Daniel Dagher, Founder and Client Director of Bray St. talks to us about how his agency was able to thrive during the chaos that the year 2020 has brought us so far.
As the world dramatically grinded to a halt in 2020 and we were faced with the uncertainty of a world-wide lockdown, the one thing I was certain of was; I didn’t want Bray St. to leave lockdown in the same position we entered it.
I started Bray St. two years ago when I decided to take the plunge, leave Australia and move to London. Bray St. from its inception has always been a cloud-based agency meaning my team of copy writers, designers and web gurus are based all over the world across seven time zones.
This meant when businesses and organisations were forced to work remotely, Bray St. had already been doing it for two years so I knew we wouldn’t have the same problems as other companies. I sat my team down as I usually do on our regular group video calls and we discussed how we could use this time effectively.
The first decision was to finally take on our own advice and walk Bray St. through a brand workshop to outline our future direction. The entire team as well as key stakeholders were part of the process, this ensured that our direction, vision and values were shared by client and employee alike.
A key outcome of our session was our shared values. This set the tone for the rest of the brand development and gave us our foundation pillars to build upon.
- Equality (Gender, Ethnicity, Age, Sexual Orientation, Social background)
- Opportunity (supporting young people, new parents, return to workers etc.)
- Sustainability (cloud-based means no paper!)
Which leads me into the biggest challenge of all, spending more on the business than ever before.
Investing money when the whole world is on fire is always going to be risky, but I couldn’t let us be in the same position as we were 7 months ago.
I wanted to demonstrate to our loyal clients that we used this time effectively, that we elevated ourselves and worked (damn) hard to ensure that we would be even better once the world started to open again. I wanted to be able to hand over a complete, tried and tested operating manual to our clients to help them work successfully whilst working remotely based on our own experience over the last 2 years. Some of which include;
- Regular communication (I talk to my team everyday about workflow and capabilities)
- Ensure a balance between video and voice call
- Effectively communicating an idea online (we’ve all been there when ideas are lost in translation over Zoom)
- Not micromanaging (trust that your employees are working to the best of their abilities)
- App integration and merging (Using apps such as Xero, Harvest and Slack can make communication and group working so much easier!)
My team and I have successfully built a business model for the next 5 years based on our insights of successfully operating a cloud-based agency.
We’ve built a swanky new website focusing our talent and skills on technology brands incorporating a strong content plan which we are starting to roll out.
And finally, we have clients who we absolutely love working with.
I’d call that successful, wouldn’t you?
Surviving and thriving in lockdown was hard work and caused many sleepless nights, but it was a team effort and I wouldn’t be here today without my incredible team of hard-working free thinkers.