"I was chatting to a new business prospect the other day, about designing a new website, and we came to the subject of agency size and internal resources. And I was pleased to tell her we’re small. One of the smallest web design / web marketing agencies in Perth, in fact.

Why was I pleased? Because small makes us agile, responsive and attentive.

"When I need to have even the simplest change made to our website, the job has to be booked-in and scheduled and often takes three or four days to get done,” my prospect had said, referring to her current web designers."

Being small allows us to hire-in task-specific specialists - to assemble the optimum team for each unique job. Bigger agencies tend to rely on a rank of salaried generalists, who often sit expensively twiddling their thumbs between projects.

Being small means we have lower overheads, savings we pass on to clients. Being small means we spend less time on admin, arcane procedures and management, freeing up more time to focus on clients.

Being small cuts out chinese whispers: client briefs account executive; executive briefs account manager; manager briefs studio manager; studio manager briefs creative. If but one word changes at each stage the outcome is invariably different to the client’s original brief. And the process starts over.

And being small avoids the ‘Everybody’s Job Story’ in which there are four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody… 

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when actually Nobody asked Anybody.

Having worked in senior roles at some of Europe’s and London’s biggest marketing and communications firms, I’ve been there, seen it, done it. If nothing else (in fact I learned a lot) big agencies taught me just how not to do things…"