A story of facts and values (and numbers as a byproduct)

We are back from three days spent with the entire Sketchin team and, guys, what a team we have put together!

During my career, I have always tried to hire people smarter than me, and this is still the case. I never had the opportunity to work with such a vast number of talented and inspired people.

Sketchin has grown to more than 100 people. What a journey. I was sitting in the Villa Erba garden, and I was looking at the people enjoying the closing party. I felt so proud. You know, one thing is looking at your headcount on a Google Spreadsheet, and another thing is looking at the real people, all together. Lugano, Milan, Rome, Madrid, San Francisco. One company, and one passion: great design. The essence of Sketchin.

Money is a byproduct of our work. It is not the goal.

Sketchin is in constant evolution, and we actively practice a form of continuous improvement on our tools and method. We never stop. We can adapt quickly to market change and increased project size. We face new challenges each day, and we react accordingly.

So, is Sketchin perfect? No, it isn’t. It is an imperfect and impermanent artefact that needs to evolve each day to maintain its culture. The culture is the core of Sketchin, and with the proliferation of new design studios abroad, our most significant issue is to preserve the design culture that made us great. This is our primary goal in the near future. Everything else will follow.

Sketchin is defined by its culture. This is what we sell to our clients: the integrity of the design. Integrity is something you can’t sell if you don’t own it as a company value. It is easy to slide into the ego bandwagon that is the biggest enemy of great design. There is an ethic, and a business ethics, that you need to cope with. It is not a simple exercise, and sometimes we have to flex our muscles to keep it together. Everybody stands for it. Every single person is Sketchin. This is the reason why we want to keep a flat organization even if we are becoming bigger and bigger.

Did we make mistakes? Well, plenty of errors. I can count dozens on my shoulders. We experiment, and we try to fail fast to find new solutions to our problems. A failure is an option in Sketchin. Nobody will blame you in Sketchin for failure. Never.

“To infinity and beyond.”

— Buzz Lightyear

I look back at the first three quarters of 2018, and I can say we have done great things:

• We have opened studios in San Francisco, Milan and Rome.
• A new studio has opened in Madrid using a franchise model that we will leverage in the following years.
• We are moving from our cradle in Manno to a shining new studio.
• We have launched an associate program where talented professionals can join us to deliver exceptional design to our clients. Not every great designer wants to be a Sketchin employee. Some of them want to be freelancers, and we understand that.

So, just to give you a rough idea of what has happened in these years I can tell you that we have doubled our headcount each single years, we have grown our revenues by more than ten times, our margin is increased by 120%, and our other financial key performance indicators have followed the same trend. An outstanding result from a pure business perspective.

What’s ahead?

We will continue to grow, but not for the sake of a “grandeur.” There are dozens of talented people that can jump on board, and, at the same time, there are exciting projects to deliver to our customers. This is a win-win situation that we will leverage as much as possible.

We will expand our international presence with new studios and new initiatives. We are definitely ready to become a proper international design studio.

We will work to spread the design culture around the world, helping designers understand the critical role they play nowadays. We are not jealous of the things we do. We like to share, and sharing is loving.

We have an ambitious internal project, called Project Homer (guess…), that will make all the Operations work as much automatic as possible. With the integration with BIP, we have dozens of systems that need to talk to each other. It’s 2018, and data entry is so old style. Let’s have machines do the tedious work, and let people focus on what matters the most.

EVO, Evolutive Experience Design, is getting a massive facelift and will adapt to the humongous projects we are running today. Again, as soon as we are finished, we will share our work with the design community.

We need to understand, and you need to understand, that we do not live anymore at the borders of the empire. Today design is the core for most companies out there, and you need to be prepared. You are no more requested to design single touchpoints, you must deliver complete products and services ecosystems.

Challenge accepted!