Having a specialism

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. So this is a show by founders of small creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. The aim is to provide some useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and some others we may get to come talk on the show. This is our fourth episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction and with me I have Dan Ghent from Lighthouse London. Hello John, how's it going?

00:24 Yeah, good thanks. You all right? I'm good. Good stuff. This week we thought we would try talking about specialisms particularly because we both have slightly different ones but at the same time we have a certain degree of focus that I thought would be interesting to cover. So I guess the first question is, is it important to have one? I mean we all do digital stuff. Today that means a lot of different things and I think this started with the web industry in the 90s whereby the web used to be a much much simpler place and websites were mostly static. There were no real tools or services to speak of. The whole industry formed around that model. All of those agencies that sprung up in those early days were providing more of a full service offering doing everything from the planning, the information architecture, the design, the bill, the SEO, marketing, emails, advertising, even sort of print and identity work. They really were sort of full package, everything in one full service and I guess the companies that exist today that are still doing this are the juggernauts of the same companies that started back then and have been bought and merged several times over into big multinational machines these days and they're all servicing larger slow-moving clients. I guess since the web 2.0 days the web has just generally become a lot more functional. The things we do online have evolved and so has the market that services those businesses and industries and I guess that's where the startup movement has come from and also where agencies like ours have sprung up from to service those markets. Those smaller size companies who see opportunity to launch something new and as a result I guess we've seen a lot of these smaller to mid-sized companies moving away from full service and even a lot of the full service companies starting to slowly sort of shrivel away and start to disappear a bit.

02:30 I think it's these smaller and mid-sized companies having specialisms that make them more agile, more suited to this new emerging market and it's just generally more flexible.

02:47 Yeah it feels like you're right there was a bit of a land grab at the beginning where if people needed it you could offer it and I suppose those agencies must have just spiralled out of control at the beginning because there wasn't enough kind of competition to balance them out. Yeah.

03:07 Yeah is it important to have a specialism? Yes it is. I think as a smaller agency as we both are when you're starting off you know you were just two people at the beginning right and I think that was the same for us. I think obviously it's much harder to be full service when you are smaller. You can't just suddenly do everything out of the box straight away.

03:38 And with limited resource you're faced with a decision of being able to do more things but perhaps be less of an expert in them. A student of all trades, master of none, whereas you have the option to choose whether to be able to double down, choose a specialism, make it your focus and become more valuable to your clients in more specific ways. That's in contrast to obviously keeping things broad and perhaps appealing to a wider base of people but also potentially reducing the value of what you have to offer to new potential clients.

04:27 Yep. So therein lies the interesting discussion about whether specialisms are important and how valuable they can be to businesses like ours especially when starting up.

04:45 Yeah I think we had a, in a way we were quite generalist because we just had quite a broad experience because I suppose being a developer and Tom being a designer we and we had very different kind of careers you know Tom was public sector and I was sort of agency and and like tech product company and it felt like we touched a lot of things so we could kind of talk a full service game but yes we couldn't deliver certainly not things like marketing services or anything like that. I suppose this is the problem with big agencies why they're so expensive is you go to them they've got a hell of a lot of capacity that you're never going to need but you're still paying for in that rate I suppose. I heard someone talking about the Hollywood method of doing projects have you heard of this? I haven't. So the Hollywood method is where you have I suppose someone like us like a small like you have you go to one person be their freelancer or a small agency and they kind of put together the team like you were making a movie. Okay so that would be what we did right you know you'd go and find someone to develop it and you'd find someone you know a marketing partner or some such and put it put it together for that particular project and they didn't mention this but it just made me think that like going to a big full service agency is essentially in that metaphor is basically turning up to someone that's already hired like the action hero the romantic lead and like got all the best actors and actresses across those but you don't need them all for your films but you're still going to pay for them you know what I mean. So yeah that was a that just made me think god that's why I don't want to do full service really.

06:58 Yeah I feel that being a specialist today gives you a bit of an edge and I feel that more and more these days the clients see value in approaching several different specialists to address different areas at the same time they may have some of those areas already covered like we've seen a lot of movement with certain types of clients who are bringing in teams in-house they may have their own development team they may have their own marketing team they may even have their own design team and they're only looking for help with a very specific slither because the size at which they are operating they don't need those resources in-house full-time as well.

07:54 Sure I don't think we see as many of them because I suppose by the very nature of what you provide as in user experience design it's never going to be the full project so we don't get many people coming to us and saying oh here's the my marketing team that we're going to use or you know or people will come and say I've done some designs but that's not the same thing that's normally a bad sign but I feel a lot of pressure actually because we probably get people that are looking for full service actually they just can't afford the big agencies and they'd be chewed up and spat out by the big agencies you know their project wouldn't stand a chance in terms of actually coming out any good but if I don't kind of talk how marketing would work even though we don't really provide you know we have marketing partners we don't really provide we provide some strategy I suppose but we don't provide actual actually delivering marketing if I don't talk a bit of marketing it's like that's a that's a gap in what we can offer that someone else will fill and potentially they'll want that person to then fill the entire thing. Right so we do have a specialism but it's it feels dangerous to talk about sometimes in terms of in terms of winning in terms of you know getting getting it right with the client and winning the work. Well how would you describe the types of client that you would typically work with? Really early stage startups you know just people with ideas and you know if we're lucky some money then sort of small medium-sized businesses and kind of entrepreneurial people within them so probably the people that own the businesses and they want to they you know see an opportunity to do something and then but yeah then bigger sort of bigger clients which would be just just bigger businesses but more often than not that's that those people like need a website rather than like a digital product or something I feel that we are having to get a bit more we are having to spread out a bit more and kind of cover a few more things. Just more advice and consultation in those areas rather than actually delivering. No exactly we don't actually do you know we don't run an SEO campaign or anything but again it's quite people's perception of what that is is different they don't they think well do you do SEO you know it's kind of well yes and no you know and then and then it's a vague answer and then that's never as good as someone just going yep you know we do so yeah to provide the full offering these days especially around startups to provide like an actual coherent thing that's going to provide them value I feel that there are a few different types of things you have to be able to put in front of them or they're not going to get that value you know they're either going to build something with you that they then don't know how to market or they're gonna um well we'd never do just the marketing or they're going to like get loads of people on on something that's just not up to it. Yeah now what I find interesting is turn the question around to us describing the type of clients that we typically work with I think we will say exactly the same thing right we work with startups of various stages some are early stage some maybe a bit further down the line and they they have a product that's already been made and been in the market for a while but there's a lot of room for improvement or optimizations or you know they're doing adding new features and functionality to that and innovation teams inside larger businesses who want to try something new you know disrupt their existing market also people with websites and being user experience guys we we tend to focus more on the apps and the functional side of stuff the tools the services you know the stuff that has functionality and does something like we just put it on a wig bucket called products really um and we do do websites because that's where we've come from but we typically these days only really do them for the services and and the clients that we've worked on for other things so that we can yeah you know we're we know the product best we can do web we sort of tie the whole thing in we'll do web stuff that's generally more functional but we we tend not to get involved too much in independence um what we just call static content sites sure essentially we tend to do less of that these days um yeah but at the same time we're doing quite different things i think when we come to describing it and how we present ourselves as being independent specialists in these different things so i think that a definite i think definitely the the level of knowledge a client has before approaching every interaction is probably on average higher than a client that approaches us okay i think because i feel i feel if they if they are looking for ux and looking for that piece of the jigsaw they know why they're doing that and they know the other pieces of the jigsaw they need yeah is that is that fair to say it is i think that they already have certain elements of it covered off and that's why they come to us because they go looking for someone who is a specialist and they find us they already have a development partner or a development team in house and um they probably also have somebody sort of the product owner of sorts who's you know the main client side contacts that we'll be dealing with and they're they're simply missing the sort of ux and the design parts go looking for specialists come across us and i think because of the way we market ourselves that's exactly why we get that type of trade through the door yeah no for us it's not that they don't have knowledge you know they're not kind of just floundering around but they are looking for someone to tell them what's important about what they're trying to achieve and you know the standard question we'll get often is shall i build this as an app shall i build it as a website right so they're they haven't got you know they need someone to to basically get them into the position where they'd know what they were talking about to be able to then go and invest in ux or invest in marketing or wherever they should invest yeah and i think maybe one of the interesting things about that is how we sort of are defining specialism because yes the skills can be specialists but actually i think it's kind of more the approach that specialists in a way that the approach of saying you know you don't know where to start with this and we know how to get it to launch like whatever shape whatever shape that may take and whatever skills you may need within that we can sensibly advise you how to get there so it's sort of it's being a specialist of that rather than saying we are design and development specialists or or a marketing specialist or you know the speciality is um no specialism speciality is like uh something a chef does isn't it um yeah that is it's more that approach which i feel because i feel we're more we're we're more at risk of um specialisms in a way because if our specialism is technology well you know like where we were what if we're the flash specialists you know what i mean like what if what if we're a specialist or something that just goes down the pan um like the industry just rules it irrelevant then then that's risky but if you're a specialist of a certain approach then that's different and i suppose that's what you guys are because yeah ux in design is is an approach rather than well how do you define it do you think it's an approach or like a skill um i think people come to us because they think it's a skill but i think it is it is really obviously an approach it's it's an integral part of all the project and the thinking and the planning and the delivery and everything else yes it's it's so hard to describe that's the problem with trying to make it understandable yeah you know yeah that it's often easier to just be this is our specialism it's it's something that doesn't actually make sense with what we actually do yeah and i that's why i was trying to try to um keep it trying to ask like what kind of clients do you work with and i guess what position they're in because i guess people come to you because they're in a certain type of position right and you guys are the people to get that problem that they have sold they're in an early stage position they perhaps don't have so much of an idea about how to run the project they don't have the experience to go hunting down separate development teams who are specialists in a certain technology stack or methodology that they realize they need in order to get their job done they're not that far down the road and so those are the people that would probably come to us more perhaps because they recognize the need for this this slither of the process that they know they don't have someone to do yet and you would get people who need a little bit more hand-holding in those early stages maybe this is their first time doing something this is their first uh ball game i think the thing we've made as a specialism is the kind of helping people define what their first release of a product should be by basically we you know we've done a lot of messaging and a lot of work on trying to avoid the the classic agency thing of oh i want to build the new instagram okay yeah we'll build that for you here's a ridiculous quote and then they just go for it and it's just a failure because that's not how you build the new instagram um so trying to work with people in a way that actually provides value we've kind of gone into that whole uh like lean startup world um of kind of saying you know what is the what's the minimum thing we could put out here um and trying to talk them around into that and you know so doing like workshops and things around that and that has become our our specialism but it's a it's another dangerous one though because you know you you are essentially saying like a full service agency could never do that because you're essentially talking people out of doing work a lot of the time yeah i was going to ask do you ever get to the point where you go through the beginning parts of this process and then advise the client not to go ahead um it's normally fairly evident if they shouldn't go ahead yeah they come to you and say i want to be the new instagram well well no if i if i if after the prototyping you know they show it to some users and then it's like yep uh radio silence because it didn't it didn't come off you know yeah and that's fine that's what prototyping is for in it sometimes um so that does happen you'd get something to a prototype stage test the market and at that point you would you would sort of halt the project um no we normally normally they we normally get them to do most of the testing because we're kind of quite a believer in the actually part of the value we're doing is they're an entrepreneur and this this workshop of taking their idea you know sketching it and then doing a little prototype they can have on their phone um part of it is like a boot camp in how to do product management you know how to how to get feedback how to then feed that into the thing and and so a lot of it is just like a wake-up call of like you know take this idea that you think is going to work and put it in front of people and then find out that they don't think it's going to work so it's um we really encourage you know we sort of demonstrate to them how to do that testing but we really encourage them to actually have it on the person you know it's on their phone in their pocket go and find your customer we give them we take we give them a little script you know we work with them on like what the demo is they'll normally do that and then they'll realize whether or not they've got the well the kind of that's when you see behind the curtain right and realize that it's actually really hard to do a startup yeah now that's that's a really really good idea so has a client ever turned around to you after doing that and said we're going to put the brakes on at this point um they've disappeared they have really okay so yes um they but again it's difficult because that as a specialism is is hard when you're up against someone that's saying we'll just build it for you you know well you're just being honest you're what you're doing is the correct approach but you're being mildly negative as well yeah but for their own goods it doesn't sell it doesn't sell well you know it doesn't sell well so no you know sometimes the proposals that go out will be like we'll do this prototyping and then of course we'll go ahead and build the new instagram but let's stop after the prototyping and you'll have the opportunity to to rethink what you know what features going at yeah yeah we we've certainly worked on some projects in the past i think that have gotten to that stage or even earlier and we've tried to convince the client to reconsider or to at least pivot and to try a different avenue to see if it has greater success and that on occasion we've been in a situation where they would want to press head regardless and looking back at how those projects turned out i think i probably would have preferred to have turned out of way at that point yeah yeah i mean that's yeah that's that's that's exactly that's a difficult specialist to have any of the specialism of reducing the amount of work you can do yeah that is the that's the lean you know that is the the lean startup way um you know and we kind of believe in it um it's just making it it's packaging it up for a client because you know the lean startup is actually how your men have run your own startup not how your men have worked with the web agency so it's kind of a it's finding of it's finding a model there that actually that can that can work is um is tricky it's taking a while hmm no it's really interesting do you have a you have a break break from the formula and do do something that doesn't follow that process like if it was more like an innovation team and i felt the money wasn't someone's personal money and you know you you will find out more if you build more like yeah you know you will like the prototype can find you out a bit but not not loads it's meant to be like i say the prototype is meant to help them with a way of thinking you know if someone's if people have got the budget and they want to try something out and and i don't feel like it's going to kill their business um then yeah then absolutely at that point we we kind of use we say well we should prototype this obviously um but if you don't think prototyping is of value we can you know we can build it we still try and keep it quite minimal but you know i'm that that's kind of their call with their business's budget rather than someone who's like i've got this great idea and you're just like there's no way that idea's got any chance if you just build something before you've even met a customer so you know we just can't do that because it's stupid yep yep so in a way your your specialism is uh helping early stage people validate their business ideas and are we doing a vision statement here yeah absolutely stopping it well i don't i don't hate them i just can't get i can't find a good one so i spend so much of my day thinking about it i can't do it on this podcast as well yes yeah we we help okay we help we help define how a we help define how a product should look when it first meets a customer yep how's that one that's not bad i like it it's okay it's a bit clunky it's really hard it isn't it is really hard defining these things i don't like it web design and development john web design and development what's wrong with that nothing move on so would you say that you you then specialize in a type of client um i know because i think that approach can okay yes in yes in what they're trying to achieve but no not in what type of business they are yep so they've they've got either an idea for a new product or i would extend it into the web design field and say if they've if they've got a problem like a complex message or something that they don't that no one quite knows how to explain you know that's their business then you can sort of apply the same things to it and say that that is also you know you should be testing you can prototype that or or at least you can go and experiment with the content um so although to be honest that's a little bit retrofitting the fact we do websites like yourself you know like of course you still do websites because you can do websites and people want websites but does it fit into that the new specialism of what we're saying it probably doesn't but i don't think we're ready to say we don't do websites at all so it's kind of like trying to say well what what are the commonalities between those two things that we can say is our is our specialism and get good at and i think it is that um you know really starting with the problem definition and then working out you know working your way towards the solution not assuming that you know what the solution should be at all at the beginning yeah yeah i feel that we've we've been we've been getting more and more specialists over time i would say as well i think when we started obviously a bit more desperate for work i'd say at the very beginning you know you take on whatever you could i guess to pay the bills and earn some money yeah when you're very when you're really starting out and it's still i guess because we both sort of fell into this in a way without really much of a business plan of our own if only there was someone like us to guide us through this process when we were both starting out and the audio yeah yeah i guess over time that we've we've become more and more specialist and identified our strengths and the things that we we felt that we delivered best and focused more and more of those and and sort of done away with the things that i thought made us a bit more generalist in the past what were they i mean when we were first starting out we were doing a lot more web work in general websites i guess um but when we were first starting out we were doing crikey we're doing banner ads no never banner ads no no oh i tell a lie one client's just popped into mind who he did it for that it worked out lucrative enough as a uh as a sort of continuous stream of small income tom's a sucker for that kind of stuff yeah yeah he'll go he'll go oh but i i could just knock it out it'd be so you know i mean it's just like no you're doing banner ads yeah yeah that quickly becomes a thorn in your side yeah we were doing like flash animation stuff at one point right okay which is a little bit a little bit crazy um all sorts of things um we've done projects in the past where we just do solely the sort of ux bit and don't actually touch any design which has been interesting um but we definitely prefer to have ownership of the design we feel if we see someone else designing what we've what we've done ux for then you know you always want to do it differently yeah of course and i suppose it feels like well what's wrong with our design yeah and very recently we've been approached by people to to just do user testing on their own their product and run in a sort of remote user testing sessions labs which we're perfectly capable of doing and could do a good job of it but it's not something we generally separate out and say as a separate service it's something we do as part of our own process and we do it on our own work well it's hard to harder to wrap that up as a deliverable isn't it like when we you know because we do research and we do some lightweight user testing and but i'm that you're right like as soon as i've done them i'm i'm moving on like my head doesn't want to stay there it's like okay i've this is this has told me how i should go ahead and try and solve this so that's where i want to be now i don't want to be writing that up for a committee or like writing up so it's a deliverable i could charge for i want i want you know i'm doing those things to to get to the end problem you know solution yeah i mean we're designers we we spot a problem and we want to fix it and if you're not given the opportunity to fix it then i think i'm going to get frustrated yeah completely i mean we did a similar thing with um with development so you know we'd have you know a lot of the time people would say oh i've got this site and this isn't working or that isn't working as bugs or whatever and of course at first it was like well great that's dan billable for a few weeks because he can just go in and and fix those things but you know i think i think it was when we hired another developer and i could hardly bring myself to like pass that work on to him even though that's kind of why we hired him so it was like you know i'd be like let's hire another developer so because they'll be junior and they will do these like rubbish bits of development and then once they started i was just like why am i just going to completely like kill this person with rubbish work um you're such a good boss yeah thank you yeah absolutely if you're listening uh right lighthouse developer christie if you're listening christie and you probably are that's what i did for you um you threw yourself on the sword i did well no i threw the sword out the window yeah yeah exactly i wanted to fly in on the sword but i couldn't bring myself to do it um no we just realized you know we don't have to do this like let's just let's just say no to any to working on other people's code base you know we want to build things bottom up and it felt at the time like we were being a bit like precious or something and that you know this is um especially with development you feel like well everyone's code should be made in a way that someone else can take over on it but then you like you step back and go that's just rubbish like that's of course that's not true you know it's like people's other people's code is difficult to work on and especially most of the time if someone's getting someone else to work on it it's because the first person was awful so you're just kind of you know you very rarely get like oh wow oh what they didn't want to work on this amazing code anymore um so yeah we kind of we've just made a policy of you know we're only going to develop our own stuff because that's not like i say that's not our specialism like jumping on other people's code and sorting it out it's not you know not what we're good at and i think part of becoming more of a specialist is is turning stuff down i think that that in itself that process makes you more of a specialist yes i guess if you never get into the habit of turning stuff out down you'll always be a generalist and everyone needs to be more of a generous when you start off you need to experiment with what types of work and jobs are out there on the market and see what fits with you and what you really enjoy where you can see you're having the most impact and then start turning the other things down that you feel are hindering that yeah completely it's the um someone mentioned to me the other day the what do you want to do more of what do you want to do less of and what do you want to keep the same you know as a way of reviewing where you know that can be used to review a lot of things like people you know it certainly can be used to for the type of work you're doing and what and what you're good at and you're right like if you don't if you don't do that you just won't get anywhere will you you know it's very hard to to understand how to get better at something make more money out of it if you're just not even sure what that thing is yeah make sure your clients respect it like it's it's it's how you get those better jobs because because people go oh right you're obviously the best at this so i'll hire you yep maybe it's less about specialisms maybe it's just more about focus i think so it's more about getting good at at knowing why you're doing something because i think if you do that and this is you know let's let's not dribble go too much onto the vision side of things i'm sure once i've got a vision statement for you we can do that episode that's fine um it'll be a good one i know it will um and we like it is i suppose it is more about that in a way it's kind of like how do i how do i deliver this thing and it's always good if if that is slightly more abstract than just like how do i you know we're the best at html5 because html5 will presumably become html6 that's a prediction for you at some point never never done it right um and then you're let you know but you want to be good at a thing that's i suppose you want to be a specialist in something that provides value like direct value not in the tools and things that you use to do that you want the specialism needs to be the thing that provides value because then you can always roll with the punches of something you know you'll see the next thing coming you'll go ah html6 is here and you'll be able to quickly analyze whether or not it should be something you're good at yeah i agree so how do you see this changing in the future do you um do you see yourself continuing on this path or do you do you see changes ahead and becoming more focused on a certain thing that's difficult i find it difficult as well yeah stamped no i think it will change but i i hope that that i hope that vision like solidifies you know that the the you know there's a startup quote that's like b or maybe it's like the amazon dude bezos um be strong on vision but flexible on details and i think that's that's how that's the way to to do it is to say you know get just keep refining that thing that you want to provide the value you want to provide and then just build a skill set around that um that's constantly moving and the thing with you know with especially with development is i don't even know how someone who's developing now like copes like it's just there's so many different ways of delivering something so many different um you know programming languages and and whatnot that i just think if you're whatnot there you go that's a that's a ct of a of a of a tech agency describing tech as whatnot you know um showing showing how uh how into i am but yeah like um you just got to pick your you know just make sure that you've got that vision for why you're learning something or why you're getting good at something not just because a client wants you to get good at it yeah i would summarize by saying you know either you know start off broad if you're just starting an agency unless if you haven't got a completely clear vision or focus from the very outset or even if you have it probably makes sense to start off reasonably broad try a lot of different things and then gradually just start to focus on the things where you think you can make the most impact um maybe start to specialize in a client type and provide a wider array of services to a very specific client type or perhaps you could narrow down the range of services that you are offering but offer them to a wider range of clients to potential approaches you could take yeah definitely you could i mean and i would also say you should talk about yourself as a specialist even if you're not so you know the way to the way to become a specialist isn't to say oh um i can't do that at the moment but come back in six months and i'm going to be good at that is to say yeah that's what that's what we do that's our specialism and then panic and and dive in and learn it because you actually find that that's basically what everyone's doing so it's fine it's not even really lying if everyone's lying yeah so the best advice we can give is wing it absolutely absolutely and i think the really important thing is to dictate your own specialism and not have it dictated to you by by clients like i think that thing you said about turning down turning down work and like turning down like eventually getting to the point where you're like no i don't want to do that um that's really important because it'll it'll kill you to not do that yeah i agree yeah i don't know where our future lies either um it's it's difficult just to get out the magic ball and figure out what lies ahead i think it's going to come out of process and trying things and and seeing what we think really works and what what we're great at and nurturing those things to make us even more specialists in our field and yeah hopefully even more expensive well the natural the the natural you know where i would say this this conversation is heading the natural conclusion of being a specialist is to become a consultant and suggest advice and not actually deliver um and they are really expensive so yeah great yeah we're on the road good stuff right so i think that about wraps it up for this one um so anything else to say dan i'm a specialist at um telling you my twitter handle excellent so uh what is your twitter handle well my personally is jentis maximus you can um you can speak to me personally if you want but i i do talk a lot of rubbish if you want like web stuff then best to follow the lighthouse london one at we are lighthouse excellent will do and you can find me at at dark john d-a-r-k-e-j-o-n and every interacts for the company stuff we are underscore perspective fm on twitter and perspective dot fm on the webs uh we are on itunes as well so please subscribe and rate us there any comments questions or feedback put them through the website and uh we'll get those and we look forward to speaking to you next time cheers dan cheers jam