For Bill Kenney and Erik Reagan — the founders of Focus Lab, LLC — putting people over profits is at the forefront of their business.
This Savannah-based branding and Web development company, which is about to hit its five-year mark, has a list of company standards that include everything from keeping it simple and keeping it real to asking more questions and working to live because life comes first.
“As an owner I don’t want, and Bill doesn’t want, to say to the staff, ‘Hey, now that you work here, here are the things you now value,’” Reagan said. “So rather than doing that, we set standards that we will hold people to and expect to be held to ourselves.”
But these standards are just a small part of why Focus Lab has done well and had the opportunity to work with everyone from Adobe and Gulfstream to the Canadian government.
Making the move
April 15, 2010, was the day Kenney and Reagan quit their day jobs to start their own business. They had worked together for years before they decided to move into a 220 square-foot office in ThincSavannah.
“We ended up with six people in that, which was really tight,” Reagan said. “We thought about expanding in ThincSavannah, but it just made more sense to go outside of it and thankfully, we stayed in the same building.”
So after about three years, they moved upstairs to the second floor and renovated it to create an open workspace that lets natural light flood in from the dozen windows overlooking Barnard and Broughton streets.
They painted the entry red, hung mini-posters on the wall with their company standards, separated their workspace, meeting space and kitchen with a glass wall of windows and threw some bright beanbags on the ground.
“We could be different types of business owners; we could make more money; we could be more of a shark; we could pay people less; we could take on more crappy work; we could have a crappy office environment; we could not buy food for everyone in the office; we could not do company retreats in Tennessee in huge log cabins,” Kenney said. “But that’s not the type of people we are.”
Their focus isn’t on making money and getting all the clients they can. They care about relationships and making the right product for the right person.
“What we like is when people tell us what they’re trying to do and we tell them what they need — because we’re the experts in that world,” Reagan said. “But it’s not just about what people do. It’s about why they’re doing it and how can we enable and support them in what they’re trying to do.”
They are a branding company, after all.
“We go a step beyond the visual and take it to the spoken aspect as well — the verbiage, the copy, the voice of the brand itself,” Reagan said. “That’s where we distinguish the separation between brand and all the other stuff that we do because the brand paves the path for how we do all the other things.”
Take their work with JibJab, the digital media company known for their dancing eCards, who reached out to them about a year ago looking for some help in rebranding themselves after being in business for about 15 years.
“They’re a good example,” Reagan said. “It started with branding, or in their case rebranding, and has kind of naturally gone to how we can support the rebrand efforts across all of what they do.”
Since then, Focus Lab has worked with JibJab on three other projects, including an app designs and updates of their Elf Dance and JibJab Messages applications. “We built such a good relationship with them that we transitioned into redesigning their entire website,” Kenney said.
Client communication
But it wasn’t always like this.
When Kenney and Reagan started Focus Lab, they took all kinds of local design and developing jobs to get going. It wasn’t until they got notice from people in their niche communities that they made the transition into their specific line of work — helping companies create a visual identity and supporting that over different platforms.
While Reagan was discussing web development at conferences and in workshops, Kenney was posting their work on Dribbble, a website where designers can share work with others.
As Dribbble grew in popularity, Reagan said, design clients started going to the site to find artists to hire, and requests for Focus Lab’s work began to fill their inbox.
“We became the mascots of the company,” Kenney said. “It wasn’t so much Focus Lab; it was Bill and Erik.”
Then, after about 15 months, they hired on a designer and a developer. Now, they have about 14 people on staff, five of whom work remotely. And their clients say those individuals are the most impressive part of the company.
“I think they’re at the top of their field from a talent standpoint,” said Charley Todd, the head of digital at Ted Todd Insurance, a company that Focus Lab helped rebrand. “Their design team is fantastic.”
The staff at Focus Lab were not just talented, Todd said, but were great at communicating with their clients.
“It always felt like they were part of our team,” Todd said. “We don’t feel like one of their clients; it kind of feels like our design and development team for Ted Todd Insurance just happens to be in Savannah.”
As Focus Lab did more work, more requests kept coming in.
But instead of saying yes to everything, they learned to say no. They even turned down a job offer from CBS Sports.
“We just had this perspective that this isn’t a race. We’re just going to live, enjoy our life and not overcommit ourselves like crazy,” Reagan said. “We didn’t want to drown ourselves for the sake of money or for the sake of growth.”
Now they have specific questions they ask clients before taking on a job, so they’re able to understand who the company is, what their goals are and who they will be working with.
“We treat our sales stuff a lot like matchmaking,” Reagan said. “We want it to be a really good match, so sales stuff is not a commission base. It’s all about being a good match, both ways. And pretty much everyone we talk to appreciates that.”
Especially their clients.
“They’re good people, and they have a great vision,” Todd said. “They have all of their priorities right, and I honestly just think they’re some of the most talented people in the country.”
And though they’ve been solely focused on their work and growing for the past four years, they hope to change that in 2015 by doing a little more outreach in Savannah, whether at events or conferences or speaking to kids about their passions and interests.
“We’re going to put our focus on Savannah next year, but it’s going to be in a bunch of different ways,” Kenney said. “We want to be part of the community.”