I’m an ambitious person, and with that comes the desire to scale a business and grow a large team. For years now, I have been running Yazaroo, and on a few occasions I have flirted with the idea of scaling, only to row back into optimisation instead.
The best work we have produced has come when I give people the agency to make decisions. It comes from collaboration and working with people who think differently to you, as they will have different opinions and ways of working you would never have thought of, and that would only add richness to any business. But the key to this is giving them the ability to act without interference: give them a brief and the tools they need. Be on standby for guidance where required, but let them drive under their own steam.
The issue with this for Yazaroo has always been the nature of agency work. When there is a large project with lots of assets and planning, there is plenty of work for a team, and when that project is finished there is not always the volume of work, nor necessarily the cash flow, to support the team.
This is not a Yazaroo problem, it is an industry problem. When human capital is what is traded, you need buyers consistently.
I have written about this problem before, and how I don’t want any one client to account for more than 10% of turnover, but the solution most agencies go for is to land a whale and milk it for as long as possible.
I won’t do this.
It defies sense. You focus on that large client and neglect the smaller accounts. Over time the small accounts drift, and when the whale swims off, you are left with the payroll required to service a client you no longer have.
We have overcome this by collaborating with other agencies and freelancers. This allows maximum flexibility to grow and shrink with each project. You may get lean over the summer but in the autumn have four projects and twelve people working on them. And the thing I enjoy most of all in this is project managing. I get to work with the best people, I hand-pick them for the job, I give them the brief, and I know they will deliver. I can get on with other things.
So I have not grown Yazaroo in the traditional sense. I see Yazaroo as my sandbox. It allows me to work with hundreds of companies, to see how they operate, to explore business models and industries, and to gain knowledge about all kinds of businesses. It requires constant cash-flow discipline, optimisation, and review to get us through the fat and lean times, whether there is too much work or not enough, as these things go.
Yazaroo has not scaled, but it has given me the knowledge and resilience required to scale a venture quickly when the opportunity comes along. Delegation and trust of people who are great at what they do is key to that.