Here’s a crazy idea - why don’t we try and help each other succeed?

Want to grow your creative business in 2020? Yeah, so do we. Read on...

The creative industry today looks very different to the creative industry of yesteryear. As clients paying monthly retainers seem to be fewer and farther between, specialist creative agency owners are under constant pressure to build a pipeline of business to keep the lights on. And as creatives who have cut their teeth in the bigger, full service agency groups long for the entrepreneurial life, more creative people are shying away from being an employee to start their own gigs. After the ink of your first round of brand-spanking-new business cards begins to dry, reality sets in - running a business is hard! It can be lonely, exhausting, isolating and stressful.

If we take a look at the insights, the stats appear daunting. As per the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than 60 percent of small businesses in Australia stop their operation within the first three years of their startup journey.

We all sit there in our bubbles, working away, trying to take over the world. We know we’re good at what we do, and we build great relationships with our clients, but the reality is, we can’t deliver everything on our own, and we leave work on the table because we don’t have the full-service skill set of the larger agency groups to deliver all of the work.

We have deep skills in the areas that we specialise in, we’re able to be competitive on price due to lower overheads of the bigger agencies, but we leave opportunities for the taking because we’re good at certain things, not everything.

Take our business, Electric And Analog, for example. We’re a brand, content and design studio. We work with innovative startups, individuals, and internationally recognised brands to solve problems through creative thinking and execution. The thing is, we deliver a rebrand, or make a website or a brand video, or conceive a game-changing idea, and then the client wants more. They need PR or media buying or search marketing. As a young business owner it’s easy to say “yes” to these things and then try and find freelancers to outsource the work to, but this is a really dangerous strategy.

In the first year of running Electric And Analog, we did an exceptional rebrand for a client and built a really great relationship with them. They were really happy with the work we’d done, and they wanted us to do some PR for them. We saw the dollar signs and naively said “yes”. After all, entrepreneurship is like jumping out of a plane and then figuring out how to build a parachute, right? Wrong. It backfired on us royally as we couldn’t find the right PR partner. We spent heaps of time trying to negotiate with a few independent PR agencies we’d just found through Google searches, couldn’t deliver to the client’s expectations, and eventually had to refund them the money. That really hurts a small business in more ways than one. However, it’s a lesson learned, albeit the hard way.

So we've decided to birth a new initiative - “Momentum Mondays”. The goal is to bring small, independent business owners from the creative industry into the same room, once a month, and encourage them to help each other out by building meaningful strategic partnerships with agencies that offer complimentary services.

How much opportunity does a specialist agency leave on the table once they’ve delivered their core offering? Why not combine specific, realised skills from a strategic collective of exceptional niche agencies to build a bigger and better group?

The goal of this is to have a group of boutique agencies complimenting each other. This means we help our partner agencies to grow, and they help us to grow. A warm recommendation is usually far more effective than a cold call. And being open and transparent with our clients means they love us more. No more white-labelling, no more trying to clip the ticket by pushing business someone’s way, just a suite of founder-lead agencies referring specialists in other areas to their clients. In theory, this should result in a happy client and better client-agency relationships.

The first Momentum Monday takes place on Monday 20th January 2020 in Sydney.

Each event will be carefully curated through invitation to build the most complimentary agency groups possible. Each month, new agencies will be invited to grow the group and host the event. There’s some ground rules too. Each agency attending has 3 minutes to complete a 5-10 slide speed pitch.

This will cover who you are, what you do, relevant case studies, how you can add value to the group, and what you need help with. You have to end with “The Ask”. What exactly do you need? And how exactly can the group help you? People are busy and the best way to be efficient is to just say what you mean instead of beating around the bush for the sake of politeness. Radical Candour. You want something? What is is? Let’s see who can help you get this.

Based on the principle of helping others, the initiative embraces growth through a sort of mutual philanthropy. As Zig Ziglar says, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

More information on Momentum Mondays can be found here:

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Momentum Mondays:

Momentum Mondays is an invitation-only, monthly get-together of boutique, independent, founder-lead businesses in the creative industry. Our goal is to share skills, contacts and knowledge to help agencies within the group grow and flourish. We aim to establish strategic partnerships and introduce our clients to our partner agencies that cater for disciplines that are out of our remit. This adds value to our clients, our partners and ourselves and helps the entire community move forward and grow.

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Company information:

Electric & Analog is a brand, content and design studio based in Sydney, Australia. We deliver meaningful ideas in the form of brand identities, websites, apps, films, social strategy, content creation, commercials, books, campaigns and objects that fuel growth & increase awareness.