The truth about working in creative consultancy: exciting but little room to mess up
By: Larasati Larasati
Tags: Creative, Design Agency, Career, Consulting, Work

Put it this way: All the usual companies are kind of like a high school. Among people with different expertise, you are the unique snowflakes and creative mastermind. You are the person-to-go for anything that smells like art and aesthetic. Meanwhile, joining a creative agency is like going to an art school. How can you make yourself stand out when everyone is so talented? It’s crucial to excelling at something that strengthens your A-Team. It will keep you afloat in the sea of extraordinary minds.

Friends with benefits?

In this place, people come and go, you keep a relationship professional with the client, you keep things professional between the team too. The ultimate goal of maintaining relations is simply to keep the project running smoothly. Once the project is over, we say thank you and come back to our own business until the next project reunites us again someday.

It’s a bit of a different vibe with my clients that are “living in” their company. Some of my clients working in-house can form a strong bond and friendship with their colleagues. If this trust lasts, it will give a long-term benefit. We often hear stories about a group of people jumping to other ships or even forming their own company as a pack.

Design is not all the works you do

What is surprising regarding the job desk is the fact that you only spend 50–60% of your time doing design practice that you learn at school. You spend the rest of the time building proposals and pitches and a small portion on team building (like conducting internal workshops or pet projects). A similar allocation also applies when working as a freelancer: you spend most of your time hunting clients and business before doing the actual work.

But If we look at “the other side,” I see that my client has also been flooded with strategy meetings, often more packed than me, instead of spending time crafting the ‘real’ design. OKRs seems like a big deal, and there appears to be more community effort for an In-house team: training, creating summits, events, or podcasts. Seeing both sides implies that a job where you immerse yourself in full-producing creative work for 40 hours a week maybe does not exist.

Chill morning atmosphere in WT’s Jakarta office, the habitat of less early birds, and many night owls.

Pray-Pitch-Win-Repeat

In short, this is what we do: we propose, win the pitch, we execute what we promised then repeated the cycle. The project duration normally spans around 3–6 months. In terms of business and personal growth, you never know where your project comes from. So I always beg for the universe to bring me those interesting cases to land on my desk! Yes, we can be more proactive in approaching desired client or ventures, betting that they can see our value and are willing to pay for our service, but more often, a request for a proposal from the other side of the world can suddenly appear in your inbox.

After you win, you will pray for different things: so that the nice guy that signs your proposal won’t turn into a fastidious person that micromanages once we discuss execution and deliverables, so all the third-party that you contracted won’t mess up your timeline, and ultimately so your project runs smoothly.

Cool works, but they are not yours

Often clients come up with a brief because they cannot conduct it in-house: because there is no adequate resource, lack of role function or division, but most often driven by their current-state that are incapable of generating the desired output. That’s why they come to you: an expert that can provide them with packaged solutions. You will get the opportunity to challenge your client and build crazy-shit ideas. Stretch your creative muscle and push your limit to deliver the best work ever.

But by the end-of-the-day, you will need to hand back those awesome ideas to your client, and you will be lucky if your recommendations get executed. After a year has passed, you will find your client launching a new feature or product, and you can see beyond those press recognitions: the seed you planted. When my team conducted foundational research in Indonesia’s listening behavior or mom’s sentiment on golden age development, we can still remember it was iterated from rough-sketches during the co-design workshop. We can traceback those ‘casual’ recommendations whispered to the client at that time. Everyone smiled when they saw that seed growing into a beautiful flower, although it was never our bouquet in the first place.

Slower career, but progressive

To progress, we need to define our success metrics. The question such as “what you want to achieve in this project” sounds a bit vague. But after you become a consultant, you feel that you always learn something new in each project, and it doesn’t need to be design related. Thus setting goals is important to focus your effort and see real changes by the end of the project. For example, goals can be to test tools like ambitiously using d3.js to create a data graph instead of an excel table. Some goals can be focused to enhance consulting skills: learn how to do project costing, present confidently in front of the clients (often C-levels and others at a high level), or simply write flawless email correspondence. You can also always have more personal targets, including leveraging your fieldwork for vacation or leaving the office at 5 p.m. straight.

The career path involves a junior, mid, senior, manager, director. Then a bunch of leadership positions that I don’t understand. Just any other jobs: as you ascend the higher ladder, the less hands-on your creative labor is; it’s replaced by signing a paper and managerial stuff. Despite your title, often you can often get a responsibility by just asking for it “Can I try to do that?”. Most superiors are okay with pushing you to the water, letting you struggle for not drowning, and unleash the ability to swim.

To exercise your capacity in handling more responsibility, it goes back to locate the right “pool”. To prove your ability, you will need a project that enables you to do it. Want to improve your storyboarding skills? Find a project that contains it as deliverables or create a proposal that involves storyboarding as part of the process.

I would assume that a job in an agency can be much slower compared to in-house designers. I saw some of my fellow Indonesians becoming a design lead or principal of something something in their mid-twenties. Something nearly impossible in Europe because for any ‘senior title,’ it requires 7 years of experience (If they move to the EU, good luck on explaining their previous title). In Indonesia, it’s a common practice to accelerate your career by jumping between In-house companies or so they called it, “frying your salary”. However, despite the crunchy title and compensation. I can claim with certainty that the awesome title (especially held by a green person) will not be preceded immediately by awesome design and leadership.

Decent compensation, less ‘bonuses’?

It depends on your role and the country where the company operated. I earned an 8 figures salary (In IDR, of course) a month, alongside healthcare benefits, insurance, and some perks like occasional sports night, Halloween party, and team dinners. Generally decent compensation for my country rate. One thing for sure, the perks get better in the time of fieldwork: a business class for long hours flight, 4-star hotels, and stipends that you can splurge to eat fancy after a tiresome day on the field.

Compared to some offers I got from in-house, large start-up companies have relatively better benefits such as more frequent bonuses, employee discounts, and even free cereal bar and dinner that make the office habitable 24/7. These companies also make more investments in training their employees. Sending people to overseas conferences, offering language classes, or paying agencies like us to provide Design Thinking training for their new-joiner. In short, big companies have bigger money and pay better than agencies.

We also have long days (my record is 1 am) Those nights with a double-espresso-shot only happen for one or two weeks out of 365 days a year. We keep this to a minimum as an overstay associated with inefficient time management.

Client facing put you in a little room messed up

Any job that requires you to face a client imposes an obvious risk. They are the ones that pay your company and your salary. Minor mistakes such as submitting a wrong invitation, referring to incorrect names, or ordering flavorless lunch during meetings will automatically invite complaints. Any sort of inconsistencies will raise the label ‘unprofessional,’ and it’s stickier than you think. While these cases never happened to me ‘in a rough way’, there are stories around the office where people drown in tears after a horrible phone call with their client.

In contrast, making mistakes In-house, unless you are in a high position, will require the problem to go through multiple layers of filters by other people before it’s finally executed. For example, I recall my epic friend once turned the Facebook landing page color from blue to black for a couple of hours and on a global scale. (What a legend!) Amid the morning chaos in Palo Alto HQ and midnight emergency at London’s office. My lucky buddy doesn’t get fired. It’s good for him to be able to drag dozens of other engineers (who are responsible for QC) to bear the mistake together. If you fuck up in-house, managers and bosses might come with a warning, but they’re still insiders of the company(yes the company that already invests a lot in you.)

Client-facing roles possessed slightly higher risk. You are responsible for ensuring the work’s quality, especially before sending it to the outside party. Ensure that you are accountable for whatever word comes out of your mouth (never over-promise!). It’s totally possible scenario for the client to drop the mic and say farewell, forever. If you fuck up, it’s not only impacting this one messed project but also all the losses of future projects that never happen.

Should I join an agency?

In the end, if you are unsure whether there is an area you are passionate about or whether you are feeling saturated, being a consultant is a good starting point to see a wide breadth of different industries. If you are not seeking short-term career acceleration or a Dorian-size salary, working in an agency will put you in the environment of uber creatives, help you to gain new perspectives, exercise your storytelling skill, and sharpen your specialized skill in every pitch and project you take.