Our design agency’s three months of runway are up.

Winding down Heist

3 min readJun 4, 2015

We posted this on our site today informing everyone we’re starting the process of closing down our company and moving on to our next adventure.

Credit: Matt Quinn (@iammattq) http://headlandsdigital.com/

Someone told us early on that every service company is three months away from going out of business. Today, our three months are up.

The line between success and failure is murky. It’s not a binary metric that you can rely on to help you make tough decisions.

Heist is neither a success, nor a failure. It currently sits somewhere in the middle. And that can be a very uneasy place to live. Do you walk away while you still have the ability to provide your team with a soft landing? Or do you push forward in hopes that the next phone call or email will guarantee your wild success?

Over the last 3 years, we’ve learned many lessons. And some of those lessons have come at the cost of the business. You can read more about them here. But the biggest lesson we’ve learned is just how important the people who make up our company are. It’s our responsibility to give them the best opportunity to shine and excel. That’s why we’re shutting down now — to hopefully give them the best opportunity to continue their success.

Heist is a family

Heist has always been about the team. Our goal was to find people who passionately punched above their weight. Designers, developers, writers, researchers and strategists whose skills stretch beyond their titles. And we succeeded.

We have a badass team of product designers and builders. Each person on our team equally talented at designing useful products and experiences as they are at determining why their solution is correct in the first place. They are deeply empathetic, user-focussed thinkers who know how to explore all creative options, test assumptions, prototype solutions and execute collaboratively. And they pushed our thinking every single day.

Add a someone great to your team

We want to give them every opportunity to continue to grow their skills, influence teams and help companies excel. If this is the type of thinking and leadership you’re looking for, please reach out to them or us and we’ll gladly introduce you. We guarantee they’ll raise the standard by which you measure all new hires.