This year we wanted to begin sharing some of the incredible work that our clients do, by bringing you a monthly spotlight. To kick things off we sat down with Sonny and Dougie Allward from Studio Duo and asked them a few questions about themselves and their experience working with us.
What do you do?
At Studio Duo, we work mostly with non-profits to try and help them increase their revenue and make the biggest impact they can via creative services such as photography, video, and websites. We do it to help get the word out about the brilliant work they’re doing so they can attract more people, more donations and more sustainability.
What are your key values?
We have an anagram for our values which is CITE
Curious – We ask questions as we are very interested in the client. We find out more about them to enable us to quickly unlock any problems they have, that they might not have thought about originally.
Impact led – We measure the impact we have made for our clients so they know they’re getting the return on their investment and to see we are making the impact intended, which is a good way to measure ourselves as a business also. If we’re making the biggest impact in our communities, we know we’re doing a good job.
Transparent – We’re upfront about fees, and if there are any problems, we’ll raise them straight away. Our contract is straightforward and doesn’t have any legal terminology because we don’t understand why people have complicated terms and conditions ourselves.
Enthusiasm – We work on projects that we feel we can actually help firstly, but that also excite us. If it doesn’t excite us, we’re not going to do our best work, but because we take on work we’re enthusiastic about, we can really drive what we need to do.
What are your plans for the business over the next twelve months?
Our plans for Studio Duo over the next twelve months are to grow with talent. As a duo, it is very much just us two, but we’re looking to be inspired by other people and use their talents as well as ours to grow ourselves, the business and our clients.
We’re all about helping clients create the biggest impact and the way we’re looking to do that in the next twelve months is to really realign our services with what they need. Over the next twelve months, we’re going to be gathering a lot of data and asking a lot of questions to make sure we’re doing the right things for our clients and making sure we’re helping them the best way we can.
People and the planet are very important to us, so over the next year, we’re also looking to receive our BCorp certification, which is already making us think of the ways we’re working and how we can run our business better.
Why did you choose BW?
BW were recommended to us, but we chose to work with them because of their ICAEW accreditation and also the personal element of the relationship stood out to us.
What value do you think we bring to your business?
It’s good to know the numbers, we didn’t see the importance of it as much before. We have full confidence, we know it’s going to be right and it’s going to get done in the proper way. If we ever have any questions (because we do all the time), they’re answered fully and in good time.
With a previous accountant, we struggled sometimes getting answers out of them because they’d tell us contradicting things at different times. With Natalie, there’s consistency and we know we can trust her to do the work and give us the correct answers.