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Barrie Barton is strategy and insights director of Right Angle Studio. He has skills and abilities that his counterparts in big agencies don’t have to use.
Thinking small has turned out to be good for Barrie’s career. Here’s what he reckons you need to know to be a big fish in a nimble pond.
We work in an age that glorifies ‘small’. Even our biggest brands pretend that they are our most intimate friend, and many large companies create fractional units, or teams, that promise the care of a smaller agency with all the buying might and resources of a global behemoth. This kind of deceit inevitably unravels. I highly recommend that big agencies stop pretending to be a scale that they are not and start practising the ‘authenticity’ that they have been peddling to their clients for the last five years.
At the moment, a small agency is a highly desirable business-type in creative industries. It’s true that when you are small you can build deeper and stronger client relationships – they really love speaking to the business owner and not dealing with a tribe of project management staff who are addicted to CC emails and exist in a constant state of anxiety because quite frankly they are too junior to understand the business at hand.
Additionally, your staff become like family which is emotional and demanding, but thoroughly rewarding when it’s all going well…like when your kid chooses law school instead of smoking bongs.
You could say that small agencies are mythologised but, like Stonehenge, they can be much better from a distance. On the inside of Right Angle Studio, which has 15 staff, we have no room for loafers and have to expect the best as a matter of survival rather than ego. We need people who have a base set of skills and knowledge, but can parlay that into new areas with confidence. There are thrills for sure, but there aren’t spills because we can’t distribute the blame across a 30 person team and three different agencies. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the client, the old adage of ‘work smarter not harder’ doesn’t apply at Right Angle – we have to work smarter and harder.
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