2 years in...
Mutual reflects on two years since opening the agency, team growth from two to five members, and key achievements and challenges.
Two years ago Andrew and I opened Mutual after being made redundant from our previous employer. We picked up the remaining assets and started from there. This is a short look back at where we've got to.
The team
We've grown from two to five, with Harry, Meg and Rachel joining along the way. Client work over the period has included projects for NBC Universal, Transparency International, CIB, McBains, and The Carey Group.
What's gone well
Support. We respond to most support tickets within ten minutes and resolve them within a day. Clients tell us this is the thing they value most.
Craft CMS. Craft is still our primary CMS. We co-sponsor the official conference and have built a set of internal tools on top of it for the kinds of jobs we do repeatedly.
Staying small on purpose. We've kept the team lean deliberately. Growing beyond this size would turn our jobs from running projects into managing people, which isn't what either of us wants right now.
What's been harder
Hiring. Finding developers whose standards match ours has been the single biggest constraint, and we've turned work away because of it.
Project management. Running bigger projects with multiple stakeholders was bumpy at the start. Tighter process and more discipline on our side have helped. Where we've misjudged scope, we've absorbed the cost rather than passing it on.
Next
Hire one or two more people, keep the project management discipline up, and see what the next year looks like.
Andrew is Technical Director at Mutual, a Craft CMS Partner agency. He has been building with Craft CMS since its public beta in 2012 — working through every major version from Craft 1 to Craft 5 — and has delivered over 100 sites for clients including Apple, Transparency International, and Arts University Bournemouth.
He writes about Craft CMS on the Mutual blog and has contributed to net Magazine. At Mutual, he leads development of Mutual One, a marketing platform built on Craft CMS as its foundation.
He has spoken about Craft CMS to undergraduate students at the University of Brighton and Canterbury Christ Church University, and appeared on the Devmode.fm podcast. He has also trained development teams at other agencies in working with the platform.
