This week Jon welcomes designer founder Murat Mutlu from Marvel App to discuss what it's like for a designer to leave the agency life behind and found a product company.

It was great to hear about the journey, challenges and what the future has in store for this world class design tool. Marvel allows designers to turn their ideas into interactive prototypes that can be used to present and test. 

Jon is joined by Tom from Lighthouse London to talk about the filter process they both go through when deciding to take on or pitch for a specific piece of work or project. 

The list of criteria discussed is not meant to be a prescriptive list we believe every agency should abide by, it’s just a discussion of the criteria that we run through when making those decisions and hopefully there are points that encourage or inspire others.  

This week Jon is joined by his co-founder Neil Gardiner to discuss their experiences with mentorship. Every Interaction have been receiving business mentorship for 18 months now, so it seemed like a good time to reflect and go over some of the benefits having mentorship has brought to their business. They cover how they got started with mentorship, some of the exercise and topics covered as well as discuss alternatives.

In this episode Dan’s co-founder, Tom Johnson joins Jon to talk about how their designers and developers work together in their teams to deliver their client work. As the design focussed half of his company, it was interesting to speak to Tom and discuss the differences between Lighthouse and Every Interaction in term of focus, team make-up and collaboration of team members when delivering projects.

How you manage feedback from clients can make or break a project. It’s a tricky thing to handle and there are many ways you can go about dealing with it. This week Dan & Jon share their process and different ways of managing client feedback. They cover how to get the most out of presentations and being prepared to receive constructive feedback that benefits the project, you, the client and your relationship.

This week Dan and Jon talk time tracking and how they use this data to help run and grow their digital agencies. 

Completing your timesheets is perhaps the most tedious part of your day, however the value this data can give your business is immense. Understanding how much time projects actually take helps you better quote for future work you are asked to cost up. Find out how to get the most from analysing your time and run your company more efficiently as you scale. 

Working for the worst client imaginable - yourself. Dan reveals the process and learnings from recently replacing the agency website for Lighthouse, and Jon talks about the what lies ahead for Every Interaction and the upcoming site replacement project they are planning.

Dan and Jon talk about the process they go through when hiring a new employee and what they look for in potential candidates. They go into detail about the places they advertise, the applications that come in, the filtering that takes place and how the process is moved forwards into interviews. They also cover what they look for in potential candidates, short intensive courses, as well as gender equality.

Does having a specialism put you in a better position as a new/smaller agency? Dan and Jon fumble around what they think are their respective agency specialisms (defining exactly what you do is so hard!) and how taking that approach benefits them in what they do for their clients. We talk about how we both started out and how things changed as we matured. Both having come from full-service agency backgrounds, we discuss how that’s not where we see the future of our companies and how focus can help make your agency more successful.

This week Jon & Dan talk about how they go about dealing with pitches and proposals. How to decide how much time to put into documentation and what is takes to seal the deal and convince a new client to choose you over other options they might have.