Matt's Story - Part 3
He’s just gone and done it, hasn’t he! A friend challenged Matt in Part I to start doing what he needed to be doing - living his best life, aka owning what he was good at. In Part II we see how Joey (wife) was a real hero and so was Jared and Steph. They each stepped up in their own way and encouraged Matt to pursue the business idea. This is where it gets really good, because frankly this is when the rubber starts hitting the road. If you’re wanting to start a business, or wanting to start anything for that matter, there are all sorts of little gems to encourage you. It’s not as impossible as you think.
‘We thought we could just ‘play and have fun.’ ’
Q
What changed after you Ouched it?
That, for me, is way more exciting.
I mean, I still feel like I am Ouching It.
I was turning down so much work while doing my other job, that when I look back if I’d actually just stopped working, I’d have probably been earning significantly more money as a consultant. But I think that’s part of it - when you don’t feel qualified, you say Yes but you don’t back yourself with the value of what you’re offering. I was just this guy with ideas.
I then realised how lucrative ideas are. I went from Matt Miller - the guy you would get to help shape creative - to convincing Jared and Steph to join me and we registered the business, OneSixOne as a multidisciplinary creative agency. I went from the guy who knows a whole bunch of creative people, and ‘get Matt in just to see what he would think and what he would recommend’ - to making a business out of that.
‘You’re kind of like, how do we do this?’
There are three of us as Directors, myself as CEO and Creative Director, Steph is Art Director and Culture, and Research and Jared handles all our Operations.
My stuff was very much overseeing projects and client acquisition and the client-face side of things, which suited me because I studied architecture, so my brain functions in building things and when I can see something, then I can trust everyone to build it.
Early on I knew that the quality of work we were doing was something that I actually couldn’t deliver with the capacity of my role. I had a friend who I previously worked with, a guy called Andy - he’s one of the most talented designers I know - and I told him ‘Look I’m setting this thing up and I want you to be involved.’
He’d just gone freelance a few months before and was doing pretty well with it so it was a pretty hard sell. He needed a year to work on his own freelance stuff and I knew that I had a year to get him involved. Which fortunately, after that period he joined us as the fourth Director.
Part of how we set the agency up was so that we always wanted to be more than just an agency. The model we worked in previously wasn’t great for creatives. We felt we had a solution, so we designed a model that looks different - it’s more holistically invested in people rather than them just being cogs in a machine, where directors are extortionately paid at the expense of freelancers. We wanted to speak into culture and places of influence and create a diverse model that’s beneficial for the creative landscape in London.
So the beautiful thing about that is that we’re all quite diverse between the four of us that set up OneSixOne, and the team members that started to come on after that as well.
We managed to secure an office which is great, just for a year.
At the beginning Ouching It was like, as the business got set up there was work that I could have taken solely. But, now it was within the context of OneSixOne which meant that I was putting it into the business, paying all of us. So a wage which would have previously looked great as a freelance job, was suddenly divided by three. Which meant that actually I needed to get three times the amount of work in the same amount of time. So those initial first few months were intense, in that I was trying to lasso things back that I’d passed up before.
It’s always really scrappy at the start of the business. You’re kind of like, how do we do this?
‘that’s when we knew that we’d kind of stepped out of that initial painful period.’
We managed to secure an office and then we set up this initial programme which was testing part of how we wanted to operate as a business; which meant we wanted to have this artist in residence. We have this beautiful office, but there’s only three of us in the space, and so we wanted to make the space available to people who didn’t have space to work. We brought in a few people - designers, photographers, a director, to work in the space. It meant that by doing that they didn’t pay any rent, they got all the internet, all the coffee.
I think that because we were doing what we were doing, it meant that we could help people shape their contracts, their retainers, help people negotiate, help people connect with other people to upscale their projects.
For example, if there was a Director who needed a DOP or a colourist, and I knew someone, I could bring them in and all of a sudden they’re able to do the project together.
It was really exciting. That was part of the model for OneSixOne and the good thing about that is the place was buzzing a bit, because people were working and doing stuff and had all these different disciplines and we all looked different as well. A lot of other agencies that people had gone to, there are like three white guys in their forties and upwards.
And yah, there’s definitely a point where you hit a groove, there's a point where there were unspoken codes where we started to function in the plan that we’d created and it was working.
When we hit a snag, we’d be like, ‘Oh we planned for this, but it clearly doesn’t work.’ After we got through that whole ‘storming and forming’ period, or whatever it is, and we absorbed the culture, the protocols - things changed. When we were functioning in the plan, that’s when we knew that we’d kind of stepped out of that initial painful period.
What happened next was I could see that if we ‘got it’ - the culture, etc - as Directors, but then no one else got it, it could become a problem to expect that new hires got our culture and stuff.
After we got set up, and we finally were working and we faced new challenges and tackled those, we thought we could just ‘play and have fun’. But that is a false sense of security because actually from what I was reading there is a point where a lot of businesses do get caught out - especially start ups where stuff can start to creep into culture and you hire people that don’t get it.
So we actually kept going back to the drawing board and figuring out our culture - what is our actual strategy, what are our values, what’s our strategy in terms of employment. We started to draw up a company handbook and there were things that needed to be in place even before we got there.
Q
Where are you at now?
A
So where we are at now is almost Phase Three.
The First Phase was forming the business, getting off the ground and Phase Two was operating within our first year, getting a year under our belt with the business. Now we’re coming up to two years and we’re in this incredible, beautiful space where we’re going to be for the foreseeable future. It’s got great proximity to potential clients and has access to a photography studio, and recording studios.
‘We’re now starting to step up out of that scrappy phase…’
We now have very much established our core team with the four of us - Jared, Steph, Andy and myself - and two additional part time staff within that, so that’s six. And there’s another four people who were brought in on short term contracts as well.
So at any one time we can have 6 -10 people in the office on a daily basis which is exciting and great. Now we’re locking down what OneSixOne is, so we’re revisiting our presence online, what we say to the world and what our offering is.
It’s a bit of a story, but it's always important to us that we’re accountable to people who’ve done this journey before and know this stuff. So, we have two advisors who believe in us, but who at the same time are - and I know everyone thinks their advisors are influential and big-wigs - but these people are. I mean, the fact that we have time with them every two weeks is insane and they’ve already fed in a lot of stuff that has already leap frogged us or propelled us, so they’ve really helped our business move forward.
And we’re now starting to step up out of that scrappy phase and we’re now able to pick and choose the work that we’re able to do rather than we have to do it just to stay in the business.
We’re now looking to strategically do the kind of work that excites us and feels relevant to the why, our purpose and why we actually exist.
We’re now at a stage where we are able to regularly pay ourselves and it’s good to be honest about that kind of stuff. That first year was hard but we’re now able to some degree able to pay ourselves regularly and as Directors we always pay ourselves last. We like to make sure that our friends are paid first and then paid better than anywhere else that they could possibly work. Not extortionately better, but better.
So that’s currently where we’re at. The infrastructure stuff is great.
‘The why is really important, because if you don’t bear that mark of integrity, you’ll just ride a trend and say stuff that isn’t actually true.’
One thing that is our strength is we have great ideas and our USP [unique selling proposition] is everything we do is on purpose. Our mantra is ‘We exist to see purpose realised’ and the reason that’s important is it’s important for clients, but it’s good for us as people within a business. We want to make sure everyone who steps into OneSixOne realises their value and their purpose is benefited by working for OneSixOne.
A lot of agencies, you go there, you work for three months and complete your project, you collect your paycheck and you leave - that’s the level of investment. Whereas our whole thing is everything we do, our methodology, how we treat people, our processes internally, it’s all beneficial to people seeing their purpose realised, realising their value, their level of creativity but also just them as a human being.
And then also for the client that’s really important, because in an age of digital transparency where - you know what it’s like at the moment, everyone’s getting called out for anything, any statement they make now if it hasn’t aligned with what they’ve been doing in the past two, three, four, five, indefinite years - they're getting called out. It’s just interesting we’ve hit a time when we set this up where purpose is really, really important - the why is really important, because if you don’t bear that mark of integrity, you’ll just ride a trend and say stuff that isn’t actually true.
So it’s really important for both the client and for us internally.
I think we’re at a really great position in terms of the industry and what people are, on a moral level questioning what’s best for our society and our culture and the fact that we're just a really diverse team, which is really beneficial to a lot of people at this time.
That’s where we’re at.
///