What I would hand someone on day one of running a studio

I ran a four-person studio for six years. I was good at the work on day one and comprehensively unprepared for everything else, and the gap between those two cost me roughly two years. This is the note I wish someone had handed me.

The work is the easy part

You started a studio because you are good at something. That skill will carry perhaps a third of the job. The rest is scheduling, pricing, saying no, chasing payment, and deciding things on incomplete information — none of which you have practised and all of which determine whether the studio survives.

Nobody tells you this because it is not interesting to say, and because the people who learned it the hard way mostly describe it afterwards as having been obvious.

I spent the first two years trying to be excellent at the third of the job I already knew how to do.

The short list

• Price the whole project, not the production. The hours you bill are a fraction of the hours it takes, and the difference is where small studios quietly die.
• Deposit in advance, every time, no exceptions you are proud of.
• Know how many months you can run with no new work. Check it monthly. Mine was two for years and I did not know the number.
• Write down what you agreed, the same day, in an email. Not a contract — a paper trail that costs four minutes.
• A client who is difficult before signing will not improve afterwards. This has been true every single time.

The one that took longest

Turning down work. For three years I treated every enquiry as a validation and said yes to several things I knew in the first meeting would go badly. They all went badly, on schedule, and each one cost more than the revenue it brought in — in time, in the better project I could not take, and in the mood of four people who could see it coming.

The studio got healthier the year I started saying no, which I resisted believing for about eighteen months because it sounded like the kind of thing people say in interviews.