What makes a company like Clearleft successful? A conversation with Andy Budd

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of small indie creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. The aim is to provide useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others we get to come to Auc on the show.

00:13 This is our 19th episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction. And back with me today, fresh out of storage, we've got Dan Gent from Lighthouse London. Hello, Dan. Hey, John. How's it going?

00:24 All right. How are you? Yes, I'm good. I'm good. Excellent. And also joining us today, we've got a very special guest, Mr. Andy Budd from Clearleft. Hello, Andy. Hi, John. Hi, Dan. How are you doing?

00:37 All good here. Yeah. Thanks for putting me before Andy, John. That's a... I'm chuffed. I gradually think that I leave me.

00:49 How's the beautiful South Coast looking today? Well, it's today started beautifully. It was a light, crisp day. Chilly but beautiful sun. And then it went all dark and weird and moody.

01:00 So, yeah, kind of a day or two halves, I'd say. Oh, that's lovely. I think you should capture that and put it in a map. That's a nice way to tell the weather. Cool. So I assume most people know who you are, but just in case we've got listeners who've not heard of you before, can you tell us a little bit about Clearleft and what it is that you guys do over there?

01:18 Yeah, absolutely. So, well, my name is Andy. I'm one of the co-founders and I'm currently the CEO of Clearleft. We are a user-centered design agency, a UX design agency, if you will. And we focus on helping mid-large-sized clients design core products and services, the kind of products and services they use to kind of make a substantial kind of dent into their income.

01:47 We've been going for 12 years. We started in 2005. We're based in Brighton, 25 people. So, small. Although I guess it depends really on what you count as small. Now, I talk to people, I say I'm 25, and some of them will go, "Wow, that's huge. We're only a team of six." Other people will look down at you and go, "Oh, we're a team of 200." So I guess small is relative. I know agencies that 200 think they're tiny in comparison to some of the large Be-A-Mops out there.

02:15 But as an agency, we were really one of the first people, one of the first agencies in the UK, to sort of specialize in UX back in 2005. There were lots of kind of interaction design agencies, usability agencies, or IA agencies around.

02:29 But as far as we're aware, we are the first, or at least one of maybe a very, very small handful, that kind of saw the writing on the wall, saw that there was a new way of delivering products and services that was a lot more considered and kind of started to work in that space.

02:47 We were an agency that ran one of the first design conferences in the UK and actually ran the first UX conference, one of the main UX conferences in the form of UX London.

02:58 And so I guess our company hasn't only been focused on helping clients solve their kind of like tricky, sort of thorny business challenges through digital design, but also trying to advance the field. And we've been doing that by writing books, talking at conferences, running our own events, and trying to make everyone better at what they do. And that often means other agencies, that often mean competitors.

03:22 But I would rather push the industry forward and have everyone benefit than some organizations or some sectors you see that are very closed off.

03:32 So I love helping people do better work because at the end of the day, if my clients hire somebody who's better than me, I'm happy because they're going to get a great job. I get sad when our clients accidentally hire someone who's worse than us.

03:47 And I want to prevent that. And the best way of doing that is to get hired. But the second way of doing that is to make sure that other agencies out there do great work. Nice. That's a great philosophy and a really familiar story. And I think it's also been an inspiration to us.

04:02 And what Clearleft have done over the years has certainly helped inspire me and what we've done with our business and hoping to follow in your sort of footsteps in a way. Well, that's very kind of you to say, thanks.

04:14 Yeah, I think John and I run agencies that are, that would consider you larger. But we met at an agency that would consider you small. So we've seen them both. And yeah, the small end of the scale is the one I think we've both always been attracted to.

04:31 I mean, I'm totally with you there. One of the reasons that we started Clearleft is that all the sort of co-founders were just fed up of the really poor service that clients got from large agencies.

04:41 And large agencies often, they often organize themselves around principles that are designed to benefit their bottom line, often at the expense of their clients.

04:53 They'll hire staff that are too junior, they'll have an ever-evolving circle of freelancers. They will organize projects in a way that kind of suits them, suits their bottom line, suits their availability, rather than doing everything they can to kind of help their clients.

05:14 And I just always hated that approach. I think that I feel very lucky that clients will want to come and work with Clearleft. And I want to make sure they have the best experience possible, get access to the best talent and have an agency or a team of people really, because ultimately an agency is just a group of really amazing people.

05:32 Doing everything possible for their best interests, not everything possible for their own personal self-interest. That just always seems wrong to me. Yeah, I've got a theory which I think I've heard you talk about and you share that the sort of large generalist, be a moth companies are sort of coming to an end really.

05:52 And that the smaller independent specialists are on the rise and probably going to do a little bit better in the future landscape of our industry. I don't know. I mean, it's a difficult one. I think in terms of the quality that's delivered, you're going to get, well, I think the challenge is, it's weird, like with the small agency space, there is a lot more variance.

06:17 There are a lot more really, really great small agencies out there that will do the best work possible, you know, that are really kind of doing amazing stuff. But there are also a lot of, you know, if I'm honest, not very good agencies out there that are actually delivering a relatively poor service, a relatively old fashion service.

06:37 I think the big agencies kind of weirdly sit in the middle ground. They're never, they're not able to do a really amazing stuff because of all the layers of process and bureaucracy and bottom line that they've got to worry about.

06:52 But what they do effectively is they kind of, they manage the bottom end of quality. So a lot of the processes, they make the result great, but they're there to stop it from sucking.

07:03 For me, I don't want to sell services that are just not sucky. And I don't, if I was a client, I wouldn't want to buy services that are just not sucky. But actually, for a lot of clients that have had terrible experiences with smaller agencies, sometimes that bigger agency is a safer bet. You're not going to be wowed, but you're not going to be massively disappointed.

07:25 It's kind of like the McDonald's kind of philosophy. If you go to a different country, you might want to go and eat at a McDonald's or a Starbucks. Even if there are amazing food options out there, you'll go for the McDonald's or Starbucks because you know you're probably not going to get ill. They're probably going to have your favorite kind of muffin on the menu.

07:46 And you kind of know where you are. You're not going to have to navigate a strange menu of things you've never heard of. And I think the big agencies sort of fit in that safe but uninspiring space.

07:56 That's an accurate but probably terrifying analogy. I'm definitely going to use that next time I'm talking to a client that's thinking about a big agency. Yeah, passing off with some put down around cheeseburgers, bad meat, that kind of thing.

08:17 But the thing is, I mean, I feel free to use that, but I guess I'm not meaning it quite that bad. Like I don't think the big agencies are kind of like the greasy spoons.

08:27 There's a lot to be said for. I mean, I say this as someone who's a vegetarian and doesn't go into McDonald's. But you know, they've got process, they've got consistency. And if you walk into McDonald's in London and you walk into McDonald's in Indonesia, you're going to have the same experience.

08:42 And for some people, that's what they're looking for. And like if you are brand like Coca-Cola and you have projects in Indonesia and projects in London, you kind of want to go with an agency that is going to give you the same quality of experience.

08:57 So I think there are reasons why some clients might prefer to flock to those bigger agencies because they're safety in numbers. But I think for me, I'm kind of like an experiential traveler who wants to take that risk in order to hopefully find some amazing culinary delight.

09:13 So yeah, it's horses for courses. And that's one of the great things about the agency world. Like it supports this whole ecosystem, big, small, specialist, generalist.

09:25 So there's no right way of doing it. There's no right way of doing agency, which I think is brilliant. Do you think you ended up how Clearleft is set up because you were started by the doers, you know, the people who founded it, were coders, were designers?

09:42 I don't know. I don't think so, actually, because I see a lot of other agencies that were also started out by doers. But those doers very quickly got seduced. They got seduced by the money. They got seduced by the process and the ego that comes with running an agency.

10:02 They got seduced by hiring people that said to them, oh, you've got to have a bigger account management team. You've got to grow to this side. You've got to exit. And so I meet very few agency founders that actually were started by business.

10:16 Most of them were started by designers and developers like myself. But I think the difference is sort of where that initial seed came from. I think all of the people that started Clearleft, you know, me, Richard, Jeremy, were all bloggers, were all web standards enthusiasts.

10:34 And we wanted to get involved in the web because we saw it almost as like a social movement. It was a window change building for society. And now, rather than having a crappy experience in a physical location with a physical brand that you could be serviced online, that you could sort of democratize communication, you could sort of open up the means of production to individuals and bloggers and small businesses.

11:06 And you didn't have to be a big brand now that had all the kind of access to that market. So I think we were I think we were ultimately we brought in on this kind of vision of the web, the open web, and also the vision of having information shared freely.

11:22 So all of the founders at Clearleft learned their craft online by other great people like Jared Spool or Jeffrey Zeldman or Jeffeeen, who gave their time away freely.

11:34 And so we came out of that culture and we always wanted to give our time away freely. We always wanted to kind of follow this pursuit of perfection and the culture of the web.

11:44 It was never about kind of making large amounts of money for us because frankly, in order to make a lot of money in this industry, you have to grow big and you sort of have to lose your soul.

11:55 And Clearleft has never been about kind of growing it to flip it. You know, I know an agency in Brighton and they are deliberately growing their company to sell it in five years time.

12:06 I don't necessarily agree with that. That's not my sort of flavor. That's not what I'm looking to do. But that's perfectly fine. If that's what you are setting out to do, that's what you and your clients and your staff understand with the goal.

12:18 You can definitely do that. But for us, we sort of we love what we do. We'd be doing it anyway. We're in it for the long haul. And I think that's the reason why we've wanted to create a slow growing sustainable business rather than a fast cash out quick business.

12:34 Because frankly, I don't know what I do with my time. And if I if I've grown a company and sold it like 10 years ago or something, I'm sure I could have found something to do with my time. But I think a lot of the companies that sell the founders have got bored and they want to be doing something else.

12:48 They want to be racing cars. They want to be manning boats or getting into art or whatever that is. I still really love the web. I still think there's a lot of problems out there to solve.

13:01 And I don't want to do anything else other than what I'm doing because I'm having too much fun. That's really great to hear. I'm sure that's absolutely instrumental to the success that Clear Left have seen.

13:12 And as part of that success, I mean, everyone talks about and we have on this podcast as well about what is what does success look like to your business and to you in one, three, five years.

13:25 I'm assuming you've kind of been through these exercises before. Clear Left with your business. How how has that sort of changed for you? You've been doing this for 12 years now. So you must have done this several times over the years.

13:36 What did what did that look like eight years ago? What did it look like? What does that look like today? What's changed? Well, I think there's there's a couple of actually slightly different questions kind of hidden in there because you're sort of almost equating success to a timeline and probably an eventual size.

13:57 And for some people, that is it for some people, you know, their level of success is judged by the number of staff they have, the number of projects they do, the turnover of the company, et cetera, et cetera.

14:08 For me, that isn't necessarily the end point. That might be a factor that tells you whether you are achieving something else with your if you're growing.

14:25 It means that you're hopefully doing a good job, that people are willing to pay for your services. But I don't think those kind of things should be the thing that drives you. As I kind of said earlier, the thing that drives Clear Left is doing great design work.

14:38 And we have actively not grown anywhere near as much as we could have done because we've always chosen to do good work over mediocre work. So, you know, for a long time, still today, you know, we will we will get offered or approached by more people than we can service.

14:56 Some agencies would see that as a great thing and will kind of scale up. For us, what we do is we use that as a way of maintaining quality. So we will, you know, of the five projects that we get offered, we might, you know, or get asked to pitch for, we might turn two or three of those down immediately.

15:13 And, you know, of the two that we are lucky enough to win, we might end up kind of, you know, choosing to go with one rather than the other because we feel that that client is going to really allow us to do the great work that we believe is possible.

15:31 So I don't see the point in taking on projects that don't allow you to do your your best work ever. And so I guess at Clear Left, we're constantly trying to find those clients that will allow us to do really great stuff.

15:42 And if it's just a kind of a low cost project or project for an uninteresting brand or project that is going to accompany with me different to work for and not in a good way and is going to sort of restrict our ability to do great work, we just won't take it on.

15:57 And that's why we've grown very, very slowly. We could have grown to 60, 70, 80, 100 people now if we wanted to, but we would have ended up compromising our goals and we would have ended up putting out a lot of really mediocre work, a lot of work that we're not proud of.

16:12 And you see that in the bigger agencies. The bigger agencies will maybe do 10 or 20 projects a year that are really award worthy and 100 or 200 projects that are brushed under the carpet. No one ever looks at the ones they brush under the carpet and you look at the really good thing. But the reality is all of the people in that agency have been doing more work that they're not aligned to, more little microsites to sell more fizzy pop, more websites to support cigarette companies or oil companies or whatever it is that those companies do.

16:46 And a lot of design agencies, unfortunately, don't have a really strict moral compass and will kind of service anybody. We turn down work on a variety of reasons. Some of it is because we don't feel that we're going to be able to deliver the service a client is looking for. Sometimes, as I said, the environment isn't right for us to deliver the kind of standard we're looking for.

17:07 And sometimes it's just because we don't agree with what the client are doing. And we'd rather not use design to service an industry that we don't think is adding value or positivity to the world. So that sounds like a bit of a hippie statement.

17:21 But yeah, so to go back to the question, if we if we do grow over the next three or five years and we kind of have a bit of a plan to we've been typically as an agency growing about 20% of the year organically.

17:36 That's not been a thing that we've decided we're going to be at 20%. It's just that that's how the the tempo has risen. And if we carry on going at that, that pace, we're 25 people now and if I this time it might be 45 people.

17:51 But that's not a target. We're not aiming to be 45. We're just saying that if things carry on like they are, we'll probably be 45 or five years time and we need to plan the culture and put in place the structure that will allow us to be that size.

18:07 But the purpose for being that size is to win better work, to service clients better, to be able to diversify what we're doing to have more specialists in the team to carry on being good.

18:22 And if it was just about the numbers of the figures of the turnover and not about doing great work, we would stay the size that we are, or we'd stay you know, whatever, whatever size was required to meet that bigger broader goal of doing great work great people.

18:38 Right. Just going back to what you were saying with the, you know, having projects that you that you turned down. Can you remember a time where that made you nervous? Or was it always just absolutely natural? And did that did you have to build a discipline towards that because it's very easy when you're not getting too many projects to turn down to kind of think, well, I should probably take this one.

19:03 Do you remember time where that was the case? I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's always it always sounds easy than it is. And it's not like I mean, I guess the reason we started doing this is because we noticed a pattern in the early years of clear left, we'd take on a project.

19:18 And it wasn't a bad project, but it wasn't a good project. It was kind of similar to ones we've done before. It didn't look great in the portfolio didn't push us forward, but it didn't do us any harm either.

19:30 And then our dream project will come along, and we wouldn't be able to do it. And then six months later, exactly the same thing happened. We'd take a mediocre project on, and then our dream project would come along and we would be able to do it. And after two or missing two or three dream projects, we kind of just thought, well, this is just daft.

19:47 Of course, if we were like out of the bread line, if we had no money in the bank, and we had mortgages to pay, we're not going to throw our team under the bus in the sake of like being dogmatic.

19:58 But when we are in a time of feast, when there's a lot of opportunities out there, and when we're feeling confident about the market, which is, you know, I think in our industry has always been relatively strong.

20:12 We will make sensible decisions about where we put our resources. And if there's a project that we think is going to be not because the other thing is a lot of it is it might sound a little bit high and mighty, but actually a lot of it is really practical.

20:25 You know, we hire really, really amazing people, and we have to give them really interesting challenges. And if we start putting these amazing people on work that they do not enjoy, they will go and work somewhere else.

20:36 And so we want to make sure that they're the constant stream of really interesting, engaging work to keep the talent we have. And I see this all the time. I see people in agencies churning out kind of projects that are below them.

20:53 And you can do you know, you can do that a little bit. And I'm not saying that we we only ever do amazing work. Sometimes there's work that we would do that we would take out of sort of more of a necessity. But we would never do a job that we felt we couldn't improve, that we couldn't make significantly better, that we couldn't deliver value from, or that we were only taking it for the money.

21:14 You know, you do have to be pragmatic, but it's more it's more about qualifying. And if you've got three or four options, rather than going for them all and growing the team massively, be selective, only go for the two or three that you think you're going to really gel with.

21:30 Because the converse is, if you take on a project that smells wrong, you're probably going to find that you're going to have a friction filled time, you're going to have staff that really dislike working with those clients, you're probably going to turn out a mediocre job.

21:48 And at the end of the day, because you're probably going to end up having to over service the client, you're probably not going to make any money anyway. So I would prefer to do a smaller number of more profitable projects, or more fun projects that end up taking anything that comes along and finding out that actually you, you've pretty much done that work for free.

22:06 You know, you spent six months working on a project where the margins are so tight that you made their money, and you had a horrible time doing it. Okay, I'm going to play that back to myself next time I'm tempted. So do you think that this sort of quality and passion over quantity approaches really helped Clear Left be successful over the years? Do you think that's one of the major contributing factors to why you've been around so long?

22:33 I hope so. Um, I mean, yeah, I think we like what we do. And we because of that, we were able to demonstrate that passion to our customers. And hopefully our customers enjoy that and value that they want to work with people who are passionate rather than people who are just sort of, they're going through the numbers.

22:53 I think it's allowed us to attract really great people because at the end of the day, agency world is a talent business. And you've got to you've got to attract really great people to work for you. I kind of a semi semi joke.

23:08 But it's actually true that my job as a, as a founder, is to constantly hire people who are better than me, which makes me the least qualified, least talented person in the company.

23:20 But it's true, you know, I was an okay designer, but I hired better designers. And then if I'm designing, that's just an ego thing when I know there's better designers there. I'm a, you know, as a pretty good coder, but I've hired better coders. Why would I code in this, you know, I'm just I'm fluffing my ego. And so your job as a founder is to kind of surround yourself by brilliant minds by, you know, people who can advise you and do great work.

23:47 And then you sort of have this coordinating role. And so I think just having, I think ultimately it's about having a set of strong values, having a set of beliefs that can guide you.

23:57 And they can go and you're going gets tough as well, because you know, we have had lean time, I think most agencies have when those lean times happen, it's good to, to have a set of value that you can kind of go out, you know, this is what we stand for.

24:10 And this is not what we stand for. And that that can that could be, you know, quite a good, good thing to kind of hold on to. Yeah, I mean, looking back over those years, what is it that you think you're most proud of? And what's come out of Clearleft?

24:26 I mean, it's it's the team of people, ultimately, you know, we are only as good as our last piece of work, I think, but that's because we want each piece of work to be better than the last.

24:38 So if my answer was like, Oh, yeah, why did that piece of design five or six years ago, and that's never been taught, that would really worry me. So it's not a piece of work, because I look at every single project coming out of our company.

24:51 And it's like, wow, you did a thing there that we've not done before, you know, a new technique, a new approach, you solved the problem that we've never been able to solve before. So every new project is the best one we've done. I think the thing that I'm most proud of is the amazing people that we've had on that journey, you know, taking folks that were new designers, and then having them kind of, you know, after they've left Clearleft go and, you know, run design teams at Twitter, or Google, or the BBC or the Guardian, become public speakers, you know, people who started as interns and are now authors and speakers on the circuit, you know, partly thanks to their experience at Clearleft.

25:31 You know, seeing that our involvement has added value to the industry and that people like you very, very kindly go, Oh, you know, you've been an inspiration to us.

25:42 I think it's all those little stories that are important. The amount of money in the bank, the nice building, the pretty accolades and case studies, I think are also in service of that bigger thing.

25:56 And did you as you were, if you can think back to when you were kind of growing Clearleft, like you had, you obviously had a nice founding team there with kind of a mix of skills. Do you remember when the first came to the point where you were like, okay, we have a skill missing from this founding team, like, that's going to stop us growing now?

26:20 Not I know you went out for growing, but just there was a part where the wheels were about to come off. What was the first thing you had to plug with a skill you didn't have as a set of founders?

26:32 Do you know what, I mean, it's going to sound weird. But literally up until about two years ago, we weren't adding skills that the founders didn't necessarily have, in a sense of brand new skills.

26:47 So our very first hire wasn't so much, oh, we can't do this thing, we don't know how to do this thing. So we hire someone that doesn't have to do it. For the first 20 staff members were really kind of, I guess, effectively extensions of ourselves, UX designers, UI designers, front end developers.

27:07 And it was about building out kind of multi discipline in teams. So it's more about kind of capacity. The reason we hired our first hire, who actually is still with us like 12, like 10, 11 years old, James box, who was our very first permanent staff member is now our head of UX has been with us for ages, hiring James, it was more about what we need more good people to service the clients we have, you know, we had one client, and we've got two clients, we need some help.

27:35 The actual person I'd say that that brought something very different to the company was probably Ellen, who is our content strategist. And that was a that was a skill that, you know, none of us really had, you know, we all wrote micro copy, we all kind of could do a content audit.

27:54 But but actually, all the nuances of content strategy, you know, was something that we, you know, you couldn't do all of that. So like, but that was like maybe two years ago. So yeah, I don't know if that's the answer to the question you were looking for.

28:09 Yeah, I know that that's really interesting. I mean, I think at the moment, one of the challenges we're finding is that our company was built from a designer and a developer. And that's very much at the heart of its culture is the work and the quality of the work.

28:27 And our main pain point is finding someone to like run projects, you know, when we've got lots of projects, and basically want someone to tidy up after ourselves, essentially.

28:41 But you know, that's sort of that's something that we've, we've done and we've learned how to do but it's, it's not quite one of our core skills, if you see what I mean. Yeah, and I guess I guess in that sense, I guess the first person who we hired who wasn't quite like the rest of the K team was probably our project managers slash studio managers. Back in the day, Sophie, she doesn't work with me more, but she, she worked with us for good five or six years.

29:08 But again, even then, like, it didn't feel like Sophie was bringing a whole new set of skills that we hadn't had before. What she was doing is she was taking a load off of the stuff we were already doing, because we were already doing project management just badly.

29:23 We were already doing, you know, running stand ups or, you know, having kind of, you know, retrospectives and all that kind of stuff that you do in project management cycle, we were just not doing as efficiently as we could so bringing Sophie in kind of allowed us to do a better job of something we're already doing.

29:43 But Ellen, I would say was definitely a new skill that we never had before. And that's interesting. And I think the purpose of us growing, if anything, is to kind of bring some more of those new skills in things that none of us currently do, but we believe we should be able to do and look for opportunities to kind of, yeah, find new avenues to explore that will just make us even better at design than we currently are.

30:08 Sure. Yeah. Nice. And even the skills like the content strategy that you said you've just brought in recently in the past two years, was that something that you didn't only before or were you using like a non permanent external resource to help with that up until that point?

30:23 Not really, no, I mean, that was that was definitely a new, new thing. That was that was us basically taking apart that we, you know, if you remember, sort of like four or five years back content strategy suddenly exploded from nowhere.

30:35 And that was something that a lot of our clients, particularly clients that had, you know, big content marketing sites were talking about, but they didn't really understand they were looking for those kind of skills and services.

30:49 You know, we were okay writers, but we weren't, you know, we weren't copywriters, we weren't sort of, you know, we're doing micro copy, like I said, but we weren't creating tone of voice documentation, we weren't working with the editorial team to look at the content flow and how content gets created.

31:05 And you know, one of the big problems I think in digital design is content. Yeah, but it's not just, you know, I think in smaller sites, you know, there's a lot of kind of like, face smashing and kind of hand stamping around, well, why hasn't the client kind of given us the content yet, we have to use lower MIPS and etc, etc.

31:20 Every project. Yeah, or like, we have to have all pieces of content created in advance. Neither those two things are actually particularly useful, because it turns out much like the advertising world where you kind of, you know, content and design has a kind of an interwoven relationship, you can't just start with the content and layer the creative on it.

31:44 You can't just start with the creative and then shed the content in its formative. And it's the back and forth with that conversation between designer and content creator that creates some of the best advertising campaigns ever.

31:57 And that was a tension that we were starting to feel in the design space is that, you know, we would either bung a bunch of lower MIPS in them but then the content of the client was creating was terrible.

32:09 Or we'd get them to produce a whole bunch of content, but then we'd be like designing our site around content that didn't quite fit. And having a content to the Guardian on the team meant that we weren't doing that meant that we were working in this kind of co design pair design kind of cross disciplinary way.

32:27 And that we could solve the problems our clients are having around content production. It's all very well just saying, well, we've got to give us the content, but they don't know what the content needs to be. They don't know when it needs to be.

32:39 They don't know what shape it needs to be. And that's now something that we can help them with. So, intricately tied into UX, isn't it? It's very hard to just sort of do that as a completely separate activity outside of the skill set your team and then just sort of have that land on your lap and you've got to deal with it and figure out what to do.

32:58 And we're feeling similar pressures at the moment with the thing. A lot of this is about kind of as you grow and have projects get bigger, like little kind of crack start to appear between like the interface effectively between you and other team members on the client side.

33:17 And another thing that we started to see is the gaps between UX and development. We're very well creating pattern portfolios and code libraries, et cetera, et cetera. And it's great to kind of design and sketch interfaces from the outside in rather than being driven by what the technology can do.

33:41 You know, we don't want to have been technologically determinant. On the other hand, sometimes you just got to have technical conversations with clients and putting them in front of a front-end developer maybe, or putting them in front of a UX designer.

33:54 When actually you want someone that is more understand the architecture of a complicated tech stack. So less about people that understand slices of it, but someone who can understand the big picture, understand the challenges of how technology gets deployed and then can help us provide code or design in a better way that's going to fit with their existing systems.

34:21 That is starting to be invaluable. And so we've been working with a couple of really, really big projects with really big clients. We're having that bridge between technology and design has been really valuable.

34:33 Now, I would draw the line at calling that person a creative technologist or even a UX developer because I think they refer to slightly different things. So I'm not entirely sure what to call this role.

34:47 But it's definitely not BA, but it's kind of like that product, technically focused product manager role that I think if you get someone good can be super helpful.

34:59 But anyway, we're getting so into the long grass now, it's probably too detailed to kind of carry on that train of thought. But yeah, specialists, the bigger you get, the more specialists you can bring in, I guess.

35:12 Yeah, that was very interesting rabbit hole. I think I'd also be quite interested to hear about how you think that sort of the events in the conference and the community work that you've done over the years. Do you think that's really helped you get good clients at the same time?

35:27 This is an interesting one. I think I think a lot of people from the outside look at the events and go, Oh, I see what you've done there. That's really clever. You know, you're building your profile, you're obviously getting lots of kind of client work from that kind of stuff. Weirdly, it's never really been like that.

35:46 That's never been the driving factor. But also, it's never been the result. Like, I really wish it was, it would have been a lovely kind of sort of side thing that we could put on a conference. And then at the end of the conference, like loads of clients would come rushing to us and say, wow, you guys are great at curating conferences, and picking speakers, why don't you come and help us design our website. But that never happens. Actually, what happens is they all rushed to the stage to talk to the speakers going, that was great. Why didn't you come and help us improve our thing.

36:18 I see. So if anything, we're doing ourselves a disservice because we're promoting, in some regard, we're sort of pushing work to other people and sort of pushing it away from ourselves. So we've never really had that experience. Maybe we're doing conferences wrong, I don't know. Maybe we should be peppering it with like logos and signs and people in outfits kind of pushing kind of, you know, flyers of people. But that's just not our style.

36:43 The conferences have come out from that desire to want to improve the industry. What happened is me and Rich and Jeremy went to South by Southwest in 2005, I think it was, had a really good time, came back to the UK, tried to find a conference that we could go to that was a little bit like it.

37:03 There was nothing. And so we started one and deconstruct, which was that conference, was the first ever like digital design conference, arguably in the UK. There was at media, which was more on the kind of front end technical side.

37:21 But deconstruct was more on the kind of design side. We were we were the first or the second conference of its kind. But that was just basically our necessity, kind of like, we want to go to a party like this. There isn't anyone running these parties. So let's do our own.

37:34 And then it becomes addictive once you've done one and people enjoy it. You think, oh, that was fun. I'll do another one and do another one. And then, you know, you wake up 11 years later, you know, you're, wow, you know, now the conference sort of circuit is changed and the industry's changed crazily.

37:50 But it's all through this desire to kind of push things forward. That's why we started UX London. We started UX London not because we thought all we make a name for ourselves in UX space is because there were no UX meetups to go to.

38:02 We didn't even realize that in 2009, I think that's well, 2008, when we started here in London, we didn't even know any other UX designers. So we thought, oh, actually, we put on a we put on a UX themed deconstruct because we didn't know any UX designers.

38:18 And we thought, oh, I wonder if there's anybody in the market, you know, or anybody in this space and 800 people turned out. Oh, that's interesting. There must be at least 800 people interested in UX. And then we spun up into a separate event.

38:32 And the same thing we're doing now with leading design, we want a conference called leading design, which is all about design leadership. Again, that was because we've spoken to loads of our friends that have gone from being designers or technologists to leading a small team to leading a big team, leading a department to sometimes, you know, being the key design leader at a very large tech company.

38:55 But all of those people that we've grown up with have had the same problems, hiring, growing their team, looking after the culture, building culture, managing up, managing down, managing sideways.

39:06 And we thought, well, you know, maybe this is something we could help those people with. You know, if we can, if we can help design leaders be better design leaders, you know, maybe there was with this one, there was a bit more of a kind of, well, if we can hide design leaders be better and more savvy at their job, they'll make better design decisions.

39:25 And that might involve hiring better agencies like who left rather than, you know, bad agencies like me to agency name here. But even then, that was probably like a little side to the thing. Oh, that could most it's just about helping folks do their job better.

39:38 The design leaders conferences on later this year, isn't it? It's it's in about three weeks time actually leading design. So yeah, some, I think what is it, I cut the cut under the dates or something like the 24th of 26th or the 26th or 28th of October. I'm pretty sure the tickets are sold out now, which I'm really excited about, because it was a super big punt.

40:00 You know, new conferences in this market are always a bit risky because there's so many events going on, but it's, you know, it's sold out tickets. I'm really, really pleased. It's nice. Congrats. But to kind of like just I guess to answer your question, the conferences were never designed to be a promotion tool or way of when you work.

40:18 They've always been done out of love and out of fun. And it's always been like our 20% projects, our side projects. They didn't really make us any money. But as designers, we can't, you know, we can't spin up a new startup because we don't have the technical skills and not developers.

40:33 But it's really easy for us to kind of spin up a new web conference. So partly it's just kind of us scratching our own itch and going, like organizing the kind of part, as I said before, that we want to go to.

40:44 But there has been benefit because, you know, people come to the conferences, they like them, they become aware of who they left. And, you know, we have had clients come to us who go, oh, I went to deconstruct five years ago when I was just a developer.

41:00 And now, or just like a designer, and now I'm running this team. And when I thought of agencies to pick, I had fond memories of you guys from that event. And I thought we'd throw your name into the hat.

41:11 So, you know, it does have some answer to benefit. Like I say, it's a long game. It's like, hey, yeah, five years, six years. It's never been an immediate thing.

41:22 And I mean, it sounds like the moment you start trying to measure the impact of those events, you'll lose a little bit of that love, a little bit of cynicism will come in and they'll probably go rubbish.

41:33 So, I mean, it's a don't use the word brand in the wrong way, but it definitely helps. I'm sure it has been a massive part of success, just quite a hard one to measure, I suppose.

41:45 And we don't bother, you know, we do good stuff. I mean, again, I'm sounding really hippie tonight. I'm not wrong about this, but there's a karma element, you know, you do good stuff.

41:55 You put good stuff out into the world, whether it's a conference for people, whether it's a blog post about something you feel passionate about, whether it's a book or an article or a talk. And you hope that people appreciate that and maybe, you know, in three, four, five years time, if they're in a position to hire you to do a thing, they might, if you're lucky, deem it worthy to bring you in.

42:20 But that's always a nice extra result that shouldn't be the purpose. And actually, I'm seeing a lot more companies and a lot more agencies running conferences deliberately for the brand building, deliberately for the marketing, deliberately because they want to kind of get in bed in the pocket of a particular brand manager or product manager, what have you. And I always find that a little bit creepy.

42:45 It always just seems a little bit disingenuous. So, yeah, I'm really hoping that people don't sort of see that's what we're doing, although I can kind of imagine if you don't know us as a company, you might just see that.

42:57 But yeah, I'm seeing lots of conferences in the conference market, so saturated at the moment, lots of conferences run by agencies that are half full, that are stuffed with free seats for the people that haven't paid just because they need to kind of make up numbers.

43:11 And you go there and they're not paying their speakers. The MD always has a speaking slot, you know, whether they're good at what they do or not.

43:22 And you look at the lineup and it's always packed full of their own stuff. And yeah, it's just creeping. That doesn't sound good to me. No, but it's good to know we've got to do the podcast for at least five years before we get a lead off it.

43:38 But the thing is that, unfortunately, that is true. I mean, you look at things like sort of Paul Boag and Boag World, you know, he's built up so much capital over the years.

43:49 But yeah, it takes a long time. It is a long slog. But eventually, all the good stuff you put out into the world will come back in some way or another.

44:01 Yeah, absolutely. I met some perspective fans the other day, John, and it felt good. Oh, really? Excellent. You have to tell me about that later. I shall. Yeah, that's not why we do this either. We do this because we're just interested in talking about it and trying to give something back.

44:17 Well, the other thing is I think by one of my experiences is the reason I used to blog is because I was using it as a way of understanding the world and learning that stuff.

44:27 And I think a lot of the reason why I run conferences as well, and I suspect that's probably why you run a podcast, you know, you get the benefit of talking to a bunch of people about how they run their business.

44:37 And that helps you inform your business. And you could just have that as a coffee chat, but you record it and put it out into the world because it helping you. It might help other people.

44:48 So you're already getting some benefit from this. And you just decided to amplify that benefit by letting everyone else join in on the conversation. I think that's cool. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah.

44:58 And it was born of doing it in person, exactly that, the sort of peer group with some friends and we just sort of talking about this stuff and it was so useful. It just seemed to make sense to make it public.

45:08 Yeah, absolutely. So what's on the cards for Clearleft in the next year or so? Anything special planned? I don't think there's anything sort of special special. We had we sort of had our 10th birthday last year. So we had a kind of a nice big party and that was quite fun.

45:26 Just kind of more of the same, I guess. You know, we've got some interesting projects in the pipeline at the moment. We're pitching for some fun stuff. If there's one big project that we're kind of pitching for and if it pans out, that will probably be keeping a lot of our team busy for a year or 18 months or something.

45:43 But it's a pitch. And who knows? I'd say we've kind of got a 50/50 chance of getting it. But we might not. And if we don't, then hopefully they'll go with a good agency that will service them.

45:54 But yeah, it's just, you know, it's doing good work and growing the culture. The events that we do are quite fun. I'm going I love going to events. I love speaking at events. So there'll probably be a whole bunch of trips overseas over the next year. I'm toying with the idea of going to South by Southwest.

46:11 I used to go all the time. I guess about 2009 kind of stopped going so regularly. But I go every couple of years and it's still good fun. It's not quite the same news up that it used to be. But in terms of diversity of content, this is really good stuff.

46:25 We've just been talking about maybe going to the Interactions Conference in New York, which is also really interesting. So you might try and get a bit of a posse out there. But yeah, other than that, just sort of carrying on doing what we're doing, really, I guess.

46:36 Good. Well, thanks for coming to speak to us today. It's been really fun. And I'm sure our audience will find it very useful. Well, it's been it's been absolute pleasure. So yeah, I really enjoyed chatting with you guys well. Hopefully there were a few little nuggets of wisdom in the kind of general waffle.

46:53 Cool. And if people want to find out more about you and Clearleft, where can they do that? Well, Clearleft is just clearleft.com. Oh, well, one, yeah, one exciting thing is that we're just about to, you know, we've been trying to redesign our website for quite a while.

47:08 And we're hopefully going to be getting close to finishing that. Oh, that old chestnut. I know. But hopefully we're having a little bit of a rebrand. We're not changing the name of you think, but we're kind of revisiting the logo and our colour palette and our typography.

47:26 And the stuff I've seen the team coming up with has been really, really exciting. So when we finally get ready to launch it, hopefully this side of Christmas, maybe after Christmas, then that will be really exciting.

47:37 And I think that will kind of just solidify and push us forward. I think the challenge we have at the moment as a company, like most agencies, is our website is a reflection of where we were maybe three to five years ago.

47:48 It's not a reflection of where we want to be in two to three years. And so I think having that new website out and all the branding and messaging that goes with it will be quite exciting.

48:00 But yeah, at the moment, just clearly have to calm you to the old site. And I guess AndyBud.com is my blog, which I kind of post to infrequently. And then AndyBud on Twitter as well, which I, if you want to hear me ranting about a whole range of things, then go there.

48:11 Good stuff. Yeah. Good luck with the project. I look forward to seeing the results. We just went through that ourselves recently. We wanted to update our website, not completely replace it. Just add a bit more content talking about who we are, what we do. We hired a content strategist to work with us to help us figure out how to communicate ourselves properly to not rebrand ourselves, but figure out what our brand messaging is and try and integrate that into the new site, into the homepage, into a couple of new content sections that were really about us. And just put that live the other week. And it's been a great process to do the really sort of content first, content strategy driven approach. I really enjoyed it and very happy with the results. It's been a pretty refreshing way of doing it, actually. Yeah. John and I have a running battle about whose website is the most out of date. I've seen some updates on yours recently, John, so suddenly our year old one is starting to look a bit tired now. I mean, the challenge is part of it. You want to eat your own dog food and you want to do the site perfect. You want to use it as an opportunity to try all the new techniques and all the new processes and et cetera, et cetera. But suddenly you can find yourself spending so much time on a thing that you would never spend that much time on a client site. And also you're never happy with it because you always know that you could do better. And then what happens is real life gets in the way and client projects get in the way and then you stop looking at the site, particularly if you're small, two, three months. And when you come back to it, you're not happy with the thing that you left and you kind of start the process all over again. So it can be really kind of slow and time consuming. And yeah, we've probably been thinking about this site and working on it in one way or another for the last year. So it's kind of I'm really, really looking forward to getting it done. I know the feeling. Cool. And Dan, where can people find you? You can get me on the tweets @GenTusMaximus or you can get a Lighthouse at wearelighthouse.com And thanks to everyone for listening. I've been John Dark at Dark John on Twitter from Every Interaction. You can find us online at everyinteraction.com. If you'd like to contact us about this episode or find any of our past episodes, you can do so on our website at perspective.fm. You can send us an email directly to get@perspective.fm. We're on Twitter, underscore perspective FM. You can find us on iTunes and we appreciate any ratings and reviews. You may leave us there. You know, tweet about the show, share it on Facebook, tell your friends, everything you do helps spread the word. Or easy to find on your podcast app of choice. Just search for perspective FM, either in Google Music, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Cast, whatever your podcasting app of choice is. All the links are on our website along with show notes for this episode. Thanks everybody and we'll see you next time.