London I love you, but I have to leave
The reason why I’m leaving the London agency life behind and moving back to Manchester
Nearly 7 years ago I packed a single holdall and jumped on the £10 MegaBus to London with nothing arranged apart from a 1-month placement. Like so many before me, I did it with a spring in my step and a determination to succeed.
London was exciting…. and not just because I was 24, skinny and a lot less grey. It’s because London was bursting with inspiring creative agencies. Brand new independents where popping up left, right and centre and they were all doing amazing work.
But 7 years later, and this creative utopia is no more
The world has changed. Clients have changed. But more importantly the London creative industry hasn’t.
The cost of running an agency has rocketed, yet the amount clients are willing to pay has nosedived.
The big agencies are searching for ways to continue their previous growth models, gobbling up any smaller competitor who is challenging their pipeline. And even worse, the people who were energised and motivated to leave the corporate agency life to start up their own small studio no longer have the choice, because the cost of taking that risk has become absurd.
Rather than changing the way the industry works, re-evaluating the way that we monetise what we do, we have continued down the same path and become out-dated and effectively damaged our own industry.
Manchester, on the other hand, is the very thing that I left in search of…
The creative scene in Manchester is thriving… in fact, Manchester itself is thriving. Every time I visit there is a plethora of new businesses, shops, bars and restaurants. And unsurprisingly these places need creative resource.
There are amazing studios in Manchester producing work that is more than equal to that of any other city in the World, from one man bands to large scale agencies. The Chase, Fieldwork, Instruct, LOVE, Mark, Music, True North… the list goes on and on. And the portfolio of events and networking is growing too with Design MCR and others becoming a goliath event.
Agencies don’t have to pay the extremes for studio space that we see in London, and life is generally a bit (not as much as it used to be) cheaper, which in turn means that you don’t have to make as much money every day. Sure you want your business to succeed and make a profit but the balance between creativity, profitability and social life is much more realistic and exciting.
The other factor is that whilst I’ve been working in London I have built up a great community of collaborators and clients, people who I speak to on a regular basis but, and here’s the nail in the coffin for London, I very rarely ever meet them face to face, in fact most of them aren’t even in London.
Skype, Whatsapp, Slack and good old fashioned emails and phone calls… these have become my channels of communication and the way that I run my business. Something that I saw Matt Pyke of Universal Everything speak in Liverpool before I moved to London, and even then he was talking about the virtues of working remotely and not always being where your clients are, and it’s taken this long for me to really grasp just how right he was.
This isn’t new to a lot of people, but I needed to leave to really appreciate the amazing world that I had literally on my doorstep.
So I guess what I’m saying is, London I love you and have loved every minute of it, but my creative heart lies in Manchester.
I’ll catch you around.
Martin Power, the futures bright, the futures Manc!
