Growing from freelancer to studio

Hi folks. Welcome to the show. my name is Toba. Today on the show, we are going to be talking about how to transition from being a freelance designer to becoming a studio and to help me with that is Seyi.

Seyi is the creative director of Dá Design Studio, an award-winning brand identity design studio headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. They provide boutique brand solution services for ambitious and progressive businesses like Cowrywise, and Paystack, just to name a few.

They also exhibited their work at the prestigious Venice Design Exhibition.

Ladies and gentlemen, Seyi!

What was the hardest thing about making a transition from being a freelance designer to becoming a studio?

It was finding the right people. I freelanced for a couple of years, and I pride myself on being very versatile and capable of many things, but it got to a point where it was very obvious that if I wanted to create quality work, I needed help. So I had to start looking for people. I also knew that if I was going to work with someone, it had to be someone that I could freely and very easily bounce ideas back and forth with.

But I wasn't super bent on finding someone who had the skills with software. I was more interested in someone who could think and ideate, and was very open-minded and collaborative.

All right! You currently have six people on the team, but when it comes to recruiting or building out a brand design studio, what roles would you say are very critical to the success of the studio?

It really depends on the type of work that you want to create as a brand design studio. For the context where we are right now, and the kind of work that we make at the studio, you definitely need a project manager, that's super critical.

You need someone who has a very good understanding of everybody's roles and responsibilities, and a very good understanding of clients’ wants and needs from time to time, and how to balance expectations on both ends.

You need someone for your books, for accounts. That's something that's very important. It's not absolutely critical in the beginning because there is software that can assist you along the way, but having someone who's able to track payments, track incoming payments and plan your budgets is super important. So an accountant and a project manager.

I know this might be strange because you’d imagine that the first few roles I'll be calling are design roles, but you can’t make the most out of design skills and people if these things are not set in place. Even if it's just you, one person being managed, it’s a great teaching experience.

Then you can start focusing on design skills and this is where nuance comes into play. Depending on the kind of work you want to do, or the kind of work you aim to create in the next coming months or years, and depending on how far ahead you're thinking, you can now start to hire design talent.

That's interesting. Still on recruitment, what are the challenges involved in recruiting for brand design?

The single most challenging aspect for us is finding graphic design talent because almost every graphic designer in this space has pivoted to user interface design or user experience design. They are product designers now!

We've been trying to hire a senior designer for several months now. We've started to look outside Nigeria, at India, Ghana, and South Africa. It's very challenging.

You spoke about finding design talent and how difficult that has been, but you have really talented people that work with you currently. What have you guys done differently and how have you been able to acquire or find and retain such great talent?

My partner Damilola is the lead on hiring right now. Initially, we were very poor at it, we didn't know what to search for. Very recently, one of the things that Damilola has done is to ensure that we have a more rigorous hiring process. So something we used to do in the past, which was in retrospect very unwise, was that we didn't have a probation period.

Once we hired you, we were kind of stuck with you and if you decided to be a different person from what we saw when we were screening you, we were kind of stuck with you. And the safety net is to have like a paid internship, or something that helps you properly assess the skill set and cultural fit of the person in question, on the job. It should be paid! If things are good, it shouldn’t feel like you're hiring the person, it should feel like it’s a mutual agreement to move forward and continue to collaborate.

You had the opportunity to work with Pentagram. How did the opportunity come about?

It was Eddie Opara’s team that reached out to us at Pentagram. They are the largest independent design consultancy in the world so they rarely have retainership type arrangements. They design and most likely handoff, and that was going to be the situation here. They reached out to us and they basically said that they liked a couple of our projects, most especially the one we did for Kofe Club, which is a coffee shop.

They really liked the work and basically conversed with us about the possibility to collaborate on a project that we knew nothing about at the time.

So rubbing shoulders with partners and associate partners at a company like that, what were things you picked up about running your business better or running a design firm from being in that space?

Iteration: the more often members of your team attempt to do certain things, the better that they get at it, that’s just it.

Another thing I learned is being intentional, it's not just being intentional about design, but also your image as a design studio. The kind of podcasts you get on, blog posts that you agree to, and the content that you partner with other people on. All of those things are very important, you want to partner with the right people, and you want to do the right kind of things.

You want to be calculated about the way you speak, how you present yourself, the kind of brands you work with, and the kind of briefs you show. Because trust me, I'm sure that you have not seen all the projects that these big studios have worked on. They’ll put out some projects and be more intentional about some case studies, and then some other case studies are going to have fewer slides, not that those case studies are bad, but in terms of their brand projections, the other case studies just help them align better.

That’s pretty cool. Dá Design has had a lot of success locally, but it seems like, you are positioning yourself currently to take on bigger challenges. What are some things that you've learned from growing the brand and striving for new things?

A lot of our decisions right now revolve around recognition and attracting the right talent. Because of our peculiar hiring and talent problem, we now need to create work that can win international awards, and get us recognition outside of this space. One of the things that we're doing is collaborating and creating internationally acclaimed work with Nigerian brands. So that when talent or people are looking for new spaces or new adventures to go on, we appear on the radar, which is currently not the case. That's something that we are definitely thinking about at the moment.

The typical person that is going to watch this, we assume that they’ve mastered or are mastering the creative side of things, but then the business side of things still eludes them. What would you say to that person listening right now?

Find out the things that you're struggling with, find out the things that you are bad at.  You need to be honest with yourself and find people who can do those things with you or do those things for you.

You don't need to hire them, they don't need to be on your team. You can start off with paid arrangements or collaborations, or splitting your fee with them. And then obviously, if you guys feel like this is something that you can do long term, then you propose something more formal, but definitely find people to help you out at the things that you’re not so good at.

Well thank you very much for that. That was absolutely amazing.

Where can people find you? Where can people find Dá Design? Social media, website, plug it all.

website is dadesign.studio, on Instagram we’re @dadesignstudio. On Twitter, we’re @da_dsgn. Yeah, that's it's.

Well, thank you very much Seyi.  We've had such a great time on the show today.

I've learned a lot. And I know that anyone watching has also learned a lot about running a creative studio and everything that goes into it.

So until we come your way next time, take care and bye-bye.