CEO Confessional: Ian Black
The Cannes-winning founder of New Vegas reflects on how confidential feedback led him to transform the firm’s culture and his role as its leader.
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Ian Black does not fit neatly into most people’s idea of an ad exec.
Until leaving the periphery of São Paulo, Brazil, at the age of 28, he had no contact with the ad industry. By 32, he had won two Cannes Lions, including the first given for social media. Now, at 43, he’s the CEO of New Vegas, a 100-person agency with a client list that includes tech giants Facebook and Google alongside brands like Heineken, Gillette, and L'Occitane.
According to Ian, his experience has been 99% trial-and-error. Even New Vegas’ origin story is wrapped in a mishap: the agency formed after one of Ian’s freelance clients bailed on a large job, leaving Ian, and the contractors he had hired to help deliver the project, in a brand new office with no revenue in sight.
In many ways, Ian’s experience resembles that of a typical startup founder—both the highs and the lows. That’s why I was so excited to speak with him about the cultural transformation underway at New Vegas.
For the past few years, Ian has been listening to employees and taking concrete steps to improve the company’s culture based on their feedback.
The project began in response to three alarming signals: a dip in client satisfaction, low employee morale, and a series of critical reviews from former employees.
Facing these challenges, many CEOs might blame them on entitled employees or “growing pains.” Ian chose to listen. What he learned shocked him, and led him to reimagine everything about New Vegas’ operations and his role within it.
The following conversation was translated from Portuguese by Ben Jackson, and condensed and edited for clarity with support from Emily Forsythe.
Ben Jackson: I wanted to start with your first jobs in advertising. Thinking about your experience as an employee at agencies like LiveAd and Wunderman, what did you want to do differently?
Ian Black: When I started New Vegas, immediately, in the first year, I had hired more women than men. So for me, that was already a huge difference.
We never had a culture of overwork. People would arrive at 9am, and by 6-7pm everyone would be gone. This was natural at first—today, it’s very intentional—because I didn’t want that life for myself! I was married, I had a life outside work. So this naturally extended to my employees.
I think we’ve always had a culture of respect: free of sexual harassment, but also free of verbal abuse, public humiliation, things that are common in the ad industry. And we’ve always shown respect for our female colleagues: in some agencies, you’d see a lot of locker-room humor, microaggressions. This respect happened naturally since I was never that kind of guy, so I never encouraged those behaviors, and we were really careful about who we chose to work for us.
I recall a conversation years ago in which you told me your leadership had what some people call a ”come to Jesus moment.” So I wanted to ask you to tell the story of how you arrived at this moment of really questioning the culture and trying to transform it.
It started, I think, with a sense of desperation, the kind you feel when you notice things are starting to fray at the edges. That was around 2017, 2018.
Everyone in the agency was really exhausted. Our client relationships weren’t great, we had more turnover, and my vision and the vision of my partner were moving in opposite directions. And there was very little dialogue, and a lot of resentment—but that was just the cumulative effect of a bunch of things from the past, you know? Of not having anything established, not even a dialogue between the partners.
We thought it was just a matter of improving our processes. So we went and found a process consultant. And they took one look at our infrastructure and said “I don’t think a process consultant is what you need. You need a culture consultant.”
We had other partners at the time, and we ended up having a leadership meeting that was almost like couple’s therapy, where we laid out all of our gripes and uncovered a lot of misalignment over what the agency was and where it was going. And that was the first time I started really talking with my partner [Vinícius Facco], and we saw everything depended on us being aligned.
And we could see the agency was totally fragmented. The quality of the work was down, things were getting off track, and we thought it was just a matter of improving our processes. So we went and found a process consultant. And they took one look at our infrastructure and said “I don’t think a process consultant is what you need. You need a culture consultant. Someone who can help you understand and establish a culture and make it official.”
They recommended a consultant who did a battery of interviews with the whole team, then called the partners into a conference room to share the results of the analysis.
In the interviews, he asked three questions of every employee:
What do you do at the company?
What do you believe you should be doing?
What do you believe others expect from you?
And the answers were all over the place.
The consultant showed us a tag cloud from the interviews with a giant “I” in the middle. And the reason, he said, was that our culture was so fragmented that our employees understood it as “every man for himself.” They made their own cultures, and their own narratives, and their own processes to survive, because the culture wasn’t strong enough to make that connection for them.
But he said another thing, and this was the real come to Jesus:
“The people responsible for everything wrong in the agency aren’t the employees who don’t know what they should be doing. The people responsible for all of this are the leaders.” At the time, I was very absent from the day-to-day. and I said “No, that doesn’t make sense. I’m barely here. How can I be the problem?”
And he said “Ian, you’re the main one responsible. You created this company. Everyone else came later. People come here to work for you. So you need to be the one who ensures things are done right.”
Knowing that I’m responsible for everything that happens in the company helps me see problems in a new light. When something bad happens, I ask myself, “What did I do, or fail to do, that led to this outcome?”
That was a big shock, and I felt a ton of responsibility falling onto my shoulders. And after a few months of processing it, I came to a conclusion that changed everything.
Knowing that I’m responsible for everything that happens in the company helps me see problems in a new light. When something bad happens, I ask myself, “What did I do, or fail to do, that led to this outcome?”
And whenever someone would complain about a problem at work, I’d stop and think and say, “Listen, I’m going to explain why things happen this way around here.” And I began to notice how often people fail to take responsibility for things, and how that gets in the way of progress.
So the beginning of the transformation—and to be clear, we are a long way from done—was me coming to understand my responsibility as a leader. And that changed my relationship with my employees. This is my agency, so I need to make sure it becomes what I want, instead of passively waiting for something to happen.
I find it really interesting what you said earlier: that whenever something bad happens, the first thing you ask is “What did I do, or fail to do?” Most founders or CEOs don’t finish the second half, because our moral calculus naturally focuses on actions. One example I’ve heard: if a mountain climber pushes another climber off a cliff, they’re a murderer, right? But if they see the same person freezing to death and keep moving, they’re just in a hurry.
That’s a marvelous example, because for me, this was about understanding that responsibility is what you choose to do or not do.
Moral philosophy refers to this as “Acts and Omissions.”
Yes, exactly. The challenge is, omissions live in a place that’s very subjective and unconscious. To use that mountain climbing example, it’s not necessarily that you saw someone dying of exposure and chose to ignore their plight. If you don’t have the conceptual framework to see that with your help, they could survive, you’ll never think to cover them with a blanket.
We say our biggest management problem isn’t irresponsibility—it’s a-responsibility… the absence of any sense of responsibility to begin with.
I’ll give you an example, in the form of a neologism. At New Vegas, we say our biggest management problem isn’t irresponsibility—it’s a-responsibility. And it’s worse than irresponsibility, because it’s the absence of any sense of responsibility to begin with.
And a-responsibility is built into our psyches from an early age. In Brazil, and much of Western society, if you break something, you get yelled at. If you hurt yourself, you get yelled at. Any mistake, you get yelled at.
So we’re conditioned, like dogs, to know that we’re always going to make mistakes, but also that if you free yourself from responsibility, nothing bad will happen. A-responsibility is one way of granting ourselves that freedom from accountability. It’s similar to those stories about men who give their female partners the brunt of the emotional labor.
And that mental framework is so deeply embedded in our society, it’s no surprise it shows up at work. And it’s embedded in me, too. I think this process helped me see how much I, like everyone else, fall into these patterns if I’m not careful.
Taking responsibility is a process of raising your own consciousness. When I perceive the consequences of my actions, I understand my role in them. And once you recognize that, you automatically ask, “What do I need to understand, or learn, or do to fix this situation?”
But I also saw that doing the opposite, taking responsibility, that’s not a bad place to be. It’s actually the opposite. It’s a place of empowerment.
Taking responsibility is a process of raising your own consciousness. When I perceive the consequences of my actions, I understand my role in them. And once you recognize that, you automatically ask, “What do I need to understand, or learn, or do to fix this situation?” And so a lot of the work we’re still doing in the agency is to try and deconstruct the frameworks that incentivize a-responsibility.
When we started this process, we had a new director of operations. The team wanted her to jump right in, but we said “No, her first job is to diagnose what’s going on.” So I asked her to sit down and speak with as many employees as possible, including former ones.
I’d love to hear something you learned from those interviews.
We learned there was a maxim at the agency: “If you ask Ian for something and he says no, just ask [Vinícius] Facco, and he’ll say yes without consulting Ian.” And that made me realize how much my partner and I were disconnected, how much our roles were overlapping, and just how obvious this was to everyone.
Also, this past year, I dove into the operations side of the business. I’d hear clients complain, and if I asked five people for the cause, I’d get five different responses. I realized how siloed we are, and how that leads everyone into a protective crouch. And I realized we needed to step back and ask, “What are our fundamentals? What are the things that are not up for debate?”
How are those fundamentals different from “corporate values” as we understand them?
We have three fundamentals: quality of work, client satisfaction, and mental health.
We also have four values: excellence, transparency, authenticity, and caring. Any time there’s a question about how to achieve those, we go back to the fundamentals.
So for example, our culture consultant encouraged us to form rituals, and one of those was starting every meeting with a check-in. And I noticed something: people would mistake the ritual for the value, and “caring” became synonymous with simply “checking in.”
But caring is so much more! So we created a matrix with our values, and in each row we wrote how that value was expressed in different relationships: your relationship with your leaders, your coworkers, your clients, with the agency, and with yourself.
We need leaders who can say to their staff, “Hey everyone, it seems like we’ve structured this process around a fifteen-day timeline. Can we find a new way to get it done in five days, without cutting corners or working nights and weekends?”
What does caring look like with your coworker? It means taking care of them without making excuses for them.
What does caring for the client look like? It means when they’re unhappy, we empathize, and we don’t try to rebut their complaints, and we try to work around their needs. In the past, our department heads were almost like union bosses. A team would say “We can’t deliver this in five days. We need fifteen days.” And the leader would take it as gospel. But that’s the wrong attitude.
We need leaders who can say to their staff, “Hey everyone, it seems like we’ve structured this process around a fifteen-day timeline. Can we find a new way to get it done in five days, without cutting corners or working nights and weekends?”
So what are the metrics that tell you these changes are having the impact you want?
The main one is client satisfaction. That’s an NPS [Net Promoter Score], and it has a few lead indicators:
Are we delivering the work on time?
Are we seeing fewer revisions from the client?
Are they coming back with fewer questions about the process?
What metric are you most proud of?
Here’s one related to hiring: our goal is that no position is left open for very long, if at all. Until recently, our recruiting lacked urgency. And that’s because the emotional cost of having someone fill in—after all, the work still needs to get done—is completely invisible to finance.
We learned our hiring process was behind a lot of operational issues: late deliverables, lower quality, all sorts of things you might not realize are connected to short staffing… I think the most important change a company can make is to abandon this culture of constantly putting out fires.
So we work to reduce that to zero, or even a negative number. Because if I wait until a role is open, it takes longer to fill. But if I invest the time, I can interview candidates in advance so that when I need to fill it, I have a list of people who can start right away.
And how did that metric—what we call Time to Fill over here—how did that emerge from this cultural transformation process?
We learned our hiring process was behind a lot of operational issues: late deliverables, lower quality, all sorts of things you might not realize are connected to short staffing. I realized if I could shorten that window, it would keep the work flowing.
I think the most important change a company can make is to abandon this culture of constantly putting out fires. Because we were spending more time every week putting out fires than getting the real work done. Imagine how much money is wasted every day! But again, you don’t see that cost. That, to me, is the craziest part of people normalizing this kind of thing.
Compared to when you started this project, how much time do you spend actually getting the real work done now?
Me, personally? Before, I’d literally spend zero days on the real work, and the whole week was spent fixing mistakes. And we’re far from done, but it’s up to two days.
In a lot of ways, your story mirrors a typical startup. What would you say to other founders who are focused on growth and don’t have time to zoom out?
First: It’s your company. Everything happens because you either act or fail to act. The sooner you understand that and become the guarantor of your culture, the better.
Second: Make sure everything is very aligned. What is the company’s mission? Where is it going? What needs to be delivered? What does success look like, and how is it measured? This needs to be documented and accessible, both for onboarding and as a reference for leadership.
Third: You need leaders, and they need to be qualified, and they need to understand that leadership means guaranteeing that alignment and the quality of work.
And finally, understand that the people around you need to be happy. The customer needs to be happy. Your workers need to be happy. And if the customer and the consumer aren’t the same, you need to think about those stakeholders, too. Keep that in mind, and your life will be a lot calmer, and you’ll see more progress and less chaos.