How we've stopped saying no to small businesses: A creative solution from Creative Folks
Jon Clough, Managing Director of Northampton-based full service agency Creative Folks, explains NNWeb - their innovative way to meet increasing demand from local small businesses and charities.
I set up Creative Folks in 2012. I saw a studio for let on Clare Street in Northampton and I liked it so much I ended up taking a lease out on it without having a business.
It was obviously a bizarre starting point to start a business based purely on liking a building. There wasn't a major masterplan. But it grew from there and we're still expanding now.
As a growing business, you do get bumps in the road at certain points. We got to 20 or 30 clients but then we had to build more robust business processes to scale it up. We've also invested heavily in getting the right sort of tech because cutting corners doesn't work.
Now we have 12 members of staff.
Our growth area at the moment is in the development and SEO space. We've always been strong on design, but what we're trying to do now is to take the build to the next stage and make it perform. So we've got digital performance programmes that are geared up to focus on SEO and paid advertising.
My view is that elements of the overall experience shouldn't be siloed off. Everything should marry up across your whole brand. So we keep everything in-house and offer everything a company would need. That means Creative Folks is home to a broad range of talent. We're recruiting to content marketing roles which will need supporting with project management and the operational side of things. We've also got four in-house developers so we don't outsource much of our tech work.
Thankfully, there is a pipeline of local talent coming through from the University of Northampton and we've had four members of staff come via that route. We want to create a cycle where junior developers cut their teeth on support tasks and then there's a clear web development pathway for them to take the next step with us.
As for our next step as a company, we were acquired by Ballards Group in January. They've been a client of ours for 10 years and now we've come under their umbrella. That has opened doors for us to expand into other areas and it's a new era for us.
We have clients in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere. The variety is important to me. What keeps me interested is that we don't concentrate on a particular sector. We do a lot of design work with Channel 4 and we've also worked with O2 and British Swimming. So we do have big brand experience but that's not meant to frighten people off. Because what I love most is working on start-ups and charities.
To make that happen, we've recently launched NNWeb, which is aimed at small businesses and charities across Northamptonshire. We can offer them a quality product for an affordable price.
It wasn't intentional that most of our clients have ended up being based in London or internationally - it's just happened that way. But during lockdown we started getting lots of calls from small local businesses or start-ups that wanted new websites.
While we're not expensive, we're not cheap either and it meant we were turning away small businesses, which felt wrong.
We started to think we could still use our expertise and deliver a quality product with all the knowledge we have. We spent 12 months working on making our design and production systems so efficient that it enabled us to bring the price point down to something achievable. I love start-ups and small businesses, and I didn't want Creative Folks to be turning them away.
We knew we could give them a much better product than what they usually end up with, because they'd still getting so much of the full agency experience. We've done 5 or 6 sites so far for small charities based in Northamptonshire just to test the model and it works really well.
The way we do it from our side is that we built lots of modules within WordPress so if someone wants a site, we use those to build it up. The most complicated part of a website build is getting the content from someone. To try to guard against that and negate any problems with the overall timeline, we use a content-gathering tool at the start of the process. We don't do anything else until that's done, which saves loads of time. Then we pick the modules we need to build the website.
From the full agency experience, you won't get the prototyping or project meetings - which you often don't need anyway as a small business - but you do get the end product of a really good-looking site that's on-brand and has lifetime licences for all the top WordPress plugins.
Ongoing support is important too and that's something else we offer. We're based in Northampton and there are always between 4 and 6 of us in the office, with others working remotely. That means the phone lines are manned so you get support as well as the initial website build.
I really think NNWeb is a great product and I'm excited about it. We're looking forward to working with local start-ups and charities and giving them the kind of website they deserve.
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Example sites
Sites built as part of the NNWeb offer so far include: