In April 2010, WeAreVI closed its doors. We had a short but pretty amazing life as a company: in the two and half years we were open, we were featured in a ton of industry mags, won awards for innovation, were named one of the top five agencies to watch out for and worked for some great brands, from Vauxhall to eConsultancy. We built up an impressive team of 25 and we were nearly bought out twice.

So what went wrong?

WeAreVI was both too large and too small. Though we were pitching for a sizeable amount of business every month, we weren’t getting the conversions, partly because we were a new agency and new to the pitching process. And asking our team to slog away, churning out mom and pop projects, was unsustainable and terrible for morale.

As director, I had a few options: downsize the business, ride it out in the hope of business getting better, look to be acquired (we did have some offers) or close the agency. Some of the staff were in favour of downsizing, which would have been very painful and meant a lot of redundancies. There was no way to be sure we weren’t just prolonging the inevitable. We could have tried to ride the storm out, but that would have meant taking on dozens more of those demoralising small projects. As for selling the company, it would have meant I’d personally have to work in an industry I’d become disillusioned with for another two years, which wasn’t very appealing.

Reluctantly, after discussing the situation with the staff, I chose the last option. I had limited finances available to keep the business afloat and it would have been irresponsible to carry on with no money available to provide for staff and get projects completed.

I’m very proud of the fact that we managed to complete so much of the outstanding work to such a high standard. The projects we didn’t complete we offered to settle or refund. Unfortunately, there was one client we couldn’t satisfy no matter what we did, but all I can say in respect of that case is: nightmare clients that don’t respond to emails for months on end, or are too busy to work on their project with you, should be dropped. Sometimes you need to stick up for yourself and say enough is enough.

This has been a sad post to write, but I’ve been meaning to do it for some time now. It only remains to say thank you to all our clients for entrusting us with your brands and your projects. We had a great few years. To my great regret, a combination of prevailing economic conditions and the particular DNA of our business made continued operations unfeasible.

Damian Kimmelman