Why we stayed at nine people

Growth is the default answer

Every year somebody asks how many people we are, hears nine, and asks when we will be twenty.

It is a fair question. Growth is what studios are supposed to do. More people, more projects, more revenue.

We looked at it properly in 2023. Then we chose not to.

What twenty would have cost

The maths is not complicated. At nine, everyone is on client work. The person you meet on the first call is the person who does the job.

At twenty, that stops being true. You need someone tracking who is on what. Someone handling the calls the designers no longer have time for. Someone managing those two.

None of those people touch the work. They exist because the company got big enough to need them. That is not waste exactly. But we would have been selling a different thing.

The number that surprised us

We went back through three years of projects and looked at which ones went well. Not the most profitable. Just the ones where the client was happy and we were proud of the work.

Almost all of them had the same shape. Two or three of us, close to the client, for eight to fourteen weeks.

The ones that went badly were the big ones. More people, more handoffs, more meetings about the work instead of doing it.

We were about to hire our way toward the second kind.

What we say no to now

This is the part people do not ask about.

• We turn down work we could do, because everyone is busy.
• We cannot run four big projects at once. Two, sometimes three.
• Some companies will not hire a nine-person studio, whatever the work. We do not get those calls.
• If two people are ill in the same week, it is felt.

We think the trade is worth it. But it is a trade. Anyone who tells you small has no downside is selling you something.

Is small always better?

No.

If you need forty people on a rollout across nine markets in six weeks, hire a big agency. They are built for that and we are not. We have said so on calls and pointed people elsewhere.

Small is better for a particular kind of work. Where the thinking matters more than the volume, and where you want the person who understood the problem to be the person who solves it.

How we actually staff a project

People assume nine people means nine people on your project. It does not.

A typical job has two or three of us on it. A creative director, a designer, and whoever else the work needs, usually a builder or a strategist.

The rest of the studio is on other projects. That is the whole trade. You get a small senior team who know your work properly. You do not get a bench of people to throw at a deadline.

If you are weighing this up for your own studio

Four things we would tell anyone thinking about it.

• Look at your last three years. Which projects went well? Hire toward those, not toward the biggest ones.
• Write the decision down and share it. Unwritten decisions get quietly undone.
• Name what you are giving up. It makes turning work down much easier.
• Revisit it once a year. Choosing small once does not mean choosing it forever.

There is no right size. There is the size that fits the work you want to do, and there is being honest about what it costs you.

What we would do differently

One thing. We should have written this down in 2019 instead of 2023.

For four years we drifted, taking work that pulled in different directions and feeling vaguely like we ought to be bigger. Writing the choice down made everything after it easier. What we pitch for. Who we hire. When we say no.

If you run a small studio and have never written down what size you want to be, that is a good afternoon’s work.

Worth remembering

Questions we get asked

Read next

Working on this yourself?

We help teams sort this out for a living. Tell us what you’re building, or see how it went for other people.