TEN YEAR TURNAROUND. BACKWARDS.

Business is a funny old game. It’s like playing poker at the big table, when all the players have different decks of cards. It’s the best job in the world and the worst you’ve ever had, all at the same time - seven days a week.

But the best thing about it is learning new stuff. Nothing delivers teachable moments like running your own gig. So in the spirit of sharing, here a story of a decade and a bit running a business called Hunch.

The beginning

Back in Easter of 2012, MySpace was still a thing, the cool kids had an iPhone 4 and we launched Hunch with a badly kerned logo and a few bottles of red wine.

We only really had one customer – and they fired us a few weeks later. It wasn’t a very auspicious start. But ‘we’ had a laptop, some passion and the ability to turn words into money. So ‘we’ kept going.

The middle

Before too long we picked up some projects. Mostly stuff that nobody else wanted. We crafted Investment Statements for a big bank and a number of “Sorry we stuffed that up” letters for a business that used to be Telecom.

Our focus (although it took a long time to put into words) was ‘making complicated stuff feel simple’. And we’ve always believed in making things ‘easy, excellent and fun’.

By 2014 there were six of us. We got on stage at the Marketing Awards, were listed as ‘hot’ by the industry press and wandered around town, believing our own PR and ambulance chasing our way into new projects.

We were doing okay. We’d rented an office, kerned up the logo and started to build a solid reputation for loving the stuff that few people care about.

And that was pretty much that for a decade. Rather than pitch for business we’d just hang out with people we liked. And as as people moved from job to job, we’d jump from client to client – picking up crumbs, polishing the edges and sending bills to pay the rent. We never had a year without making some money. It was working.

The middle: Part two

Covid was a bump, but not a disaster. We used the timeout to re-think our way of working. And saved our pennies to shift up the road and settle in a great new space.

Then 2023 never really started. The Summer was crappy, the big rains didn’t help, the election was looming and the reality of ‘cost of living’ started biting through the supply chain.

By September we were underwater. By Christmas we were stuffed.

The irony of September was that we got on stage at the Business Awards for ‘Excellence in Strategy and Planning’. It would have been a moment were it not so fraudulent. As that boxer once said, “everyone has a plan until they’re smacked in the face”.

Things weren’t great. We were losing money month by month and it was harder and harder to find new work. And as we wandered around town reading every room, the writing was on the wall, everywhere.

We needed to make some tough decisions.

Back to the start

After Easter this year, there’ll be six of us again. And we’ve fought tooth and nail for every bum on every seat. Turns out, cutting a business in half is a hard thing to do. Besides the obvious emotion of the people stuff, the practical stuff is tricksy too. Half the overhead, half the costs and double the sleepless nights.

But you do what you have to do when you run a business. So that’s what we’ve done.

The strange thing is, it all feels good again. It looks like we’re going backwards, but feels like we’re moving forward. Sure it’s half the people and half the revenue, but it’s tight and buzzy and exciting. Just like the old days.

The learning journey

If there’s one big thing that changed my perspective, it was choosing to shut the doors. We started out fighting to avoid it. Then it quickly became ‘Plan B’. And the reality of that reality was a shot in the arm.

Like Schrodinger’s cat, our business is worth a big chunk of change and nothing at all, if you never open the box. But as soon as you make friends with ‘nothing’ it changes the way you play the game. The risk goes away, you’re gambling with winnings – and everything starts to feel like fun again.

And that’s the point. Somewhere on a wall is a quote someone framed of something I used to say. “Make money, have fun and do the right thing”. But somewhere on my journey, the fight to find cash took over the stuff that I care about. And it didn’t help.

That’s the funny thing about owning a business. Before very long, the business owns you.

But not anymore. We’re a start-up again. We’ve got everything to prove and nothing to lose. Just six people in a room above a pub making ‘complicated stuff feel simple’ by making it easy, excellent… and fun.