Starting a design business

Damian Cranney: "Somewhere in my subconscious I always knew that at some point I would run my own business. That was always the plan. I think psychologically once I dealt with the biggest fear, which was failure, and realised that the worst that could happen here was that I give it a lash, I try it, it doesn't work out. I knew that I had enough experience and was smart enough and canny enough to probably get myself a job somewhere in Northern Ireland. So if it didn't work out that was fine.

"I finished work on the 31st of October 2004, Frank became incorporated on the 2nd of November 2004. It was myself and a mobile phone and a big empty desk and that was it. I spoke to the bank, secured an overdraft facility and a loan of £10,000, I did put £10,000 of my own money into it, which I'd saved. So it was about £20k startup cost. On the day that the company started up, we had a live project which was a small website for a building company here, and a promise or an open-ended discussion with two other potential clients. And really 'nothing' opportunities that we jumped all over at the time, and spent 40 hours servicing three small clients, and they were so well taken care of.

"So we noticed momentum being injected into the business quite early, and we reached a point quite early on, maybe after five months, six months, that the phone just started ringing and people came to us with enquiries and we didn't stop to think how lucky we were or why is this happening, we just kept working hard and trying to develop systems and grow the business.

"At any given time we might have between 20 and 40 projects running through the studio, of different sizes, but we always try to keep a fairly even balance, and not be doing too much of one thing. And that's really just about being in a situation where we have eight full-time employees, and committing to the skillset, and knowing that if we have too much of one thing, someone is idle and we need to hire.

"Things are actually quite good at the moment, I'm delighted to say. The last three months we've seen encouraging signs of recovery, but what the downturn has taught us is to be really frugal and to really tighten up our ship a little bit."