Design Agency Secrets Revealed: How Operations Can Supercharge Your Success!
Who has 2 thumbs and loves Ops? You, silly.
Let me set the stage: I was the person who would throw around "negative space" and "draws my eye across the page" in casual conversations. I knew the etymology of the term "leading." I was cool. I was a designer. Then I saw a spreadsheet. My plain vanilla life was about to get dangerous and sexy.
Of course, that's hyperbole - the change wasn't immediate. I never was cool. I stuck it out. Worked my way up to Creative Director. Did some training in Design Thinking. Dabbled in UX. But damn, that spreadsheet kept calling back to me. It showed me around and introduced its friends, Project Management and Process. After several years of this Ops flirtation, I was in. I came out to my co-workers: I love Operations.
So I know what you're thinking - Operations is boring. Thinking long-term is hard. Planning is hard. Yes. It is. But don't worry. I'm not going to ask you to do Operations. You go about your business impressing clients and making great designs. No, I only want to convince you to hire that poor soul who finds this fascinating. Let them deal with Operations. But you do gotta hire them. Like, now.
That’s because today's agency life is complex. There are different departments, better software and services that need to be learned, and micro and macro pain points galore. And then, you have all those nagging business needs, like finance, HR, and IT. But, most importantly, it's developing the internal processes that run your agency. How does web design communicate with their PMs who communicate with the Editors, and where do they put all this stuff? Who is responsible for what? Playing hot potato with company workflows is not a solve.
To make the case, we only need to start with internal processes. All the other technical areas (IT, HR, etc.) flow from these. You can't leave internal processes to chance once you hire your second editor or your third designer. You can skip these and be effective when you're a 2-5 person shop. You're small enough that everyone is all up in everyone else's business and can fill in the gaps. But at some point, that's not cute anymore. Now, you're stepping on toes. Whoever grows out of a start-up with the better process will survive.
When you acquire more than one person in a department, the "best" person's process is the one that's "taught." It's all so haphazard! What determines who is the best? Why do we leave such things to chance?
So now you decide, "Yes, I want to be Master of the (Design) Universe." From that stage on, the type of business you want to be - the type of success you want - starts to depend more on how systemized everything is. It's not enough to just have a process. You also need a way to:
Capture all of your processes
Test it to make sure that it is actually the best
Disseminate it effectively to your team
Why? Because processes for a bouncing baby Design agency grow like mushrooms. You will acquire more and more of them to run the business effectively. When companies don't want to confront the truth that they need systems, they can't grow. They can't figure out the mechanisms for how to grow effectively - how do you bring on people? How do you teach them? What do you teach them? Suddenly, you run into the wall of your Design agency's growth. You may try to bring others on, but they fail to launch. As a result, you can't take on these shiny new clients. Or maybe you think, “training be damned! Throw the newbies in the deep end.” And the same thing happens - fail to launch. You may get some type A's that are self-motivated enough to overcome that. But that's a damn costly mistake considering how much you spend on training, onboarding, and getting people up to speed. Without a system, it takes a LONG time. You can go longer than a year with an employee who only knows about 25% of what you want them to know 100% of the time. Compound that by multiple employees. A dedicated Operations human starts to look like a pretty good bargain.
And we're just talking about onboarding. What about the internal efficiencies needed to become Master of the (Design) Universe? In Start-ups, everyone wears many hats. Communication is natural and organic. That is until you grow and need people to work in their lanes. Quickly that organic communication seems to have some nasty growth hormone in it. People, especially in remote work environments, aren't good communicators. It's hard to know what to communicate and when to communicate it. Oh, and most importantly, who must you get clearance from first? Have you ever felt the pain of that one person who blasted out a Slack to the whole staff about potential staff cuts? Or that super important client guidance doc that only went out to 4 people?
Next, let's address the elephant in the room: software. Still using a spreadsheet for project management? That's adorable. If you have more than 15 people, it's unmanageable. Even if you start with dedicated software like Trello, what happens when you outgrow it? Do you need more reporting? Integration with the fancy new sales software? How do you switch?
And then, let's say you’ll just make the switch to whatever you want. You just brute force it. Ok,tough guy. Come back in a year, and you see that half the staff don't use it and the other half use it inefficiently. An "evangelist" on the team usually knows the program inside and out, but no one reaches out because they blather on and on about how great it is. Their expertise is doled out piecemeal, only to those brave souls willing to dedicate an hour to "Did you know that you can do this in Asana?"
And finally, that evangelist leaves and takes your paddle. They also took all of their knowledge - that investment you provided, and they developed. It's gone. People now put their tasks into a Google doc and link to it in Asana. Savages..
Systems are boring. Most people don't care to create or maintain, let alone acknowledge their importance for any business that wants to grow past 8 people. Everything that I just mentioned wastes small agencies thousands of dollars per year. You reading this just wasted time that you could be using for Operations.
But wait. Didn't I tell you that you didn't have to do this? After all, no one on your staff has the time to do this independently. Do you want to understand AI and how it impacts you? Great! Add that to your To Do list, along with finding better reporting software, trying to get your sales figures up, fixing QC mistakes, and any of the multitudes of other issues and initiatives a typical agency (or any business) has at any given moment. That was sarcasm. But all of these things fall under Operations. Do your designers keep making mistakes? Operations can help. You can't get the Account sales figures up? Operations can help. Are your clients starting to leave for other agencies? Overload that poor Ops bastard you just hired. I'm telling you, they'll love it. Because to improve any of these - and a million other business needs - requires systems thinking. The ability to pinpoint the exact problem, synthesize a ton of research, create a plan, gain stakeholder approval, roll out, and maintain. That is what Operations does. That's what we love. It saves you money. It keeps us occupied. It's a win-win.
You have to think about it like an appliance: when you have no Ops, you get to keep the old, sunflower-yellow dishwasher. You don't have to invest. But you gotta pre-clean the dishes and pay out the nose on electric and water bills. A new, highly efficient dishwasher pays for itself in a couple of years. After that, it's all bank, baby. You come out ahead and can laugh at all those poor saps scraping off their oatmeal with no ability to report on department-level utilization rates. Losers.
So… have I made the case? Do you love Ops now? Do you still have 2 thumbs? Mission Accomplished. You're welcome.
Stay tuned for upcoming posts where we dive into the finer points of Ops and give real, actionable steps for better Operations.