How to start a creative studio by a first time founder.
We started a design and events company. In 2020. Here’s a few things we learned.
Exactly one year ago I was in a coffee shop with my Casual Business partner Jon, writing down the rules of working together. Amongst them was:
- Embrace risk. Making mistakes is okay.
- Never create work you are not proud of.
- Avoid working on weekends or working late. Sometimes it happens. Don’t make it a habit.
Embracing risk is the one I was the least comfortable with. I had just left my full time job and a stable income and was feeling nervous heading into unknown territory. I’ve since learned that embracing risk is crucial for any first time founder, as long as you are ready to accept failure and quickly learn from your mistakes.
Here’s a few things I wish I knew when starting out and what we’ve learned this past year.
Decide if you want to do it alone or with others.
Having someone to go on this journey with means you will support and motivate each other, share the decision making and responsibilities and they might even help grow your business in unexpected directions.
If you do choose to have a partner make sure they are someone you trust and most importantly, that you enjoy their company. You will be interacting with this person every single day so if it’s not something you enjoy doing you already know it’s not the right match.
Having a partner with a different set of skills to yours can be very useful. Myself and Jon come from a similar design and branding background but at the same time have very different individual skills that compliment each other, which means we can expand our studio offering and add value to each other’s work.
Whatever your skills or preferences are, you need to have a shared vision for your business and rules for working together. During those early days we used Notion to make notes and to-do lists, as it helped us organise ourselves.
Another thing we did is discuss what’s important to our work life and our views and principles as individuals and as a team and agree on what’s negotiable and what’s not. These principles will form the foundation of your business, even when you hire people in the future.
For example we knew it was important to us to create a good balance of life and work that we could sustain for years to come. We also had to define our individual roles, even though these can change all the time, especially in a small team. It’s a good idea to decide who is responsible for what and who the client deals with — in our case a different person for each project, but as a rule never both of us.
Find a common goal and understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Making a list of things we wanted to achieve at the very beginning helped us clarify our common goal and get focused.
We agreed that we want to create beautiful and meaningful work, for clients that appreciate good design and in the process collaborate with other talented creatives and brands we admire. We believe that being serious in business doesn’t mean wearing a suit or following certain rules. And finally to try and have fun along the way.
Our vision was to take care of the whole brand experience, whether that is online or in person, at a physical event or as a storytelling piece of content. Our common goal was to create a studio that helped people and brands connect with other people through meaningful experiences, regardless of the format.
We realised that we needed some help to bring our vision to life and that’s where our partners come in.
Find awesome partners that you trust.
Clint, Doug and Erika have many years of experience in planning and running any type of event. Adding their areas of expertise to ours, meant we could offer an integrated service to our clients as well as expand our own skills.
With them on board we had a unique proposition; to design and implement a company’s brand experience, whether for their customers or employees, from beginning to end, from identity design to launch event.
Taking the leap
Having a full time job, especially one you are happy with, is not easy to let go, I get it. I spent over a decade working in agencies with some brilliant people on some exciting projects. But there was always a part of me itching to create something of my own.
At the same time, starting a company is a scary thought. I kept thinking, will it succeed, will it fail, will we have clients, will anyone really care?
During those early days we kept telling ourselves “If not now, when?” There’s never the right time, so now is as good as ever. We knew there would be some scary moments but we also knew that looking back and wondering why we never did it was worse than trying and failing.
The first step is by far the hardest, and once you take it you realise that you have no other option — it’s all in or bust! So you start focusing on practical things that need to get done which is a much easier task to conquer. My advice, as cliché as it sounds, is to take each day as it comes. Stop worrying about one year down the line, it’s impossible to predict what will happen anyway (hello global pandemic), so just focus on what needs to get done today. Not tomorrow, today.
Sidenote: Becoming a business owner isn’t for everyone and that’s ok too. Don’t feel pressured into launching a studio because your freelancing has taken off and you think that’s the next step. There are benefits and disadvantages to both.
Start small and do the groundwork.
So you’ve decided to make the jump. My advice would be to start small and keep things modest at the beginning. We saved in our first year by working remotely before deciding to invest in our own studio. Even though we are still happy working from home, we want to expand into other areas like podcasts, design products, collaborating with other creatives and hosting talks, so a studio made sense for us right now. Make a list of ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’ and invest wisely.
It’s incredible how many non-creative aspects there are to running a creative studio. It’s not out of the norm for us to go from designing to writing a proposal, to creating content for our social media to preparing an invoice.
It’s not easy, but the positive side is that by doing it all you are in a better position to understand what the role requires when you come to hire someone else for it.
Some boring but important bits.
Make sure you have 3–6 months of savings to cover your expenses before starting your business. This is really important as it’s unlikely you will generate income from day 1 and it can really help with reducing some of the stress that comes with it.
No designer wants to hear this, but you need to start getting excited about excel sheets. Make sure you have a profit and loss sheet, a cashflow forecast and decide on your payment structure and policies early on, for example will you be invoicing a deposit upfront and how much would that be?
Create a really solid Service Agreement including your Terms and Conditions for clients to sign before starting any new projects. There are some good templates online to get you started and a lawyer can make sure you are legally covered, especially when dealing with intellectual property and copyrighting.
Choose a name you love and brand yourself.
Fun fact: One day I walked past Jon’s laptop and saw some really cool type treatments with the words Casual Business. He said it was just an idea he had and we talked about how it’s a great name for a design studio, with an offshoot clothing line called Business Casual (ETA 2021?). I then threatened him that if he didn’t use it, I would. He must have taken it seriously because a few months later we started talking and Casual Business was born. The name also beautifully expressed the way we both feel about business; We’re serious about it, but always keep it casual.
Once you have your name, buy the domain and start your social channels straight away. If all your favourite name domains are taken, you can always get creative with adding something other than .com depending on your type of business. We had to buy Casualbusiness.com at a premium as it’s a common combination of words and later found out that the handle was taken on social media too. So we decided to go with @quitecasual and we quite like it too.
As a branding studio our own brand was especially important, so we went through quite a lot of iterations before settling on a style, colours, logo and font. We then changed it all again a few months later.
To launch our studio we created some Casual Beers in collaboration with a local brewery and started taking them with us when meeting new clients (ahh face to face meetings, remember those? )
Even though we spent a long time thinking about our own brand initially, what matters most is getting started. Don’t let analysis paralysis take over, you can always go back and iterate on your first designs.
Keep going
The launch is just the start. After that you need to keep going, keep adapting, change some things, go back to the start, scrap ideas, deal with it and try to enjoy the journey along the way.
And that’s without a pandemic thrown in the mix.
A few months post launch we were in lockdown with all of our planned events cancelled or postponed to the following year. There were many reasons to panic but all we could do is keep going. We kept working on our own brand, talking to existing clients and reaching out to our network, adapted our offering to online events and looked for ways to make our business stay afloat. I wrote a bit more about what we learned during this time here.
Endurance is just as important as getting started. Showing up every day, even when you don’t feel like it, is the number one thing you need to prepare for when starting a business. Equally, you need to find ways to push through low periods or when a major crisis arises. Running a company is a bit like a rollercoaster, one minute you feel on top of the world, the next it’s all falling apart.
Struggling with imposter syndrome is very common for first time founders and something I’m constantly working on. Things that helped me is to take a step back every now and again; It’s hard to see the wins when you’re in the thick of it, but if you stop and look back every few months to a year, you can clearly see your achievements and all the great things you’ve made happen.
It also helps to have a life outside of work, to create a healthy routine, have days off and try to finish at a reasonable time each day. I know advice for founders is usually to HUSTLE HARD and NEVER SLEEP but that’s not sustainable in the long run, trust me.
Make sure you reach out to other creative founders, old colleagues, mentors or friends. It’s given us incredible strength to hear from others and get their advice.
Also remind yourself often why you’re doing this by looking back at your vision and company manifesto. I have to admit that we haven’t revisited it much during this year but it’s a great tool to align yourself with if you feel you’ve lost your way.
Finally, one of the biggest things I’ve learned this year is to treat everyone you meet with kindness, ask for help when you need it and become best friends with your accountant.
