Chapter 3 – Boring and conventional

Finding (and keeping) good clients was the first step towards the inevitable crisis of how to scale the business. Before that though, came the quandary of deciding whether to even bother.

As a one-man-band I could have settled into the groove of running Janno as a ‘lifestyle business.’ Doing the work that paid the bills, and not much else. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

At some point though, I started to ponder what the end-game might look like.

I certainly wasn’t wishing for the end before I’d even started, but everybody that sets up a business gets to thinking about what the road ahead looks like, how to navigate it, and what the destination is.

There’s obvious and cliché answers that your brain spits out early on, around money, and early retirement, and bla bla bla….But then it gets a bit more….existential.

Between 2012 and 2015 Janno grew as a one-man-band to the point where I had to look for help. There were far too many Red Bull fuelled editing marathons, and I was burning through my weekends way too often.

Image: David Baird

So I bit the bullet and looked to grow the business with my first full-time hire.

It was a disaster.

I recruited a 21 year old graduate, and made the decision to rent an office space in which the two of us would work. An eye-rollingly boring and conventional approach to the inevitable scaling up conundrum.

The wheels then proceeded to come off when the person I’d hired failed to make it into work on time, with monotonous regularity.

We parted company just 8 weeks later.

Boring and conventional wasn’t even suitable and reliable. *Sigh*

So, I was left with an office that only I was using, to do work that I could do at home.

Which got me to thinking, does the idea of building a team hang on a physical location?

No.

And so in 2016, at the end of a one year lease on the pointless office, Janno went remote, in a move that not only allowed us to grow, but that would see us way ahead of the curve four years later when the pandemic hit.

Between 2012 and 2015 Janno grew as a one-man-band to the point where I had to look for help. There were far too many Red Bull fuelled editing marathons, and I was burning through my weekends way too often.

Since 2016 we’ve averaged one new hire every 12 months.

John, David, Eoin, Jak and Fraser each filled roles in video post-production, whilst Nicola joined us as Marketing Manager. Sassy jumped the gap from freelance VO artist to full-time audio producer, and most recently Teresa joined us as our Projects and Operations Manager. We stand up today as a team of seven, with plans afoot as I type to recruit an eighth.

Together, as a team, we’ve developed a production method that sees us offering – in my opinion – un-rivalled value to all of our clients, that come to view us as a production partner and not just a supplier.

We’ve grown because I realised that the collective skills within a team will always outweigh my own talents.

And we’ve grown because we’ve not sat still. We’ve diversified and innovated in bold and exciting new ways, with new products and new workflows and methods that deliver outstanding results.

The Janno Media of 2022 is not just a bigger team, but an intricately more complex, efficient and ever evolving business.

Which brings me full circle to the existential query I mentioned earlier on, and which I’ll confess, is far from answered. It might never be.

We’ve spent ten years working on the question of how do we do, what we do?…. and appreciating that the how of today won’t necessarily be the how of tomorrow.

The past two years have taught all of us that much!

Time instead, to ask “Why?”