Background
Bright Collie (formerly Huw David Design) are a brand agency, based in South Wales. They provide a range of creative and strategic services to a diverse range of clients ranging from start-up businesses, through to large, blue chip market leading brands.
Bright Collie appointed Mustard as their trusted business advisers to help specifically with providing the business owner, Huw David, with business structure, help with achieving key goals and upskilling.
Challenges
Typical of most creative businesses with less than ten staff, Bright Collie was very much reliant on Huw’s input from a creative and project management role, along with being the key driver of sales and new business. The outcome being that Huw’s time for working ‘on the business’ was almost non-existent. This was beginning to affect not only the business, but also the time he had available to spend with his wife and two young children and his friends.
A main challenge was to diagnose quickly where the main fault lines in the business were, and where work should be channelled to make positive changes. With only a small team, delegating of responsibilities was an issue for Huw, especially as he was very much ‘hands-on’ with current clients and projects.
How we helped
Working closely with Huw, we were able to help him to :-
- Shape his vision for his business.
- Have a clear action plan for scalable and sustainable growth, including the order and trigger points to hire additional team members
- Clear roles and responsibilities for all team members
- A clear picture of what makes an ideal client – and what makes a D class client!
- Strategies for dealing with A/B/C/D class clients
- Improvements to Client Service
- Improvements to Project Management
- Improvements to Sales Process
- Recruitment tools and processes
- Becoming an employer of choice
Outcomes
Since working with Bright Collie they have seen
- Growth of over 20% for Sales.
- Trebled the size of the team, with specialist roles being created within the business.
- Doubled bottom line profits
- There has been an office move to larger premises, which aids with expansion of the team and client base.
- As his team have become more self-sufficient, the business is less reliant on Huw enabling him to enjoy more time with his friends and family.
