Currently, I am about four months in starting up my new agency. I wanted to document a bit of the journey as we move forward.

Starting a company has its ups and downs and is definitely not as stable a job as working for a product company, but most days I couldn’t be any happier with my decision to start an agency again.

Some days the doubts creep in. The most worrying part for me is that it’s particularly difficult this year to get the right clients, as some design processes have been turned on their head by the new AI design capabilities; the market is flooded with designers; and the impending recession isn’t particularly helping either.

I know what kind of projects we are good at: helping with the design role in a software team when a) a piece of software that is already successful is getting a redesign or b) in the phase of company growth where the company needs both the strategic vision of a senior designer, yet it’s not sensible to have a full-time hire. One task for me is to sell myself and my team to that specific kind of client.

When I was working in my previous agency, I literally had no idea how to do sales and business development. Most projects came via referral and overall things mostly flowed naturally. This is not the case this year and I have to do active outreach, keep a list of potential clients, and really get out there. I feel like I’ve picked up some skills in that area over the years. Part of it is a mindset to deliberately work on the company instead of in the company; another aspect is literally how you spend your time. If you are meant to work on business development, don’t be working on side projects or writing blog posts (guilty as charged…).

I also find it quite difficult to hire – what we do at Obra Studio is quite specialized. Even though there are many designers looking for roles, many don’t have the necessary skills to do the particular kind of work that we do. I’ve had a hard time defining what we want in designers. I am looking for sort of a mix between an agency and a product designer. Somebody T-shaped enough to switch roles within projects in the pursuit of shipping great software. Somebody who’s actually interested in user interfaces and didn’t just choose this field “to earn six figures”.

At this moment, we have two more open positions to fill. We are looking for a UI/UX designer with front-end skills. This is a contract role for one year in a part-time capacity. I am also still looking for a business partner to run operations in Belgium and take a joint risk in building the team. The main requirement is proven experience as an agency founder and to be driven to work on building out a boutique agency with a high quality standard.

The most difficult jump I foresee is the jump from 2FTE to 5FTE (full-time equivalent). While we currently work with 3 freelancers, we are only generating 2FTE of work. We need to move to generating work for 5 FTE. The business partner in Belgium is a crucial part in scaling up operations.

All in all, I can’t complain. The two things I was discussing are more or less evergreen problems for agencies: having enough clients, and hiring the right people. In general, things are going steady and we are approaching €75k revenue in a short period.

Currently, we have about 3 clients in what I’ve started to call “Obra Education” (Figma workshops, designing with AI workshops etc.) and another 3 in our main work, the design projects. Four clients are from Belgium, one from Luxembourg and one from the US.

I’ve steadily been working on our Craft CMS-based website with a trusty web developer freelancer. I’ve started to create landing pages for the different types of services we have on the Obra website. The latest one is about the UX rework of Bootstrap-based codebases. I was in a conversation where I was reminded that this was a specialty of my previous agency.

I notice more questions than I expected about Figma workshops; and about designing with AI. What I didn’t expect was no questions whatsoever about accessibility services, even though the European Accessibility Act is basically around the corner.

It’s tempting to sometimes focus on optimizing processes, but for now, given our tiny size (3 freelancers & me) it’s not necessary to optimize things too much. You can forever look at processes, templates and the perfect website. However, the focus should be on growth. I have to remind myself to keep my eyes on the ball.

It’s April 1st but I am already thinking a few months ahead. The summer months are typically low on work, as Belgium tends to fall asleep in July and you basically have out-of-offices talking to each other. I want to secure the right projects to work on to continue our growth trajectory. If you are in the market for an agency, check out our design services.