On evolution
During the past few weeks at NixonMcInnes we’ve made some changes to the team, and I wanted to describe why and how, in as open a fashion as possible whilst still being sensitive to people’s feelings.
A little while ago it became clear to us as a management team that we had to take a step back and think about the shape of our company going forward and probably then make some tough decisions. We had to ensure that the shape of team fitted the workload we have currently as well as being well set up for our future vision for NixonMcInnes and our clients.
In particular the things driving this were:
- The blend of work we are being asked to do by the market
- The capabilities we feel we must have in house and those that we concluded were not absolutely essential
- A necessity to grow a higher ratio of fee earners to support staff
This is because unlike many of our peers, we are not a new business. The company is in it’s ninth year of trading! We started at the very bottom of the foodchain, originally as a regional web design agency doing web stuff. So whilst longevity in business is generally thought to be a good thing, it has meant that we have had to evolve, and rapidly in more recent times. And change isn’t always easy.
Back in the day the very first book thrust into my hands when Tom and I teamed up was The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that exactly described the future of the web and that we understood, believed and bought into from the very off. So although our clients were mainly interested in ‘getting a website designed’ or ‘doing some email marketing’ our interest has always been in the human and social aspects to the web. But we were patient.
During our time as a generalist digital agency we grew a signficant in-house high quality web development team. I don’t say that as hype: we carefully hired discipline experts rather than website all-rounders and eventually ended up with two or three specialists in each of the major web design and development areas: designers, front end developers, back end developers and producers. That was our whole team – our design and build team.
When we saw how the client community was finally readying for the social web our moment had arrived and we weren’t going to let it pass us by – we capitalised. I reckon our timing was excellent. We made significant investments in creating the market, through speaking, training, product and service development, internal learning, industry collaborating.
And during the past 18 months we have massively evolved and changed to reflect this.
Today we’re able to offer a tried-and-tested stack of services that go from the start of a client’s journey – with training, strategy development, research, all the way through to full design and build together with online pr and social media marketing – and now find the balance of services we provide weighted roughly 50/50 between ‘consultancy’ and ‘design and build’. Our consulting team has been steadily growing, matching the growing scale of our consulting work.
Importantly, demand for our consulting services is significant and steady whereas demand for our design and build serivices is much more variable and lumpy – that is, it comes in big peaks and troughs which makes planning and resourcing a challenge.
The blend isn’t showing signs of staying at a 50/50 split. So our plan is to retain our expert social web-flavoured design and build capability – which allows us to actually execute and deliver against strategies, and create the vital hubs and platforms for conversations – but to grow our consulting team in line with the demand we get for those services (which is lots, and growing rapidly).
So as a management team we agreed to make some changes to the team shape and structure to reflect all of this. I say management team which sounds grandiose and besuited, but actually in keeping with our particular culture and approach to business it was our board members (only one of whom is non-exec - so all normal people, active and on the ground) plus two ‘guest seats’ – two of the guys from the team that aren’t part of the regular board, to give us fresh perspectives, balance, reality, sanity and diversity.
So that ‘make some changes’ is the tough bit: as a group we ultimately decided that two positions from the design and build team were to be made redundant with a further person in that team going from full-time to part-time. And our full time marketing position was also made redundant to reflect our emphasis on existing clients and existing external relationships (eg with journalists, collaborators, event organsiers etc). So I guess a change of 3.5 people.
It was very hard on everyone in a tight-knit team where the culture is transparent and inclusive. We tried to be dignified and sensitive and above all to ensure that our business decisions didn’t irreversibly damage our team ethos and trust. Even so I’d say it was a pretty shitty couple of weeks.
Having made the changes, we now move forward confidently.
We are working in increasingly long-term client engagements, we are winning lots of exciting new business, we are clearer and more confident about what we do and we feel we took the difficult but vital decisions we had too.
So that’s us, warts ‘n’ all.
The future? I’m sure there will be change. As a consultancy operating in such a mentally-fast-changing world as ours, we know our areas of interest and practice will constantly evolve.
And as and when we change we will try to talk about it openly – for better or for worse.
Thanks for listening.
Will McInnes wrote this on 04.09.09 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, Employee engagement, NixonMcInnes box
On September 4th, 2009 at 2:05 pm, Julius responded:
Appreciate the honesty and always admired the transparency of your agency, on top of the fantastic engagement with the community (Measurement Camp).
Keep it up!
Julius
On September 4th, 2009 at 6:56 pm, Will McInnes responded:
Thanks Julius.
On October 1st, 2009 at 1:57 pm, Matt Hill responded:
Not sure how I missed this post!
I was admittedly confused the other day when I visited the Nice People page and saw that nearly all positions now include the term ‘Director’ or ‘Consultant’; I was rather puzzled since I wasn’t aware of your new direction as a ‘pure’ consultancy.
It makes sense for you to move this way given where you’ve positioned yourselves over the last two years, but I can’t help feel a little sad too. I didn’t see this as the direction NM would go when I left 2.5 years ago — so I guess I left at the right time or I wouldn’t have had a job there today anyway ;-)
It’s clearly worked really well to re-position yourselves in the social media space and capitalise on your expertise in this brave new world. Good luck for the future, and good luck too to those who had to be let go. Must have been a really tough time, but hopefully everyone will find new opportunities in moving on.
On October 1st, 2009 at 2:44 pm, Will McInnes responded:
Hi Matt, thanks for your perspective as one of the people who’ve been with NM on its journey!
Just a small point: we’re not a pure consultancy now, nor do we want to be :)
We have Steve, Edd, Telmo, Joshua and Matt working on designing and building real online stuff – including a very substantial social network for a niche group.
But in recent times the growth has been much more in our consulting services.
For us it’s really important to help clients from inception (training, strategy and research) all the way through to delivery and then into promotion and marketing – so the range of areas we work in has both narrowed (social media) and broadened into a stack of services.
Our positioning will continue to evolve. More on that another time!
Thanks for the positives dude.