Lifecycle of UI/UX Design Agency
Every business has its own lifecycle. After 6 years of work in UI/UX design here is what I discovered about design agencies.
Every business begins like the history of the brand new creature: you see it as a newborn, you need to raise and it will be growing and blooming, bringing you wealth and happiness. For sure, everyone is ready to take action and risk at the start, taking small business as something unstable and even not that serious. However, once it shows you great results and saves positive progress with time, you start to work less, get more and become relaxed. Some situations around you (crises, war, pandemic) may bring you back to Earth and you will be ready to give all of you to the business again. Thus, one day or another you get into the comfort zone. It happens accidentally when you don’t wait for it at all.
The comfort zone is the very beginning of the end. When you stop investing and giving all of your time and effort to the company, it will stagnate. Stagnation will lead to decreasing actuality on the market and once you can see how you reach the point when 6–10 years of work on the market no longer convert in clients since you have become either outdated or no longer actual. New designers came to the market, new trends arrived and you (along with the comfort zone) start slowly moving towards the end of all of this business story. Some may survive the crises, simply becoming different in time, staying on the same level, some may transform the business completely and some may take it as a point of growth: what will be your solutions is up to you, but here is a classic life-cycle of the design agency.
The Introduction Stage
The very beginning of the great new story.
At this stage, the company only starts to work and earn. You test the hypothesis, that your business will be successful on the market and look for a way to sell services to the clients successfully. You test yourself and your payment models, seeing if you are working with the right employees and if you have gathered the right team. This is a very nervous and turbulent period of time when you only begin introducing yourself to the market and may face a lot of challenges.
The very first challenge is to make sure that you sell something actual and important on the market. If you work with a stable, but not that actual service or product, your business bloom phase will not be that bright. If you have joined a high-wave business sector, you may have caught a lucks tale. Another challenge is your work with clients and inner processes construction. If you have a working and tested model of the work organization, it may be less effective with the new team. Moreover, your new team will require time and effort to become a team of professionals you want to work with. This required time.
In other words, you need to have some time from the moment you have launched an agency and hired juniors till the moment you have been working together for years and grown up into the seniors. The same goes for the clients. The first 6 months after the release of the company, you will have many clients and you will simply have to wait for them to stay available on the market. However, success comes to those who can wait and if you have been successful in that, you will proceed to the next stage.
The Growth Stage
You will get regular clients, increase sales and start to expand.
While still not having all the processes set up accurately and partially working in the chaos, you will notice how you start to get more orders from the clients. Once, you will understand that you are ready to launch a new person and will hire more designers. At the same time, this stage also is significant due to the fact, that you are still working actively on the operational tasks and having not that high prices, taking the market by increasing amount of designers.
At this stage, you have a list of regular clients, with stable incomes, who have good recommendations and instruments to sell design the way it will be bringing you profit. For the CEO, PM and Sales it may be the hardest part, since here you can not be involved in the strategic work rather than working on the daily routine, training new designers and taking on more and more projects. You will also most likely realize who you don’t want to work with and what should an ideal world for your design approach look like. And this is the time when you start to think about the strategy, not just action. You think globally about where your actions take you. And here we enter the new phase.
The Maturity Stage
Once we enter this stage, you become free and rich.
Normally this phase begins with the decision to hire more managers and operational workers, who will take all of your and the director’s work on themselves. Since you have had a lot of sales, a stable sales model, designers and constant clients, you have regular income and may be free to delegate your work to the new employees. With this required stage you start to get to the next level: when your ability to develop new niches, discover better marketing and improve the current work of the company becomes more important than the routine you had before.
Now, your company can work with or without you: clients will be reaching out, people will be working autonomously and you will be able to have your income and some rest, playing bigger games and putting bigger goals in front of you. Processes, as they are, will require improvements, but you will have everything set up so that there is only dreaming big and achieving more phases. However, this is the most dangerous phase of work as well, since you may get into the comfort zone and stop learning, stop making urgent sales, and stop developing a client loyalty program and this will lead directly to the stagnation, that always comes next.
The Decline Stage
You can never avoid this stage, since it always happens and has several outcomes.
While you have been chilling and working globally, something in the company was staying the same and led to the quick chaotic change due to the sudden burnout. At the same time, the market simply changes and proven with years of work, your sales strategy may no longer work. Decline starts, you get less payment and see how to fall to the level of the growth. Taking it as a crisis, you start taking action to stop the decline and prevent the company from dying.
The first outcome may be a full rebranding: including logo, client approach, tone of voice, marketing team, etc. So you need to update the face and the company so greatly, that this will allow you to jump on the new lifecycle. If you have made a partial redesign, like refreshing the website and the logo, this will make you stable for a year let’s say and then the decline will start again. The only way to start the cycle from the very beginning is to change the company, staying under the same name: you may launch a new product, or new service, make rebranding, but you need to surprise the market.
The second outcome is ignoring this fact, saying that the outside conditions led to it. Most likely, this will lead to stagnation and a pause in sales. You still will be earning, but every 2 months you will be feeling how you earn less, than before and how clients become less satisfied. One way or another, ignorance never solves the problem, it may only bury it for a certain time, but then it will be activated again.
Open new business — this is the third outcome, and many people do this way. When you see, that the crisis is here and you have your reasons to change your life greatly, you are free to open a new company and this will boost its lifecycle from the start. Moreover, opening a new business doesn’t mean starting something brand new. Most likely, you will keep on doing the same, with probably the same people, but under the new brand and name. This decision may result in a very good outcome.
Every business meets decline. But true CEO always keep on growing, learning and improving work, since this is the classic story and once you have seen it for the first time, you will be ready to do what you have to every time decline comes and test yourself on showing better and better results!
Originally posted at medium by Zero One Design