We’ve become so successful, we have to change everything.
We’re changing a few things here at Silktide Studios. Now the lofty age of 8, we’ve grown, our work is our best yet – and this means a tonne of new challenges.
This is part of what we’re doing about them, and the lessons we’ve learnt along the way.
What do we do, exactly?
We’re astounded how many businesses can’t answer this question clearly and consistently. We were one of them.
In the past, here are some ways we’ve explained ourselves:
- “Complete websites – from concept to design, build to hosting.”
People get what we do, but it doesn’t convey any value. Ok, you do that – so what? Just as importantly, do we really want to get out of bed every day just to build ‘complete’ websites?
- “The web development experts”
This conveys what we do and some value. It also happens to be true – we have a team of specialists here in virtually every field. However, the presentation is confusing to the customer: they want websites, not web developers. Some might also argue it’s a smidge arrogant (you can blame me for that).
- “Creative web solutions”
This sounds catchy, but it’s not actually representative of what we do. Of course we use creativity, but it’s not the #1 thing we base our company around, just a part of something bigger.
Of course, we’ve survived – thrived even – with these past identities. But we knew we could do far better.
Rethinking our identity
We needed an identity which genuinely represents what we do, and conveys unique value that we provide. It should also be easy to express, immediately graspable, and work well as a tagline. Customers and staff should both know exactly what it means.
The result: “websites that work”.
We aim to produce websites that deliver results for our customers, period. Everything else that we do will come as a result of that: great designs, build, technology – all exist purely to serve the objectives of a website, and maximize what they achieve.
What’s most interesting about our choice, is it already represented the latent identity of our company. Our staff are hyper obsessive about great websites. We feel physical pain when we’re asked to do something we believe to be bad to a site (don’t get us started on splash pages). We’ll argue with our lovely customers solely because we want them to get the best results, when it would be far easier to shut up and nod sweetly. We do this because we care. We just never said as much, and we never made it our stated number 1 priority. Until now.
I don’t think we’ve created a new identity. I think we simply discovered our best, and chose to bring it out.
How do we do that?
What we do is just half the battle. The crucial question is: how do we do it?
Again, this was more an act of self-discovery than invention. One of our most unique characteristics is how obsessive we are about hiring the best people and treating them well. We do this because we believe the best people – treated well – produce the best work. Hence flexitime, free gym membership and a host of other benefits that go to the core of Silktide Studios.
In our later years, we’d also been learning the importance of process, mostly through the painful experience of not having good process. Everyone in our team could see this was something we needed to push further.
It became clear that what we needed to consistently deliver “websites that work” was a fusion of our great people and a solid process. Or as we call it: “people & process”, a snappy moniker that makes it easy to remember.
Silktide Studios, redefined
This is what we had so far:
What do we do? We create websites that work.
How do we do it? Through great people and tight process.
We wrote up a 3 page summary of this and our clearest USPs. The text we use there was designed to make sense to anyone: from our prospects to our employees. Now we needed to make it real.
A process that writes itself (almost)
We’d been working on new processes for some time, but having a defined identity has brought everything together rapidly. When we’re making a decision now, the one question we needed was “what will best make websites that work”?
We knew for instance, that certain steps were a must:
- We need to define ‘results’ for every site we do
- We need to measure them
- We need to deliver consistently better results
We also knew that we wanted to surprise and delight our customers, so we thought of ways to make that consistently happen, and built them in: from thank you notes to helpful guides to interpreting your web design.
To design a process that people will use, we’ve had to involve the whole team, and experiment with real projects. We don’t expect our process to ever stop improving: part of our process is a monthly check on the process itself (phew).
Consequences
We’re just getting started with the changes here. We’ve been careful to tackle our own private victories first – sorting out our processes for instance – before changing our public face. Soon we’ll be updating our public brand and website (update: we just did), which we’ll be covering on this blog. Stay tuned.
