about all of it and kind of figure it out as I go. And that turned into vlogging, which turned into, I just capture stuff during the day and then the next morning hopefully I can make some sort of cohesive story out of it. And then I blinked and all of a sudden I was in the process of firing myself and kind of starting all over again at 47.

Ross Borden (04:21):

Yeah, I want to get into that new life after firing yourself. But I think that was a vibe that I got. And I don’t know how early on I was following your account on TikTok, but I think pretty early. But I immediately got the vibe that this is a guy with a big important job who works in media and production and storytelling for his company or for different brands. I thought maybe you worked at one of the big agencies, and I was like, he’s probably experimenting with this because it’s a new storytelling platform and it’s a new way of creating frictionless fast content. But then your stories were so good. I think you were the first one that was like you would do the loop. I don’t know what you call that as a creator, but you could watch it on a loop and it all makes sense given your voiceover.

(05:13):

So you’re ending the video with, and that’s why I always say, and then it goes into the beginning of your video perfectly. But yeah, a couple things struck me with your content. One is that you were clearly a very busy guy in your corporate life. You had a family, you were always running, and it was sort of like a day in the life of Tim, but I loved your videos. They always had a takeaway. There was always, I was blown away at how much you were getting done in these. It’s a normal Wednesday, but it was like you clearly are a very busy, productive person. So first I want to go back to when you still were working at the job, you’re still managing what, 200 people on your team,

Timm Chuisano (05:58):

2 40, 2 40.

Ross Borden (06:00):

So you’re managing a massive team of people. What was the reaction of your company and of your team when you were like, oh, now Tim has hundreds of thousands of followers and he’s making these videos seen by millions of people. What was the reaction when people started to discover you at work?

Timm Chuisano (06:21):

It was a slow drip. It was a very weird slow drip, but thank God it was a bit of a slow drip with a couple of, what I’ll say were kaboom moments where all of a sudden it was just water cooler talk across the entire company. The company is a hundred thousand people coast to coast, including Hawaii. So as things would start to get bigger, luckily I got into this space sooner than what Charter knew what to do with me. And fortunately for everybody, the natural angle that I took was that enjoy your work, be kind in the office, be thoughtful, be considerate, be reliable. All of these almost cliche things that you would want to instill in any workforce. And that was just naturally coming across just the way that I existed and lived. I had just gotten through a very toxic time in my career as well and was on the other side of it. So I almost had this rebirth of a mindset too, of like wow, and helped us kind of turn a page, so to speak, from a culture perspective.

Ross Borden (07:28):

What do you mean toxic? Why? What was toxic about the former part of your career

Timm Chuisano (07:33):

In 2014 or 15? Comcast comes in and they try to acquire us, the two biggest cable companies, I think, on the planet, on these merger discussions. And they’re putting up name tags on doors already, and it starts to become more like, Hey, how do I make sure that my job gets saved or where’s my space? And then egos start to come out. And it was just this environment that I was extraordinarily uncomfortable in addition to just the overall change management that I’d already been through, because the Thursday before, my first day before any of this in this job, they brought me in, they said, you’re going to inherit a hundred people for this new role of vice president of production creative services. You have to fire everybody in the first six weeks. You have eight months to rebuild the department from scratch. Here’s the new business model. You handle 20,000 projects annually that can’t slip while you’re doing this. I was 35 years old, I just had a kid. I’m like, the fuck is going on?

Ross Borden (08:33):

Well, you had to fire a hundred people. You inherited a hundred people and you had to fire all of them, all of them within the first six weeks.

Timm Chuisano (08:40):

One of those

Ross Borden (08:40):

Brutal,

Timm Chuisano (08:42):

We, your jobs, as you know, it no longer exists. And I went through all of the mental conundrums that one would go through in a situation along those lines. And I ultimately arrived at, if I walk away from this A, there does not seem to be a discussion. It was, here’s the job, now let us tell you how it’s actually going to go down, because that’s why they brought me in the Thursday before my first day. I thought, wow, look at how cool and important this job is. I have to go in early for additional prep work

(09:11):

Was amazing. I’m a VP at 35, and they sit me down and they have this conversation. I’m like, oh my God, what in the world have I signed myself up for? And so by the time TikTok comes out and I start making them, I’m kind of in this, I’m just turning the page mentally from everything that I just described. And because nobody knew me there either, I was like, I can do whatever I want here. I’m going to learn from a technology and from a workflow perspective, and then I can just be 17 if I want to. I can talk about whatever things. And then as I started to understand what might be useful to the audience, and also because of everything that I just said, I’m like, I know I could help anybody think their way through a work conundrum.

Ross Borden (09:59):

So I want to come back to that stuff later in terms of the corporate culture and happiness and appreciation. But first on the creative angle, I think if I was running a huge brand and I saw that someone from my team was making tiktoks every day, I’d be thrilled because those of us who’ve worked a lot in production know that there can be insane amounts of waste of money and time and overthinking things and overshooting things and spending too much on video that’s overproduced. And then you have to pay for every view. Whereas what really works are basically TikTok style, more quick to edit, quick to produce, quick to ideate. So how did that change? Were you just doing that for fun on the side when you were doing your own stories or were you also, did some of the work you were doing for yourself on TikTok bleed over into some of the work that you guys were making for all these small business clients as you guys were running this big team?

Timm Chuisano (11:02):

It’s a great question. There is almost no spillover for a couple of different reasons. Number one, I was breaking every rule in the company handbook on a daily basis. Can I capture content on premise? Can I use company equipment for blah, blah, blah? But it got too big to fail before they knew what to do with me, where I was like, Hey, there’s an employee that has however many thousand I had when they finally figured it out. But also because of the demographic that it skewed towards, it took a while until you either had to follow me or you had to connect the dots. But in a company that big, it was kind of easy to just have this happening underneath the current until it was like, wait a minute, what’s going on here? Who is this? And that was kind of a wild experience in and of itself, and I tried to be very cautious about it too. And also too, in that position, I try to stay out of the day to day. My job was for 240 people. My job was, is our budget being managed eloquently as humanly possible is what’s our five-year CapEx plan,

Ross Borden (12:14):

Right? You’re not in the war room with creative, this is what we should do for that video. You’re managing 240 people and making sure budgets are on track. Totally. But your employer, when they found out that you were a million follower creator on TikTok, it was too late for them to essentially ask you to stop. But you’re saying those creative learnings from TikTok that you were, as you figured out the platform and making better and better content didn’t really bleed into the client work that you were doing essentially.

Timm Chuisano (12:44):

Well, two quick things on that. One, there was a really funny, especially in hindsight now moment, where when a Rolling Stone article came out that I got in trouble for it because it mentioned in the article that it worked for Spectrum. And as long as I kept the word spectrum out of my mouth or out of an article or a podcast or whatever, I was basically just going and doing whatever I wanted to do when technically anything that we did as individual employees that was in the public facing domain that had any general association with the fact that we worked for this company, had to be vetted by pr. Again, a hundred thousand person company, they don’t want people out there just being like, Hey, I’m going to talk to whomever about whatever. So if you were public speaking, unquote, you needed full on approval before you even did it. And there was a chance that someone from PR was actually going to be on the phone or in the room with you. So when the ruling of Stone Thing popped up, I was like, I know where this would go. They’d be like, oh, we want to vet the questions. We want to help you prep your answers, and can we come over to your house when this happens? And it was like, absolutely not. And no, no, thank you.

Ross Borden (13:52):

And especially when the title of the Rolling Stone piece was, meet the Overachieving creator teaching TikTok to Chill the Fuck Out, they may have turned some heads at the company.

Timm Chuisano (14:02):

So when that dropped, and it was funny, I was like, the interview happened, and then time goes by and you don’t hear, and I’m not going to follow up with the writer who is just a wonderful human being across the board and wildly talented too. I mean, God, am I so fortunate that she even thought of this in the first place, and all of a sudden one day, it was like three or four months later, Hey, the article, Hey, help All is well, article’s almost ready. I’ll send you a copy. I was like, amazing. Two seconds later, here it is. And I was in a meeting and I remember being like, oh, shit, this is really happening. That was a, oh, this is cool to, oh, maybe it went away and maybe I’m not cool anymore. Maybe they just don’t want to do this anymore to, oh my God, this is all,

Ross Borden (14:46):

It’s going live tomorrow.

Timm Chuisano (14:48):

Yeah, no, it was already live. By the time that she sent it to me, it was like, Hey, here’s a 32nd warning kind of thing. Once that came out and started to get around the company, I was like wildfire. And then all of a sudden the next day, my boss was knocking on my door being like, Hey, Tim was like,

Ross Borden (15:06):

Talk about the Rolling Stone piece.

Timm Chuisano (15:08):

Yeah. He is like, no, he was great. One of the best human beings I’ve ever worked with. He goes, how was your day yesterday? And I remember, I’m like, I know where you’re going with this, but I appreciate the fact that you’re really trying. And he said, personally, holy shit man. Good for you. Professionally, we might have a bit of an issue on our hands. It said spectrum in there. This went up to the top of the food chain. And because there’s multiple verticals within the company, it went all the way up to the ceo and the CEO O called the president of our side of the company, and the president of our side of the company was like, what are you talking about? And they’re like, Hey, you have an employee that was rolling Stone yesterday. What the fuck is going on? And

Ross Borden (15:51):

His PR team had no idea, no heads up. He’s just like, wait, what?

Timm Chuisano (15:55):

Right. Which is the worst, worst that I could call blindsided. So he was pissed. Yeah. And so I remember being reprimanded for that, but outside of that, they really, especially in hindsight, they did a pretty amazing job of just letting me do my thing.

Ross Borden (16:14):

So when did the soul searching start? When were we talking to your wife and your boss about do I really still want to do this and should I try and elegantly fire myself and restructure my team?

Timm Chuisano (16:28):

Probably summer of 23 I would say is when it started to get real. I think it was that spring that the Rolling Stone article dropped, and all of a sudden I’m getting phone calls from agencies or agents and started to get, I think I had already signed with an agency called Park and Fine to work with them as my literary agency.

Ross Borden (16:54):

It’s funny, I started this podcast. I’m talking to all these digital creators and then half of the most successful ones are talking about their book being the thing that really cracked their career wide open, or they keep writing books because the books are like this flywheel that’s spinning and it’s getting them more press, more followers, more brand deals. The books are doing well, they’re getting another book deals, so why not just keep your job, keep the paycheck, keep making tiktoks, and write the book on the side. What was missing or what else are you going to put behind this new career as a creator and a writer that you wouldn’t be able to do if you had stayed at your job?

Timm Chuisano (17:35):

One of the tipping point moments was getting a project handed to me by the president. There was something that was somewhat of an annual thing that would pop up. And so I remember getting that, and I had gotten the point where for things along those lines, I was able to quickly evaluate almost in a blink how much time it was going to take me. Got really good at time blocking over the past decade, and so I saw it. I’m like, that’s at least 20 hours just over the next two weeks alone of just meetings and keystrokes. And I remember thinking, what else would I do with that 20 hours? And I didn’t have the firm answer in my head, but that just wouldn’t get out of my head of what would I do with this extra time? Especially because I had my wife supporting me saying, don’t wait too long. It wasn’t even a

Ross Borden (18:29):

Question my mind to make the leap. If you’re going to make the leap, don’t wait too long. We haven’t really touched on brand deals. Let’s touch on that quickly before we wrap. So like I said earlier, you’ve been on both sides of the table. You’re a creator, but you’ve definitely been on the brand side as well. And it sounds like the role when you were managing 240 people, you guys are also essentially doing agency work too. So creative production, creative strategy. So you’ve kind of seen it all. What brand deals have you had that you think are some of the best ones personally for you? And then what advice would you give to both creators and to the brands in terms of making great content that people actually want to watch?

Timm Chuisano (19:13):

Amazing questions. I’m really proud of the Dyson work that I’ve done. I’ve been a Dyson home partner for think a year and a half now, and really smart on their part where they’re like, you’re using our product. You obviously like vacuuming because it’s just a part of your daily routine. Let’s figure out how to bring that to life. And they bought an idea that I pitched, which was the robot vacuum was basically applying to be a new housemate of ours. And so I’m touring it around the home and adding a little bit of whimsical magic, so to speak, to something that could have just been like, here’s the product, here’s what it does, here’s why I use it, et cetera.

(19:58):

So storytelling from a different perspective. So I’d love to work with Dyson. I’m in the process of getting some pieces through a queue with Lincoln right now, and I’m actually really excited about the last one that I just shot where the whole thing is about pushing your boundaries and how do I do that to a reasonable degree that’s not just going to be something that checks the boxes for what the brief says but doesn’t actually deliver to the audience. I think that that’s to the second part of your question. It has to deliver value at the end of the day. And by delivering value, it’s got to be something where someone’s going to want to share it with somebody else or they want to keep it to come back to it later. And that’s really hard to do with an ad piece, but I think the way that you can get there is to have that be part of the conversation, be cognizant of the brief, but not have it just be the brief, because that’s what gets the internal approvals. There was a piece that I did with, I won’t call out the brand name. There’s a piece that I did with the drink company and they had a very specific angle of, here, we want you to tell people why you use this beverage for these reasons. And I remember being like, it’s pretty close. It’s not really off the mark for me as an individual. So yeah, I can do it. But in hindsight, because they said, this is what we want you to do for these reasons versus here’s what we’re looking to get across,

(21:33):

Its up

Ross Borden (21:33):

Being something. How does this apply to your actual life and your story

Timm Chuisano (21:37):

Authentically? But even beyond that, how does this apply to the view’s life? Who gives about my life? There’s a lot of things that I could talk about that’s like, cool, this thing is amazing. But unless I give the viewer a nugget that is actionable, insightful, or elicit some sort of emotion from them,

(21:54):

Then it’s useless. I did a brand piece with a sneaker company and they were very cool about me saying, this is not going to be about the sneakers. This is going to be about my running path. Because if I tell people, if I use this opportunity to say, this is one of the best running paths that most New Yorkers don’t know about, and I’m literally just going to bring them along the road and show them exactly where to go and what the best time of day is and those types of things, and I just happened to be wearing our sneakers while doing it, that did super well. Why? Because people wanted to remember what that was. They wanted to share with a friend, Hey, let’s go run this running path. And it just happened to be that it was part of a brand deal where if it was like, let me tell you what’s so great about this sneaker

Ross Borden (22:42):

Pure scrolling.

Timm Chuisano (22:44):

Yeah, exactly. Even if it had the most incredible in it ever,

Ross Borden (22:49):

You’re kind of a brand dream if they’re smart enough to listen to you because you come with, I see where you’re going with this brief. I’ve been here before, but I’m going to spin it a little bit. And I think that’s an important lesson for both the brands. And I know we have a lot of brands that listen to this podcast around how can they work more effectively with creators? So being a little more open to going beyond what’s just in the brief and read the cue cards and hit the points and then we’re done. And then I think for the creators, a lot of creators, when they get approached by a brand, they’re like, I don’t want to screw this up, so I’m just going to do what they say when I think the better thing to do, which is actually good for the brand as well, is being like, I see where you’re going with this, but to make this more authentic to my audience and more impactful and more authentic to me, which is what you’ve been telling me you want, authenticity is like a cliche almost is how much it gets mentioned in this industry.

(23:43):

They should kind of take it a little step further or tweak the theme or tweak the content a little bit because that’s going to make for better content.

Timm Chuisano (23:53):

If I was a brand, right, if you put me immediately back in that world, I am bringing in creators in the development of the broader campaign that they’re effectively at the end of the day going to be one of the last dominoes to fall on. Here’s what we’re developing for Doritos next year. Here’s what is in just the origin stages for this new whatever it is,

Ross Borden (24:13):

Bringing the creator way up the creative food chain to get a look at the ideas in their infancy before they’re like fully formed,

Timm Chuisano (24:21):

Totally treating it almost like, Hey, we want to treat this as user testing. To a certain extent, it’s going to be that much easier to turn things around and hopefully then create long-term relationships too, because there’s a reason why LeBron James and some of the biggest celebrities in the world, they don’t bounce around between brands all the time. Yes, it’s because they’re the world’s biggest celebrities, but also because people like consistency when it comes to the people that they associate with which brands. And if we just become basically NASCAR drivers with a bazillion logos stuck all over ourselves and nobody knows what the hell we stand for this sneaker for that sneaker,

Ross Borden (25:01):

Yeah, it’s all worthless. You kind of stand for nothing.

Timm Chuisano (25:04):

Yes, but it’s the brands that are doing that to the space. It’s not the space doing that the other way around. And brands seem to be cognizant of that.

Ross Borden (25:14):

Yeah, very good advice. Love it. Well, Tim, we’re over time. I have a feeling you’re about to become a bestselling author, so tell us when we can look for the book, how to Get Addicted to Appreciation. Is that right?

Timm Chuisano (25:27):

How to Get Addicted to Appreciation? Fingers crossed early September, and if I can deliver something that really gets people to look at their day-to-day differently, then I think it’s going to be really fun, and I think it’s going to be really fun to see how it can impact people’s worlds.

Ross Borden (25:45):

Well, congrats. Congrats on The New Life as a full-time creator. Congrats on the huge following and the amazing content on TikTok, and congrats on the book deal, and we will be looking for it.

Timm Chuisano (25:56):

Thank you, brother. Thank you very much having me on today.

Ross Borden (25:58):

Thanks for joining. Creator, the podcast is produced by Matador Network. We are a leading global travel publisher focused on travel and adventure. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe. Every week I interview a new top creator. New episodes are released every Tuesday on YouTube, apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere podcasts are found. Thanks for listening.