Leaving Google Aged 23 To Set-up An Agency - 11 Lessons From Year One

A couple of weeks after my 19th birthday I decided to partake in a Google programme, won it and ended up being put forward for an internship. As it turned out, I ended up interning for Google in Dublin. 

Not surprisingly I was awestruck interning for a company like Google and worked hard to secure myself a full-time graduate role by the end of the internship. I continued to be impressed by Google — especially by the perks you received working there. So were my friends and family — they would tell me incessantly how lucky I was. 

However, as cool as working for Google is, I’d always been more attracted to the life of an entrepreneur; getting myself involved in entrepreneurial ventures from a young age. Whilst an incredible experience, at Google I soon started losing my drive and my work ethic. It wasn’t anything to do with the company, it was more because I just wasn’t doing what I really wanted to. So in the final months working at Google, I began exploring the idea of starting a business.

Everyone I confided in told me this was a ‘mindless’, ‘silly’ idea that I would ‘regret’ down the line. I was advised to ‘stick it out for a couple more years’.    

It made sense they’d say that. I was 22 at the time, on a very good wage, super relaxed working environment, amazing perks, and I wanted to give it all up for the stress, hardship and uncertainty that comes with starting a business, given that I’d never even worked in an agency before let alone started one? Yes.

11 Lessons Learned

So after two years of working at Google, aged 23, I returned home to the UK to launch a creative agency. Whilst Google was great, what scared me the most was waking up in ten years time unable to now take major risks and saying ‘Ah well at least I got to sit on bean bags, chill on nap pods and eat free food everyday.’ I knew that setting up an agency would be hell in the first year, but I also knew that if I could just get past that, then the benefits would be great. Below I share 11 lessons that stood out to me over the last year. 

Money Is Necessary for a Comfortable Life, but You Don’t Need Tons of Money for Happiness

On leaving Google, the first and most obvious change was, of course, having no income. Oddly I didn’t miss the money — I had enough to get by and that was enough for me at that point. 

It also became obvious to me that a lot of the perks I thought I’d miss and had convinced myself I couldn’t live without, were superficial and not one bit necessary for my happiness. Instead, I was happy to wake up excited about something I was doing and being able to spend time with friends and family at home in London, which to me was way more satisfying.  

Your Network and Your Own Personal Brand Is Important 

For some businesses you need more than a good network to start making sales, but for myself and my business partner, all we needed to do was reach out to past clients who we’d done freelance work for and friends who were in need of our services. 

As freelancers, there is much less of an expectation when it comes to the things that you need such as a website and business email address. We probably operated as freelancers for the first 3-4 months, which brought in enough money so that we could fund the creation of Heue and didn’t need a loan, or outside shareholders. 

Thinking back, some of our first clients probably hired us more to help us than because they really needed our services, which I’m eternally thankful for. I think that’s why building and sustaining a healthy business network is super important, because people will support you if you’ve supported them in the past.

People Sometimes Take Advantage

But not everyone in business is out to support you, and we learnt that pretty quick once we moved outside of our network. Whilst I don’t think this is always the case, most businesses will squeeze every last drop out of you if they know you are just starting out, because they know they can. 

Knowing you’ve just launched, they’ll know you’re “desperate” for new clients. More than that, they know you’re likely inexperienced and working with a small team, so they also feel there’s a risk working with you, which they’ll want to mitigate as much as possible. That means they won’t want to pay a lot — at least not for the first project. That puts you in a tough position, because you’ll want your foot in the door to prove yourself, but you have limited time and resources and don’t want to waste them on someone who isn’t willing to pay. 

Often what happens in creative fields like advertising and marketing, is that clients will ask for very detailed proposals. The problem with this? Proposals aren’t a five-minute job, they take hours; not only in thought but actual execution. Starting out, you obviously need clients, and the temptation can be to go all in to secure clients. You tell yourself that if you work hard at this proposal it’ll wow them enough to win you the contract, and if you don’t put much effort into it, it’ll be a missed opportunity. However, we learned the hard way that this is often not the case. It’s no perfect science.

One potential client of ours was offering a five figure deal. For that reason we did the following: 

• Strategies for their entire digital marketing
• Branding mockups
• Website mockups, incl. mapping out various pages
• Countless meetings travelling two hours just to get there
• Countless documents outlining our strategy

In the end, they didn’t even go ahead with the project, let alone with us.

However, I am not saying to put in zero-effort. Limit yourself to an hour or two, and don’t just give everything away at once. Keep a ‘what we can do for you’ attitude and less of a ‘what and how we will do it for you’ attitude. Knowing if they will go ahead with you is very-very difficult to predict. 

Perhaps I’m contradicting myself, but the clients which ended up signing on the dotted line actually had the shortest proposals, because often clients have made up their minds as to whether they’ll go with you before you propose anything.

Know When to Walk Away

As mentioned, it’s important you decide up front how much material you’re willing to provide. But it’s also important to know that as an agency you will be pitching to people right left and centre. When you budget, budget for unpaid hours doing pitch work. Otherwise, it’s easy to end up feeling mentally and physically drained from all the unpaid work you’re doing; feeling like you’re wasting your time in a period where you have very little of it. Yet pitching is crucial for gaining new clients, so you have to set time aside for it.  

Again, we had to learn some of this the hard way. For example, one very well-respected brand within their sector who we’d heard amazing things about, were negotiating with us to help them with multiple projects. We spent hours coming up with different proposals and designing mock-ups, yet every week when we went in they asked us to present something new as their ideas had changed. But they were also very enthusiastic and wanted us to work on multiple projects, spoke about joint ventures, etc. so we kept going. 

Then red flags started popping up — they hired an in-house designer and web developer, and then our brief was scaled down to just focusing on ideas and strategy, which reduced our workload by about 90%. What was the most frustrating thing, was that the brief given to the new recruits were our ideas and strategy which of course we hadn’t been paid for yet. Eventually, I had to make a tough call and basically gave them a final proposal so they could say yes, or no. They said they weren’t ready and needed another six months. 

After six months, they still weren’t ready. 

That’s the thing with some clients — sometimes it really isn’t you, they simply just aren’t ready and are looking to test their ideas on someone rather than actually pulling the trigger. You need to feel them out for that, and you have to set an ultimatum a lot earlier than we did. 

Raise the Quality of Your Work, but Also Your Prices 

As you go, you learn. Your work improves. As it improves, your prices should rise too. This isn’t a dishonest practice, it’s actually very important because higher margins incentivise further service improvements, which you can pass onto customers. 

At the beginning, our prices were very low so that we could get through the door. This meant (for example) hiring developers who were cheap, and yes mistakes did happen. As we built trust with our clients and brought on other clients, our prices grew, which we used to hire better developers — less mistakes happened.  

However, this can cause some struggle with some clients, but so long as the quality of your work has improved, your price increase is justified. Some clients will try to get discounts and “the same price as before” but while you can give them some discount to show you appreciate their loyalty, you have to increase your price tag.

Bigger Clients Are Almost Always Better

This may sound like I’m not really saying anything new and it’s super obvious, but hear me out.

When we first started out, we quantified the success of our business by the amount of clients we had. It took us about nine months to figure out that we preferred less clients who spent more. 

While you have to start out with smaller clients who are willing to take a risk with your new agency, so as to be able to prove yourself, you need to become more selective as you move forward. Yes, every pound is a pound, but while making that pound you could be making ten pounds with someone else. 

We have found that bigger clients generally respect our time a lot more and are better at delegating tasks to us, as they have better things to do than micromanaging our work. This makes the whole experience a lot better for both parties.

Smaller clients are the polar opposite. We quantified smaller clients as smaller workloads, but it never-ever is. They’ll squeeze you to the floor on your prices, and when it comes to paying that price there is always an issue. 

Then again, you have to start small when building your portfolio and reputation. When dealing with smaller clients be sure to agree workloads and expectations explicitly upfront so you both know where you stand. Sign a detailed contract.

Prove your worth with smaller clients, increase your skills, then start choosing clients who treat you well and pay you fairly. 

Also, bear in mind that some clients, no matter how much they pay, aren’t worth your time. In the last year we’ve decided to part ways with clients purely on the basis of how they’ve treated a member of our team, because keeping a happy team is far more important than money.  

Processes and Workflows Should Never Stop Changing 

It’s important to develop processes and workflows when you start out — from templates for various documents to processes and workflows for how you perform the work. That said, many times you’ll learn that what you thought would work on paper, doesn’t work in practice. 

On the one hand, it’s a trap to stick to your guns and have it your way if a client doesn’t agree. On the other hand, throwing your entire process out the door, or obsessively changing it to try to improve it with every client, is also a waste of time. 

Find a comfortable middle ground, where you allow clients to give their input and continuously grow from your lessons while working, but don’t get obsessive about your processes, or constantly developing them. 

Hiring Can Be Entirely Unpredictable 

As you grow you want to expand the people who work for you, or hire people who are better than you at some services, or even increase the amount of services you offer. That’s great news, but the hiring process can be temperamental, to say the least. 

We work with a lot of freelancers and we’ve been using PeoplePerHour, Upwork, Forums and Reddit. Sometimes someone’s portfolio looks great, but they’re a disaster to work with. In these instances, we’ve had to do the work ourselves to save our reputation. Of course, that has meant financial setbacks. 

My recommendation is to pay as little as possible up front and hire people for smaller tasks before you give them bigger ones. We once made the mistake of hiring a company to develop our own website — paid up front in four figures — and ended up having to redo the whole thing — this was at a period where we were till freelancers and hadn’t taken a wage for about four months. 

Eventually though, you’ll find all the right people, but it’s kind of like dating — it takes a couple of dates to figure out if it will work and you have to date several people until you find the one who is your perfect match. 

You’ve got to get used to getting your hands dirty when it all goes wrong

We really wanted to stand-out and we wanted to do something which we hadn’t really seen other agencies do. We decided to create an animated video, which talked about each one of our services and how they linked together. 

We hadn’t made an animated video before and thought it couldn’t be that difficult. Oh, how wrong we were.

• It took us 15 hours to create a mood board and then storyboard that illustrated what we wanted to say in the most efficient way. We hadn’t done it before and grossly underestimated its complexity.
• We went through three different illustrators to find the right one. The first one ended up not being as good as his portfolio suggested, the second tried to force us to do a style of illustrations we didn’t like and the final one we went with was PERFECT artistically, but we could only speak to her on Skype through a translator. We were running on a strict timeline to launch, so we took a risk with her. After a lot of missed deadlines, we cut the project short with her and essentially had to learn how to draw illustrations ourselves — some very crucial hiring lessons were learned here too.
• Once we’d gotten the visuals straightened out, we had to animate them. The first animator we hired agreed to a start date, but after three weeks of waiting told us he was going on holiday and couldn’t do the project. We then did some asking around and found a good animator on a forum. As we were some distance apart, we had to use our Adobe After Effect skills to animate some of his work ourselves to communicate subtle changes.
• The voice over artist was great, but it took them three weeks to nail the exact tone of voice. I think one of us had to record and send over a reference.

The end result of the video was great, and our path to getting there taught us a lot of new skills, but no way will we ever do another.  

Invest in Your Brand, It Pays Off

On the surface of things, spending that amount of time, money and effort on that video without any direct promise of payback seems stupid. And, to be frank, until we launched, in the back of my mind I did think it was a stupid use of our time. We spent months doing prep work for launch — everything from arguing about our brand colours to painstakingly tweaking thousands of words in copy (which most of it we’ve never released). In fact, across the board we put a lot of time investing into the brand when we could have been out cold-calling. 

Did this pay off? Yes, we’ve had a lot of clients hiring us because of the look of our website, or concepts we developed for our portfolio — some of our biggest clients in fact. 

We actually didn’t put ourselves out there until six-eight months into this project. In hindsight, whilst I’m happy we put in the work early on, we probably should have went public a little earlier. 

Know Your Own Worth

This refers back to previous points, but know your own worth. While we have grown as an agency in the seven months since we first opened our doors to the public — our pitches, portfolio and credibility have improved — the most important change is our own attitude. 

As we grew our client-base, we became far more selective with who we wanted to work with and indirectly that made clients want to work with us more. The strange thing about this is this only came about as a result of having existing clients we were happy with and so we didn’t need to chase anyone unless we really wanted their business, but new clients didn’t know that. A client reaching out to work with us a year ago would have had us falling at their feet, but now we vet them as much as they vet us. Strangely, this has made clients more likely to work with us. 

We’re no longer desperate, we’re selective. 

Furthermore, our mindset has also changed from working for a client, to working with a client. They get our expertise and time, and we get to join them on their journey and create projects worthy of putting our name to.

In Closing

Setting up a creative agency is hard work and requires time up front — you need to develop a portfolio, website, brand, etc. and find freelancers or staff to work with. However, it can be wildly rewarding if you just know what you are doing (and avoid some of the pitfalls we fell into). I love running our agency and I’m a lot more motivated to go to work on a Monday morning (and Saturday…) than what I was when working for Google. That’s not to say that it’s for everyone — some people prefer being employed. Personally, I prefer being an entrepreneur.