Changing lanes
For most of the life of my business, acidlabs, I’ve operated at the whim of the body shop contracting market, and while that’s worked a lot of the time for the purposes of bringing in money, it’s mostly in the category of busywork and it doesn’t represent the best use of my skills or the best opportunity to do work that’s good to great.
Working that way also doesn’t represent the type of work culture I want to model: one that’s focussed on treating people — clients, collaborators, staff, everyone — with the kind of respect you see shown by Jason Fried and DHH at Basecamp (you should read their blog, Signal v. Noise).
It also doesn’t it take advantage of the strengths of the people I collaborate with to add capacity and capability to acidlabs when it’s needed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what this means and where it leads.
The best use of the capability and capacity within acidlabs would be to operate as a studio, offering the kinds of skills I have: design thinking, service design, user experience design, customer experience design, and facilitation. It would also offer the best opportunities for growth and diversity of clients.
I’m not afraid of the competition; I can hold my own against them.
And, while I’m no natural salesman, get me in a room with someone and I can explain how the work I do can be a game changer.
In my perfect world (and I’ve imagined this before, but it’s never happened because of doing onsite contracting), acidlabs would be 2–3 people full time by the end of 2017 supported by a model that brings in additional collaborators as needed. I’m determined to make that happen.
So, consider this the official announcement:
acidlabs Studios is now open as Australia’s (and the world’s) newest service design agency.
