A new year retrospective on the MakeReign journey so far.
Happy (belated) 2018! As we kick off a new year at MakeReign, we wanted to share some of the experiences and lessons learned so far.
There are lessons to be learned in reflection — these lessons are great in finding areas of improvement moving forward. We wanted to reflect on the last 18 months of running MakeReign; how we got here; the various milestones and challenges we’ve experienced along the way, and share some of the things we’ve learned. Our journey certainly has had its successes, but it definitely hasn’t been without its pain points. My hope is that by sharing our experience, you might find some helpful advice that could be of use to any aspiring entrepreneurs on their own journey in starting an ‘agency’ or a business or considering going freelance. Not the lofty, “start young, believe in yourself, just do it, keep doing it” type of advice, but the “this is how you could go about doing it” type of advice.
I wrote a piece about MakeReign last year, which explains a little more about our story.
(This post slightly delayed — I know! It’s already mid-Feb, where does the time go?🙄 Been meaning to write this since the end of last year, but finally found some time to put fingertips to keyboard and share this with you. Any and all feedback welcomed! Have your own story or experiences to share? Let me know in the comments. 🤘)
Finding a space to unleash our collective talents.
First major step in our journey. We needed to find somewhere to work from. There’s not really too much in finding a location. Search online. Scout a few places in person. Decide on which you prefer. When you’re based in Cape Town, you’re spoilt for choice for potentially great office space. What I wanted to discuss here has more to do with the decisions we made to create our space, that speaks to the vision for the kind of business we wanted to be.
We wanted to create a space that would help us unleash our collective creativity. Our space is where we make things happen, where we get shit done! There weren’t too many rules from the landlords on what we could do with the space we chose— basically just return the space as you found it. One of the fundamental decisions we took early on was: to be a rad studio, creating rad work, with rad people, you needed a rad work environment.
“It’s really important to create a work environment you actually want to work in.”
The goal was to create a working space that not only looked great, but that you enjoyed coming to hone your craft (whatever that may be) in every day. The idea was to have our studio be a place creative minded people (whether a part of the MakeReign team or not, and whether a “creative” or not) could come on the daily and discuss their thinking, their ideas, and bounce off each other’s energy. To unleash our collective talents, it’s vital to find create the right environment for the team to perform at its absolute best and allow opportunities for advancement.
We’ve put a lot of love into the space for these reasons. But creating a rad work environment doesn’t necessarily mean spending lots of money — you can get started in, say, a co-working space (an option we considered at first). The lesson here is to try and surround yourself with people you could potentially make connections with, connections that could help you grow as a company or individual, in an environment that gets you out of bed every morning.
Getting great people to work with us.
“Build the right team and get the culture right — the rest will follow.”
A rad studio space, creating rad work requires rad people. From the get go, we’ve been focused on our people. Getting truly talented people to work for you and retaining them is a key driver of success for any business. We want to work with the most talented, just all round awesome bunch of people in order to create industry leading work. To us, developing the right team is super important. Build the right team, and great things will happen!
But possibly most important in finding the right people, and keeping them excited about what we’re trying to build here, is the importance we’ve placed on company culture — our identity as a company. We’re building a studio culture that aims to unleash our collective talents and believe the magic comes from how you do things and how people work together. This means we’ve spent a lot of time developing our core purpose and values that guide our company.
We’ve now grown our team into nine permanent employees in our 18 months, and have built up a solid squad of freelancers we work with from time to time. And this works for us. We’re not trying to grow too big. We want to keep our team as small as possible, for as long as possible.
Getting (new) business.
There are of course a number of ways to do this. But here I want to express the importance of connections and relationships in building a company. A lot of our business has come from referrals and repeat business from existing clients. Matt (one of the Founders and design director here) had developed some strong relationships through his Dribbble account before we started, that kept new business coming in. We’ve maintained great working relationships with most of our clients, with a majority of them working on multiple projects with us. It’s these relationships that has allowed us to get where we are.
Build that reputation of reliability, trust and ability to deliver, and you’ll spend less on advertising.
I think this stems from the emphasis we put on having our clients as partners. We don’t work for our clients, we work with them. We become part of their team. We take time to understand their business and get to the heart of what it is they want to achieve. Ultimately, if what we create together succeeds, we all succeed.
I also wanted to discuss the importance of showcasing what you do and growing your audience. We place a lot of importance of showcasing our client & concept work on our Dribbble account, as well as showcasing our identity — who we are as a company — on our Instagram. (Be sure to check us out on both!) Without having time to put our proper website up, these tools have been hugely beneficial in growing an active audience and new business leads.
An audience returns often — on its own — to see what you have to say. This is the most receptive group of customers and potential customers you’ll ever have.
— Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson from the book ‘Rework’ (I strongly recommend you read it, it’s great!)
Getting work done.
I can’t stress the importance of getting some sort of internal system or process implemented early on. I believe it is far more complicated and becomes a lot more complex to introduce change as you grow. That’s not to say your process or system will ever stay the same. It won’t. You’ll always find room for improvement — and that’s a good thing. My point here is to try implement a system as early on as possible so that you make it as easy as possible for your team to make decisions and get things done — and then iterate, iterate, iterate, improve, improve, improve. We try to solve the various different problems that come our way by experimenting with and testing different solutions — the key is always striving for improvement. Experimentation for us is a great way of ensuring the best outcome. Get better month by month with the challenges we face, once we’re comfortable in the solve, we move on to solving the other challenges that will come our way.
I won’t go into too much on our system — what works for us, most likely won’t work for you. You need to look at yourself and your team and really think about how you are working, how you will work best, and that will help you to determine what works for you. Don’t try adopt a methodology or way of working from somewhere else.
Getting paid.
You’ll come to know the challenges of cashflow management if you start your own business. Cashflow is the main cause of business failure. Do not pop the champagne bottles when that first big payment comes in (well do, but maybe just take a sip!). Cashflow is ultimately what will guide your decision making and takes quite a lot of foresight and planning on your part. Be prepared for that. Bill early and bill often! Always be mindful that people pay late, or don’t pay at all for months — be prepared to have to do a fair amount of chasing; especially when clients are in different countries… And you’ve got your own bills that stack up to worry about. Stick to the basics of financial management; always have money in reserve — make use of that savings account (Interest!). And be smart about your payment terms and conditions. Possibly the best advice I’ve been given on this journey;
“Profitability won’t kill your business, cashflow will.”
So there it is, a bit on our journey and some of the challenges we’ve faced, in the smallest of nutshells, over the last year and a half.
We haven’t always done it the right way, that happens — but we’re pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished thus far.
Here’s to many more years of milestones, successes and challenges!
