Yesterday was my last day at Doccle, and I’ve been asked what I’m going to do now. Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about this. As I talked about in my “choose your own adventure” blog posts, different options were in my head: a full-time position at a US company; an agency; founding a product company.

A month of wedding things is coming up, but after that, the plan is to go the agency route, and work on making Obra Studio a bigger design studio.

The main focus will be on providing high-quality design services. This has always been my strength.

I also really enjoy putting together a clear offer for a project and then executing on that offer. The offer brings clarity to what is going to happen, and it creates a clear deal. I place a super high value on clear project offers and subsequent execution.

Next to design services there will be certain product offerings, such as a Figma course and paid software utilities. The focus of those utilities would be to help reach a higher level of craft.

Since I can be a permanent resident in Mexico now, I can now form a company here and start having employees.

I want to keep my Belgian company to work with employees and freelancers in Belgium and to easily bill in euros to Belgian companies. On the Belgian company side we would focus on having a team of high-quality designers to work on the right interface design projects.

The Mexican company would house certain costs like WordPress/Craft CMS dev freelancers, graphic and motion designers, some front-end tasks and more.

The combination thereof will allow us to be more of a full-service company with a cost saving aspect for certain types of work. For example for certain tasks such as WordPress website maintenance, converting designs to HTML/CSS/React or certain graphic design the same quality of Belgian work can be attained at much less of a cost.

To be honest, if I see big name Belgian agencies taking weeks to implement a basic feature in a website and then overcharging for that privilege, and then ship work with bugs, I am sure I can do much, much better.

Sometimes I dream of the US as a market but it’s hard to “get in”. As I talked about before, I feel like innovation is coming out of the US. All the tech I’ve been excited about the past few months came out of US-based companies.

My network is almost entirely Belgian. With Mono we sometimes worked for international companies (I remember Japanese, Chinese, Swiss and US clients) but over 80% of our project revenue was from Belgian companies. With some travel to the US for networking purposes, my plan is to attain more clients in this time zone and to have a good balance between clients from Belgium and clients from the US.

An interesting dynamic when having both a team in Belgium and a team in Mexico is that you can basically work around the clock due to the time difference. If I can find someone I really vibe with design-wise, we can riff of each other’s designs while keeping sane working hours. This can allow us to sell design sprints with the added advantage of more speed.

My current thinking is that budgets from clients in Mexico might be too low, but to be honest, I have to explore the market and see what I can get. I am sure high-end clients like BBVA or funded startups like Nu have the right budgets for design. There is also a ton of investment in Mexico right now.

To get started, I would like to have a co-founder/other designer on the ground in Belgium. This needs to be a great designer and a skilled communicator, with the ability to take projects into their own hands.

Being able to meet live will be needed for certain types of workshops and meetings. Clients prefer to see each other in real life, and realistically I will only be in Belgium for +-1 month per year. The person would also have to be skilled at working remotely – this is not something everyone is that good at. It requires good writing, clear communication and following up on your tasks.

In my dreams we go back to a bigger team, and I am able to invite the Belgian team to come to Mexico or the other way around for a team event.

I am thinking of working out of a nicely designed office, servicing clients with high-quality design, eating delicious tacos together, holding local design community events… basically a return to what I’ve been doing with Mono, but now bigger, better, and with a big Mexican influence. Vámonos!