| I started
my own business on 12th September 2001. That’s right, a day
after 11th September 2001. On that fateful day I was flying back
from the Caribbean after a two week holiday and had just landed
at Heathrow when the first plane struck the North Tower. The next
day I went back to work to find the company had gone bust. Completely
unrelated to 9/11, but certainly a very strange and un-nerving couple
of days.
I was creative director of a mutimedia
firm. Don’t let that title throw you, I wasn’t on the
board and I had no insight into the accounts or general finances
of the company. My job was mainly to manage and do the jobs in the
studio. I did know, however, that the boss had recently employed
a friend of his on something like £42k as a senior programmer
for whom there wasn’t very much work for him to do. I knew
that the value of the work coming in couldn’t possibly cover
the salaries going out which had been propped up with loans secured
against the boss’s house.
The company had been set up ten years
earlier to build bespoke PC systems that were used for multimedia
presentations. Most of that market had disappeared due to the advancement
of PCs and the availability of straightforward software like Powerpoint
which virtually did the job for you. Why spend thousands on a bespoke
system when you could pay hundreds for an off-the-shelf one that
was better?
I saw my role as attempting to guide
this outmoded company into the much richer vein of design-led graphics.
The company could easily pick up branding, print design and of course
web design as well as still doing high-end multimedia such as CD-ROMS
which were still in demand. My team created a new identity and marketing
campaign along with a brilliant (if I don’t say so myself!)
website, that I was sure could have attracted press attention, if
not awards, if it had been launched.
But the boss had put the brakes on.
He just wasn’t comfortable with ‘creativity’ and
‘design’. He wasn’t comfortable with newer technology,
especially the new iBook that our programmer bought. It was able
to do exactly the same job that the bosses hot-wired custom built
editing suite could do, except that it was faster and didn’t
take up half the office. The boss wanted to be fiddling with PCs
with their cases off and discussing servers over a pint of ale at
lunchtime.
While I was on holiday I had come
up with more marketing ideas and the concept of a ‘sub-brand’
that could be used to sell the new design portfolio without appearing
to impact on the more staid and traditional image the boss wanted
to cling onto. I did a lot of thinking about creativity and how
it can be used to solve companies marketing and branding challenges
and came up with ideas for names such as ‘Ideas Workshop’
and ‘Ding!’.
So it wasn’t exactly a complete
surprise that the company was no longer in business when I got back.
The next day I started my own company
and began to put all the ideas I’d come up with into practice.
Sometimes you need a kick in the teeth to actually take action and
get on with things.
Why did that multimedia company fail?
To an outsider it appeared to have everything going for it. Except
for clients of course. Inflexibilty, stubborness and fear of change
were characteristics of the boss. Not being able to see the bigger
picture, to understand where the market was moving was another.
The downfall came because of a lack of creativity and a fear of
creativity and doing the same things and expecting better results.
Once, perhaps, creativity was a luxury,
but not now. Now you have to be creative in business.
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