A whole year of Goodness.
The begininng of April saw Goodness celebrate it’s first year in business. So we wanted to take this opportunity to share some of our thoughts and experiences on our journey so far.
Last year we decided to take the leap and set ourselves up as a ‘proper’ agency.
The idea is for us to work as an agency, on our own projects directly with our own clients. A deliberate move away from freelance work which neither of us was that keen on.
Brief introductions. Goodness are Jord (me) and Kev. We created a successful charity project called Secret 7" in 2012 and have been working ‘together’ ever since.
We’re 2 creative brains on opposite sides of the world. Myself in Sydney having a focus on design, branding and art direction and Kev in London being more production, events and partnerships focussed.
And despite being on opposite ends of the earth, we’ve made a success of Secret 7" (our baby) and have developed a unique and complementary way of working that has led us to deliver some really interesting and diverse work under the Secret 7" / Goodness umbrella.
So… We launched Goodness officially on the 29 April 2019. I say officially as we’ve been operating (kind of) as Goodness for a while to run Secret 7". Up until that point we’d been running Secret 7" and everything that goes along with it whilst I was still in full time employment and Kev was bouncing around between freelance and full time on the project.
Secret 7" has opened various doors over the years, it’s this that gave us some courage to try something new. We’ve always thought we’d be able to turn some of those openings into opportunities, but with me working full time we’ve never had the resources to actually pull that off.
We talked a lot before we opened our own doors.
How would it work? What’s the ideal project? Where does the work come from? How are we set up as a business? What’s the offer? How do we talk about the offer? etc, etc.
We’re still working through 80% of those things a year later and most of them are even more of a talking point now than they were when we started.
I think the main thing for us was ‘how’. How do we actually run a business together when we are in such different time zones and very rarely in the same room? In eight years we’ve really only ever been in the same room a few times. Obviously lots of people do it, but it did feel almost impassable through theory alone, we both felt we had to just go for it and see what happened. Blind naivety was what we say had got us this far with Secret 7", and selective naivety might just get us a little bit further.
We decided to set up as 2 seperate companies. Which made most things easier, but made some things more complicated. Is it the way I thought I’d be set up when I set out on this journey? Not really. Does that really matter? I don’t think it does. We were finding more and more that neither of us were particularly ‘planning’ inclined and that the art of ‘planning’ just got us into a web of what-ifs. We were finding we are both a bit more comfortable with following each other, blindly into the unknown.
We spent a lot of time talking about what kind of work we wanted to do, what kind of agency we wanted to be. We spent some money on a brilliant writer to help us craft our manifesto, our ‘sell’.
We ended up with a starting point, something to guide us as to who we would work with and what we would work on. We set out our stall and went for it.
I didn’t leave my last agency with any clients, or any projects to start on. Kev didn’t either. So we started Goodness by having to focus on partnerships for our next edition of Secret 7" and having to chase down any kind of work before the savings ran out. It kind of defeated the purpose of our manifesto really. Although we’re still really glad we did it.
Selling the agency was tough. Explaining to people what we do felt like 2 very seperate things. We do all this arts, music activation work in London and then more brand and design in Sydney. But we do it all together. Kind of. Or at least we want to.
It’s taken a while to get this more streamlined, albeit a world away from where we’d like it to be, but with each office becoming more autonomous and comfortable in that autonomy.
In Sydney we managed to land a couple of brand projects with startups like Collective Leisure, Ripe Planet and Mindaribba Local Aboriginal Land Council.
In London we secured partnerships with Sony Music, Camden Town Brewery and Greenwich Peninsula for our seventh Secret 7”, and put together a brilliant lineup of musicians for creatives to design for — Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Foo Fighters, The Internet, Koffee, Miles Davis and Vampire Weekend.
This felt to us like a great start, which seemed to get even better when we were invited to pitch by Nike for a small campaign.
So pitching is hard anyway. Everything is harder when you’re on different time zones and have windows of 2-ish hours together a day. Pitching under those conditions is especially hard.
…Then we all went on holiday.
We ended up pitching with me in a hotel room in Bangkok, Kev in a villa in Italy. Even the client was scattered across the world on their annual leave. We’d both spent the last few weeks pulling together a pitch for something we were definitely out of our comfort zone on, but we were proud that we’d gone in with something we’d be happy to produce, something very Goodness.
The internet cut Kev out half way through the presentation, so I ended up winging most of it on my own. The reaction was positive. We didn’t get it.
Goodness doesn’t necessarily sell trainers.
But we walked away proud of our fighting spirit and determination for what we were doing.
Beyond the Nike pitch and Secret 7" 2020 (which then in the current Covid climate became a real struggle) we’ve found it hard to work as closely together as we had intended. New agencies don’t necessarily walk into big projects that can afford our set up and we’ve found that fairly separately Sydney has been plugging away with more brand and design work (some more Goodness than others) whilst London has been focussed more on Secret 7", new business and events.
Does this matter at this stage in our journey? Maybe not. Is it exactly what we thought we’d be doing when we set up? Probably not.
What matters to us is that we think we are forging the right path. We are building our ‘business’ to be able to support the way of working we want to work. Collaboratively, creatively and internationally within our own parameters.
So the bulk of our collaborative work comes in the form of pro-active and speculative ideas and projects. The kind of things that set us on this path in the first place. We’re sticking to our strengths even if those strengths don’t necessarily bring in the money (yet). We’re obviously having to do other things to keep our families fed, but with a keen focus on bringing our Goodness worlds together more seamlessly as we move forward.
The multiple hats is something people warn you about when you tell them you’re setting up your own agency. It’s kind of obvious that you would end up having to do a lot more work and play a lot more roles. This is something that although we are in business together, we don’t get to share the load so much.
With the autonomy of doing things alone comes independence, true. But that independence brings with it admin.
Having to run a business is the single most time consuming job I personally have ever done. Invoicing, quoting, chatting to people about quoting. Long conversations about quoting with absolute time wasters, making and presenting creds deck after creds deck. All the while trying to produce the best work of your career, with little budget, it’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. And the plates are still spinning, if a little wobbly. It’s the adrenaline and ambition that keeps them going I think.
Negotiating an unusual working schedule has its pros and cons too. We both added to our families in the past year too, so new businesses, and especially those in dual time zones are obviously going to be a challenge when the pressures of young families are thrown into the mix as well.
We’re developing ways to work autonomously on our own timezones, so we can be more efficient on each others. With our own projects, our own new collaborators and clients that suit more of our existing skills. But with the shared vision and end goal the thing that binds us together as Goodness, the love of the strange set up and the unusual working practises. Those things are what make us Goodness I guess.
So Goodness as an agency moves into its second year. Unconventional, unflattering on the inside (and outside potentially). Doing some unusual but interesting things, with nothing pinned down, nothing set in stone and no real light to guide us.
Just the way we like it. Apparently.
