🎪 Scaling Service x Will Worsdell: should you start an agency with your mates?
And why you should invest in team building before you even have a team
If you were ever in a band at school, you'll know that the first priority, well before learning to play your instruments or writing any songs, is the name. It sets the tone. Get that right, and all else will follow. And speaking to Will Worsdell, co-founder and strategic director of experiential agency The Park, it seems the same is true of agencies.Â
"We were spending way too long trying to come up with a name … We need a website, we need to register at Companies House, etc. And we'd landed on some that were dreadful in hindsight, but then one night we put 10 names into a Google Doc. And then the next morning, we all go in and highlight the ones we like, we won't know who's put what, and then we just go with whatever the consensus is. And The Park was a consensus, and it came from Glastonbury. Lloyd had just been going through photos to try and get inspiration and found a photo of us and Jack outside the Park Stage at Glastonbury. Threw that in, and we all loved it."
That's Jack Lamacraft and Lloyd Major, Will's co-founders back in 2018. Their partnership has thrived, but Will is clear that it takes a few things to make a good business partnership. "For me, part of the enjoyment is actually us hanging out together. Particularly when you go through times like the last two years, that were very challenging, and you're having to have some pretty scary conversations and look at some things; I prefer being able to have people you can talk stuff through with. But that's not for everyone. The pro of being on your own is complete control and freedom."
Should you go into business with your mates?
For Will, the "most important thing about business partners is aligning on values." And Will knew that he and his partners were on the same page. "Jack, Lloyd and I, first of all, were mates. A lot of people say don't go to business with friends, because too much is on the line. I would disagree with that.
"If I went into business with someone I only knew from a work environment, I would be very comfortable with them from a work point of view. But I'd have no point of reference for what happens when the shit hits the fan, or when we open up, or when we've got big decisions to make."
Will rates this even above skills. "You can hire people to fill those. What you can't hire is personalities that are there for you at crucial times of running a business. So I think aligning with people that share your values on life and on business, that look at the world in the same way from a values point of view, I think that's the most important thing."
As a result, The Park was able to establish its founding values and culture right from the start. "We agreed that from day one, even though there were just three of us, we were going to behave like we were an agency of 30 people. Last Friday of every month we have a cultural outing, where we take the team out and go and do something that inspires and gets us thinking - we did that from the start.
"It makes me laugh: it's three of you, why are you going to the Design Museum? But we wanted to build the culture. We had an employee handbook before we had any employees, we had all of that stuff in place. We've always believed that culture will drive the work."
How should co-founders divvy up the responsibilities?
The other crucial aspect of founding in a partnership is a clear allocation of responsibilities. "Complementary skills is sort of a cost of entry, but it's very important. You need a nice rounded proposition. But almost more importantly, there needs to be clear delineation. At the start we were a little bit like kids playing football in the playground, we all ran after the ball. And then we had to take a step back. If everyone's responsible, no one's responsible. It was very inefficient."
They solved the problem of delineation with a shopping list. "We basically just listed out all the responsibilities of the business, almost as if we were a 50 person business. Then we divvied them up between us." But this didn't mean working in isolation.
"We came to realise there are certain things that can't all be on one person: you need one person to drive it and almost kick the others to make sure they're doing it. It was about making sure that for every key part of the business, there was someone that would hold the other two accountable, as opposed to it all being on them."
How to nail your proposition
While the culture fell into place right away, The Park had more trouble nailing their proposition." Getting to position and a proposition that was unique and compelling, that took us six to nine months." In the end, Will realised that, particularly in the experiential space, "a lot of people talk about culture, and a lot of people talk about consumers, or their revolutionary technique. But not many people were talking about the way a brand might behave. So I thought maybe there's something in that."
That something became The Park's signature, Brand Proof. "Ultimately, Brand Proof comes from the belief that there is a lot of talk in the world, brands and advertising saying 'trust us'. And while there is sometimes a role for making promises, what's more important is to prove what you stand for. That can be in a tangible way in terms of product benefit, or it can be in a more cerebral way, brand positioning or an emotional quality. Our point of view: don't just say it, prove it. Actions speak louder than words."
But Will is wary of being pigeonholed. "Obviously this lends itself to experiential as a field. But it doesn't necessarily mean events. It could be an initiative, it could be a partnership - it's about action first as opposed to message first." This means that The Park can position themselves as both specialists and generalists.
"We can be very clear. We're an experiential agency, we're interested in working on the way a brand has experience, we're interested in brands creating actions. But the way that you execute that can be broad. It gives us that breadth of creativity in delivery, and it allows the market to shape our offerings. Brand Proof allows us to have broad conversations, and the execution of our work can be decided by what clients want from us and what they think best. And that's sort of how it's gone."
In the early days, it took a little while to adjust to the pace of the business. "There's a lot of people that want to have a chat. There's a lot of clients that say 'Yeah, come and chat to us. Yeah, sounds great.' And you walk out feeling like you are going to be inundated by briefs, but then after a while you realise that there are lots of nice people that are sort of pleased that you're doing it, but that doesn't necessarily turn into a brief. That can get a bit demoralising."
Eventually, Will realised that "it's a long term process. You're not going to walk in and introduce yourself and get 'Oh, thank God you're here, we've got a brief we've been waiting for someone to take.' Everyone else is working on a much slower and longer term basis. I think that was a bit of an adjustment for us." And once the work did start coming in, "We'd all just focus on the brief, and then once that finished: Hang on, we've not been doing anything in the pipeline."
How much do you earn in the early days of running an agency?
Then there was the question of money. "The first three months, we didn't take money out of the business. We started paying ourselves after three months, and we have paid ourselves every month since then. In terms of that first year, we talked about our bare minimum to cover off our home costs, rent, mortgage. And even now. I wouldn't say I'm paid what I would get for this role out in the open market. But you've got to look at it in a slightly different way."
When starting out, "you need to think seriously about your own finances. For us it was about getting to a point where we could cover the costs, and not be letting people down at home, and then build from there."
And if he was starting from scratch all over again, is there anything Will would do differently? First, more risks and more bravery. "When you first start a business, you can get wracked with the fear of things going wrong. And actually what we've learned over the last four years is that every time we've taken a bold decision to invest in a hire or an office, it's paid dividends. It's moved the agency on, it's created opportunities, it's made the work better, it's made the culture better. I'm not saying you should take on loads of debt. It's more that boldness of investing in areas that you think will deliver revenue and growth for the business."Â
The other thing to guard against is complacency. "There is one pitch in particular that we always use, we remind ourselves to keep ourselves honest. We went into it, we were complacent, the work was poor. We didn't win. And when we walked out we said: that is never going to happen again. People going into this, never think you've got it made. Every agency's three phone calls from disaster. Never be complacent about your pipeline, and keep working on those leads."