How and when to grow your design studio’s team, with thoughts from Bielke&Yang, Oddity and Parker

Running a design studio can be likened to spinning lots and lots and lots of plates. It’s not always what the creative-minded among us would have hoped for, especially in the early days; with managing every aspect from clients and creative, to admin and workflow, proving to be a huge ask. We only have so many hours in one day, so if the goal of your business is growth, it may be time to consider a helping hand. But what role should you hire first, and how do you know if you can afford it? To find out how they did it, we spoke to three experienced studio founders from around the world; Bielke&Yang’s Christian Bielke, Oddity’s Alice Mourou and Parker’s Tyler Eide. What triggers growth? What are the key factors that drive the decision to expand a team? For the studios we spoke to, workload and timing are major catalysts. Tyler Eide, Principal & Creative Director of Parker, describes hiring a new employee as “an investment in the long-term health of the business.” For the Seattle-based design studio, this feeds back to trends that have some legs. “Are projects coming in at a rate that requires a full-time employee?” Eide asks. “Are you in enough demand to raise your rates and afford supporting roles or other creatives?” “At a certain point,” Bielke&Yang Co-founder Christian Bielke tells us, “not growing your team is harder than growing it.” In the beginning, the Norwegian studio hired to account for an increase in workload, “but then we learned that the better work we put out, the more projects will come in,” he adds. Turning this around and saying “no” to things allowed them to build the studio that they wanted to build, “a place where we choose what clients and projects we want to work with.” However, as Bielke candidly points out, “saying no to things is very hard,” and is something that they try to be better at every day.