2 years in...

How has it been two years already?! Around this time last year, Andrew and I opened the doors to Mutual.

We had both been recently been made redundant from the agency that previously employed us but knew that from the ashes of our old employer could rise a very good little agency. So we purchased the remaining assets and set to work.

Since then, we've grown to five people with Harry, Meg, and Rachel joining us. We've also done some very exciting and rewarding work for well-known brands such as NBC Universal, Transparency International, CIB, McBains, and The Carey Group.

So I thought I'd reflect on the past two years and write a little about what we're doing well, and where we're focusing our efforts on over the next year.

We recently looked at the stats and the vast majority of support tickets are responded to within ten minutes and resolved within a day or so, too.

That's not all support tickets - sometimes they're larger and take a little longer, but we're really happy and we've heard from our client partners that they are too.

We're finding it really difficult to find good web developers who care as much about the detail as we do, and over the past two years, that's held us back quite a bit. We've had to turn down jobs we would have loved to do, but we knew we weren't yet cut out for it.

Our team is great, but we're looking for one or two more people to make us run like clockwork.

If you're interested in working with us, shoot over an email at hello@madebymutual.com

We've always managed projects at our past agencies, of course. But Mutual is taking on really interesting and complex projects with lots of dependencies and stakeholders. This has been our biggest teething problem.

By embracing agile methodologies, and being increasingly strict with ourselves, we're now finishing almost every week with no overdue tasks. We're keeping jobs within scope, and therefore within budget.

When we have gone over-estimates in the past two years, we've swallowed that cost rather than passing the cost of our failings onto our clients. That pain has helped us learn to be better.

Craft is still our go-to choice for Content Management System and we can't see that changing any time soon. We're co-sponsoring this year's official conference and have invested heavily in building out a suite of tools for Craft to make it ever better for our clients.

We've shown that we can deliver great work with a nimble team. I'm sure that other firms might be able to do things a little quicker or a little cheaper, but we're going for quality. And I'm really happy with the quality of work we consistently release.

Andrew and I are well aware that once we grow the team much more we'll stop managing projects and start managing people. That's not who we are, so we're going to stay lean and mean.