The Happy Studio – Find Your Natural Size

When we started our company, we thought we would grow huge. That was the goal. To make a big important company that had impressive signage, expensive chairs, and lots of interns to order around. Today, we’re about as small in staff as when we first started. In fact, we’ve shrunk a bit from our largest size. We didn’t shrink because of lack of work, or an economic downturn. We purposefully chose to do less. We chose to work only with the best staff we could find, and only for the best clients. Through some carefully thought out “shrinkage” we have less clients, less staff, and more revenue than ever before. We’ve fallen in love with being small.

Hire the best you can get
No company can afford a bad employee. They’re a drain on morale, quality, and the checkbook. Fire a client before you hire an employee that you “need.” Hire employees because they’re great, nice, smart, and a good fit. Not because you have too much work. Work will find a great company. If you hire people just to support a big client list, you’re making an ouroboros. The proverbial monster that eats its own tail. You’ll never win that fight.

The Happy Studio

We’re definitely not the biggest studio in town. But we’d really like to think we’re the happiest. Like all businesses, we make lots of decisions every day. It’s been that way from the start, but a couple of years ago we made a shift in our decision making process. We started to consider happiness rather than just earnings, and productivity.

We’ve decided to create a series of articles about how we factor happiness into our process. We’re calling the series “The Happy Studio,” and we hope you find it useful, or interesting (or both!)

Advice is a tricky thing
When you need advice there’s nobody to give it. When you don’t want it people are lining up to give it to you. This series isn’t about telling people how to live. We wouldn’t begin to know how to do that. Nor does it tell the story of the countless things we probably do wrong. This story is about some of the things we think we do right. Or better said, the decisions that have led to us being happier to come to work every day.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let’s dive in to our first article…

Triage.

If you haven’t learned it, you better.
Ear-ache, over there. Broken arm, over there. You’re appendix burst? Right this way sir. Some days it seems like every client is having a coronary. You can’t fit a baseball through a garden hose, so you better find a way to prioritize your workflow and keep everyone happy.