How do you scale your business, from 2 to 20 and beyond? A creative company's approach: Act 1

The question of scalability in the business space, especially the start-up environment is a daunting task for creatives. Whether you are a start-up that has 5 people or 500, business structures must be in place, and you must be committed to trying things and failing early on.

In our industry, there are so many talented designers and web programmers out there, each with his or her dream of being their own boss. And while the freelance community supports this methodology well, building your business from being a designer in the living room, to becoming a business owner that manages multiple facets of the service offerings, client requests, budgets, payroll and so on, is not an easy task.

One of the most critical facets of building a creative shop that can scale is ensuring that no matter what structure is in place, the staff can be flexible within their job descriptions. In other words, team members must wear many hats at a small firm, and so having a team backing you up that can not only serve many roles, but also can take on new responsibilities through promotion and other benefits, is absolutely critical for scalability's success. As a small business, if you cannot promote those from within, you can never scale up with any certainty that as the owner you won't be micromanaging everyone, every day.

In addition to the ingredients of the structure, i.e. the employees, business operations and thought leadership, the structure itself must scale or be flexible enough to allow for new positions to be adopted as the firm grows from a smaller shop into a more mature creative machine.

Over the years here at Killswitch we have tried different structures. Some have included managers, some have not. Some give employees equal input on many facets of a project, or an operational problem. Some include project managers or in other scenarios, development managers that manage different aspects of the operational and development portions of a project. And over the years we have grown into a model that works for our level of firm and clientele.

But there is still always a lot of room for improvement.

And there should be with any small business, not just a creative firm. The most important thing to remember if you are a new creative starting out, and looking to build your shop up, is not to worry about the things that are not going to be with you tomorrow. Concentrate on the big picture items, and that should serve you well to ensure the details of your client's project are being taken care of.

For the back story on how Killswitch grew, I would recommend reading this article first, and then coming back to this one, as it offers a more clear back-drop for what I am talking about here.

Below I have outlined the most important things I have learned over the years in scaling a creative business, from getting it off the ground to maintaining it, and everything in between.

1. When you first start out, you have to understand that you will make mistakes. If you are a creative person, you probably do not have a business background, so from the start, be comfortable with the fact that you're probably not going to just step on your own toes, but you may at times, step on a few clients' toes as well. The most important thing you can know when you first start is that you must learn from these mistakes the very first time you make them.

2. Your business never gets big enough, and you never get busy enough to ignore the work that is being sent out. Even at a firm of 10 or 15 people, work can squeak out that the owner or managing partner never sees, especially when there is more than one owner. Control the flow of outbound information, design, and anything else that will impact your brand. This point is especially important in an early growth stage company. Work that is not up to par early on can have a worse impact than many think. Some of those early client connections will be the ones that bridge you to your next project and next tier of success.

3. Work, work, work. If you expect only to do good design work and be successful, you've got another thing coming. Designers are a dime-a-dozen these days. At Killswitch, we receive between 3 and 4 resumes per day from creatives. Clients have so many options for their projects, and so it is important that the design strategy and execution not only be good, but that you distinguish yourself from the rest. This could be a service that you offer, in addition to design. It could be the way you manage a client, or it could even be the thought leadership you employ if you are a slightly larger company. The bottom line is that your work is never enough in the small business space. You should always have to offer more.

4. As your business grows, your bank account should too. Just because you are a designer, and you now have a studio with employees, payroll, deadlines, and all the other things that come along with this, doesn't mean you should be living like you were in college. Quality of life, when you are a small business owner, comes with a lot of stress, but should also come with plenty of rewards if you are doing things right. This is a topic that is overlooked a lot in this industry. The saying goes that if you do something you love, the income and quality of life that you desire will follow. Well, that is just not true. You must decide where you want to be, and how you want to live and work towards those goals, whether they are financial, or a mix, it doesn't matter. Just don't forget to think about this as you grow your business and client base.

5. Think about your employees first and your clients second. This statement might sound a bit off, but in many circumstances, you must consider the impact a project has on your talent, especially in this industry. Cultivating a small business is as much about building a talent pool as it is building a client base. Killswitch was fortunate early on to land some big accounts, and while those have lead us to where we stand today in many regards, there are things that would be done differently now when it comes to employee impact and so on. Creative firms will lose some great talent no matter how well you manage your employee morale, but you should try to make sure it is never because they are burnt out on a project or a client. Staffing and other strategies can be used to ensure that employees don't get burnt out on one client or project, and I would recommend using everything in your arsenal to ensure this does not happen

6. When your company is more established, and you have operating income and the freedom to make a great hire, do it, and do not hesitate. More importantly, when you hire someone, make sure they are not just qualified for your position, but are better at what they do than you are. While being a small business owner and creative professional can make it hard to hire someone more talented or experienced than you are, this strategy will never let you down. By surrounding yourself with great talent, you will see your business grow quickly.

7. Secondary to the point above, and my concluding point... put the power in the hands of your staff. Allowing your staff to make the recommendations and to have a voice is a very critical practice, especially at a smaller, more collaborative studio. At the end of the day you might be surprised at how much better the outcome is for your client. The real power here, is that as your staff become more active in the business and critical decisions, the easier it will be for you to scale up and hire more team members.

Many of these points help contribute to the base that allows you to scale. Check back for an additional follow up that goes a little more in depth on strategy and execution. I will post "Act 2" soon.

Feel free to email me through our general email address if you have any questions or need help figuring out how to get things off the ground with your new venture.

Have the Changes in Employee Culture Predicted and/or Contributed to the Rise of Social Media?

It may not be an obvious exercise to connect the changes in employee culture over the past 30 years and the current rise of social media, however when you look at the general patterns and focal points for both, you begin to see that the changes that began to take place some 30 years ago, may have played a key role in developing the environment we find ourselves in today.

Back when our parents grew up, the culture supported the idea that your "career" would be only with a handful of employers. People went to college or a technical school, graduated and then became part of the American culture, where it was not uncommon for people to spend 15, 20 or even 30 years with a single company. Some earned a living wage at first, and worked their way up, while others worked in the same job for their entire 30+ year career.

It's not hard to understand why that culture was different. They had pensions, employee loyalty incentives, retirement programs that were calculated based on their life-long commitment to the company and so on. People worked 9-5 jobs, with very little technological interference, and the majority of their 8 hour day was behind a desk or out on service or sales calls. Communication with clients and with your colleagues in the company was face-to-face just about all the time, and that was the way the culture accepted these types of professional positions.

Life was good, and people felt stable at one job. They felt stable having only maybe a handful of different bosses over their entire service at the company, and they accepted the fact that the American Dream was to own a home and raise a family where people conversed around the dinner table. They didn't just accept it, but the majority of Americans defined their life by their career and company choice. They were who they worked for, and the culture of their friends and family usually surrounded a single or only a handful of brand names.

Oh my, how times have changed, right? Just about everything from the past has been completely rewritten for today. And while we have not rewritten history, in many cases we have rewritten culture's acceptance of many of the points I make above.

We live no longer in a culture where someone will spend their entire career at a single company. In fact, our leaders now encourage us to work for different companies. We do not accept a destiny where we have one or two professional experiences and then retire.

Why? Well the answers are both simple and complex. The simplest, pensions, at least those that were once intact in some of the strongest industries are no longer. Thanks to Social Security and company views on retirement, the retirement card has been leveraged on the employee. No longer does the employer have to worry about taking care of their staff after they retire. The American dream of owning a house and staying in it, is well, gone. Not just because of the recent economic climate, but because people don't stay in one place due mostly to their employment choices. The use of newer technologies simply does not allow us to benefit from the previous generation's single career lifestyle nor does technology support that model. And one of the simplest reasons of all: people just want to do new things.

And so, over the years people began to change their outlook on what a career is defined as. Some argue that it was the academic community who pushed new professionals into a mindset of "many jobs = more experience = better rounded candidate for the next job," while others argue that the companies themselves, as times changed, in fact thrived on turn-over in the company, because turn-over allows for fresh thinkers. When you lay people off, or help people move on to other opportunities, many have argued that you actually create more opportunity for a hiring company to bring in fresh talent and that outweighs the talent you are losing. Whatever your opinion on this, it is clear that most professionals these days will not spend more than 5 years in a single position or in many positions in a single company.

And so the need for social media was born.

As people shifted to a more mobile mindset, and as career advisors, coaches and other industry leaders have pushed professionals to seek multiple opportunities over the course of their career, what has happened is that our career culture has become one where people are driven to do reach new heights professionally, but most importantly they want to reach those new heights for new companies which are within new networks of people.

And with this new mindset in place, there was a need for connectivity like never before. No longer could you see the same people in an office for 30 years and go home and see the same neighbors. It was becoming crystal clear that the days of living within a single network were over. And so people began to move, their career titles changed, their networks of colleagues changed, and the house that they went home to every night changed, sometimes over and over and over again.

As people's networks began to change, our drive to stay connected to people played a critical role in the rise of social media and the supporting networks. LinkedIn, Facebook and many others have been proving this notion for several years now. Not only do we want to stay connected to those we already know, we want to build new networks. We want to not only tweet, but we want to now rank twitter users so that we can see who has the best reliability in giving us reliable and trustworthy data. The social networks have now turned into networks that not only allow people to stay connected, but connect people to places, and that validates those people in our networks by allowing the community to decide who has the best opinions and information to share. These types of services are providing us with the ability to do things that previously were only done face-to-face.

Clearly this new way of staying in touch with our friends, colleagues, business associates and family members is not going to change anytime soon. For a moment though, think about what it would be like to stay in the same job for 30 years, to connect with the same people every day, and to see the same neighbors when you arrive at your driveway every night. The world seemed so much smaller back then, and now, it would seem that there is no limit to how we connect, or who we connect with.

The changing of a professional culture may not have predicted the rise of Social Media, but it surely is one of the major factors in contributing to the need for it. While we wait for that next opportunity to arise, and we get excited about adding yet another position title to our LinkedIn page, or another colleague or friend on Facebook, remember that it didn't always use to be this way.

The days of someone living and working within a single network are almost completely gone, and I hope that for the next generation, connectivity does not completely cancel out the need for a friendly face-to-face meeting or chat at the office water cooler.

Lessons Learned About Starting a Small Business and the Possibilities and Pitfalls You Must Be Prepared For

With the AIGA Small Talk series quickly approaching, I wanted to take some time to reflect upon my journey of how I have gotten to where I am. In doing that, I wrote the story below in hopes that it serves as a background for those who know me and maybe don't know the story and for those who have yet to hear my story. And maybe for those young students, it'll help you determine your path, like many before me helped determine mine.

The Vision

I remember when I first set out to start a creative firm, I was in college and I thought to myself, "Why not, right?" It'd be better to work for myself than for someone else. I had entrepreneurial spirits in my blood, and I wasn't going to fail. And so, those many years ago, I set out to do just that, to "Change the World" so to speak with design, my art school awesomeness, and something that I thought I could do better than others: design and communication.

So I started to build a base of small clients. We're talking mom-and-pop shops, family member businesses, and so on. I was 22. Fresh off back surgery a year before from a train accident here in Chicago and looking to begin a new phase of life.

The Back Story

But let's step back even further, to what started me on the path that would eventually lead me to be writing today. (Yes, this is going to take me all the way back to high school folks). I was 16, living a normal teenage life, and I had friends who were attending The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They invited me to come out and visit, so I accepted, and when I arrived, I fell in love with the city right away. It was so different and so stimulating, in comparison to where I grew up. It was, for me, the next thing I needed to do.

So I applied, in my junior year in high school, mostly with an all sculpture portfolio. My drawing skills, to say the least, were not on par with even my architect father's hand and eye coordination. My sculpture teacher at the time told me I wouldn't get in. (Yeah talk about support), and I think it was at that moment, I knew I had something special happening. I had luck on my side, yes luck, and a little creative talent. I was ready.

So the Art Institute reviewed my portfolio and asked me to come out for a pre-acceptance interview. I was nervous, but I had guidance, even then, from my friends who were attending, and with their help and a little help from admissions I got in. At that time, 1 out of every 4 people were accepted, so I felt pretty good. I guess they saw something, that even at that point I had not seen. I didn't chalk it up to talent but more to being in the right place at the right time, as I sure was then.

The School of the Art Institute had a 4 year program, and it was there that I began to understand what it was I wanted to do. My 2nd year, I ended up in Visual Communication, with Intro to VisCom, taught by the late John P. He was a critical reason why I chose to stay in VisCom, and why I excelled from there. For me, SAIC was never about the quality of the facilities, the non-grade system or its academics. It was all about the professors and mentors. I was able to finish the program before my senior year, while studying under great designers and typographers of the likes of Stephen Farrell, Ann Tyler, Jennifer Moody and others. My senior year I took all graduate level independent studies (for those of you undergrads, yes you can do this with the dean's permission), and it was my senior year at SAIC that I got my next moment of major clarity... my first client.

The one thing that school never prepares you for is the real-world. You hear this complaint about so many industries, but it is more true for the creative industry than just about any other. Working with my first real client was an eye opening, life changing event, that would determine the next 8 years of my life.

The Real Deal

Upon graduation, I worked with the base of clients I had garnered while I was still in college. For the first six months I worked alone, in the apartment I lived in during my senior year. The projects were small, and I couldn't pay my bills at first, but I kept working on it. Around that six month mark, just before summer of 2003, I teamed up with my schoolmate Meredith Martin, to start Killswitch. She had been interviewing at the time for creative positions but decided she would come aboard to see how things worked out. After all, we had nothing to lose. It was then that Killswitch was really born.

We got our LLC status in early 2004 and set up a bank account with $8000 we had saved from previous client work and savings. We moved from my apartment into hers and set her entire place as our studio. Desks in the living room, conference room in the kitchen, and we had one employee... a programmer.

At that time, we both focused on creative, while I also took on the business side responsibilities. We knew eventually we would have to divide this up even further, but back then we both had the time to wear many, many hats.

We started acquiring new design work, along with some small flash-based websites. We learned our lesson pretty hard in the beginning, as our first major web client wound up declaring bankruptcy, and we were never able to get paid up for all of the work we did. (We knew something was up after his first couple of checks bounced, and then he attempted to pay us part of our fee in Best Buy gift cards he had received from his uncle for Christmas). That moment was a wake-up call, so we managed to get some rock solid contracts in place from that point on. We started doing a lot of work for smaller local companies and other design studios. This operation was month-to-month for some time, when we decided to take the plunge. We were working 14-16 hour days from early 2004, until the beginning of 2005 to meet deadlines and get enough work done that we could slowly pay bills and make it into a living wage for ourselves.

In 2005, things began to pick up, we took our first "real" paychecks, and it was then that we got our first "real" office in Chicago's West Loop neighborhood: a 2500 sq ft loft space, super cheap rent, and it was just the two of us. We had big dreams and high hopes that we would fill the space. And guess what... we did.

By the end of 2007, we were full with 14-15 people working in that space, no real conference area, bathrooms that you could hear people pee in (I am not kidding, one of our project managers who is still with us can substantiate this claim), and we were running out of space. Plus, we had acquired some big named clients by then, and this space was just not going to cut it any longer.

By the beginning of 2008, we moved, into the space we are currently in: a 4000 sq ft building in Chicago's West Town neighborhood (on the outskirts of Wicker Park), much nicer and more professional. We opened a second office in Austin, TX around the same time, and on payroll we had upwards of 27 people total, all benefits, no contractors. We were doing it the right way, working on some large accounts. We grew, and we grew, and we grew.

And then...everything changed.

Restructuring

In late 2008 into early 2009, the economy, as everyone knows, took a plunge. We never lost our accounts completely, but when Fortune 500 clients decide they are going to spend 10-20% of what they spent a year earlier, you realize that something has changed. And so we finished projects, laid staff off in early 2009, and then were left to clean up the pieces.

Going through the process of suddenly having to shift your company from an expansion growth mode to a contraction survival mode was probably one of the hardest things we've ever done. Just like the big guys, you have to trim budgets, expenses and unfortunately, that means letting go of talent. But as a small business owner it is especially difficult to do this and not to simply give up. There were a lot of other opportunities for me along the way, as there were for others at the firm, and everyone hung in there like dedicated soldiers. This economic downturn was nothing short of a war within the industry, only we were not fighting our competitors, we were fighting the uncertainties of the business climate.

And as we went through this process, I took a look around at many other agencies, those who were 10-30 people deep and who had been around for a lot longer than us, and they were completely out of business. Completely. That is when things got very scary.

It's worth noting that we had everything they tell you to have in business school (even though I never went to one). We had a well diversified portfolio of clients, plenty of money in the bank, we had never had any business debt, we had employees who liked coming to work every day and we had good clients. And even though we had all of these bases covered, had done good work for many years and had a support from our employees, we were not immune to the economic downturn. No one was.

Nothing they teach you in school can prepare a business owner for a downturn like what occurred to us and many others in our industry. And one of the biggest lessons I learned from this first 6 year phase of Killswitch, is that building a successful business is a lot less about what you can control, versus what you cannot. Granted what we and many other agencies have gone through is probably the worst we will ever see, but that doesn't discount the fact that everything you build can come crashing down pretty quickly. You must do the things you can control well, but you also have to have a little luck and timing along the way.

Moving Forward

After the dust settled and the storm cleared, Killswitch was still in motion. We still had a project manager who was with us since our first office, several programmers that had been with us for many years and a few other staff who made it through as contractors. I can say that without the staff we have had over the years I would not have achieved the success I have in such a short time. They have been pivotal with the decisions that were made, and while there were mistakes made as we have gone through the cycles of business, I don't regret anyone's involvement or contribution to where Killswitch stands today. Everyone has had a positive impact, both for those people with us today, and those that are no longer here.

And so with all of this restructuring behind us, we were ready to achieve the impossible. To rebuild, correct the mistakes we had made, and to do this next round of Killswitch smarter, more efficient, and with even better work from before. And so far, we are doing just that.

As an owner of a small business, I now truly understand the responsibilities that come with this job. Whether it be the mouths that it feeds, or the impact it has on clients and their projects. For those more seasoned than I, this probably all comes as no surprise, but for me, there is nothing in this world I would want to do more than build a small business. My creative path has brought me to what I truly love to do and now that I have just turned 30, I intend on doing just that.

Onward and upward.

Footnotes on achieving success for new entrepreneurs and small business owners:

1. If you hire staff, always hire people better than you for the position you are hiring for. Don't worry about them making recommendations or opinions that may differ from the company's vision. While hiring employees that share a common layer of vision is important, finding employees who are independent and who want to add to a company's procedures and vision, are the most important kinds for you to find. Sometimes these employees are the ones that can change the direction of a small business in a very positive and eye opening way.

2. Don't think that owning your own business means that you will be able to easily make your own schedule. Your client base target will have a lot to do with this point, however, most of the time, clients don't really care that you're a business owner. They come to you for a service and expect excellence no matter who they see at the meetings. It is important to understand that as a new business owner starting out, your schedule, as much as it might be hard for you to admit, will most likely be dictated by your clients. At least in the beginning, success is not likely achieved otherwise.

3. Make sure that even when things are busy you take the time to look at as much work going out to clients as possible. When Killswitch started to grow, and we became layers of managers working at two offices, this is the one area I wish I had taken more time to perfect. Even your best employees will make mistakes, just like you have. As the owner of the business, you are responsible for the work going out, its brand messaging, expectation of excellence and achieving the client's expectational perception of the project. If you are in a creative industry, this point is especially important.