Despite numerous car journeys during which I made a promise to myself to write more blog posts (there’s no shortage of subjects which incur my opinionated wrath, as you can well imagine), I find myself looking at the last date of entry and realising it’s almost a year since the last posting.
Gulp. Never mind. I’ve been busy.
2012 was a formative year for Square Banana. Whilst nothing significant per se actually happened, it was a year where I gave myself a virtual kick up the business butt.
Square Banana has been trading for many years now (since 2005 in fact), and we have completed all manner of exciting projects for a whole host of reputable and emerging brands, businesses and individuals. Having said that, I had developed a knack of working ‘in silo’, operating from modest premises and coping with the extreme workloads by sacrificing evenings, weekends and family holidays to deliver work that I was proud of and that represented the Square Banana brand. However, in late 2011 and into early 2012, I decided to see if the business had any scope for growth. I had spent long enough ‘waiting’ for it to grow, but it was clear that growth wasn’t going to come to me…I had to go out and grab it by the ‘short and curlies’ (as my grandfather so often put it). I had also – prior to that – taken my eye of the business in an attempt to develop a product of my own, which in turn (ironically) made me realise how much I loved the design consultancy game.
I engaged in some business coaching. To be brutally honest I wasn’t sure what this meant and what to expect, but it felt like a good idea. I needed to talk *at* someone who wasn’t another designer, family member or well established client, whilst hoping that they had some wise, sage-like words of wisdom to enable me to miraculously sprinkle some magic dust upon the Square Banana floorboards, thrusting forth the business into unforseen territories. Well, it wasn’t entirely so. But as it happens, it was amazingly liberating. When someone (who has no vested interest in fluffing your ‘design’ feathers) asks you fairly direct personal and business questions about your skills, your ambitions, your priorities, your family, your turnover and your profitability, you soon realise how much you’ve brushed under the ‘proverbial’ carpet and hoped would resolve itself. It’s actually quite embarassing when you are asked what you’ve done to achieve A, B or C and you find yourself struggling to answer. Sure, I did some ‘profiling’ (to which there was no conclusive answer…I seem to be a right royal mix of all ‘types’) and some objective ‘mapping’ but the most rewarding part of the exercise was the open discussions about what I wanted the business to become and some steps I should consider in getting there….and the bloody obvious realisation that no-one is going to give me those direct answers on a postcard.
So 2012 was the year where I ‘started’ to investigate Square Banana’s potential and make some decisions about how to go forward, prompted by the conversations and results from this business coaching.
I won’t go into the detail, but the initial steps seemed to have worked. I evaluated the type of work that was ‘high maintenance’ and ‘low reward’ (‘reward’ is a multi faceted thing BTW…it ain’t just money) and looked at ways to minimise these whilst not offending clients or risk alienating myself. I also started attempting to define what it was about our offer or skillset that set us apart from the competition (this is still work in progress as it happens!) or that appeals to the types of clients that I wanted to secure. It may well have coincided with an upturn in business sentiment, but the steps seem to have reaped the appropriate rewards to date – not necessarily in terms of monetary value, but more in terms of the structure of the workload and the types of projects we are now doing.
Another key decision was to locate Square Banana in a more urban, upbeat location and throughout last year, we’ve been scouring the county for a suitable base. After a great deal of internet trawling, arguments with office space brokers, negotiations with landlords and last minute changes of mind, we have finally moved into a great studio space in the centre of Cheltenham – Gloucesteshire’s spa town. It’s been frought and frantic at times, but we are finally ‘in’ (3 weeks and counting) and are currently making efforts to turn it from an empty space into a creative hub (we would have sorted this sooner had it not been for unforseen, last minute overseas trips and a whole heap of inclement snow!). I will post again in a few weeks to show you some appropriately arty photos of our spangly new studio space and no doubt a false impression of how tidily we operate! BTW – if anyone finds themselves in the centre of Cheltenham and fancies a coffee and a chat, feel free to pop in.
So a creative space is all well and good, but we needed bodies to occupy this space and help develop the business. So, I also set about trying to find the right kind of Square Banana designers. Very long and convoluted story short, I put the feelers out for seniors who might want a strategic move and middleweights with a bit of experience, but it soon transpired that most interested ‘experienced’ designers who hadn’t already taken the plunge into business ownership were a little too cautious to risk their comfortable salaries for a new venture in a small design business – despite the potential rewards, or if they were, they didn’t really ‘fit’ (a quick caveat – despite not securing a senior, I’m not averse to hearing from people who might consider a ‘strategic’ move in the future…I don’t want to burn my boats just yet). As such we soon turned to recent graduates or juniors as a viable option.
With this I decided to experiment. Having been to New Designers and – as a direct result – having had my faith restored in the emerging design talent, I decided to see if there were any young designers who might respond to a slightly less orthodox method of recruitment. I decided to spend 1 week posting a request for junior product designers on my LinkedIn status and my Twitter feed. 1 post per day over the course of a week. My logic was that – as a small business – I am looking for people who have their eyes peeled and their ears to the ground (notwithstanding their abilities as a designer – something I can validate in an interview and a review of their portfolio) so by posting it on a social media site (both semi-professional and professional) I could at least see that they were looking for opportunities rather than waiting for opportunities to find them. This yielded a mixed bag of applicants; some great, some good, a few mediocre and whole heap of crap. It still amazes me that some of the ‘designers’ (note the inverted commas used) who applied, seriously thought themselves worthy of serious consideration, let alone an interview. To my mind there seems to be a groundswell of young designers graduating who appear to ‘expect’ a job from the industry, at a time when many bloody good designers are losing theirs due to larger agencies ‘scaling back’. Once again, I’ve dipped my toe in the festering pool of another subject which could so easily consume this entire post…I will return to this another time!
I interviewed a handful and all seemed competent and able, but I was looking for someone who wasn’t necessarily brilliant at 3D CAD, or could operate rendering software in their sleep, or regurgitated the expectant ‘design phrasebook’ in every interview reply. I wanted a ‘thinker’. Someone who looks at a problem brief and has a good long think about it. CAD skills can be taught, rendering software is only going to get easier to use, but ‘thinking’ appears to be a rare skill, often missing from many graduates (from my direct experience I hasten to add). Incidentally, I contributed to a comment/advice article on Develop3D shortly after New Designers which can be found here.
So after a raft of interviews, I whittled the field down to a few, of which I chose a recent graduate from Northumbria Uni. A young lad called Robert Sloan who started at Square Banana a few weeks ago and who has already been heavily involved in delivering concepts for a future healthcare/wellness product. Whilst he’s obviously still finding his feet, he’s a keen asset and is helping to propagate a creative, ‘thought-led’ ethos throughout everything we do. I’m looking forward to seeing what he can bring to the business and – more importantly – how he can help it evolve.
So, there it is. This time last year I wasn’t entirely sure where we were headed. Now at least there is direction and vigour to enable and promote growth (albeit ‘tortoise’ slow compared to many recent tech businesses out there). It’s been bloody difficult trying to shoe-horn these initiatives into a year crammed to the gunnels with new and exciting design projects, but we’ve managed it…somehow (and I have the ‘silver fox’ swathes of grey hair to prove it). We have a new studio, new people, a new website (have a gander here), a revised sense of purpose, an awareness of our strengths and a hugely positive outlook.
That can’t be bad can it? Regardless of how it all shakes down.
This article first appeared on the Square Banana Blog and on LinkedIn as a personal article.
Square Banana Ltd. was the business I owned and ran from 2005 until 2017 when it was acquired by Kinneir Dufort. Square Banana no longer exists but I have republished the posts from the Square Banana Blog on this site as an archive and for the interest of anyone who might find the content useful or insightful.
The opinions are always my own. Nobody else’s.
