How I Founded and Launched My Agency Business
Year One of My Journey to Escape the 9-5
This is the first in a series of articles about how I’ve spent over 10 years working from home on my Explainer Video agency, Cartoon Media.
It was always meant to be a lifestyle business for me, meaning that I can work the hours that I want, and I tend to average about 3 hours’ work a day on it.
Because I’ve not gone down the high growth route, my experiences may not be what some people are looking for, but if you want to quit your day job and create your own lifestyle business that pays the bills, you’ll find plenty to help you here.
Since launching Cartoon Media in October 2012, I’ve made some significant mistakes, some that almost killed the business, but I’ll cover them in a separate post shortly.
In January 2012, I was the manager of a technical team in an insurance company but had decided that, after almost 20 years in insurance, I wanted to leave and start my own business. One of the reasons was that I found the whole thing soul-destroying on a daily basis, but that’s another story for another time.
As luck would have it, the company was bought by an American firm who promptly arranged the culling of a number of middle managers in March, one of whom was me.
Needing some short-term work, I sent an email to my contacts in the industry and was offered a 1-year contract, ending in April 2013. I was able to work both on site and at home during this time, so my goal was to set up a business that allowed me to work fully from home, and would at least pay the bills by that time.
For a couple of years before I was made redundant, I’d been running a blog helping comic writers and artists market their work. I’d also interviewed various writers and artists, some of whom worked for Marvel and DC (I was a massive reader of comics in the 80s and 90s).
I decided that I wanted a business that leveraged the skills of talented artists, and had been considering an online T-shirt business, but a business mentor I had at the time asked me if I’d heard of Whiteboard Animation videos, where a hand would draw simple cartoon images along with a voice track.
Whiteboard Videos had recently become a thing, starting with the RSA Animate videos which were produced by a company called Cognitive Media in 2010. Similar companies started sprouting up in 2011 and 2012, and were calling them by various names, including Doodle Videos, Whiteboard Animations and Explainer Videos. They could be used for marketing, training, or pitching an idea.
It was the early days of a new movement, showing that there was a growing demand for producing these videos, so I decided in May 2012 that this would be my ticket to freedom.
But at that point, I didn’t have a business name, website, a means of creating the videos, or artists who could do the work, since my drawing skills are shoddy to say the least.
While some companies were recording live videos of them drawing the doodle images, then speeding it up and adding a voice track, I found software called VideoScribe that could produce Whiteboard Animations by emulating the hand. You just needed to load in your images, voice track and music, adjust the timing of each frame to match the voice track, and voila – you’ve produced something that could be exchanged for cold, hard cash.
Although VideoScribe came with its own library of clip art images, enabling you to create a video from scratch in a couple of hours (or a few minutes if you used on-screen text instead of a voice track), I made the early decision that we would only produce videos based on custom-designed images. This would enable us to charge more than the companies who were clearly only using clip art because their videos looked the same as their competitors, especially the boring, slightly creepy ones that involved people with no faces.
The problem was that you couldn’t just feed in any image into VideoScribe and expect it to draw properly. It needed to be a vector image that had 2 layers – one for the image itself and one with the path for the hand to follow, so that it drew the image logically. This meant that any cartoonist that I hired to work for me had to learn how to create the vector images in the correct dual-layer format.
At that point, I didn’t know anyone off the top of my head who would be willing to work on my videos. I’d previously been hiring freelancers for some work on my blogsite through freelance website called Elance, which was later bought by Upwork, so I scoured the site for good quality cartoonists and connected with a few of them.
I was very lucky in that I only had to trial 5 cartoonists to find 3 who were willing to learn how to use VideoScribe and could produce images at the right price point to make it a profitable venture. The same three cartoonists have been working for me on a freelance basis ever since and have never let me down. It’s rare to find great quality freelancers who you can trust in the long term, so I was blessed to find them.
I needed a website name and bought the domain CartoonMedia.com. I’m not sure why I chose that at the time, but it sounded good to me and summed up what we were doing. One of the cartoonists produced a great-looking logo for me, and I used that logo for the first 8 years. He also produced the images for a promotional video that we produced to advertise the site, which I displayed on YouTube and at the top of my website’s homepage.
To create the Cartoon Media website, I hired the web designer who had previously created my blogsite, and he did a great job, working from July-September so that I could launch the business on 1st October 2012.
Almost all of my sales have come from phone calls, so the website displays our phone number and a contact form which includes a phone number field so that I can directly call anyone who enquires.
I created 3 packages – Silver, Gold and Platinum, and have been using those 3 names ever since, though the packages have evolved over time. Initially, all three packages covered Whiteboard Animations, but a couple of years later we started to produce 2D animation videos (with computer-generated, rather than hand-drawn, people, objects and backgrounds), and these became the Platinum package.
I needed to get some early wins, so aimed to price low and steadily increase my charges over time.
The process was that I would be the sole contact for our clients, managing the projects and writing the scripts and storyboards, while the cartoonists and freelance voice artists would produce the images and voice tracks. In the early days, none of our videos had music, so I added that as an option later.
I found the first few voice artists on Google and Elance, choosing ones who were high quality, but at a price I could afford, since the charges fluctuated wildly.
Although there wasn’t a massive amount of competition at the time, not many people had heard of Doodle Videos, Whiteboard Animations or Explainer Videos, so I started blogging a couple of times a week on the Cartoon Media website to try to get it ranking for these keywords (for the people who were searching for them) and explain what these things were and what they could do (for those who didn’t have a clue).
I hired a woman to run the Twitter account for the business, and for the first year the majority of our social media activity was on Twitter. She would mainly post links to articles that I’d written (usually posted on repeat every couple of weeks), and I would send her batches of separate posts in a Word document that she would then spread over time.
Had I launched the business a few years later, I’d have probably focused more on Facebook and Instagram, but back then, they were mainly used for social communication. LinkedIn would have also been a good choice, since I was selling B2B (business to business) but I didn’t trust anyone enough to look after my LinkedIn profile for me and didn’t treat the platform as seriously as I should have.
The first 3 months after launch was almost completely dead for business, but I was still working my contract for the insurance company so at least I had some source of income. From October to December 2012, the company generated a grand total income of £432.50. Not exactly inspiring!
However, in January 2013, things were taking off. The website started ranking for my target keywords and enquiries started coming in from the UK, Europe and the US, some from Twitter and some directly from Google. The company behind Videoscribe, Sparkol, also ran their own directory of Doodle Video companies, so I paid a monthly fee to be displayed. This became a significant generator of business because it attracted targeted buyers who already knew what Whiteboard Animation videos were and knew that they wanted one. If you can attract potential customers who at least understand what you’re selling and how it will help them, you’ve navigated a major hurdle in the sales process.
From January to March 2023, the company took £7,528.12 of business. Bearing in mind that I was charging only £495 per minute of Silver package video (black and white) and £695 per minute for Gold (full colour) the profit margin was fairly slim after I’d paid the cartoonist and voice artist, but when my contract with the insurance company came to an end in April 2013 I was then able to focus full time on the business.
My working hours with the insurer had been decreasing steadily over the previous few months as the project had been comping to an end, and I’d decided to only charge them an hourly rate for the work done rather than the standard weekly consulting rate (not the best decision money-wise, but it meant that I could work on my business guilt-free). Therefore, because my consulting income had been gradually reducing for the final few months, the pressure was now on to make the business a success.
Enquiries were coming in steadily and I was handling up to 10 projects at a time. In my first year, I took £38,521.19 in turnover, and after the expenses of setting up the business, the profit was less than half of that, so I couldn’t have survived on that had I not been working elsewhere for the first 6 months.
But £20,237.70 of that turnover came from the fourth quarter of that year, which goes to show what can happen when you start to get traction. It then shortly became the norm to generate between £5,000 and £15,000 of turnover a month.
Looking back now, I hadn’t increased my prices early enough. I was working my butt off on multiple projects that could have generated twice as much. Plus, I was pricing so low that I was putting off larger companies with bigger budgets. Now, those kind of companies generate most of my business, but you live and learn.
If you’re thinking of launching your own business, I hope you’ve found this helpful. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Let me know if you have any specific ideas for future articles.
And if you know anyone who might find this helpful, please forward it to them - thanks!