I recently left a good job with a big agency to start a company with some smart friends. We’ve been working on a few projects and we’ve all been wearing many hats, project manager, developer, user experience, designer, QA — this in addition to trying to start a business.

We were starting to talk about hiring our first employee, either a part-time junior developer or junior designer. (note the word junior probably means intern) And then late one night I got a text from one of my partners, Nick, that read:

“Is now the time to exploit young talent or to be making”

He followed that up with:

“I feel like it’s time to make and to try to avoid the lure of becoming account guys. More for you than for me. I don’t want you to end up managing more than you’re making again”

It was a timely reminder if I needed one. One principal our company is founded on is that we are all makers and want to continue to be so. We want and need to see some output for every day we put in, however big or small it is. We have left or are leaving great jobs at great agencies because deep down we want to make more and make better.

The agency business model is a simple one, the more people you have on retainer the more money you can make. But this is often at odds with what it takes to make great work.

We want to be a different type of company. Not an agency but we don’t know what yet.

From the top down we want everyone to make something of value every day (and avoid MS office as much as possible).

We want everyone that works with the experiment to have skin in the game (this means owning part of something).

We want to be able to work on products as well as brand experiences and have the credibility to do so.

So Nick, yes we do need to hire the above people. But not to exploit them, rather work with them to help develop their careers and help us get smarter about what we are doing every day.

We also need to keep reminding ourselves that we need to spend our time learning, designing, thinking & coding and not being account guys.

Signed, MidLife Makers.