How to start a design studio – a beginner’s guide

I gave a talk to a group of third year design students, sharing what it’s like to set up and run an agency. The organisers wanted to show the students that people in the industry are the same as them, just at a different stage in their career.

When I think about how much the industry has changed since I graduated in 1997, it’s easy to get a bit carried away. But two things that certainly haven’t changed are the nervous excitement of the unknown, and the unshakable belief among designers that we can make things better. Running a studio was something we used to talk about, but none of us had any big plans for how it would happen.

It made me think about the things I wish I’d known when I was approaching graduation: How do I make myself employable? How will I find my dream job? What skills am I lacking? How should I deal with clients? Are people more interested in technical ability, or how I think?

But these questions aren’t just about entering the world of work or starting a business – they feel relevant to anyone wondering what the future might hold. The mindset you need to start a creative business – and keep it going – is the same one you need to take on any new creative challenge, and to be successful in any aspect of the design, branding and marketing industries.

Of course, there’s much more to cover than could ever fit into one article, but let’s make a start here. For me, the key steps are these: prepare yourself, start small and embrace change.

I firmly believe there’s no such thing as a bad first job. The experience you gain from being around other professionals, and from taking pride in performing a role will always be valuable to you. Not to mention having that first job on the CV.

When you’ve got that job, make yourself indispensable by showing how you add value to the company. This is what entrepreneurial thinking is about: understanding that every business needs to grow, and seeing how you can help. It’s not just about running your own business, but thinking about how to improve processes, add services and find new areas of revenue – wherever you’re working.

Learn from everyone and anyone, and bring your personality into the studio. You’re not expected to know everything, so don’t hide if there are gaps in your knowledge. Ask questions, listen to the answers and put it all into practice.

Respect everyone’s opinions – you don’t know the internal politics of the agency, and you certainly don’t know your client’s businesses. Ultimately, you’re learning how other people do things – whether good or bad. So, when you see something you’d do differently, you’re learning a bit more about how your future studio will operate.

When the time is right, start small. This allows you to take risks and learn what works before too many people are relying on your business to put food on the table. We started Studio Output in Nottingham as three partners: Dan and I had worked together at our previous agency, and Ian was one of our clients. This gave us a good understanding of how a project develops between the designer and client, rather than in isolation.

Be realistic, but ask yourself plenty of ‘What if’ questions. We always planned to be bigger than three, using Adrian Shaughnessy’s maxim that ten people is the optimum size for a creative team. But we didn’t think what might happen beyond that, meaning that once we grew above that number we were already ‘off plan’.

We wrote a really thorough business plan – it’s not just for the bank, but is a really useful guide to work to. It forces you to think about where your work will come from. It helps you understand your competitors. Think about what their clients are looking for, that others can’t currently deliver. Is that your niche?

Your new ‘unholy trinity’ will be a profit & loss sheet, planning pipeline and cashflow forecast. Make the effort to understand these – I can’t stress this highly enough. It’s probably the most painful thing for a designer to take on, but you’ll only get a real sense of how the business is doing once you can ‘read’ the numbers.

This will also teach you to watch your cashflow and debtors. Cashflow can kill even a profitable business, and plenty of high-profile agencies have gone under because the cashflow dried up.

Okay, I’ll stop talking about numbers now.

It’s vital to establish what your studio’s vision is. Why does it exist, where is it going, and what do you stand for? As you get bigger it’s all too easy to lose sight of your own vision, so when things change you need to be clear about what makes you, you.

One of our challenges was starting out as print designers. Like a lot of agencies, we had a period of trying to catch up and make sense of where things were going. It made us realise we could never really sit back and say we knew one thing really well. So, we learned to apply our principles and approach in lots of different ways, and to think more about the challenges we could help people solve.

Our first experience of working with clients in a different way came when we won the Ministry of Sound club contract in 2005. They wanted us to work in-house, and embedding designers with a client was a new challenge. It’s much more common now, and we often work with clients, or have them working with us, throughout a project. But at the time it forced us to think about how someone working remotely could feel involved and part of a bigger team.

We adapted our methods and gained another perspective of the client-agency relationship. Over the years, the Ministry work was some of the most directional we’ve ever done – and we used it as a testing ground for new designers to really push themselves.

The learning from that was to hire the most brilliant, creative people we could find. It may seem obvious, but in a service industry like ours, people are your most valuable resource – perhaps the only one that really matters.

When the time comes, hire the best people you can afford, and make sure they can do something you can’t. As Daniel Levitin says in ‘The Organized Mind’, a business is like a brain, and all the parts work together to create the output. Each new recruit should fit your values, but also bring something new with them.

Look after your team, and make them feel part of what you’re building. You’re asking people to hook themselves up to your dream, so there needs to be something worthwhile there for them.

And if there are people you admire but they’re not quite right for your team, collaborate with them anyway. Some of our most experimental work has been with freelancers or other studios who extend our network and our capabilities. We co-founded Glug as a way of celebrating and showcasing the talent we worked with. It’s now grown into a regular ‘notworking’ event for the creative community, with events in 26 cities across 15 countries.

Over time this way of working became the new normal for us – always pushing boundaries and working with the best people we could find. It’s exciting starting projects without a fixed idea of what the outcome will be, but instead focusing on the difference we want the work to make.

We’ve seen agencies come and go, sometimes because they stuck to their guns in a world that won’t wait for you to catch up. Although you gain confidence through only doing what you know, it’s vital to recognise that your principles and ways of thinking are much more important than your immediate skill set.