Something I’ve learned over the years, working with lots of designers, and particularly young designers, is that there’s a real obsession with perfection in the design world. In most creative agencies, everyone wants to produce the best work they possibly can, and they want everything to be absolutely spot on.
I know a few agency owners (I won’t name them) who are deeply committed to only producing their very best work. They won’t sacrifice quality for the sake of commercial compromise, and I genuinely respect that. I like that passion, that integrity, and that excitement for the craft.
But the reality is this: you have to sacrifice something to run a business.
You simply cannot run a business purely on producing your most ambitious, most desirable work. I would love to run Yazaroo as an agency that only did highly complex, rigorously researched rebrands. The problem is, we might only get one or two of those projects a year. The vast majority of the work we do is fairly dull. It’s website support. It’s maintenance. It’s not exciting, but it pays the bills. And that’s fine.
That work allows us to exist. And when those nice flagship projects do come along, we can go to town. We can enjoy them. That’s why we’re here. But trying to build a business only around that kind of work is madness. You won’t make any money, because the work just isn’t there in sufficient volume.
I once heard a story about Saatchi & Saatchi back in the day. They were famous for their big campaigns and huge brands, but apparently that only made up around 20% of the business. The rest was small, boring, unglamorous ads: tiny bits of print tucked away at the back of newspapers. Not sexy, not exciting, but absolutely essential. That boring work paid for the big work, and the big work attracted more boring work. That’s how it functioned.
I learned this lesson the hard way myself.
At one point, I hired a business consultant who told me I should focus exclusively on large-value projects. For about a year, we restructured the company to do exactly that. I turned down a huge amount of small work. I just closed myself out of the game and let it all sail by.
We did land a couple of big projects, and we did make money. But when I looked back at what we’d rejected, it became obvious that we would have made more money if we’d taken the smaller jobs as well. The big projects came with extra overheads, extra complexity, and extra risk. The smaller projects were cheaper to run, had better margins, and arrived more frequently.
They added up.
Don’t poo-poo the little jobs. They matter.
It’s the same reason a Michelin-starred restaurant can charge £300 for a meal and still never make as much money as McDonald’s. Volume wins. Mass market, done sensibly, often makes far more money in the long run.
So if you’re running a creative business, yes, keep that passion. Aim to do your best work. Put the good stuff in your portfolio. But accept that the business has to exist first. That means doing work you don’t love. You don’t have to show it. You don’t have to brag about it. Just do the work, take the money, and wait for the big projects to come.
Perfection is a luxury. Progress keeps the lights on.
