Think about the last big brand guidelines document your studio produced. The 80 or 100-page PDF with the logo exclusion zones and the tone-of-voice essay. Now be honest about how often the client actually opened it after the kickoff call.
That document is waste. The designers did not need to make all of it, and the client did not need most of it. Fergal Hughes built a business on spotting exactly that kind of waste, and he is the only person I have come across positioning around it. On the Exit Ready podcast he calls himself the Lean Designer.
Lean is about removing waste
Fergal stumbled into lean through a project for his uncle’s company, which builds standard operating procedures for manufacturers. To do the work he had to learn what lean actually is, and it changed how he saw his own craft.
“I started to discover that they talk a lot about waste in Lean, and there was a lot of waste in what we do as designers. A lot of iterations, designing stuff people don’t end up using, or don’t know how to use, especially when it comes to brand guidelines.”
Lean came out of Japanese manufacturing. People assume it just means going faster, but really it means removing the steps that add cost without adding value, and caring about the people and the process that produce the work. For an agency, that is a quietly radical idea, because so much of what a studio produces is effort the client never uses.
The biggest waste is the deliverable nobody uses
The clearest example is the one Fergal built his positioning around. The brand guidelines that gather dust.
“People do these massive 100-page brand guidelines, which big companies need, but a lot of people just look at them and put them in a folder no one uses. The gap I see is creating processes and simplifying how people actually use the brand day to day.”
I have seen this from the other side for years. I can count on one hand the brand documents I have known to come off the shelf and get used. The rest are waste twice over. The studio spent margin producing pages no one needed, and the client paid for something that never got implemented.
The fix is a reframe of what you are actually selling. The deliverable is not the point. The brand getting used, consistently, across the business, is the point. Fergal builds the implementation in, rather than handing over a document and walking away.
“Then the brand gets used better, gets seen more, there’s more consistency and clarity. That’s where I see lean branding.”
Be where the work is used
The lean word Fergal kept coming back to is “gemba”, which means the place where the work actually happens. Instead of designing in isolation and emailing a PDF, he embeds with the client.
“I started running the service in the gemba, on the factory floor. I was seeing the culture of the business firsthand. I got to know the business very quickly, and I started seeing improvements that could be made within design quite quickly too.”
There is a commercial prize hiding in that habit. When you are in the building, watching your work get used and fixing what does not, you stop being a supplier who delivered a file and become a partner the client cannot easily replace. That is the same shift that turns one-off projects into ongoing relationships, and it is worth far more than the original brand fee.
Small habits, compounding
Lean is also a culture of tiny, constant improvement, and Fergal runs his solo studio on it.
He does a morning meeting, on his own, to set the day. He uses the “two-second lean” idea of documenting every small improvement, often on video, the same principle a factory uses when someone tidies a workstation. And he lives by “fix what bugs you”, dealing with the small frictions before they compound into big ones.
“If I do a slight improvement, I do a video about it. Not all my videos are about the work I do. They’re about every wee improvement I make in my business.”
None of these are dramatic. That is the point. Continuous improvement is a hundred small corrections, not one big overhaul, and over a year it separates a studio that gets sharper from one that just gets busier.
Why this matters to your margin
Waste shows up directly in your margin. Every round of iteration nobody asked for, every deliverable that goes unused, every process you reinvent from scratch is time you cannot bill, and time is the raw material of an agency. Cutting waste is one of the most direct ways to improve your margins without raising a single price.
The agencies that run lean are not the cheapest. They are the ones where the work that gets made is the work that gets used, where the processes are written down once and reused, and where the team fixes the small things before they become expensive ones.
What to take from this
Look at your last three projects and ask a blunt question of each deliverable. Did the client actually use this? If the answer is no, you found waste, and you can stop producing it.
Then build implementation into the work instead of ending at the handover. Get closer to where your work is used. Write your repeatable processes down so nobody reinvents them. And start the habit of documenting one small improvement a week. Lean is not a project you finish. It is a way of running the studio that compounds.
Go deeper: Hear the full conversation with Fergal on Exit Ready episode 007, then read how to build agency SOPs and how to improve creative agency margins.