Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

Over the six and half years that 3form has been running we’ve achieved a great deal, won lots of awards and worked with some great people on great projects. As with any business it’s important to move with the times and adapt to changes in the market and in the direction that you want to go.

As co-founder and sole director of the company I thought I’d write a little about some of the changes that 3form has been going through and what I have planned for the future.

But first, maybe it’s worth saying a little about what I’ve been doing this last year. Looking back it’s been quite a ride!

A year in the life of…

Possibly the most significant thing in terms of 3form was my becoming a British Council “Digital Pioneer”, through which I went to Hong Kong to look at international business opportunities and to take part in a business and personal development programme back in the UK. This process made me look at my business in a fundamental way and reassess what it is that I am trying to achieve.

I was also honoured to be named Birmingham University’s Alumnus of the Year - so that was two fantastic awards in a short space of time, both of which opened up exciting new opportunities for me, including becoming a donor to the University, having a say in how alumni funds are spent and joining the industrial board of my old department - the School of Computer Science.

As you may or may not know, I’ve been working hard for the past two years setting up a marketing, representation and lobbying group for the creative and cultural industries in Birmingham and the West Midlands, called Creative Republic. From a loose, nascent group of likeminded people we gained £80,000 of financial support from Arts Council England and now have an “ambassador” in post who is responsible for making the organisation a reality. It’s been a lot of hard work by some very talented people on a totally voluntary basis, but to see it come to fruition is fantastic.

Plus Festival went into its second year, and as a director working (again, voluntarily) I did my best to push the festival forward wherever I could, particularly in the use of web and web-content.

Type, the record label that I co-own with John Xela secured some high profile film and advertising licenses including a Honda ad and usage in motion picture soundtracks like Leonardo DiCaprio’s upcoming environmental film. We hit our thirtieth album release and had tours and shows worldwide. We’re currently in early plans to run an experimental festival in the USA in 2008. With John moving back from Manchester we may even see a few niche events like we used to run in the Default days springing up. Things look rosy for experimental music right now!

I was invited to join the board of the Fierce! festival of performance art and worked with them on some exciting and high-impact viral work in their tenth year and their most ambitious festival to date. With Mark Ball, the current festival director having the fantastic opportunity to join the RSC as well as join the board of the South Bank, as a board the responsibility sits with us to push the festival forward in new, exciting and unexpected directions.

I became a school governor and have been helping the school with a marketing and communications strategy on a voluntary basis. As a charity I can’t be involved in building their website, but I certainly intend on pointing them in the right direction over the coming months.

I collaborated with Birmingham uber-blogger Pete Ashton, and through the support of Creative Republic, we set up Created in Birmingham on a shoestring budget (I emphasise the shoestring). It’s a blog about all things creative and cultural from our fair city and has become something of a catalyst for sparking life into Birmingham’s ‘blogosphere’. To the surprise (and possibly annoyance) of many it’s now outperforming some high-profile and very well funded sites but with a ‘keep it simple stupid’ aesthetic that seems to strike a chord with many. (Well done, Pete!)

Pete also figures in some of the things we’ve been doing with Flickr, the photo-sharing website. This has been a big part of my life over the last year and we seem to have formed something of a photography community around the site with press coverage, meetups, events, collaborations, performances and exhibitions starting to self-organise out of the connections that people are making through the site.

I’d say that we’ve been ‘evangelising’ a fair bit this year, and the word seems to be getting out that we can all make Birmingham’s web presence a very interesting space indeed.

Part of that has been running my own blog on a regular basis and ‘opening up’, sharing ideas rather than trying to keep them to myself in the vain hope that they will give me some kind of advantage.

That’s something I’ve learnt from a fair few meetings with exciting people - the importance of sharing. Going to SXSW in Texas was a seminal experience for me and it suddenly dawned on me that ‘sharing’ doesn’t mean ‘giving away’ - it means handing an idea to someone else and saying ‘run with this - see what happens’, and if something comes of it just being happy that the idea has been made real.

I think that this blog has helped me do that very effectively.

The other conference of note was b.TWEEN in Bradford, where I pitched a very early form of a new project idea to some high profile media types and won the prize for the best pitch in the process. That definitely gave me the kick I needed to put my own time and money into pursuing a very entrepreneurial new idea that I’m working on.

Some other things I’ve been doing, just so I have all of this down in one place:

I’ve been helping Emily, my partner, launch her new wedding and portrait photography business by applying some of my web, business, marketing and design experience. It’s exploded and she is doing extremely well.

I joined the ‘interactive’ steering group for Digital Central and helped to influence decisions about how to spend a million pound fund for supporting digital businesses.

I joined the ‘Creative Birmingham Partnership Board’ looking at how to get creativity and culture on the agenda of high level decision makers. This lead to some exciting conversations and connections, mainly in terms of public sector connections.

I joined the Design Business Association and have recently taken up the challenge of getting the West Midlands’ members talking together, organising some events and generally doing my best to represent the design industry where it counts.

And you’ll possibly have already read about my recently joining the “City Team” for the Birmingham City Centre Masterplan, a group tasked with nothing short of coming up with the big ideas that will inform how Birmingham will change over the coming ten to twenty-five years.

Today, as I’m writing this on the train down to BAFTA in London, one of the projects we delivered with Maverick TV has been shortlisted for a national RTS Innovation Award… fingers crossed (update - the award went to Sky News - ah well, nice to be nominated!).

And through all of this, I’ve been working on exciting web projects at 3form too numerous to discuss in detail. Running a small business, raising our first round of finance, dealing with HR issues, looking at business strategy, doing pitch after pitch after pitch for new business, developing new technology ideas (Facebook applications anyone?), testing out new platforms and new ways of working, ditching them (Ruby on Rails?) and generally trying to innovate for my clients and make their businesses and projects a success.

But the biggest change of all was becoming a dad for the first time, which was quite simply the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

So what have I learnt along the way?

Quite simply, I’ve been spreading myself too thin.

Running an interactive design company is a full time job, as could be running a record label, or acting as a creative consultant, an educator, and so on.

And what happened over recent months is that I became less effective than I had been. The people I was working with had expectations, but because I was so involved with all of these projects at the same time I became aware that I was not meeting them. That’s not good enough.

One man can only achieve so much in the number of hours there are in the day at the same time as having a family life and time and space to think up the big ideas that will make all these projects successful.

A change needed to happen.

A new business model

I have decided to steadily shift my business model to one that allows me to re-focus and work on a smaller number of specific projects so that I can be more effective.

In order to compete, you have to innovate, so I am putting innovation and the creation and recommendation of new ideas at the heart of what I want to do over the next phase of 3form.

This point of innovation is where I work best. My clients and the people I collaborate with me all tell me that they like working with me for my ideas, so that is what I’m going to try to spend more of my time on - innovating, not replicating.

The British Council Digital Pioneers programme challenged my business model at a basic level. Taking me out of my UK-centric situation and dropping me into a culture based heavily around international trade made me realise a thing or two about the macro-economics of the creative industries.

In effect there is one thing that is the ‘added value’ in any creative project, one thing that is the driver for innovation, no matter whether you’re operating just in the UK or across international markets via the web.

The idea.

A challenge to UK creative businesses is the concept that somehow in this increasingly connected global world that companies based on organic, localised models will not be sustainable. I don’t believe that it will be as straight-forward as that. That’s because what ‘offshore’ companies will not have will be the ability to come up with innovative, exciting, cutting edge concepts that fit into a company’s plans, that differentiate them from their competition and help them succeed.

I see the idea of a company operating just as a general ‘web agency’ increasingly becoming slightly outmoded - and that’s a good thing. I see the future being in niche service providers excelling at very specific things whilst generalised web production outfits will be scaling back and getting used to the idea of using experts to deliver specific pieces of work that fit into a bigger picture.

I want to be ahead of the curve, so over the last nine months I have been steadily changing my business model from one of a classic ‘design agency’ (get more clients, get more staff, get a bigger turnover, grow the profit margin, repeat that process) to me being ‘the ideas guy’.

3form is Stef Lewandowski

So, on day-to-day terms, you can think of me as 3form. I still have a PA - Estelle, I still have Sam doing my bookkeeping, but essentially 3form is a one-man entity for the time being.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t be working on large scale, high impact projects.

Far from it - in fact, this new model should enable me to continue with the kinds of projects I’ve been involved in but scale up rather than down.

My plan is to be more effective, to input my ideas at a higher level with the people I am working with, to work on larger scale projects as someone who generates good ideas and plans that can then be implemented by an in-house team, or by one of a handful of trusted production companies and suppliers.

Over the last few years I’ve met some fantastic people that I’d love to work with, but because I’ve often been seen as a ‘competitor’ in those situations I’ve just not been able to do so. This new model means that I am free to work in partnership with some very talented people unrestricted by those perceptions and in a network-based way, rather than as a hierarchical employer-employee way.

New themes

So I’m focussing on a few themes:

• Innovating not replicating
• Delivering good work
• Fewer, higher impact projects
• Being the ‘ideas guy’
• Putting personal creativity back at the centre of what I do day to day
• Using the web where appropriate, not just for the sake of it
• Keep it simple, stupid
• Using design as a tool for change
• Working with people I respect on exciting and meaningful projects
• Continuing much of my work with creative/cultural representation but in a paid capacity where possible
• Giving up some commitments to focus on others
• Making a significant difference to Birmingham and the Creative and Cultural industries

So, what does this mean for clients and co-workers?

The first thing is that this isn’t a sudden change - it’s taken almost a year to gradually make these changes. Along the way it’s caused a few glitches but has on the whole gone without a snag. So really this should just feel like business as usual.

Open Hosting, our technical provider are continuing hosting provision for our web clients but with the added bonus that they will receive 24-7 email support direct from them at no additional cost.

If there are updates and changes that need to happen to work that we’ve already produced I’ll do my best to make sure that these happen as quickly as possible.

The future

I’m excited, and I want to thank everyone I’ve been working with over the last six years - it’s been a blast. I’m looking forward to the word ‘3form’ continuing to being synonymous with the kind of high quality work we’ve been producing to date.

Businesses change and grow over time, and I hope that in making these changes I will be able to achieve and create great things, work with exciting people, be innovative, travel, make Birmingham a better place, make money doing it and through it all enjoy my life with my young family.

Stef Lewandowski
3form