Starting and growing a digital business

What’s it like running a digital business? Gavin Sherratt, Co-founder and Managing Director at digital agency Studio Mashbo, shares his experience and top tips.

We’ve had our fair share of highs, lows and lessons learned since starting Studio Mashbo in 2011.

Back then, there were four of us, based above a sex shop on the edge of the city centre. Today we’re a team of 10, with room to grow in our new home at the heart of Liverpool’s Commercial Quarter.

Our original focus was on developing digital solutions for third sector organisations. Mashbo was our early idea for an online fundraising platform. The concept failed, but we liked the name — and decided to keep it.

There is value in failure — if you learn the lessons. By failing fast and failing early, we learned loads of lessons about what should be done when starting a digital business.

During this period, we also parted ways with one of our Co-founders. When your back’s against the wall, you learn so much more about people than when it’s all sunshine and things are going to plan. There was a clash of values between members of the team; it took guts, but we had to question the shared commitment within our collective. We lost a friend but gained a stronger focus on our business — and our three remaining Co-founders grew even closer.

Our friendship has helped us during those inevitable tough times you face when running a business. It also makes the good times — winning new clients and creating amazing digital products together — even more fun.

Fast forward four years and we’ve evolved. Today, we are a leading digital consultancy and development agency. We work with global brands, big businesses and household names. Our mission is to build things people use.

One thing that has really helped us grow is our community. By working in an open way — sharing our successes and failures, and creating a platform for other creative digital businesses to shine — we have developed a pipeline of new projects and connected with emerging talent. We set up Creative Kitchen in 2014, hosting regular meetups and industry showcase events. We are now spreading the Creative Kitchen love to Manchester and London.

Liverpool will always be our home, but we also have a base in London that helps us to grow and stay close to London friends and clients.

We have grown significantly, but in a controlled and focused way. Early on, we made a decision to do the things we love and excel in. We never want to be ‘Jacks and Jills of all trades, but masters of none’. We focus on delivering quality digital products that solve business and social challenges. We are also working on our own products and investing sweat equity into startups.

We had a fairly rocky start. But, through hard work, strong values, friendship and community we’ve grown our business and our network. We’ve got the scars to prove it — and the confidence to share our highs, lows and lessons learned. If that helps someone else get their own business idea off the ground, then that makes us happy.

Related blog:

• Liverpool: an entrepreneurial haven

Gavin Sherratt is Co-founder and Managing Director at Studio Mashbo. You can follow them on Twitter @StudioMashbo and @IamChaz_. Don’t forget to follow us too @DigiCatapult.

Find out how we are collaborating with digital businesses across the UK and how you can get involved with our Clusters and Communities programme.