Give us a brief overview of your agency – when you were founded; how many employees (full- time and average number of freelancers you use at any given time); major clients; where you’re located, etc.
Novio was founded on Valentine’s Day 2012 with two employees/partners, Paul Curtin and Jay Rendon. Since then we’ve added exactly one other person, Leigh Pyle, to serve as Managing Partner (a.k.a. adult supervision).
Early on we made the decision to grow as much as possible without growing at all. Basically, we wanted to see if we could build an empire the way Hugh Hefner did—while wearing pajamas.
This means building a largely virtual model. For the most part, the three of us work from our respective home offices in and around San Francisco and, depending on client needs, tap into our collective of more than 50 freelance “novios” around the world.
This gives our clients the agility to work across multiple time zones, if needed. We’ve worked on projects with teams simultaneously sitting on three continents. Of course, the onus is on us to identify the right projects and build the right processes and tools, but mostly it means working with the right people.
A lot of the names in our address book are not only some of the most award-winning creatives around, they’re also friends we’ve known for a decade or two. It’s really a dream team that clients wouldn’t normally have access to in a traditional agency environment.
Recently, we launched a new advertising brand campaign for UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, our third campaign for UCSF in two years. We’re also currently rebranding Ventana Big Sur and RocketSpace, a co-working accelerator that helped launch Uber and Spotify.
Why did the world need your agency? Why did you start it?
When we started, we talked about the times in our careers when we’d had the most fun—when the creative was the best, when the work had the biggest impact, when the clients were truly a joy to work with.
In the end we came up with a very short list: three names. One thing all three had in common was that each were C-level executives or higher—CXOs, founders, owners, board members, entrepreneurs. So we made a decision: no skin, no game. We don’t work with middle managers.
Also, we don’t want to be an AOR.
We want to solve big brand problems—the kinds of brand problems that transform how companies think about HR, IT, Ops, sales, etc. Then, rather than stick around trying to justify a retainer with less significant work, we teach clients how to fish, and show ourselves out the door.
They can (and do) call us again when they have another problem, or when they move on to another company. We might have called our agency bootycall.com, but that URL was taken, so we settled on Novio, which is Spanish for “boyfriend.”
We should say we’re still working with the three clients we started with, though all three of them have moved on from our initial engagement. And each of them tells us they can’t get what we provide from any other agency.
What benefits do you think a small shop has over medium-sized or large agencies?
It’s funny, we don’t think of ourselves as small. Size isn’t really a metric that has a lot of meaning for us.
Partially this is because we don’t all show up to a small office every day or sit with the same small handful of people all the time. But also because we get to work on high-profile projects for well-known brands like HP and UCSF.
Honestly, we kind of feel like we’ve opted out of the whole size debate.
What keeps you up at night when running a small agency?
The work. That’s it.
Part of our desire to build an agency this way was to be able to focus on just the part of it that excites us the most. We didn’t want to be distracted by all the friction that comes with “running an agency.”
We love creative. When the work is good, we stress about making it great. When it’s great, we lose sleep thinking about how to make it perfect.
Network agencies dominate so much of our profession – from news to awards to how clients think about advertising. How does a small agency like yours make its mark?
We learned three important lessons while working at Goodby and Eleven: play well with others, it’s not just about advertising, and zig when everyone else is zagging. So, that said, the big network’s dominance has been great for us.
On the one side are clients who are frustrated by the networks: the bureaucracy, the in-fighting, the contracts that lock them in, etc. On the other side, are clients who are very happy with their network, but who sometimes need a partner to come sit on their side of the table to provide a different perspective or some leadership and advice.
By being not just media agnostic but discipline agnostic, we’ve been able to successfully work with and around established network structures.
Do you find that clients care that you’re small? And if so, how do you address that with them in pitches or meetings?
First off, clients care about results. To the degree that they care about how we achieve those results, they care that we’re fantastically efficient—they don’t pay for people or departments they don’t need, and because we involve them in the creative process, we arrive at strategies and ideas incredibly fast. When you explain this to a CEO, there usually aren’t many follow-up questions.
As for pitches, we don’t do them. We’re happy to spend a day with a prospective client, work-shopping some ideas and showing them how we think, but we don’t do spec work. Ever.
How does your size affect the quality of the work you turn out?
Size doesn’t have a direct correlation to quality. Big agencies do great work, too—we know, we’ve worked at a few. The key is being disciplined about your priorities. Our size and our ability to focus on just the stuff that matters to us (solving brand problems to transform businesses), are both outcomes of our model.
When it comes to your vision and culture, what do small agencies offer that the big guys just can’t?
Being so focused on the handful of things that truly matter to us enables Novio to be extremely adaptable in how we think about and run our agency, which clients we choose to work with, and how we decide to engage with them. We have a very clear story when we go in and talk with a prospective client. We usually know within the first 15 minutes if it’s going to work out or not.
That not only helps us, but it’s also important to the talent collective we’ve built around us. We get told quite often how much people like working for us, and that makes it easy to attract the best people to us.
All of this comes from a real clarity of purpose, which is harder to maintain as agencies get larger.
What’s the biggest surprise you learned from running a small shop?
How fun it can be. The typical agency model can get complicated really quickly. And that makes running an agency stressful and difficult.
Work with people you love, do what you enjoy, stay focused.
What do you love most about keeping things small?
The personal connections we have—not only with our clients but also with the talented people we get to work with. It goes back to: it’s not only what you do, but whom you get to do it for/with.
The pajama thing is pretty great too, though.
How big do you want to get?
We want to engage with bigger, more diverse brands, tackle tougher creative problems, and continue to work alongside all the smart account, creative and production partners we surround ourselves with.
Happily, we don’t need to hire more people, move into a bigger space, open an overseas office, or increase billings to do so.