Francis Gagnon is the founder of Voilà:, an information design company specializing in sustainable development. In addition to leading the work of the firm, he delivers training and gives talks on information design and data visualization.
Francis worked eight years (2005-2013) for the World Bank Group, in Washington DC. He led the design of the first standardized management reports for the advisory services of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) on five continents. He also designed and implemented a data management system in addition to creating models of financial reports, human resources, project portfolio and results.
Francis’s work has been cited by The Economist and Fast Company and has appeared several times in “The Best of the Visualization Web” at VisualisingData.com. He is also one of the founders of Visualization Montreal (2014), a Meetup group with more than 1,800 members.
Francis and I met years ago, and while working at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) gave me one of my first opportunities to teach custom data visualization workshops. In this week’s episode of the podcast, we talk about Francis’s journey to building his own information design company.
Episode Notes
Christophe Viau (d3visualization on Twitter)
Related Episodes
Episode #33: Chris Parmer from Plotly
Support the Show
This show is completely listener-supported. There are no ads on the show notes page or in the audio. If you would like to financially support the show, please check out my Patreon page, where just for a few bucks a month, you can get a sneak peek at guests, grab stickers, or even a podcast mug. Your support helps me cover audio editing services, transcription services, and more. You can also support the show by sharing it with others and reviewing it on iTunes or your favorite podcast provider.
Transcript
Welcome back to the PolicyViz podcast. I am your host, Jon Schwabish. Spring is here, blue skies, cut grass, warm weather, my allergies are out of control. But I hope you are well and safe and healthy. I am very excited for this week’s episode of the podcast. I have my good friend Francis Gagnon here. Francis founded the information design company, Voilà, back in 2013, in Montreal. Francis and I go way back to when I was first getting started in teaching data visualization and presentation skills, and we’ve worked together for a number of years, and it’s really been an omission on my part not to have Francis on the podcast prior to this week. So I’m very excited, he was able to take time out and talk to me about his company and his work. As you’re going to hear, it’s a really interesting conversation that we have, because we’re not going to focus so much on the actual process that Francis and his team go through in creating visualizations, in creating both the print and online products that they make. We’re actually going to talk about this concept of building an information design company. I think as we all know, there are lots of freelancers around and in the data visualization space, but there are not as many companies in the data visualization space. And so, Francis talks about his evolution going from working at the World Bank to starting his own firm freelancing, and then building up a team behind him.
So I hope you really enjoyed this week’s episode of the show. So Francis worked for a long time at the World Bank, as you’re going to hear. His work has been cited by the economist, cited by Fast Company, and he’s appeared several times in the best of the visualization web at visualizingdata.com, run by Andy Kirk. He’s also one of the founders of Visualization Montreal, which is a meetup group that has almost 2000 members now; and as you’ll hear, he really reached out to people in the Montreal community to sort of build out that data visualization group. So it’s a really interesting conversation, I think something that we haven’t really discussed so much on this show about building out these firms and these teams. And I think you’re really going to enjoy this week’s episode of the show. So here is my interview with Francis, and I hope you will enjoy it.
Jon Schwabish: Hey Francis, good to see you. Welcome to the show. Looking dapper as always.
Francis Gagnon: Hello, Mr. Schwabish. Nice to meet you.
JS: You really do class up the joint, I got to tell you. We should be doing this as like a video podcast.
FG: I get that a lot. Thank you.
JS: How are things in Montreal, how’s business, how is everything?
FG: Oh my God. Well, first, it’s spring in Montreal, and you really have to go through a Canadian winter to appreciate spring as much as we do. So, of course, it’s probably like, what, 10 Celsius here, so everybody’s wearing shorts and T-Shirts, not because we’re celebrating, this is the joke of the Northern people. But yeah, I mean, I would say with confinement and third wave and all I think it’s very much on our mind, and we’ve been reopening maybe too much, maybe not enough for like, this is really what’s going on, it’s universal, it’s a global story right now for us as well in Montreal.
JS: Right. So I want to talk or focus our discussion on your information design company. I think there are several of these around, but I think folks will be interested in hearing more about how you actually founded the company and how you manage it – I think there’s a lot of freelancers, as we both know, doing terrific work, but when you’re freelancer is just you as opposed to your company where you have a staff and you have to manage the staff, you have to pay the staff, you have to do the HR part, so there’s a lot to it. So maybe we can start by having you just talk about, you know, you started it – we met when you were working at the World Bank which is thousands of employees, and then moved to Montreal and started this company – so maybe you could start by talking a little bit about that change from working from a huge company to starting your own.
FG: Yeah, well, I should start by saying that I always wanted to have a company but I didn’t care to have one that I didn’t know anything about, you know, selling nails and screws and these kind of things. I really needed like, I’m not this much of an entrepreneur that I would do anything, I have a mentor here, business mentor, and he was in online gaming then in glasses and sunglasses and then in accounting, he doesn’t care.
JS: [inaudible 00:04:51]
FG: He’s a businessman, he’s an entrepreneur, he loves – that’s not my profile at all. So I was always curious to be an entrepreneur, but I needed to have my own idea actually to have something that I really believed in. So this was dormant for several years, and I really only discovered information design, like, in my late 20s, early 30s actually. I think I was probably 30 years old when I discovered many people, Edward Tufte and [inaudible 00:05:19] and these kind of things that made me realize that this field actually exists. But I did not decide to start a business right there actually. It was more like a hobby in my perception or like a skill maybe that I would have. And so, soon after that I got this job at the World Bank, I was not in this field at all. What I was doing is called donor relations, it’s not very important, but I did this for six years while developing my own information design skills. I went to trainings, I was reading about this, and I was developing this, but it was not really a skill that was in demand from my employer. It was just like, well, your graph is nice, but have you finished this report please [inaudible 00:06:01] like, organize this meeting or give me the minutes of the meeting or whatever for this. But then I really had this breakthrough moment where, after some sort of management meeting to which I attended, it was all PowerPoint slides, and you can imagine – no, I don’t think you can imagine how bad the graphs were, like, seriously. It was like – now I cannot like – you would have a bar graph, one column is this high, it says 28%. There’s another column identical next to it, it says 0% in it. Go figure. They are both the same heights, one is 28, the other one is zero. It looked like this the whole thing. And I was in the back just fuming and redesigning this thing, and on my own personal time, trying to think how can we present that.
And I had been trying to switch job internally for quite a while, and one day, I was very lucky, I was with one of the higherups in Paris actually for one of our events there. And so, you’re in a smaller teams, you have more personal time with those people. And I told her, I want to switch, I want to do something different, I’ve been in the same position for six years by now. And actually, in the course of that discussion, I said, well, I have something I can show, and I pulled these graphs that I’d started making, and she literally grabbed me by the ear and said, come over here, like, you’re going to do this now full time, I need this as a manager, here I need to see my data much better. And so, this was my first, like, they created a special position that’s called a developmental assignment. It’s for a determined period of time, so for two years, I was in this position to redo management reports internally. And so, this is how I became an information designer after some sort of personal training, doing it myself, and then finally getting noticed by someone that was high enough to actually create that position, to see the needs, to see the value and to create the position.
So I spent two years doing this, and then I was told, great, now go back to your former position, and I was not – I have [inaudible 00:08:17] when you know you know, so I just decided that – this was the time actually my oldest daughter was about to enter school. I had been abroad for 10 years by then. I sort of wanted to be closer to my family. I wanted to keep doing this. I wanted my kid to go to school in French. And what you hear is not a British accent, it’s actually French. So we came back to Montreal to start this business actually. So I left my job, and I know that for a lot of people, that’s the hard part, like, how do I let go of my stable – this was not a worry for me. I think I’m overly confident when it comes to the job market. I’m just like, I cannot imagine ending under a bridge, like, sleeping under a bridge. I will figure it out for sure. So I left that job and came here, but at the same time, and this is important to know for people who want to become freelancers or start a business in this, I have sort of the connections at the World Bank to do this, and they sort of gave me my first contracts as well. As I was leaving my department, they gave me my first contracts, and my connections then across the World Bank started to inaudible 00:09:33] with me. So this is not something to be neglected in my story of grit and courage and hard work.
JS: Right. Was there an information design industry in Montreal at all? Was there anybody doing this when you went up there?
FG: Well, at the time it was it was Function, F Function.
JS: Oh F Function, right.
FG: You may have heard of them. The funny thing is, I first met them in New York at a conference, I forget now, in 2014, and there were speakers, both of them, the founder, Sebastian, Audrey. And so, I went and introduced myself, and it turns out that we worked in the same building, dyer on the second floor [inaudible 00:10:12] yes in Montreal.
JS: Wow.
FG: So I was a big admirer of their work as well. At the time, they were showing what they had done with [inaudible 00:10:20] Conservation International to show some pictures that were taken around the world, pictures of wildlife. And I’ve always followed what they were doing, we founded [inaudible 00:10:33] as well, so there’s a meetup. We have 18 members by now. But it’s like, I came to Montreal, and I was looking for this community, I was like, where’s the meetup. There were no meetups. I contacted a few of those people. In Montreal, we also have Plotly, which is a tool actually. It’s not like a design business like us. We are much more like Function, except that Function had a lot more technical skills than we have. Sebastian, one of the cofounders was a programmer, and I’m the opposite of a programmer [inaudible 00:11:09]. But they have, I don’t know if closed is the right way to put it or suspended, but Sebastian has moved out of Canada Audrey has taken up a job in industry. And so, now we also have Chris Viau who’s kind of well-connected, he’s at D3. He has a big Twitter account with over 10,000 followers. He works in the Silicon Valley. I’m going to forget a lot of people but at Plotly we have Nicolas Kruchten who’s fairly active on social media as well. And a few individuals as well and courses and all, but it’s – And some of the media are developing this increasingly, but we’re not at the stage of the US media. But yes, there was a bit of a community, and my goal is to put literally Montreal on the map. And when I say on the map, I’m trying to see something else than maps of Manhattan always. When people are testing data, it’s always New York, it’s always Manhattan.
JS: Yeah.
FG: I’m very keen on getting maps of Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver or whatever, if it’s Paris or London. But literally, both bringing information design to Montreal and making people realize that this can be a job, and making people talk about Montreal as a source – I mean, it’s funny, because when I arrived, I knew that Montreal was a city of design according to UNESCO, I was super enthusiastic about this. And then I read about it, and it means that it has potential.
JS: It just needed you, that’s all it needed, it needed you. You were the potential.
FG: I guess [inaudible 00:12:51] to the next stage, and [inaudible 00:12:53] but yes, this is the community that was here.
JS: Okay, so this is around 2013 or so. So you move back up to Montreal, you’re building this community or really finding the community and getting in place. So tell us a little bit about the early stages of the Voilà, and then how has it evolved over the last, I guess, eight years or so?
FG: Yeah, I mean, I remember fondly the first year, because I had much less work than I do today, and I had time to develop material, I had time to set up my website, and I had [inaudible 00:13:33] sometimes now I’m like, okay, I need new material, but this client is expecting this, and I’m meeting the team at that point, and when am I exactly going to do this, and the kids want me, etc. And so, the first year was much more calm. I had those first few appointments from the World Bank. I was working by myself, and one thing that I should clarify is that I always wanted to build a team, I did not set out to be a freelancer forever. I mean, this is why it has a name of its own, Voilà, it’s not attached to me. I’m trying to build something bigger than me, because I do not have a lot of technical skills, so I want to be able to do more of what I envision, but cannot do myself, and I want to do it better than I can do it myself. So I always wanted to build this, and there’s the entrepreneur as well, I’m very interested in, and I’m talking more to the entrepreneurs here on the line, but I’m building something like a system, like a machine, something that works, and think of any business that you go through, they have processes, they have standards, they have knowledge and all, and I’m super interested in that part of building a business. We have a new project that comes in, and we have a process, it’s going to go through, even if it’s creative. And it’s very hard to build a process around something so creative, and so hard to anticipate even. But you look at the big four of the consulting businesses, and that’s what they do. They never know exactly which company is going to ask them for which business strategy or what. And if they can do it, we can do it.
JS: Yeah. So when was the point where you said, I need now to start hiring people.
FG: Honestly, it was after one year that I decided, so in 2014, I said, okay, I need to start associating, and maybe not hiring, but at first, like, collaborating with others, maybe working together. And then it was more personal setbacks at the time, stuff more in my personal life that delayed this. And I had to put this more on hold, and keep the freelancing business going. And it actually took me quite a few years to get back to it, because it’s only in 2019, so five years later that really, I mean, I had associated with a few people to deliver some specific stuff, but fairly rarely, honestly. And then, in 2019, I realized that, I guess, I realized I was getting old. And so, I was getting exhausted of clicking, that’s how I call it, doing a lot of the things that are mechanical to me, that are, I know how to do them, I could delegate them. And I had this long term vision of myself, like, do I really want to be doing this in 10 years, where do I want to be in 10 years, do I see myself engaging the client alone during the negotiation, the invoicing, fixing the printer and doing everything, the conceptual and the clicking, as I call it. And I said, no, I was afraid of being exhausted before the finish line. I felt like if I keep doing this, I’m going to snap at 52 or something like this, way too early for it. And so, I said, I have now, while I still have the energy to drive, I really have this interest to really stop what I’m doing and assemble a team. And at that point actually, I did something that I never wanted to do before, I did not have the courage, I guess, to do it. I said no to work so as to free up time, because I wanted to start this business and assemble the team before, but I always thought I would do it in parallel, you know, like I accept the work and I do the work, and then I… But it requires so much mental energy to do this, that doing it in the evenings, doing it on the weekends or just with the parenting, and then…
JS: Yeah.
FG: And then trying to rest maybe, who knows, I just couldn’t do it. So I had to say no to contracts, I had to really take a hit in my income. And just say now, my project this week is finding myself in office because I was working from home at this time. And then, my project is really to think of who do I want to hire, and what is the profile, and how do I go about this. And my project is to redo completely the image of the company, so that people get it that it’s not like before, and [inaudible 00:18:07] as a business, not just as me with a business name. So I really have to put a lot of things on hold to be able to build this business apart. I had this image in my head, what I was doing before that, it was like I wanted to open a restaurant, but every day I was going to sell hot dogs on the street. And so, now I had to give up on this hot dog income and say, okay, I’m going to have to write a menu, I’m going to have to hire staff, I’m going to have to renovate the space, I’m going to go without much of an income for quite a while, and then we reopen, and then it’s a business. So that’s what really was difficult for me. I would say that I had probably been trying to do that for a couple of years before I decided to suspend work.
JS: Suspend it. And so, for freelancers who are listening to this and who are maybe considering a similar path, in your experience, what should their expectations be? So if they’re going to follow this path of, I need to stop work, I need to pause on the work and just focus on the space and the hiring and the technology and the HR, in your experience, what does that timeframe look like, and then how long does it take to sort of ramp the work back up?
FG: That’s a good question. I remember really starting to suspend work in March 2019, and my first staff arrived in August 2019. I had an intern before that which was very useful, especially, as an experience for me, someone who was supposed to come for six weeks and she was very good and very easy to manage, autonomous, and these kind of things. So it did help me to, like, before making a commitment to someone to see how I was feeling with someone but she was really an intern in that she did not have a lot of information design expertise, I really had to teach her stuff, but it was great for me to get out, I had no choice but to rent an office for the [inaudible 00:20:07] we would work somewhere together. The first staff really arrived in August, and then in October, we had a party to sort of really highlight that, okay, now we’re a business, I want to introduce you to my staff and our projects and our products, and we had printed stuff on the walls, and I had half were clients or collaborators, the other half were just family filling up the room, thank you for coming. [inaudible 00:20:36]. But I always felt that this party, actually, for me was like a milestone. I needed somethings to be done to have a party. And so, it forced me to actually think through a lot of things. I didn’t need the party itself, and they were not clients, but it was a motivator, it was a milestone for me. So now we’re in October, and if you ask about ramping up really, I would say within a year, it was probably back, maybe even less than a year. Honestly, I’ve always been very lucky with work, in that, it just, I built it, and they came.
JS: The related question, when you decided to say no to work and to focus on building the initial staffing and the office and all that, did you tell your clients – I assume a lot of these were clients that you’ve been working with for several years – did you tell them, I’m pausing our new work for this particular reason, but in X number of months, let’s reconnect? So again, for those freelancers who are listening, is that that sort of strategy of, like, hey, I’m not shutting everything down, I’m just kind of retooling, and let’s talk in five months or so?
FG: Well, it was both better and worse than this. Better, because I did not shut down everything. I was still doing some work during that, but I was much more selective about it, and worse, because I was a consultant at the World Bank, that’s how I was getting business from them. And I needed to become a business to them, not an individual, and so, a lot of places they differentiate between the two, and it’s very different. And to go from one to the other, I had to do no work whatsoever for them for one year at least. So I literally had to tell all of them, I am not doing anything for one year, and hope that they’re going to be there a year later. And even to become a business, it’s fairly complicated, they need to invite you, they need to fill a lot of paperwork, they don’t doing this. So you need to find someone who is motivated to actually do this for you. So it was a big risk, and I remember people around me being like, are you sure you want to do this, can’t you find another way of keeping this relationship but delegating the work. And this would have been skirting the rules, and this is not really my profile. I wanted things to be really clean, and I wanted also to develop more outside of the World Bank. I mean, it already had a business outside of it, but I did not want to be dependent on the clients like this. And so, I used that year really, like, I think in March, I made my decision; in April, I started telling my clients that out of as of July 1, I was not doing any more work for them. Basically, I had to – I came back after a year, and already before the year was over, I had former clients coming back saying, are you ready now, are you ready. And I said yes. And so, it started again. And what’s great is that, as a business, we do more ambitious work, because there’s more of us. And so, we get even more visibility, we get more capacity. And also, it was totally worth it to take those chances. But as I said in the beginning about leaving my job, those are, like, I think I’m fairly risk prone compared to some people. It’s hard to say no to work, but at the same time, I find that it’s been some of my best decisions to say no sometimes, and so to really focus on what we’re good at. And in this case, saying no to clients for a year was really, like, it was a bit like when you go to school, yes, you delay when you’re going to make money, but it’s really going to make a huge difference.
JS: Right, it pays off in the end, yeah. So okay, so now you are hiring people, you have an office space, you’ve ramped back up, what does that mean for you now as not being the principal designer doing your work, but you’re doing, I mean, well, first off, I guess, what is the share now between your management responsibilities and your actually creation responsibilities, and then, the more important question probably for most listeners is, what is your day to day like now as the principal of the company.
FG: Yeah, I think I’m going to give you the easy answer, which is 50-50, that’s when you don’t know what to say, you always say so 50-50. So, both.
JS: [inaudible 00:24:53].
FG: In this case, really, I have much more management responsibilities, of course. I mean, at the same time, some of it is no longer on me because I have a project manager, so she takes care of invoicing and proposals for clients and all, and she does 90% of the work. I come back, I come at the end to approve, polish, comment on it, if you will. So, and then the other 50 is still in production. It allows me to be really at my point of highest value added, which is, in my opinion, at a very conceptual stage, like, really cracking the thing, like, what is the visual going to look like, and what is the data. And so, really, I’m the only one at the moment – well, no, we just hired someone who has a sociology degree, but until recently, I was really the only one with substantial studies. I studied international development, economics and environment, so I had to embrace the work and to do the analysis for the team, and I still do, and it’s a part of my work that is extremely challenging, because it’s this creativity part, and you have no idea if you’re going to crack it in five minutes or in five days.
JS: Right.
FG: But I love it, because it’s so satisfying when you do. There’s a moment, like, I got it, and the client is like, wow, and yes, this is why I do this job. And the other part of managing the company, and the team is surprisingly pleasant to me. First, we have an A team really, it’s recruiting is very difficult. But if you have great people, it’s such a pleasure to work with them and to just delegate and trust. And so, this part is pleasant, but to go back to what I was saying earlier, I love to build a system, a machine, a process. I love that part, and then seeing it activate. When something comes in, and just like, oh my god, this is going to work, we’re going to end up – it’s not a good example, but we’re going to end up with a Big Mac, like, there’s like all those suppliers, and there’s this process. And then at the end, oh my God, I can repeat that thing. It’s almost like the cartoon machine that goes… It comes out as [inaudible 00:27:15] whatever. I love building that thing, and I love that the whole team is very involved in this, and what can we do differently, what should be our process, who should do it first, and how do we decide that, or how do we create, how do we manage, how do we propose. Everyone is very much into this like I am, and I really like this aspect. And because I was so keen and eager for a long time to start a business, even the very boring admin stuff of government permits and whatnot are rewarding, I don’t want to say pleasant, but yes, I get this form filled, and this is all for businesses and entrepreneurs and [inaudible 00:27:57] now.
JS: You’re part of the club.
FG: Yeah, it reminds me of the very first time I identified myself as an information designer was just as I started business, I went back to Washington to talk to the World Bank, and I met this custom officer, and he asked me, what do you do for a living. [inaudible 00:28:17] thanks for asking, I’m going to [inaudible 00:28:20]
JS: I am going to blow your mind right now. This is my actual passport, and this is how I would redesign it, just so you can see.
FG: [inaudible 00:28:29]. And now I feel the same rush about being, oh I’m an entrepreneur now. I fill boring forms, that’s great.
JS: Right.
FG: [inaudible 00:28:40] I think so. I think this is what I was saying that I had reached that point where my motivation for doing everything which had been there in the beginning, I was like, oh, I can’t believe they asked me to do their report, like, I get to do this design, I get to do the graphs, and I was super motivated. But after five-six years of doing this, like, it was repetitive, I had done this before, and now why is InDesign not managing the footnotes properly, and things like, is this really a good use of my time to fix the footnotes here, couldn’t I ask someone to do this. And actually, that’s one of the reasons why the first person I hired was a graphic designer. I felt that this was the thing that was easiest for me to delegate as a bunch, as a deliverable, and say, okay, this is a lot of work, you can set up this report entirely for us. And I was so lucky, we had such a good match, my graphic designer is also a scientific illustrator. So it’s someone who is used to get into the substance and understanding something that is complex, which is not always easy to find, and an illustrator on top of it. So do the graphic design [inaudible 00:29:51]. I’m going back to this but the HR and the recruitment, building a good team is really, it’s what it is, we sell time and expertise, we don’t – there’s nothing physical for sale.
JS: So how many employees are you at now?
FG: Oh, I’m glad you asked, Mr. Schwabish. I have four employees. That means five of us in less than two years. I’m very, very pleased.
JS: Yeah, it’s amazing.
FG: Yeah, it’s actually the fifth one, and I count myself now in those five, but the fifth one is coming on Monday as well. And so, it’s great also. I think I wanted to have a business because I wanted friends at work, colleagues, and [inaudible 00:30:31] just to work along with my clients who I met, and it’s just like I often have this moment where, when we go on a video conference for a meeting, of course, everyone’s working from home now, and I see those faces, I’m like, this is the business, this is our team, and…
JS: Right, it’s your team, and you brought it together, which is like that must be a source of pride that, it’s not just a meeting on Zoom with random people, it’s the team that you’ve brought together, and it’s for a common purpose, yeah.
FG: And sometimes it’s the details of someone’s going to say, yeah, I bought a bicycle. I’m like, yes, I’m glad you’re earning a living here. And you can buy a bicycle with this. Or you want to do the groceries, just this pride of, I mean, I do not like an overdeveloped sense of how do you call it in the US, the job creators or whatever. There is something to me about creating this business out of thin air, and even in a field that is not very well known at the moment, and just having it suddenly, like, Voilà couldn’t survive without me at the moment. And I say that without any pride. Actually, it’s the opposite. I wish that I could build something that could survive without me, but very soon, and I see, by the way, I see the difference between my old and my new clients, the old ones, they write to Francis. The new ones, they write to Voilà [inaudible 00:31:57] they are related, there’s Chloe, our project coordinator and client coordinator, who is [inaudible 00:32:02]. And it just feels like, okay, for them, this is a business. One of the persons that I hired was a replacement for someone who left, and it just moves. there’s someone, like the client is just, that’s fine, as long as you deliver, it’s fine with us. This is what I like about it to create something that has an identity in itself apart from me, because I won’t be able to do this all the time, and I want to be able to move around the business as well. My vision is that of a, I have no idea how it works, but of an architecture firm. I have this vision that the head architect has a vision, is involved in every project to a certain extent of where this is going, but not necessarily enjoying every staircase and [inaudible 00:32:48]
JS: Yeah.
FG: So this is where I would like Voilà to be, but I want to give a lot of room to people and expertise, that’s why they write on the blog and [inaudible 00:32:57].
JS: Yeah. That’s great. That’s terrific. Congrats on all of that. I mean, that’s amazing, five people and what, not even two years.
FG: Yeah, not even, well, five, if you count.
JS: Yeah, but really once you decided to really, do it, really, less than two hours. It’s fantastic. Congratulations. I’ll put links to Voilà and your other social media places and the blog on the show notes so folks can take a look and visit the website to see the work and to check out the team. Francis, thanks so much for coming on the show. It’s always a pleasure chatting with you.
FG: Thank you, Jon. Talk to you soon then.
JS: Okay.
FG: Bye.
And thanks, everyone for tuning into this week’s episode of the podcast. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you learned a lot. I’m sure if you’re interested in learning more about how to start up your own data visualization or information design company, Francis would be happy to chat with you and you can reach out to him on any of the different links that I’ve included in the episode notes. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
A number of people help bring you the PolicyViz podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs, audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs and each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you’d to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The PolicyViz podcast is ad free and supported by listeners. If you’d to help support the show financially, please visit our Patreon page at patreon.com/policyviz.
