#24 Starting an agency can be hard - why do we do it?

 
 

On this episode Jon & Dan take a listener question. Steve Cowburn writes in to ask:

“Why do people start their own companies, given that the rewards and workload can be tough? What is that 'certain something' that we get out of doing it for ourselves?”

To answers Steve’s questions, Jon & Dan cover the following topics:

  • What was the initial decision process in starting our agencies - what led us to take the plunge?

  • What was the turning point where it first felt like a business and an agency?

  • Working on our first ‘product’ and finding our niche

  • What were the first things that began to highlight how hard it can be to run a business

  • Doing the first business activities as new founders

  • Who did we look towards as inspiration - who could we learn from?

  • What was our fallback plan?

  • Business and personal milestones that forced us to make decisions

  • Hiring the first employee

  • What do rewards do we get from it personally

  • What are the purely financial rewards?

  • Working hard and what you need to put in

  • If for some reason we no longer had our companies, what would we do next?

 
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Jon Darke

Recent episodes
#24 Starting an agency can be hard - why do we do it?

On this episode Jon & Dan take a listener question. Steve Cowburn writes in to ask:
 
“Why do people start their own companies, given that the rewards and workload can be tough? What is that 'certain something' that we get out of doing it for ourselves?”

#23 Managing productivity and feeling productive

This week Jon is joined by Dan to talk about how we manage your time and feel productive while running our agencies. It’s a hard thing to quantify and we feel every business and person running them are different. But we talk about what works for us, along with what doesn’t.

#22 Selling the value of design, and design process to clients

This week Jon is joined by Dan to talk about how to sell the value of the design process to clients. If you’re working with clients who don’t understand the value of design or simply don’t have any experience working with a design team, how do you communicate the value your design process can bring?

#21 Getting your story straight - brand & communication strategy for agencies

Jon is joined today by Anna McLoughlin of Inkspiller. Inkspiller are a copy and brand strategy consultancy helping businesses find their inner voice and communicate to the world. Anna works mostly with creative companies - helping agencies to find their voice and communicate what makes them different. Anna recently took Every Interaction through this process and the result was a new content strategy that led a revamp of their website.

#20 A globally distributed product team - a new model for design agencies?

This week Jon is joined by Matthew Lenzi of Hanno - a globally distributed product design agency. Hanno are quite unique in the way that they run their business; a distributed team working around the world using a forward-thinking vision of 'how companies should work in the future'. They’re living the dream sold to us by the level of communication offered by the internet - something that’s quite unique and I’ve not seen anyone else do as successfully before. We talk about how they got started and made this model a success.

#19 What makes a company like Clearleft successful? A conversation with Andy Budd

This week Jon and Dan are joined by Andy Budd from Clearleft - a well known UX Design agency based in Brighton. Clearleft are well known for their high quality of work as well as advancing the field by putting on a number of UX, Design and Development events around the country.

#18 Scaling an agency from 1 or 2 people to a growing and stable team, with Pete Campbell from Kaizen Search

This week Jon is joined by Pete Campbell from Kaizen Search - an SEO and digital marketing agency based in London. Pete started his agency less than 3 years ago by himself, and has since successfully scaled to 9 people. 

#17 Introducing systems and process to give your business more structure, with Brad Flowers from Bullhorn Creative

This week Jon is joined by Brad Flowers from BullHorn Creative - a brand & communication strategy agency in Kentucky USA. Brad and his fellow directors have been making changes to how they run their business, inspired by meeting folks at peer groups and studying business books. This inspiration has helped provide them with a more solid foundation for growth and stability. In this episode Jon and Brad go over this experience, and share how anyone else can do the same.

#16 Delivering website development projects using agile processes, with Rory MacDonald from MadeTech

Jon is joined by Rory MacDonald from MadeTech - an agile development agency - to talk about how you can use agile methodologies to deliver website development projects.

#15 How to create a winning proposal with Dylan Baskind from Qwilr

This week Jon is joined by Dylan Baskind - designer/developer and founder of proposal writing tool Qwilr. We speak about Dylan's journey from working in the agency world, having direct clients and hitting frustrations with creating proposals in the ‘print’ mentality of an A4 PDF doc that takes way too much time to create and delivers an inferior experience for both creator and client. We talk about how Qwilr came to be and what goes into making a great proposal.