Here’s something I was wrong about. I thought ‘scaling’ a design business was about getting more clients.
Rewind back to 2017. Our design agency was growing nicely, with a steady stream of new clients and interesting projects. We thought we had a pretty good formula: Decent-to-good at the thinking part (strategy) and then we had a great team to turn ideas into stand-out brands or beautiful digital products.
And naturally, we assumed more clients were out there that would want that type of service - we just needed to be more visible, spend more on marketing and hire a business development role.
But there was something we didn’t do before we went for scale. Process.
Sure, we had a process for each service and we were pretty decent on the delivery side but here’s the problem;
Each project manager in our team had a different version of what that process should be and ran their projects accordingly
We often changed our process mid-stream on a project (aka - making it up as we went)
Unfortunately, we didn’t document our process very well
On the surface, especially for clients - it appeared like we had our stuff together and maybe we believed we did too. But pretty soon it became evident that ‘half a process’ isn’t a process.
And then you start to run into problems.
As a founder, you find yourself being pulled back into projects to unpick issues when you should be focused on growing the business
The work outputs started to suffer: For example, our PM missed a vital step in the process of a brand project, and we ended up ‘off brief’
The number of awkward client convos rises - which builds stress in the teams and impacts the culture
My strong belief is your agency systems need to be highly automated BEFORE you consider going for scale. Too many agency folks do it the other way around, going for growth and revenue, believing they can fix those issues later.
I think the three big areas that you must commit time to document and build process behind are;
Agency process (Every process behind the running of your agency)
The sales process (From the first convo to signing the contract documented)
Project workflows (The start to finish, step-by-step delivery process for each service you offer)
It’s a sizeable thing to bite off. But 100% worth the effort.