Step into my office: Wilson Fletcher on the role of digital services in driving commercial growth

What does your business do?

This was our vision; 14 years ago we believed that digital services would eventually underpin every aspect of everyday life and would literally represent the commercial future of every organisation. So, we built a new type of design company to focus exclusively on the strategy and design of digital services. And that’s exactly what we do today.

Most organisations approach their strategy in a traditional way, or are so focused on delivery that they don’t take time to think strategically about their opportunities; that’s where we come in. We help our clients identify, shape and deliver on their digital service strategy. Our work spans everything from broad, insight-centered service strategy and visioning to concept design and prototyping.

Describe your office culture

We’ve always described it as ‘professional irreverent’. We’re as much a bunch of friends as we are colleagues. We always say that we want the person you are in the bar to be the person that turns up to the studio each day – no fake professional personas thanks. Our office dog Jessie is an example of our culture – she sees us as one big family, which is how clients should feel when they enter the office.

I guess it boils down to a belief that the whole notion of a work-life balance should be ridiculous if our studio culture is good enough. We’re all practitioners and our work is a key part of our lives, so we should always try to make days spent in the studio as enjoyable and sociable as possible.

How do you attract and/or retain talent?

Attracting the right people is always hard so we choose cautiously; it’s always a combination of team fit and bringing new skills or perspectives to our team. And fit is always the most critical, as we can fill gaps in knowledge. Quite a few of our team have been with us for many years and I think they stay because we have a strong philosophy to our work and how we conduct it. That extends to how we work with our clients too. We’ve often hired people that we knew already.

Where are you located, and why?

We’ve been based in great studios in Shoreditch for almost 10 years. We’re near Brick Lane and when we moved in there wasn’t even anywhere to get a decent coffee. Everyone else was up at Silicon Roundabout. Now we’re spoilt for choice – great delis, restaurants, bars, shops, street food, you name it. Our clients love coming here and we love being here. It’s a really vibrant part of London.

Name a project you were proud of in the last year (client work or otherwise)?

We’ve done some incredible strategic programmes over the last year, the majority of which we can’t talk about. But I’d probably single out one of the simplest in many ways: the website we created for mental health charity MQ. It’s a really important subject, they’re a brilliant organisation and we’ve contributed some our own time to help them do things really well. We’re always proud when we get to work on something that makes a real difference and this is one of them.

What’s the best piece of agency marketing you’ve seen recently?

To be honest, we rarely look at how our peers market themselves. As we frequently say to our clients, paying too much attention to your close peers can distract you into acting too reactively. I think that most agencies in our sector are using content as their primary means to market themselves. In my view you can tell more about an agency’s level of expertise from their content than their work, in most cases. I know from our own experience that there are so many things we do that we can’t show. Content allows us to expose some of the areas we work in that can’t be made public.

What do you see as the biggest challenges for digital innovation agencies wanting to grow and thrive both now and in the coming years?

We have to help our clients grow and thrive. It’s simple really: if they do, we will. That means we have to be obsessively focused on producing amazing work for them. Probably the most universal challenge everyone faces is getting in front of the right people in client organisations. For us, that’s typically very senior leaders, but we know they get approached relentlessly.

Describe the new business ethos at your agency

It’s very consultative. Our approach is honest. We would never try to sell ourselves for the sake of it. We’ll only put ourselves forward if we genuinely think we can make a big difference. The vast majority of our work still comes referred – and has done since day one – but we do reach out to new people more now, as we have a senior team with incredibly deep experience. We always enjoy hearing about new challenges. Our content is a big part of that process, of course, as it allows us to give people an insight into how we think and what we care about.

The Future Factory is a new business agency based in London.