Sometimes you forget to sit back and take a look at what you’ve achieved. We’re forever travelling at 100mph; there’s always something to do, someone to see, some place to be. So, although it’s a little late coming (considering it’s now mid-February) I thought that it would be nice to document a few of the things that have happened over the past 12 months.
January
This time last year we didn’t have any employees, nor did we have a permanent address (were running the business out of two home offices). Chris Kemm was in Leeds, having left Brass just 3 months prior, and I was still in Sheffield. Sometimes we worked from Leeds, sometimes from Sheffield, and sometimes from both — it wasn’t the best, but it worked for us at the time.
The year got off to a flying start. We were building an installation for the National Media Museum, designing our first financial services website and branding a new international mechanical and electrical engineering company. We spoke at the University of Huddersfield Barnsley Campus on ‘An Introduction to Digital Marketing’ for the third year running, and of course we attended New Adventures in Web Design, which was brilliant.
February
February brought us the opportunity to work on the re-branding of an online property management system, Property Prefect. This was a great project as we played a part in everything from naming the company to redeveloping their sales website and redesigning the management system interface. After several weeks of really hard work TES Foundation was born. (It was also the first time we used a high-resolution logo for the Apple retina display!).
March
After a chaotic start to the year March allowed us a little time to breathe. Both Chris and I managed a bit of a holiday, and we continued to work and build a great relationship with Fuelled by Social Alchemy by revamping a couple of newsletter templates, which have since been sent out to many hundreds of recipients. We also took some time out with friends to tackle the Real Ale Trail (which was a slightly different achievement, but an achievement nonetheless!)
April
For the previous couple of months we’d been thinking a lot about our next move. Nope, this wasn’t the worlds longest game of chess — we wanted to grow the business, and in order to do that we needed to settle somewhere. April was a time for some serious decision making: Which city was the company going to be based in? Should we get an office? Where should the office be? How much can we spend on an office?… You get the idea. It was scary and really exciting, all at the same time.
In the end we opted for Leeds. We had a growing number of clients and contacts in the area and the creative scene just seemed a bit more vibrant. We found a really nice, affordable office and we haven’t looked back since. We moved in on the 30th April, and looking back it seems that we didn’t get much else done that month (other than starting to introduce our new branding)…
May
We started to settle into our new work environment and continued to build on our long standing relationship with Igniyte, an agency based in Shipley. We built the Platinum Stairlifts site and started work on the design and build for Visual Merchandiser, both of which were WordPress based — definitely an emerging theme for the year! We also extended the Nu-Light LED website that we’d built at the end of 2011 to include their full product range, which we did the photography for, too.
June
June was a bit of a quiet one with lots of meetings and planning exciting projects for the coming months. We designed the logo for Aspect Home Cinema and produced stationery designs to help kick-start the company whilst they built their first showroom. My life got more complicated when my other half got a job in Watford, and Chris swanned off to Sweeden for a week. Very nice.
July
The summer saw us start an eCommerce drive. Most of the websites that we’d produced up until this point were relatively simple ‘brochure’ sites. We had of course worked with other agencies on several bigger projects in the past, but we had nothing to put our name to. In July we began working with OnState, an eCommerce agency, on one of their clients’ websites, started a re-brand and responsive eCommerce rebuild of one of our oldest client’s websites (launching very soon) and won a pitch against several much bigger and well established agencies to redesign another rather large eCommerce store — this time in the fashion sector — however unfortunately due to changes in the company’s management structure this was never completed. We also started working with Iris (now part of 2020), and Technophobia, both of whom are brilliant Sheffield-based agencies.
August
Business was going well and we were starting get a bit concerned with the workload. We’ve got great relationships will all our suppliers and subcontractors, but we decided that it would be much more effective to bring someone else on board full time — a placement student. This posed two problems:
- Where were we going to find a eager and enthusiastic student; and
- Where were they going to sit
We got in touch with the University of Huddersfield (which is where both Chris and I studied) and enquired about moving to a bigger office. By the end of the month we had Adam (our first employee), had moved over the hall to a 5 person office (which we also share with Fuelled by Social Alchemy), and were expecting David, a freelance developer (and good friend) to take the other desk in a couple of months time.
September
Wow. What a lot of change. We spent time training Adam, got used to sharing the office with more people, started to learn how to be real Bosses, and built a little responsive blog for Connection. We also decided it was about time to get an employment contract in place and update our service contract to a much more official-looking bespoke Terms and Conditions document, which was quite an eye-opening experience.
October
We turned 3 in October — which we couldn’t quite believe — and started work on a new responsive website for Fuelled by Social Alchemy. David started his freelance career on the 8th and all of a sudden, just two months after moving into a bigger space, all our desks were full!
November
Time to knuckle down. We designed and built the ERS Medical website in around 6 weeks in order to hit their tight deadline and launch the company for the start of December, which pushed us to our limits but was really enjoyable at the same time. We also continued our working relationship with our office neighbours, Calls9, who gave us the opportunity to work with them on building some HTML templates for one of their apps, which was pretty exciting.
December
Christmas was nearly here and so was the end of 2012. Thankfully once we’d launched ERS things calmed down a little and we were able to wind down before the holidays. We closed from the 23rd December until the 2nd January and came back raring to do it all over again.
I’m not afraid to say that we achieved a hell of a lot in 2012, and I’m incredibly proud. I love this business and I love this industry and I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.
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By Chris Skelton
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