Near the end of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne has pretty much destroyed Wayne Manor and worries that he has destroyed the Wayne legacy and failed to save Gotham.
Micheal Caine's Alfred Pennyworth gently brings him back to a lesson from his childhood, recalling when Bruce first fell into a well and was surrounded by bats.
Alfred repeats the line:
“Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
It's a great line (if you've got no idea what I'm talking about, you can watch the scene here).
What running a digital agency actually feels like
It's also a fairly accurate description of what running a digital agency (or any business, or living life...) actually feels like, sometimes.
We've been doing this (learning to pick ourselves up) since Day 1 (25 October 2012).
We've worked with big brands, small charities, ambitious startups, and institutions you'd recognise. We've built things we're genuinely proud of. Some of those projects are on this website, with all the right quotes and outcomes and metrics.
The projects that don't make it onto agency websites
But there's another category of project that doesn't usually make it onto agency websites.
The tender you made it to the final round of - and didn't win. The app you built, got through the app stores, and watched sit there undeployed because the sponsor left. The platform you designed, validated with real users, and presented to a client who loved it and then went quiet.
These are the falls. And we've decided to write about them.
Not as therapy [well maybe a bit, Ed.], and not as a way of attempting to publicly change decisions that weren't ours to make. But because this kind of work - the thinking, the research, the architecture, the craft - is genuinely useful. And it'd be a shame for it to sit in a folder.
More than that: there are organisations out there with exactly the problems we were trying to solve. They deserve to know what a properly thought-through solution looks like.
What's coming in this series
Over the next few weeks, we're publishing a series of articles about projects that didn't go the way we planned. Some are tenders we lost. Some are projects that were built and never launched. Some are specs we developed off our own back because we saw a gap so clearly we couldn't not.
None of them are failure stories, exactly. They're more like unfinished ones.
Here's what's coming:
Article 1 - Who wants a community engagement platform built for them?
We've scoped a community communications platform for civil engineering and infrastructure organisations. We're looking for the right partner to build it with. (This one's already published - read it here).
Article 2 - The one that got away
We made it to the final round of a competitive tender for a fabulous membership organisation. Our proposal was good. Someone else's was better. Here's everything we did anyway.
Article 3 - No use crying over spilled milk
We built an app for a major UK safety organisation. It passed app store review. It was ready to launch. The internal sponsor left - and it never went live.
Article 4 - You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs
We pitched hard for the rebuild of an app for the National Governing Body for an Olympic sport - a project that would have put us at the digital heart of that sport. We didn't win. Here's the proposal, the process, and what we'd say to anyone with the same challenge.
These are the four we've mapped out so far. There's more to come...
We're a small agency. We work hard, we care about the work, and we don't win every pitch. Neither does anyone else who's honest about it.
The falls are part of the process.
What matters is what you do on the way back up.
Get in touch
Ross Musgrove is a Director at Bravand and Co-Founder of Fresh Meet CIC - a not-for-profit that gives young people paid work experience on real commercial projects at the Real Living Wage.
P.S. - if the Alfred / Bruce scene above was a bit emosh, I'd recommend watching the Tumbler Chase Scene from earlier in the same movie. That ought to pick you back up.
