I get asked this more than almost anything else. If the work is good and the phone keeps ringing, why haven't we turned Northern Digital into a thirty-person machine? The short answer: we tried the thought experiment, and we did not like the company on the other side of it.
Ten people is a choice
Headcount is treated like a scoreboard in this industry. More people, more billable days, more “capacity,” more slides about squads. I have sat in enough rooms to know what that actually buys you: account managers who translate, specialists who never meet the client, and a calendar that is always six weeks too full.
Ten people is enough to brand, design, build, and look after a site properly. It is not enough to hide. If a page is weak, everyone in the studio knows who touched it. That pressure is useful. It keeps the quality bar where we can still feel it.
We founded the studio in 2024 in Leeds because we wanted that kind of closeness — to the work and to each other — not because we failed to raise a round.
What you lose when you scale
The first thing that goes is taste as a shared language. In a small team, you argue in the kitchen and the argument is over by lunch. In a large one, taste becomes a process: brand guardians, design QA, a PDF of rules nobody reads.
The second thing that goes is the client relationship. I still want to be on the call. Jason still wants to see the build. Natasia still wants to write like a person. Ella still wants the identity to survive contact with a CMS. That only works if there are not three layers between the kickoff and the people doing the job.
- You start hiring to fill seats, not because you found someone you would trust with a client.
- Utilisation replaces craft as the number you watch on a Monday.
- Junior work gets sold at senior prices because the pitch deck is still the founders.
- Culture becomes a values poster and a Slack emoji.
None of that is evil. Plenty of good agencies run that way and make a lot of money. It is just not the job I want to go to.
Quality over headcount
Staying small is not the same as staying still. We take on the work we can do well — Shopify storefronts, Craft builds, identity, organic SEO — and we say no when a brief needs a factory. Saying no is how the yes stays good.
Look at the work we do show. Anovair had to feel like a warehouse sale without looking like a dump bin. Aqua had to explain a platform without a glossary. Proud Mary had to taste like Leeds. Those are judgment jobs. You cannot process-map your way to that in a scrum of twenty designers who have never met the founder.
Clients notice
The clients we want already know the difference. They have been through an agency that grew faster than its taste. They are tired of being handed over. They would rather have a smaller team that remembers the brief from week one.
We still have to be commercial. Rent at West Pt is real. Salaries are real. We are not a hobby. The constraint is the point: if we cannot make the numbers work at this size, the answer is better work and better-fit clients, not another row of desks.
When someone asks why we have not “gone to thirty,” I tell them the truth. We could. We would be a different company. I like this one.
Where we go from here
We will hire when we find people we would let talk to a client on day one. We will not hire to look bigger in a pitch. If that means some briefs go elsewhere, good — they were never ours.
If you want a studio that still fits in one room, you know where we are. Northern Digital, West Pt, Leeds, LS1 2DZ. The kettle is on.
