2020: The Year in review

Published in

Bruno

7 min readJan 12, 2021

2020 was what it was: Our most challenging year!

For the first time in our agency’s life we would like to share with you a behind the scenes look at 2020.
We can say that it has been stressful and tough in so many ways, but it was also joyful, interesting and really fun.
You know what? I’m fed up with bad buzz news. It seems like every news wants to spread bad stories, so this post will be the opposite! Not just happy things for the sake of happiness but real stories described by an optimistic guy. Simply put, “a glass half full”

My name is Barthélémy Chalvet, co-founder and creative director of AgenceMe.

The Work

We continued our job of re-branding at Sendinblue, we helped Buzzman with exciting projects, we completely re-branded WP Rocket, we made a new website for Reelevant, we made some marketing materials for Allianz, we branded Kara.ai, we worked on product with LeCollectionist, we helped Roche with a brand new product. We did the same for many other companies like MyTraffic, Dougs, Innit, Zenpark, Yaago, Paiva, iPaidthat, Shipup, AxleHire, Opt Health, Innit…

In total, that’s more than 33 companies we helped with their brand, products and website, more than any year in our history.

Amazing team

Our main goal in 2020 was growth, and that happened. We hired 3 new people at AgenceMe. If you are a CEO, recruiter or even a small agency you know how hiring people is hard and time consuming. This took up a long part of 2020. For us it was really important to hire strategic people with strong skills, we wanted to open the field of possibilities. That’s why we hired a Business Developer, Community Manager and Motion Designer.

We’re now ready to think bigger, take on huge projects and create everything in-house. AgenceMe’s goal has always been to create everything in-house and keep the same vision and quality of work. No one can say the opposite, it’s so much easier to work in the same office (don’t really understand the hype with distributed teams but let’s talk about that another time).

Welcome California

Our first office in the US opened in mid-2020 thanks to Luke, our Business Developer and UX Designer. Feel free to shoot him an email, he has great geo-political knowledge but can also talk about his last Bumble date. Here!

What’s the goal behind this new office? We have been thinking about it for a few years now. We were even thinking of moving all the team to San Francisco a few years ago, but you know, visa, red tape… make me crazy! And to be honest, France life it’s pretty great.

We wanted to be more present for our US clients (time zones, meet in real life etc…) but also wanted to develop this part for other reasons. The United States has really great companies that we would like to work with. We worked with Uber a few years ago and the experience was really awesome.

To understand why we created this US office, let’s talk about numbers. When we started the agency a few years ago, 80% of clients were US based. Then we hired more french people, we grew, we added new services, we helped top french companies (Qonto, Sendinblue, Chauffeur Prive, Mon Docteur…) and these numbers changed a lot to become 10% from US and 90% from France in 2019. For us it was impossible to be present only in France. We fell in love with the US (mostly San Francisco) the first time we visited. Thanks to our first clients (Xola is the first company we worked with in the US and we’ve been working with them for 7 years now) based in the US I became what I am today and AgenceMe became AgenceMe thanks to that too. I’m so grateful about that. It’s a truly special, tender relationship.

Anyway we did it with the right person and numbers are already promising, 20% from the US and 80% from France in 2020. Looking forward to 2021 but we’re pretty sure it will be great 🤞.

The Financials

Ok this topic is tough. What I can tell you and what I can’t! Especially because it’s a french taboo to talk financials…

As I said previously, this year was stressful. And it’s because of our turnover! Of course Covid played a big role but it was not the only factor. Some ongoing projects were canceled and new missions got delayed. As a recent father, I couldn’t really work full-time during 2 entire months (nursery was closed), it was the same for Marine (Co-founder) and other people on the team. It made us less efficient, we lost about 2 months of work on the branding part (which represents 70% of our revenue).

Luckily the US market was there to help us to find new opportunities and clients. Thanks to that our turnover was the same compared to 2019 and our profit increased 🔥.

Our Second Coworking Space

AgenceMe is not only a Design Agency. We also created a coworking space 4 years ago, Le Studio. We really enjoyed the experience of designing offices. Probably the most enjoyable thing I have made in my entire life. Marine took on a really really huge workload on brand, identity and overall style (colors, wallpaper, furnishings…).

People may not know it, but the most difficult thing in coworking spaces is to create a great synergy between the people. We found the right way to do it after 1 year in our first coworking (yes it’s pretty long). We knew it would be the same amount of time in the second one.

Back at the end of 2019 we found a great opportunity for a second coworking space with the best location in the heart of our city, Rouen. Today it seems crazy to open a physical business but in 2019 it didn’t. We took the opportunity.

We opened the space in February 2020. We got great interest from many companies and freelancers. Everything went really well! We even booked more offices than our first coworking. And then… the Covid came. We closed our two spaces, we paid back all coworkers, and many coworkers left… During two months it was a mess. 0 visibility from the government and no one could help us. We got 0 revenue for two entire months!! I can tell you it was hard but we’re staying optimistic. We bet everything on communication and social networking, so that we’ll be ready when everything is back again.

Thanks to the lockdown we were able to re-open in September. The following months were tough because of the new lockdown, curfew… But our efforts and a lot of communications paid off, our coworking space is now full.

And much more

I know you’re busy and spending more than 5 minutes in an article is insane. So I will be really quick here. We made many other great things this past year. Here’s three of them:

Podcast: We created “les yeux brouillés” late in 2020 for our coworking space. Marine interviews creative people from across the country. You can follow these stories here : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyVWpaMGE8OvfAry1fqPJNA
Dev: 2020 was the year of our dev team. We made a lot of new websites thanks to our team. Front-end and Back-end development represented 25% of our revenue in 2020 compared to 18% in 2019. Huge gap!
Services: Lately in 2020 we started providing a naming service in AgenceMe. We can now help companies further in their rebrand.

Hello 2021

No one knows how 2021 will be (even if these first days feel so bad), but one thing I’m sure of is that we will do our best to make it AgenceMe’s year. Yes we have a ton of things to show and launch this year.

New Rebrand: We’ll rebrand our agency with a new website. The launch is scheduled this month!
New People: We’ll hire new creative people. We’re looking for Motion Design, Creative Director and Web Designer. Send us your portfolio on contact@agence-me.com
New Services: We’ll launch exciting new services… But it’s too soon to tell you guys ;)
Travel: This has always been our M-O at AgenceMe : Make travel with the team, meet clients across the world, re-activate our creativity and attend some conferences (San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, Montreal, Barcelona, Los Angeles…). We’ll try to keep this guideline in 2021.