News | Cuttlefish is 10 Years Old!
Mon, 10 Jan 2011
Cuttlefish is 10 years old this week! Yup, it's 10 years since I decided to leave a guaranteed monthly pay packet behind and start working for myself. Looking back the decision made itself. The company I had been working for was leaving me very creatively unfulfilled and I really had take my experience and expertise somewhere else.
I set up the business in 2001 with the simple goal of (as you can see on this screen-grab from the early Cuttlefish site) "exploring the creative uses of technology". This still remains Cuttlefish's core aim to this day (especially on the Cuttlefish Digital Arts side of things) and over the years we have brought our creative approach to the internet and multimedia to a broad range of clients from local authorities to large plcs, business and educational establishments, art organisations and individual artists. We've managed to handle almost anything thrown at us - be it websites, CD-ROMs, web services, e-commerce systems and or, as is increasingly the case, iPhone Apps.
One of the early hopes of working for myself was that I would be able to devote more time to developing my arts practice. This has certainly been the case and in recent years I've even been able to re-enter the world of research by firstly doing a research-led MA at Camberwell College of Arts in 2006 to 2008 and now working towards at PhD in Digital Arts at De Montfort University in Leicester.
So, what do I think are the secrets of running a creative business for 10 years? Well, the first surely has to be getting a good team around you and learning how to delegate (which is tough). The next is believing in what you do and not seeing the business simply as a 'money making machine'. Lastly, I reckon, is knowing how to initiate and manage change. When I think how the web industry has changed in 10 years it's scary. Does anything work the same as it did then? I mean, we didn't even have Facebook.
