One of the most common questions I get asked when talking to other businesses is ‘Do you work with companies outside Aberdeen?’. It would be easy to assume and settle for work just the variety on your doorstep alone - your know the region, the sectors, the people and the companies involved - finding your kindred business spirits is always easier if you share more in common.

To a certain extent of course, this is true, we do work with many regional clients across a variety of sectors and love doing so. However, growth has many guises and from the start, spreading our geographic footprint was central to our plans - plus I love a wee road trip to meet a new client!

But how to do it? When you are a seen as being ‘out in the sticks’, you are fighting a solid preconception, so you have to work hard to dissuade this. The conventional, but expensive, way is to physically commit to another region. Get an address, move to/ hire someone in the area, full-on marketing and spend real time and show leather meeting people - there is much to admire about this. However as a start-up, that was an expensive route and would stretch our ‘new client’ BD resource too thin - little old me (the only time the word ‘thin’ and ‘me’ will be in the same sentence).

An alternative way, and something we have stuck to ever since, is to get involved with business organisations and sectors who are generally more naturally spread across locations and who are generally more agnostic to your own location.

Let’s look at one such sector. Generally speaking, the smaller SME food and drink businesses we thrive with are not concerned about where we our based. They care that we care. They care that we will commit. They care about the work.

And then COVID happened and the idea of remote working as part of a clients expectation, only increased. That’s not to say that we don’t visit more distant clients at key stages of a project - nothing quite like seeing your client in their environment, doing what they do with the people they do it with. The expectation to travel multiple-times across a project is just not the accepted norm anymore.

These past couple of years alone, we have worked with a variety of businesses based outwith the North East of Scotland - from Glasgow to Dumfries, Falkland to Tbilisi, Edinburgh to Rotterdam, Manchester to Osaka we are working and building relationships with people in any and all time-zones consistently.

As an aside, one of our core values is ‘Corporate to Boutique’ - meaning that we want to be as comfortable working with a boutique start-up as we are with a larger companies c-suite. This approach to geographic growth is from within that wheelhouse.

— Mark

How have you increased your geographic footprint? Is this important to you? What challenges have you had to overcome in doing so? I’d love to hear your stories too. Comment, email or arrange for a coffee soon, I always around - though may have to be via video of course ;)

mark@fortytwo.studio.

Follow the latest from FortyTwo Studio on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.