6 months on: The story so far

Today marks 6 months from the day Hydrogen was registered with companies house.

Apart from your first born baby, a 6-month anniversary isn’t really a day that’s normally celebrated. But it is a milestone that allows me to look back and reflect on the successes and lessons learned during that time.

I realise that all businesses will have a unique journey for their first 6 months, but there will undoubtedly be some similarities too. 

So… here’s the Hydrogen story, hopefully if you are on the same journey this might help:

Starting point:

It’s a sunny August morning (yep, they do happen from time to time in Glasgow), my wife is at work and my one-year-old is having his morning nap. I’m in my back garden having a coffee, contemplating my next step after parting ways from my previous business. I’d mentally made the leap to start up on my own and I knew I wanted to establish a social media business, having seen what was possible in my previous roles. I just needed to come up with a name, identity, purpose and all of the other good stuff that makes a business. “So let’s start with a name” I thought. I’ve always viewed the constant stream of content that is distributed on social channels as the ‘fuel’ that powers today’s marketing communications and I had the strapline ‘social marketing fuel’ stuck in my head. I needed a name that was simple, tied into fuel in some way and more importantly… available! Then it came to me… Hydrogen! The simplest element, also a fuel (rocketfuel at that) and ever so helpfully it was available as a URL. Within an hour I had registered the URL and some social handles and my mind was whirring over the business approach. Fast forward to my wife enduring 4 straight months of chat about Hydrogen…

The plan:

The age old question, do you have a business plan? I’ll be totally honest, I don’t – not on paper at least. It’s not that I would struggle to write one, or that I’m not sure where I want to take Hydrogen. For me, it’s more the about the fact that I’m so certain of where I want to take the business that I don’t need to write it down in a document that will never be looked at again. The plan for me has always been to create a best-in-class social media agency based in, and run from, Scotland. I have no desire to step outside of this space, dilute the offering or start delivering other services just because there might be some quick cash in it. That’s what partnering with other agencies and specialists is for. I believed that there is space in Scotland for this sort of business and, from what we’ve seen in the past 6 months, it certainly looks to be the case. One piece of advice I’d give to potential business owners is to make sure you have a mental/written plan from day 1 and stick to that plan no matter what.

Advisors:

When you kick off your own “thing”, everybody you talk to becomes an advisor, whether you invite the advice or not. It’s very easy to become blinkered by your own vision/path and you can quickly find yourself dismissing what others say. I’ve been given a raft of advice, some bad and some great. What I would say is: take it all in, take time to consider it and make your own conclusions. Although the overall vision is unchanged from the start, this advice has helped me make key decisions on the other fundamental business elements.

Bank:

With the company registered, website in place and some clients lined up, we needed a bank account. We are using Xero as our accountancy software, therefore we wanted a bank that integrated with the tool. Without naming names, we made a bad choice and went with the wrong banking partner. It took us over 8 weeks to get setup on all their platforms, only to be told (right at the end of the process) that they couldn’t link up to Xero. We ultimately switched and less than 5 days later were with a new bank, setup on all their systems and hooked into Xero. If I was to ever do this again, I would ask a lot more questions upfront - you don’t want to be wasting hours on calls to the bank in your busy initial weeks.

Clients:

From kicking off work with our first client, we have grown massively in the past 6 months. We’ve been numerous new business meetings, worked our network hard and we’ve got exceeded our expectations for this stage in the journey. We’re now: managing 20 separate social media communities; providing training and consultancy to others; delivering a national campaign for a FTSE 100 business; and helping a new brand launch their product on a global scale. Add this to a really strong pipeline of opportunities and we couldn’t ask for a better start to things. Interestingly, we could have “gone harder” at it and pushed for more and more, but my key learning from this is that it’s taken us time to settle, if we’d of pushed for more we would have almost certainly started to drop balls and fail our existing clients. Our aim is to grow, but it needs to be done in a steady way.

Team:

I was given advice at the start to ‘keep costs down and save’. I took this onboard but it’s not the right approach in my eyes. I believe that, in order to achieve success in this game, it’s about taking calculated risks. Maybe you don’t have 12 months worth of a pipeline in place, maybe you don’t have everything worked out with the clients, but the key for me is knowing that without recruiting the right team, you’ll never be able to take that next step. We’ve got a small but well-formed team in place now, allowing us to deliver everything from creative to strategy and we now have plans in place to hire 2 more people in the next few months. We just need to make sure they are the right people.

Office:

“Have you got an office yet?” It’s a question that surprised me in the early days of Hydrogen, but was the one I got asked most often. In today’s world, where remote-working is the pretty common, I never thought it would be such a big deal… but it turned out that it was. Lots of people didn’t take us seriously until we had a physical office to call home. We looked around at serviced offices in Glasgow, only to be left completely disillusioned by what was on offer. We then stumbled across a great studio space in Finnieston (recently voted one of the trendiest neighbourhoods in the UK!). This space will allow us to grow by another 3-4 staff before we need to consider a move and unlike the serviced office spaces, we won’t be charged for the new desks (definitely worth considering if you are aiming to expand your team).

Personal life:

Be prepared for this. Moving from a salaried position to a business owner is something that becomes all-consuming. You think and talk about it 24/7. I’m sure over the past 6 months my family and friends have grown tired of my relentless business chat. You also have to be prepared for free time in evenings and weekends disappearing. I’ve found myself working at 11pm on weekday evenings and at 7.30am on a Saturday morning. In the past, that would have been something I would’ve been loathed to do. But when it’s your own business, for all the free time lost, you actually quite enjoy it. I’m just glad I have an understanding wife who accepts that it needs to be done.

In summary, we’ve come from a 1 person spare room startup to a full agency office currently hiring team members 4 & 5, with some massive clients in just 6 months. And for that I’m really proud. We’ve had some real big highs and hit a few bumps along the way.  My personal life and finances have taken a battering. Throughout it all though, the vision remains the same, never dilute this. We’re a specialist social media agency and we aim to be the best at what we do in the market. And I think that’s what it all boils down to really, if you have a vision for the business and have the bloody-mindedness to get there, you will.  Finally, enjoy it. I’ve been told by so many people years into running their own businesses that the first year is a fantastic journey and they’d love to go back and relive it.