In September 2006 I decided to leave the practice I was working for.<\/p>\n
The terms weren’t bad — no worse than what colleagues were getting in other studios — but salaried technical staff in Spain were not, as a rule, well paid, and the working conditions were nothing to write home about. Looking at the landscape, I concluded that the way to move forward was to set up an office of my own.
\nThere was also the matter of a couple of commissions I had been doing in the evenings, on top of the day job. They were growing, and I was going to have to choose: turn them down or give them more time. I chose the second.<\/p>\n
My first thought was that this was a complicated undertaking and I didn’t want to face it on my own. My first business partner turned out to be a friend: Carlos, who worked in advertising and was between jobs at the time. I put it to him that we set the thing up together, each covering his own field. What we were after was an interdisciplinary team and, let’s be honest, some company.<\/p>\n
We got stuck in. Between us we came up with the name, designed the logo (that was mostly Carlos), the corporate identity, wrote the business plan and settled on a legal structure. Given our circumstances, a sociedad civil<\/em> (SC) looked like the sensible option — roughly Spain’s version of a general partnership, with the partners personally liable.<\/p>\n Almost immediately, though, it went wrong. The problem was a difference of view on investment. Carlos was for spending the bare minimum. I took the line that you have to speculate to accumulate, and that we needed to buy the latest computers. That, and one or two other things, meant that within a few months Carlos decided to jump ship. I paid him his share of the equipment we had bought together, moved out of his garage — for a while, our garage — and carried the office home. It was an amicable divorce, and the proof is the rather good sculpture he gave me not long ago in memory of our beginnings, which is the image on this post. It was also the start of a hard stretch. I was up to my neck in it by then, and I was starting the office the one way I had not wanted to start it: on my own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" September 2006: I left a salaried job to set up my own office, and I had no intention of doing it alone. How the partnership with my friend Carlos began, and how it ended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-en","category-klicstudio"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n