Brand guidelines that don't sit on a shelf: Fergal Hughes, FH Design

Connor: Good morning and welcome to the Exit Ready podcast, the podcast for agency owners who want to build a successful agency, because a successful agency and one that’s ready for sale are parallel journeys. I’m Connor McAuley and today I’m talking to Fergal Hughes of FH Design, also known as the Lean Designer. This for me is quite a serendipitous moment because the first podcast I ever appeared on as a guest was Fergal’s, and now I’m in the hot seat and he’s going to answer my questions. Fergal, welcome to the show.

Fergal: Thank you. I don’t like this seat. I prefer being the one asking the questions, not answering. But we’ll give it our best shot.

Connor: You’ll be grand. Tell me about FH Design. How did it start, and what services do you offer today?

Fergal: I focus mainly on branding, but I also do ongoing support for businesses. To answer how FH Design started, I have to go back a bit. It started with a studio I ran with two other fellas, John and Tom, called Shady Dolphin Studios, which unfortunately shut down during COVID for multiple reasons. After that I did a lot of in-house marketing design roles for a couple of different companies. Then unfortunately my father passed away about two and a half years ago. It was quite sudden. It hit me that life is short, and why spend your time doing something that doesn’t really suit your skills and you’re not really passionate about. I loved running my own agency. I loved working for myself and helping local businesses. So I started freelancing and it just built and built from there.

Then I got this project from my uncle, Tom Hughes, for his company Gemadocs. They basically do SOPs to help companies get their processes right. Gemadocs is a Lean company, so I had to learn about this thing called Lean. I didn’t fully understand how it could connect to what I do, but I was very happy with the project. It was one of my biggest at the time. Afterwards Tom said to me, “Why don’t you just be the lean graphic designer?” I said, right, okay. I’m no expert in Lean. But then I started practising what he was preaching and implementing these small changes. It’s going to sound silly, but I was doing morning meetings with myself. That’s one of the big things in Lean. I literally got a presentation together and did it with myself, stretching in the morning, all that sort of stuff, just to embed myself in that lean culture. I found it very useful.

When I started doing these lean practices like “fix what bugs you”, I realised there’s so much to Lean that people don’t really get. A lot of it’s to do with culture and just caring about people. Then 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. That’s how I found my niche and became the lean graphic designer.

Connor: I love it. When we met last year, you were just about to pivot into the lean name. My agency was very much built on those principles. Continuous improvement was something we implemented personally as well, in how we conducted ourselves and in the continuous evolution of our own service. When you came up to me about it, I just thought, that sounds like a really strong positioning in the market. I’d never heard of anyone so focused and niched into an area that was so applicable, but yet overlooked by so many people.

Fergal: Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either. When I started Googling I expected someone else had already done this from a lean perspective. It turns out I might be the first.

Connor: I am a big fan of continuous improvement. I’m a big fan of lean practices. I don’t have my own morning meeting, but I do like the idea.

Fergal: From that I’ve actually started doing a Zoom call every week with another freelancer. We do our own morning meeting and we both stretch together. So it’s not as strange now as when I was doing it by myself. We’ve evolved from that, but I still think it’s a great thing. Something I probably should do more often than just once a week.

Connor: Everything is just an evolution. All of those things you’re doing today are the iteration. You’re evolving it, making it better, bringing other people in, and the service will evolve through that as well. Now, you answered my second question already, but what did running your previous agency, Shady Dolphin, give you that you’ve used to do this now?

Fergal: A lot of positives, for sure. Working with my business partners John and Anton taught me a lot. John has the gift of the gab. He’s a really great fella, and when it came to business he was probably more clued in than I was. So I picked up a lot from him. The other big thing was contacts and creating a community. Social media is massive, but locally there is so much going on around here and people are doing such great things that you can pick up a lot. You’re a fantastic example. I reach out to you randomly every so often for help. Creating a community like that around you is so important.

Connor: From my perspective, you are one of those creators of great work, but also a content creator. I know you wouldn’t call yourself that, but the level of detail you go into on your own self-promotion is next level. You sit on camera, you talk on camera, you show your work as you go along. If every other agency owner watching this is honest, less than 10 percent of them do it. They know they should, and they have to come out of their shell a little to see the benefit. How do you find it works for your business?

Fergal: Recently it’s been fantastic. I had to get over something Shady Dolphin did really badly. We were good at promoting, but we weren’t quick enough. We always wanted perfection. Sometimes perfection can be a bad thing. I know that’s not a great thing to say as a graphic designer, but especially when it comes to promotion, people want to see your authentic self.

That’s one thing I’ve learned from Lean. The two-second lean rule is to document your improvements, mainly with video. On the factory floor, if they’ve done a tiny little improvement, it has to be documented and celebrated. It’s always good to get before-and-afters. Some of the videos aren’t great. They’re not supposed to be. They’re just to document the improvement.

I wanted to take that into social media and evolve it a bit. Make it slightly better, but don’t worry too much if it’s not perfect. If I do a slight improvement, like the time I stole something from my client Spairn (they have these foam boards on their desks with cutouts for their pens and pencils), I literally nicked the idea, did a video about it, and put it out. Not all my videos are about the work I do. They’re about every wee improvement I make in my business. If it helps one person or even one person looks at it, I’m very happy. I actually enjoy the setup of it. It can be daunting at times, but the more you do, the better you get.

Connor: I keep my first videos online to show how far I’ve come. Not to say I’m brilliant at it today, but I’m a lot better than when I started. It’s overwhelming at the start because, well, what are people going to say? Are they going to make jokes about it? Then when people start to contact you, you also think, am I posting into the ether? Most of the time you are, until somebody messages you and goes, that really resonated with me, or I really love that. And then here’s an order off the back of it. Those things you can quantify later, but at the start it does feel hard.

Fergal: I think people worry a lot about the numbers. I do too. We’re all guilty of it. I’ve posted videos and 10 minutes later opened the phone up and seen a hundred views and been disappointed. But it accumulates. You do get the right eyes on it eventually. They see the social proof and the history of it, and it all layers together to work.

Connor: So tell me about the work you do in lean brand design and the type of businesses you work with. What does that actually look like day to day?

Fergal: I’ll talk about what I’ve started doing with some clients. It all began with Ryan Tierney. If anyone is into Lean they’ll know Ryan Tierney. He runs Seating Matters and recently bought Spairn. He’s one of the leaders of Lean in this country. I started working with him through Gemadocs, and then he asked me to come in and help him with Spairn. Spairn recently rebranded and they wanted help implementing the brand, with a more personal sort of service. He wanted me to come in and do it. In Lean they call it “in the gemba”, which means where the work actually happens, on the factory floor.

I started running the service specifically for him and it really worked, because I was seeing the culture of the business firsthand. I got to know the business very quickly. Then I started seeing improvements that could be made within design quite quickly too. You could change things and make improvements faster.

That’s a service I now run inside FH Design alongside the branding work. With lean branding internally, I’m always trying to improve my own processes for how I do the branding, but that’s an internal thing. Externally, the most important part of lean branding is how the brand actually gets implemented after you create it. People sometimes 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 use the brand day to day. Then the brand gets used better, gets seen more, there’s more consistency and clarity. That’s where I see lean branding, and that’s what I try to do with businesses.

Connor: You’re absolutely right. Those 100-page brand guidelines, I can’t think of a dozen that have been put on a shelf and taken back off it for use over the years. That’s waste on both sides. The designers didn’t need to design that, and the company didn’t need it at that time. It’s that implementation where you can take good, concise, lean brand documents and roll them across the business. From your perspective, because you know the lean process and you become invested in the business, you become trusted as a partner when you’re there as well.

Fergal: Very, very quickly. I feel like I’m part of the furniture, especially with Spairn at the moment. They’re probably sick of the sight of me, to be honest. But they’re a lovely bunch of people. Because they’re at the start of their lean journey too, I’m learning so much being there. I come in once a week or once every two weeks and you’ll see they’ve changed this, they’ve changed that. The other great thing as a designer is you get to see your designs in person, starting to work. One day you’ll come in and the brand pattern we implemented is just there, on the glass, in the foyer, done. I came in and was like, wow, that looks class. It’s cool to come back in and see the improvements being made.

Connor: Brilliant. I have a loaded question next. It was loaded for everybody else, because you are building your business from the metropolis of Magherafelt, which isn’t a major city. But when I think about your customer base, manufacturers and industrial companies, you’re not too far away from them being where you’re located. Does that work to your advantage or disadvantage, or maybe both?

Fergal: 100 percent it works. I thought about this today. There is gold in these fields, in the countryside. Mid-Ulster is booming with manufacturing. You could drive down a wee country lane and there could be a company there that ships all over the world or makes something crazy. So it’s definitely an advantage for me to be based here. With COVID and remote working, it’s become easier to work anywhere, but I’m a big fan of local businesses. My goal is to help as many of them as possible get the most out of their brand. In manufacturing especially, some companies out here are doing amazing things and have neglected their brand a wee bit. Those are the golden nuggets I’d love to come in and help, to make their brand as good as what they produce.

Connor: You’re absolutely right. There are so many of those businesses, mid-Ulster primarily, that I’m aware of. They produce manufacturing equipment. Even CDE down there, and all the businesses that feed into CDE in Cookstown, are huge. For many years the brand probably didn’t do the heavy lifting. When they invest in their brand and see the results, it’s just amazing to watch the growth and how it compounds.

Fergal: Massive. It’s unbelievable. Not to hone in on Ryan Tierney again, but he says he wants to make Ireland the next Japan. Lean originated in Japan and he wants to create that culture here in Ireland. I’m a massive fan of that statement. We have everything we need here, maybe not the weather, but everything else.

Connor: Where does FH Design go in the next three years? What does it look like three years from now?

Fergal: I have a lot of work to do still. There are always improvements to be made. This has changed recently. When I started freelancing, I was very much of the opinion that this was going to be me, just designing logos and doing the thing I love, and I’d be happy with that. With the lean perspective, I’d love to grow this and get some people on board and teach them the process, so more businesses can have lean branding. I’d also love to create some sort of course people can learn from, because I think I’m onto something here and it could be massive. I just need to learn more myself. I’m at an early stage of this. Three years from now, we’ll see. It’s going to be big.

Connor: I look forward to being part of that journey and listening to it along the way. With Lean, efficiency and incremental change for the better are part and parcel of the process. It would be a miss of me not to talk about AI and how that could feed into it. How are you using AI in the studio at the moment?

Fergal: I’m using it like a lot of freelancers are. You can’t not use it, for all the admin stuff and processes. I’m definitely using it there, but I’m probably not fully implementing it to the best of my abilities on the creative side. That’s down to the fact that I enjoy doing it so much myself. I don’t want to relinquish the fun part of my job to AI. But if I don’t, I’ll probably end up falling behind, so it’s something I need to look into.

Connor: Honestly, I’m a bit of an AI nerd, and there is nothing out there at the moment that can replace that human strategy and the design quality we bring to the table. That’s fine, because the strategy is what the customer is paying for. The knowledge and experience we bring, and the execution. We can be augmented with different tools, but we still have to do the work. I can’t see that changing. AI design looks like AI design. It probably doesn’t resonate with our ideal clients either.

Fergal: It’s a bit contradictory because I’m into this lean thing, and you’d think AI with design and Lean would go hand in hand because it’s faster. But it’s not, because Lean’s all about people. You’re trying to improve the process for people. That’s how it originated in Japan.

Connor: It’s clarity of process and clarity of decision-making, and AI can’t give you that. It doesn’t have that understanding. Maybe it will in the future, but right this second it can’t. That’s the bridge that needs to be crossed for it to be a disruptor to us. Just keep learning it. Things are changing at such a rapid pace I can’t even keep up, to be honest.

Fergal: It’s so fast.

Connor: It’s mental. So that brings me to my last question today. If somebody wanted to start their agency tomorrow, what would you tell them?

Fergal: Make sure you really enjoy it, because if you’re doing it my way, by yourself, it can be quite challenging. But at the end of the day it’s so much fun. Doing what I do is creative problem solving. That’s just what my head does anyway. I’d say I’d do it for free, but I need paid.

The other thing I should have done when I was younger and didn’t, out of ego, was get as many mentors as possible. Keep learning. It’s only recently that I’ve met people like yourself and other business owners. Don’t be afraid to brush up against other industries, because there’s learning to be made from everyone. Collect as much information as possible from people who’ve done it before. When you’re younger you feel like you know everything, and that’s really not the case.

Connor: I put myself in really uncomfortable positions and put myself in rooms I probably shouldn’t even be in, because the people in those rooms and the conversations I have are helping me learn things I never knew. That happened today. I was in a chat the other day with a gentleman who was incredibly successful in his career. Why he gave me time for a coffee I have no idea, but it was a really good conversation and I learned a lot from that person. Doing that, having people who have the skills you want and have walked the path you’re still on, helps you mitigate the risks and look for opportunities you haven’t even considered yet.

Fergal: You shouldn’t be the smartest person in the room ever. You want to be the least.

Connor: Fergal, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you coming on, and thanks to everyone who has tuned into the Exit Ready podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave a little review wherever you’re picking this up. If you want to build the best version of your agency, head over to moveatpace.com where I share a heap of resources, articles and my own agency valuation assessment. Thank you all and I’ll see you next time.