What ten years of building a creative team across two continents taught me

I started Workspace in 2015 with my co-founder, Aba, and one belief I still hold: talent is evenly spread across the world, opportunity isn't.

In the early days we ran training sessions in Accra in rooms full of laptops. The young designers in those rooms were every bit as good as people I'd later meet in London studios. What they didn't have was access. The clients, the briefs, the trust.

Aba and I now live between London and Accra, and anyone who has lived between Africa and Europe will know that switch is felt in the body. In Accra, life is shared. In London, it's just us. I mention it because the same tension sits inside the business. Where work happens matters far less than how it's held together.

Ten years and more than 700 client teams in 22 countries later, these are the lessons that stuck.

Talent was never the hard part

People sometimes ask, carefully, whether quality is a risk with a distributed team. I understand why. But in a decade, talent has never been our biggest problem. Some of the most gifted designers, illustrators and developers I know have never set foot in a traditional agency. What was missing was the bridge between their skill and the businesses that need it.

Clients pay for reliability

This took me longer to learn than I'd like to admit. A brilliant design delivered two days late is a problem for a marketing lead with a launch. A beautiful piece that's off-brand is another round of feedback. What clients actually value is knowing the work will arrive on time, on brief and on brand, every single time.

So the number I watch most closely isn't revenue or client count. It's on-time delivery, which sits at 97%.

Systems make distance disappear

Early on, we tried to fix quality by finding better people. It helped a little. What helped far more was structure: a proper brief for every request, a project manager who owns each client, art directors who check everything before it's sent, and one place where everyone can see what stage the work is at. Once that was in place, it stopped mattering much where anyone was sitting.

It also helps that Accra and London share almost the same clock. People are often surprised by that.

Trust people before they feel ready

In 2021 I took a part-time growth role at a fast-growing organisation, and my manager there, Veronica, changed how I think about leadership. She handed me things that mattered before I felt ready, then stepped back. I've tried to do the same at Workspace. People who joined us as junior creatives now lead work for international clients, because they were trusted with real responsibility and had a system around them to catch mistakes.

I'll be honest: letting go is still the hardest part for me. I've caught myself holding on to work other people could carry, telling myself it was leadership when it was really control. A business held by one pair of hands can only grow as fast as those hands.

If you're hiring creative help

Whoever you work with, don't only ask whether they're talented. Ask how the work moves. How briefs are taken, who checks quality, how you'll know where things are, and what happens when something runs late. Talent gets you one great piece. Systems get you great work every week.

That's what we've spent ten years building. If you'd like to see how it would work for your team, book a call. And if any of this resonated, I'd love to hear from you.