Our Retrospective Journey Of Founding a Motion Design Studio

Back in April, Buff celebrated its 8th birthday. It got us thinking about how we managed to get to this point and our story as founders. For anyone reading this that doesn't know us, we founded Buff as equal partners but aren't romantically involved. 

We say that up front as it's an important part of what has, at times, been quite an intense journey. Most of the agencies we knew were started by close friends or couples, so diving into a working relationship like this had plenty of unknowns and things to learn.

When we started, neither of us had kids or any experience of running a business and that made it easier to just ‘take a punt’ and try our luck. When we look back, we took the leap without really knowing each other particularly well. But we felt we had the right blend of skills and personalities to make it work. Whilst there have been bumps along the road, we’ve both learnt and changed so much in that time and feel incredibly lucky to have got to this point.

As Buff (and ourselves) have grown and developed, we’ve realised that there are so many areas where we’ve needed to adapt, both professionally and personally. So we decided to write this article as a way to help anyone that is looking to start a business and take that same ‘punt’...

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How Buff Started As An Idea

To start from the beginning… Back in early 2014, we had been working together at a video production company just outside London. Within the business, we had been operating the motion-design side of things, Chloe as a Project Manager and Tom as a Motion Designer.

We were starting to run more and more jobs together and in that way, it felt like our own little business within the wider organisation. The shared experience of that company had a huge impact on the type of company we knew we wanted to start. There were growing frustrations that led to us deciding to go out on our own, but also great ideas and concepts that we’ve taken forward and used within Buff. For that opportunity and experience, we’ll always be massively grateful.

The decision to leave came about quickly. It felt like within a couple of days and a few conversations, we had got the ball rolling. Looking back, it was a massive leap. We knew we liked each other as people. We respected and admired the work ethic and skillset of each other, but was that enough to make it work? It felt that way at the time and so without too much thought, we went for it.

At this stage, neither of us were parents. Both of our respective long-term partners were amazingly supportive, particularly as we had no idea when we could start realistically generating money. If we’d had children, it would have made the decision to jump ship and the subsequent months a lot more stressful. On reflection, it may have been the tipping point to never have started Buff.

Ultimately, we were fired up by the idea of taking control of all aspects of what we do: how we charge, who we work for, how we run projects, how we lead a team.

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Reminiscing The Early Days

It started off being so freeing to be our own bosses: not ‘having’ to be anywhere, waking up in the morning with a blank canvas. It was exciting but somewhat scary. We were naturally enthusiastic and spent the early days reaching out to potential clients, refining our website and researching the competition and companies we admired. Tom worked on some freelance motion contracts that were invoiced as Buff and those were our only source of income initially. Alongside this, Chloe was putting the business foundations in place (insurance, project documentation, client outreach).

We treated everything from the beginning as an equal partnership, the same as we do today. So regardless of who was actually generating the money, all the other processes and operations were key to put in place and would be an important investment in Buff.

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Acknowledging Our Contrasting Skillsets

A big part of the attraction to starting a business together came from us both having very different skillsets and approaches. We knew other small studios that had started with two creatives, some that are still going today. Whilst that setup can absolutely work, we'd question that if by covering the inevitable management of projects a creative would be taken away from what they're good at or enjoy? We felt that by having a partnership with an even split between the client side and creative side, neither of us would have to compromise and we’d be able to focus on what we enjoyed. More importantly, we surmised that we’d be able to offer a more responsive service to our clients because we have an equal focus on both key areas. So when we started, the separation in job roles meant that Tom was focused on the creative output and Chloe took the rest.

We’ve always joked that on reflection this seemed like an unfairly weighted split, but for us, it worked. It meant Chloe was covering the project management, client account management, resourcing/booking freelancers, finance and other operational tasks. We both then shared the new client outreach, contacting companies as and when we saw someone interesting.

Developing Since Then 

Since the beginning, we’ve approached every aspect of the business with a ‘reflect and improve’ mindset. Probably because we’ve had to learn on the job how to run a business and manage a team. With every decision, we’ve recognised the potential impact and tried to retrospectively analyse if it worked, or didn’t. This idea of continually trying to learn from the highs and lows has stuck with us and we embed it throughout company processes.

Along the way, we’ve had to build and acquire knowledge of business management, HR, finance, legal contracting, the list goes on… It’s never nice to feel out-of-your-depth but there have been times when we inevitably have. Particularly when it comes to the added responsibility of recruitment and managing our team.

We want to create an environment where people’s well-being is the number one priority. But this can be a difficult balance when you’re a small, young business and you have challenging clients. When you’re not established, it’s hard to say ‘no’ or push back on requests, curve balls or timeframes for fear of losing a potentially large contract (or future contracts).

Coming from previous companies where there was a culture of ‘whatever it takes’, where all-nighters were a semi-regular endeavour, we knew that wasn’t what we wanted to be doing at Buff.

Where possible we would build in a buffer (excuse the pun) to allow for things to shift in a project schedule. Sometimes, even with this, it’s sadly an inevitability that we need to ask a team member to work past 5:30 to get a delivery over the line. Whilst we have always tried to discourage this, it can’t always be avoided.

Our attempt to counter this is to give everyone time back in lieu. This means any extra time the team works past their normal hours (9-5:30) we give them back. Generally, to avoid burnout, we want them to do this within the following days but if that’s not possible they can bank it and use it when they choose. Thankfully, it’s incredibly rare that we ask anyone to do this.

Today we like to think that we’re established enough and have the confidence to turn down a client or project if it would push us past our limit. When a dream brief with a crazy deadline comes into our inbox it’s a difficult decision to say no, but we would be doing our team and client a disservice if it means working late into the night.

In the early days, however, because Chloe would cover the pre-production more, and Tom the production & post-production, it meant we were busy at different times. Whilst we would offer to help, it’s hard walking out the door on time when the other person is working late. We’ve learnt that this is just the natural ebbs and flows that happen with the evolution of a project. And thankfully with the company less reliant on either one of us individually now, there are people available to muck in and help anyone who’s up against it.

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Learning to Delegate 

Arguably the most effective improvement we’ve made to the way we work is learning to delegate. Our business coach Matt Essam really helped us to feel confident with this. For people like us who like to have a firm grasp on control, relinquishing it is difficult. The common mindset of “well it’ll take me as long to brief you as it will to do it myself” would often play out in our minds. Not only this but we have pretty exacting standards and so navigating this was always going to be a challenge.

If we were ever going to build a cohesive team dynamic, it was inevitable that we would need to learn this skill. It wasn’t always more involved tasks either, we fell into doing the more basic jobs because we didn’t want to palm it off to someone else. For Chloe, the transition happened when going on maternity leave - delegation was essential. And when Tom once mentioned to Matt that he needed to call the window cleaner, Matt quickly pointed out that having the creative director of the company doing this was ridiculously inefficient. He was right and to look back it’s blindingly obvious, but it took someone external to point it out. It wasn’t a practical use of our time and it meant we weren’t using our skills or experience to generate income. We had just naturally fallen into a pattern of ‘keeping the wheels turning’ and not taken a step back to look at the wider picture.

For this and a host of other reasons we’re so pleased we invested in working with a business coach. Thanks Matt!

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Growing The Buff Team

It has always been a key mission of ours to build a valued team who loves where they work. We want every person who has been at Buff to look back on their time fondly. We spend so much time together and work plays such a big part in all of our lives that we want to create an environment where people can flourish and really enjoy their time. We would never want someone to leave us and think that the time spent here wasn’t productive or enjoyable.

Without any direct experience of HR, writing job descriptions or employment contracts, we’ve had to learn as we go. We’ve obviously both been through it earlier in our careers, but when you’re the one responsible for onboarding and training a new recruit, it brings a whole new dimension.

With more team members comes more responsibility, from a financial point of view too. Up until this point, if we didn’t have any work then we couldn’t pay ourselves. Now, if cash flow was an issue, we’d need to have some pretty difficult conversations. Thankfully, this has never been a conversation had with any of our team.

The recruitment process we’ve designed and developed strikes a nice balance between being comprehensive but informal enough to hopefully take any stress away for the applicants. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from people who have gone through the process so we hope we’re getting it right. We’ve been really lucky to organically grow a team of talented and very lovely people that we enjoy spending time with.

Something we started doing from our first hire, back in 2017, was to hold regular Performance and Development Reviews to check in with how things are going. This process has served us well and has meant that we have a lot of great conversations and feedback from the team about how to do things better. As well as giving us an opportunity to give pointers that steer their learning.

We also poll opinions about appropriate decisions and ideas with the team, which we hope makes them feel more invested in the company and where we’re headed.

A big thanks goes out to Danielle Alsey, an experienced HR consultant and all round great human, who’s really helped us refine our recruitment and review process. Cheers Danielle!

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Looking Into The Future 

We’re continually looking at the way we work individually and as a studio to strive for better, so the future for us is about improvement and refinement. A big part of our business plan for the next few years is about sustainability and future-proofing. We’re working to increase our positive impact as a business by giving back more than we take, so we’re Net Positive. This is something we both feel passionate about as company directors and we’re looking forward to reporting on what we learn.

Having a positive impact on the world around us with the work we do every day has been a driving force for us. Let's face it, there's no shortage of marketing content in 2022! But if we can support high-impact causes through the success and development of the business, it makes the whole team feel proud of our achievements.

If anyone is interested to read more about our impact as a business, you can take a look over on the Impact Page of our website here.

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All In All…

Whilst there have definitely been tough conversations and tricky moments to navigate in our relationship, we’re now in a place where we feel that we’ve refined our approaches to be better at working together. It’s hard learning to adapt to someone else’s ways of working and expectations but there’s definitely a fulfilling challenge in doing so.We have each realised that running the business together is more fulfilling and enjoyable than if it were one of us alone. When Chloe was away on maternity leave it became so apparent that the fun part of running the company was navigating the successes and challenges as a partnership.

"A problem shared is a problem halved. A joy shared is a joy doubled."

We really hope this article resonates with people and there are some takeaways for anyone looking to start a business. 🙏

Chloe & Tom

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TL:DR - If you made it this far!

We feel the key areas that have made the biggest difference to our company and the most important aspects of our relationship as business partners are:

Open dialogue

Both of us value honesty and cherish that in our own personal values, but learning to incorporate open dialogue in a professional relationship requires trust. We trust each other enough to know that each person approaches their work with the best intentions for the business. So it means any mistakes or suggestions are easier to discuss, accept and rectify for next time.

Delegation

‍ Learning to delegate was the moment we were able to make the business less reliant on ourselves. By giving the team more autonomy and freedom we were able to make our roles less integral and reduce bottle-necking. It makes the company structure a more level playing field and the shared responsibility across the team eases any potential stresses or problems to solve.

Similar work ethic

‍We knew a little about how the other approached their work before starting Buff but it became clear over the years that we have a very similar outlook and level of dedication. This has always been important because you should feel like you’re in it together and you’re each putting in the same amount of effort to the cause.

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