creative briefing

My agency will be undergoing a number of changes over the next few months that are part of the natural evolution of the business. With faces, structures, models, and handful of other elements due to be changed, I see the process as an opportunity to hit the reboot button and rebuild certain aspects from the ground up. This got me thinking – what would I change?

It’s not very often that a business gets a chance to tear down everything and start again. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears go into developing the brand, reputation, networks, clients, PR (for the SEOers), and basically every other grain of what you call your business – so much that “starting over” is a concept that is usually quite foreign to most. But let’s entertain ourselves for a bit, shall we?

What if you had the opportunity to do it all again? Over the years, months, weeks, and days that you’ve been a business owner (yes, this applies to you freelancers as well), you’ve picked up an immense amount of new knowledge. Knowledge that sometimes helps you realize that some of the things you’ve done were not the right things to do. Knowledge that sometimes makes you think, if I could do it again, this is how I’d do it.

So what would you change? What would your business look like if you were to start it again today? What were your biggest mistakes and what have you learned?

To get the ball rolling, here’s a few of my biggest business mistakes:

• Not setting aside budgets for internal work: Budgets for client work are a no-brainer and are easy to justify. Why shouldn’t internal work have the same rationale? Your brand, website, and products are all important assets that, when properly invested in, will offer a [bigger] return.
• The ‘we can do that’ mentality: Every small agency’s tagline should be “we can do that” – not because it’s a good strategy, but because you end up saying it so much that you it might as well be a tagline. Trying to take on too many things outside your realm of expertise will thin out your business and leave you delivering less than mediocre results.
• Not having a hiring strategy: When you first start out, your business doesn’t need 30 sets of hands. It probably doesn’t even need 10. What’s more important to focus on is getting the right set of hands to work with you to build the business and more importantly, to run and execute the business and bring in the revenue. Partnering with a developer to match your design skills = great idea. Hiring a team of designers before you even have an established flow of work coming through = bad idea.
• Not having a growth strategy: Hiring is part of this, but a bigger part is having a plan for how your business will grow in 1, 5, or 10 years. If you’re a lemonade stand, you should have a plan on how you will grow your business into some kind of industry leader in lemonade production or distribution (for example). Without a growth strategy, you’ll always just be that same lemonade stand at the front of your house (or in my case, that lemonade stand with a really thirsty neighbor – thanks Satish).

These, and many more, are considerations that I’ll keep in mind as I begin to build the next instance of the agency.

What about you? Leave your biggest mistakes in the comments and share what you’d do differently if you could start over again (if anything).

PS – As further support that this is an important topic to consider, Naomi from the IttyBiz factory has also recently asked the same question to her readers. Check out her blog if you haven’t already – it’s one of the most entertaining and insightful small business blogs around.