We just closed FF Studio. While it’s fresh in my mind, I thought I’d write down some thoughts about the last three years, and about running a small studio that did mostly public sector or public sector adjacent work in 2025. For those unfamiliar: FF Studio was a small design and technology studio. I started it and ran it with Eliot Fineberg. At our busiest we turned over £900k in a year and had c.8-10 freelancers working with us across 3 or 4 projects, mostly in the public sector.

The personal (is political)

I thought that FF Studio would be the work of my life. My 10-15 year project, building a design studio that felt fit for the 21st century.

But it’s not to be — not this one, not this time. Eliot and I are parting ways (we’re still friends). Over the past six months it became clear to us both that we wanted different things from our professional lives. To keep things simple and avoid the prospect of complicated personal feelings getting in the way of our friendship if one of us took over the limited company, we're simply entering into voluntary liquidation and closing the company.

When we started FF, I had a vision of how to design an (admittedly small) organisation in ways that would make other organisations look at us and say, “oh hey, if they can do that…”. I think creating and running a business is one way of creating a prototype of the kind of world you want to live in. Erika Hall (who wrote Just Enough Research) reckons "the most important design work in these times is figuring out more ethical operating models for businesses". The desire to do that guided me almost as much as the work we did. I wanted to prove that businesses could be run in a socially responsible way fit for living life in the UK in the 2020s.

That means acknowledging house price growth comparative to incomes, that there's no longer a housewife in most households doing the laundry and cooking, that forms of inequality and bias exist and drive our behaviours in all kinds of unconscious ways. And it means trying to find as many tiny ways as possible to try and make our organisation one that was part of building better futures for people rather than maintaining the status quo. So: we tried to pay and treat freelancers well. We gave ourselves the compassion and flexibility we would have wanted from an employer on a routine basis when our children needed picking up from nursery or school, and when exceptional things happened in our home lives we each took the slack from each other to make sure the other person could handle their life situation without work as a distraction. And we tried to stay aware to our biases and check ourselves and each other, to listen to feedback from freelancers about what kind of organisation and culture we were creating and adjust accordingly, to build strong, diverse teams. We weren't perfect on any of these fronts, but we were conscious and trying.

Despite closing, I still hold the belief that organisations can be radically different - better - than most of them are. We tried to show that concept through the quality of our work as well as in how the studio ran. The work and the company were strong in ideology, morals and commitment. The experience of working with us was probably weaker in some of the areas we deemed as unimportant to us (don’t go to FF if you want the dogged pursuit of a particular delivery methodology that fit perfectly with your pre-existing governance structures), but on the things that mattered to us, we put in the effort.

Things I’d do the same

Build great teams, let them run.

Sonia told me that we excelled at "making a great environment to work: non-hierarchical, high trust, fast moving but not crisis mode or stressful environments." We brought in people we'd (usually) worked with before, set a clear brief, and stayed involved enough to keep the work on track and the team protected just enough from any noise coming from the client or people around them. We weren't micro-managing anyone. We set standards and trusted our teams to meet them. They pretty much always did. I think people enjoyed working with us, and we tried to treat people as well as we could, whether being flexible about life, or sending our freelancers hampers at Christmas.

Have a bit of fire, try to play it differently.

We didn’t want to be a digital transformation consultancy, we’ve both worked in that space and respect the people doing that (very necessary) work. But we were missing the creative spirit of the agencies and studios we’d worked in earlier in our careers, and wanted to bring that to the party too. Part of FF’s mission was to find out an answer to the question “is there a market for the weird work?”.

So: we wanted to be a creative technology and design studio that did beautiful, inventive work beyond the commodification of the Service Manual. I think that came through in some of the case studies we published. Over time “what does an FF project feel like” became clearer and clearer (big thanks to Lizzie at the V&A for helping us to see that). We ran pacy projects that modelled what good looked like and when we prototyped early it surprised people because, well, it turns out “you can just do things”.

Stay honest.

We almost certainly did ourselves out of some revenue and definitely some margin by being honest with clients, occasionally to our detriment. We gave up revenue opportunities when we said "no, we don't want to run a bums-on-seats organisation" and declined to find a client 8 content designers and skim off the difference on day rate. I don't regret that: we had a clear idea of what we weren't, and we stuck to it.

Open up.

We invested heavily in our case studies, trying to (as much as possible) "work with the garage door up" to share what we learned along the way. It's not always possible to do that with different clients - I wish we'd done more of it - but I don't regret spending the money or time on it when we were able to. It cost us margin and profit - a case study like the pilot fund probably took about ten days or maybe even more, once you added up everyone's time on it. But the internet is for sharing. If we're asking for your time in reading it, it's right that we put some time into making it, too.

Have a nice time.

The nicest days we had running the studio were when we got out from behind our laptops, whether in the studio with a whole gang or me and Eliot sitting on Brighton beach after lunch. I probably won't remember all the days at my desk drafting a Statement of Work but I'll remember the conversations on the walk to Baguette King or the trip Eliot and I took to Marseille for a week to try and write the first FF Studio strategy. Investing in having a nice time is one of the rewards of running your own thing. If we'd hired someone (more on that below), we would've tried to work out how to fairly distribute the nice-timeness of it as best we could too: there's nothing worse than seeing the bosses have a nice time while you're stuck behind a desk on £30k a year.

Things I’d do differently

This is a longer list. I think we did more things right than wrong. (Maybe it's just my personality to see the areas I wish we'd done differently or more on.) It was personal circumstances rather than business failure that led to us closing, but of course I find myself wondering whether, if we'd done some things differently, we'd be in the same spot.

Tighten up our product / service definition.

I am probably never going to be someone who runs a studio that offers fixed services, easily replicable, productised and sold and done systematically every time.

But we were probably too many things to too many people. At first we didn’t want to close down the chances of getting work by reducing our offer or target market: 2023 was the beginnings of a cold winter in digital services. I have a nagging feeling that not being able to say “we’re FF Studio, we do A B C so that you can X Y Z” held us back after a while. Certainly it meant I felt a bit blocked on going hell-for-leather on new business.

Build the support team.

We paid our accountants, of course, but otherwise tried to do most of everything else ourselves: new business, finance ins-and-outs, coaching, delivery. Then this year we worked with Alex on product definition, and with Kseniya and David K at Posterity Global on procurement and routes to market, and I thought: we should’ve had this support structure around us 18 months ago. “Procurement hacking will be the most creative thing you do for the next two years”, Tom told me early on: so spend money on getting creative support for procurement rather than on that fancy studio website. If I did it again, I'd try to start noticing when we were asking the same solvable questions over and over again - and then look for someone in a fractional or consulting role who could help answer them.

Keep the bar, even for founders.

About six months into working with Sport England, I told Will that I wanted all our Linear tickets to be tighter. No more stubs: every card should describe the work and have a definition of done. I wanted to be able to come back from holiday and have the board reflect the work, to be able to understand what was going on without asking for extra documents or chats. Perhaps that was too idealistic, but I wanted us to be tight.

Eliot and I espoused that standard for our teams but I don’t think we consistently lived it for ourselves. Without job descriptions for ourselves, our roles got muddied between us, and we weren’t always great at holding each other to account. When we were flying that was fine: we both knew everything the other one knew and could slide the work between us. But over time I think it made us a bit complacent: our fortnightly founder retros became monthly, or we skipped a management meeting because we didn't feel like it. Perhaps clocking what we wanted to hold each other accountable to and having some kind of six monthly check-in (call it a performance review if you really want) would have been beneficial, to make sure we were holding ourselves to the same standards as we held the rest of the team.

Take a position.

As much a note to self as anything. As a result of both me and Eliot’s nature, we were a thoughtful company, and sometimes thought maybe too much about nuances rather than taking a stand on anything. We probably nodded to “doing what’s right” rather than actively expressing our points of view or values. Clarity, care, generosity felt like the values we tried to embody, but we never really expanded on what that meant. So did we really live up to the idea of the company as a way of practising some form of social justice if all we did was try to do the right thing but never talk about what the right thing was? I veer away from statements that feel like gratuitous postering, so we tried to give money to charities like ABCD rather than write posts on LinkedIn about how genocide in Gaza is a) happening b) bad - but I wonder if that's cowardly, or whether we should have just been more public about those actions. Show, not tell.

That 'taking a position' expands to our own industry - I've got a bunch of strong opinions (quite tightly held, actually) about what is right, as in correct, on the internet. Things like: hiding content behind sign-in walls is bad, Markdown is good - nothing particularly radical round here. But I never wrote them down. So for an organisation with plenty of opinions, very few of them got codified in a way that opened conversations or made us accountable. I wish we'd expressed more of them.

Take more risks.

We didn’t hire anyone, despite multiple opportunities and moments to do so. I felt the weight and responsibility of hiring someone strongly, after having seen a designer get made redundant two months into starting a role at an agency I once worked at because the client work disappeared. I think we made a bunch of safe choices or non choices like that, and I wonder what would have happened if we’d run forward hell for leather.

Be even more transparent.

We tried transparency with the series notes - but they dropped off after a while. I think about whether it's a differentiator, and how reading and learning from other organisations and how they run has inspired me over the years, too, and how we might add to that ecosystem of knowledge. Could we have been more radically transparent? Tom Critchlow used to post an annual revenue-by-product-or-service-line chart in his reviews of the year. I used to gawk at Garden 3D's open P&L - the nerve!

We published our charity donations in 2023, but didn't do it in 2024. We never published our P&L in full. It felt maybe too bold, or too transparent - do we lose a strong negotiating position with clients? Is making money and talking about it just a bit cringe (it's certainly against the national psyche)? What would everybody say? In hindsight I'm not sure I'm bothered about what everybody (whoever they are) would say, but the unfounded worry was enough to ensure the idea never got to the top of our to-do list.

Experiment harder.

If figuring out more ethical business models is the design challenge of today, then there are a ton more things to prototype and experiment with to get there. One thing I'd try if I did it again is to attempt to align the incentive systems between us and our freelancers. It struck me a number of times that on a fixed price project, Eliot and I were incentivised to get it finished as quickly as possible: fewer days worked, lower staff cost, more money in the bank. But someone working on a day rate is incentivised to take the same number of days as they estimated it might take in the first place - everyone's trying to pay their rent. And we never really wanted to be the people who said, nope, you've finished, it was only 14 days not 20, off you trot.

I noodled about with spreadsheets a couple of times that explored the idea of a profit-share at the end of a project, so that we all had skin in the game to finish efficiently. We didn't try it, but I still reckon there's something in it.

Trust my gut.

On everything. Choosing a website platform. How we spend our time. Whether it's been too long since the last retro. If that client is worth investing more time in. When to ask for help. I ignored my instincts sometimes to go with the flow, so I guess this one really means: back yourselves even more than you did, and run at it.

Fin

I worked for a studio called With Associates from 2013 until it closed in May 2016. Last week someone I'd just met told me, "I loved With Associates' work".

I lucked out getting to run a studio and design it the way I wanted it for almost three years. I miss it. I'm glad I had the chance, and grateful to everyone who gave us a chance. If anyone tells me "I loved FF Studio's work" in one, two, five or ten years' time, I'll be very happy indeed.

FF Studio was Anna Goss and Eliot Fineberg

with delivery work from: Sonia Turcotte, Rod McLaren, Alex Segrove, James Darling, Kim Morley, Jo Schofield, Will Myddelton, Debs Durojaiye, Maria Izquierdo, Ignacia Orellana, Kay Dale, Ella Fitzsimmons, Michael Cornford, Keelan Fadden-Hopper, RJ Fernandez, Samir Daoudi, Georg Fasching,

our communications and branding work were by Rod McLaren, Laura Silver and Conor Delahunty.

and this post was reviewed and edited by Ella Fitzsimmons.