25 lessons from 25 years in business

So why start on such a downer?

Because it’s true!

We all fail. Often. But if we’re not failing, we’re not striving.

The real lesson in failure is that it’s rarely the end of the world. Sure, every time we put in a lot of effort on a proposal that we don’t win, it hurts. It’s hard to reconcile the hours, days, weeks of effort our team pours into pitching our expertise, only to receive the knock-back. “Sorry — not right for us at this time”, “Sorry, the winning agency just seemed to get us”, or worse, the ghosting. No response at all after a few polite nudges for an update…

But here’s the thing we’ve learned,  and relearned, over 25 years: failure is rarely final.

Five years ago, we poured our hearts into a pitch for Tower Bridge. We wanted it badly. We believed we could do something special. And then … we didn’t get it.

It stung.

We could have quietly filed it away as a near-miss. Instead, we talked about what we’d learned. What we could sharpen. Where we could be braver, clearer, better.

Fast-forward to when the tender came around again.

We pulled out the stops.

We brought everything we’d learned from the first time — and everything we’d learned in the years since. This time, we won. And we launched the Tower Bridge website in November last year.

Failure didn’t close the door. It showed us how to open it next time.

So yes, failure is inevitable. But so is growth, if you’re willing to sit with the discomfort, learn the lesson, and have another go.

Don’t get us wrong — new work is exciting. Winning a pitch gives you a buzz. There’s energy in the unknown, in the fresh start, in the feeling that you’ve been chosen. But that feeling fades quickly if every relationship starts and ends the same way.

What really sustains an agency over time are the partnerships that last.

We’re incredibly lucky to have clients who’ve put their faith in us in the long term. We’ve worked with Derwent London for 13 years. We’ve run the website for the National Television Awards for nearly 15 years. Stiff + Trevillion have been at Ten4 client for 20 years this year! That still makes us pause when we say it out loud.

Because a relationship like that is a gift. There’s the obvious, practical benefit: long-term clients bring stability. Financially, yes, but also emotionally. There’s a deep sense of reassurance in knowing you have a bedrock of organisations who trust you, who understand how you work, and who don’t disappear at the first wobble.

Psychologically, that matters more than we probably realised in the early years.

When other clients come and go, as they inevitably do, those long-term partnerships give you confidence. They remind you that you’re doing something right. That your way of working has value. That you are relied on.

The best partnerships evolve beyond client and supplier. They’re built on mutual respect for each other’s expertise. On honest conversations. On a shared understanding that good work takes time, trust and a willingness to challenge each other when it counts.

Those relationships don’t just produce better work, they make the hard days easier. They give you the confidence to keep going when the industry feels noisy, uncertain or relentlessly short-term.

So yes, short-term wins feel good. But it’s the long-term partnerships that carry you through the years.

That statement isn’t always intuitive, especially in a world that often treats compensation as the ultimate signal of value. But over time, it’s the conclusion we keep coming to.

Pay is important, clearly. It’s often what attracts people. But culture decides whether you deserve to keep them.

Ten4’s culture has been shaped by a long series of practical decisions: where we worked, how we spent time together, the structure of our team, and what we chose to protect when circumstances changed.

At different points that meant sharing daily lunches around a table, continuing to prepare food even when it became inconvenient, and later accepting that remote work completely changed what “being together” looked like. What stayed consistent wasn’t the ritual itself (it was never really about the free sandwiches), but the belief that time, care, and shared moments matter. If you stop making space, culture erodes.

Culture also shows itself under strain. When people face illness, family changes or personal upheaval, culture stops being an abstract idea. It’s evidenced in flexibility, trust, and judgement on the fly, beyond what’s written in policy.

We haven’t always got this right. But one mistake we’ve managed to avoid is treating culture as a vibe: something that naturally emerges if the work is interesting and the pay is good. 

Culture is a vibe, but it’s also an effort that good pay doesn’t absolve you of. Why? Because nothing can compensate for a lack of care, trust, listening, difficult trade‑offs and active decisions. These things, just as much as pay, show your team what you actually value.

In Ten4’s early days, straight out of university and hungry to make a splash, we said yes to almost everything.

That ‘yes’ brought us some amazing early clients — Sony Music, Columbia, RCA, Southbank Centre — and into all sorts of unexpected work: creative campaigns, video production, photo shoots, strange and wonderful Flash builds, early home-grown content management systems, even a sincere attempt at making our own social network from scratch.

Much of the time, we made it up as we went along. We were fearless, fuelled by excitement, optimism, and the belief that we’d figure it out.

Over time, that kind of fearlessness became something more considered. We’re now brave enough to say no.

But why is ‘no’ also fearless? Because it requires something harder to come by than naive ambition: judgement.

It means turning down revenue in the short term to protect the work in the long term. It means being honest about what you can do well and what you shouldn’t do at all. It means resisting the temptation to chase everything, and instead committing to the things that really matter to your team and your agency.

Both take courage: the bravery to leap into the unknown, and the resolve to hold steady when a team of 20 and hundreds of clients depend on you getting it right.

If you can hold onto both kinds of fearlessness and know when to use each, you give yourself a real chance of building something that lasts.

In our experience, great work rarely comes from the loudest voice. It comes from the junior who challenges a bad idea, or the quiet one who finally shares what they’ve been sitting on.

When people feel safe enough to say “I don't get it,” “I disagree,” or “What if we tried this instead?”, the work, at Ten4, anyway, gets better.

Our developer Amelia noticed it when she joined from a large retailer: at bigger companies, decisions come from above, made in meetings you're not part of. At Ten4, she wrote, “there is space for my input [...] everyone needs to have a voice and be heard.”

Maybe all of this is easier in a small(ish) agency. And we know hierarchy is never going to disappear entirely; someone still has to make the call. But at Ten4 we try hard to separate the thinking from the deciding. For the former, the org chart shouldn't matter.

As a founding principle of the World Wide Web, accessibility is something we've always taken seriously. But we've learned over the years is that implementing accessibility works best when it's understood by everyone.

A few years ago, we decided to put everyone involved in project delivery through accessibility training. We recognised that if that knowledge sat with only a handful of specialists, it would inevitably be applied inconsistently. By giving everyone the same foundation, accessibility stopped being a niche concern and became part of how we work.

The difference was remarkable. Not everyone became an expert, and that wasn't the goal. The goal was awareness. Designers, developers, PMs and strategists all became better at spotting issues, asking questions and making better decisions. Accessibility became a team responsibility rather than a specialist discipline.

The lesson didn't stop there. When we hand over a website, responsibility moves to our clients. Accessibilty can quickly degrade if content authors aren't equipped with the right knowledge. That's why we spend time helping clients understand the basics: meaningful link text, useful alt text, clear heading structures and well-organised content.

For years, the case for accessibility has been built around inclusion, usability and compliance. Those reasons are as important as ever. But recently we've started to see another benefit:

The same practices encouraged by WCAG make content easier for machines to understand.

Search engines have always rewarded clear structure and meaningful content. Now AI systems do too. Whether it's a Google indexing a page, an AI assistant answering a question or an LLM summarising information, accessible content gives those systems both context and understanding.

Descriptive links give meaning. Heading structures create hierarchy. Alt text adds context. Semantic HTML improves interpretation. All of these best practices make content more understandable, not just for people, but for machines.

As AI evolves, organisations are increasingly focused on Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO). In many ways, the foundations of AEO look remarkably similar to the foundations of accessibility.

That's perhaps the most surprising lesson.

25 years ago, accessibility was simply the right thing to do. Today that's still the case, but it's also becoming a competitive advantage. The organisations that invest in accessible, well-structured content are making their websites easier for everyone to use, and easier for search engines and AI systems to understand.

Technology has changed dramatically over 25 years. Principles haven't. If anything, the age of AI has made the case for accessibility even stronger.

Every client wants a website informed by evidence. And every agency wants to talk about data.

Yet, in almost every project, there comes a moment where sweeping statements start to flow.

The funny thing is that many of the most common beliefs in digital (on both sides of the client/agency coin) have either been misunderstood, oversimplified, or repeated so often that they've become accepted as fact.

Take scrolling.

For years, "above the fold" dominated website conversations. The assumption was that users simply wouldn't scroll.

Yet research from Nielsen Norman Group has clearly shown that users do scroll, and spend significant amounts of time engaging with content below the fold. The question isn't whether people scroll or not — it's whether you've thought enough about the experience further down the page to make it rewarding when they inevitably get there.

Or take usability testing.

More data is always better, right? Not necessarily. One of the most cited findings in UX comes from Jakob Nielsen's research showing that testing with just five users can uncover around 85% of usability issues.

It's not because five people represent everyone. It’s because the biggest insights often come surprisingly early.

Then there are the statistics and stock-phrases that get quoted endlessly despite being difficult to verify.

"People only read 20% of the words on a page"

"Almost nobody reads introductions in emails"

"People make decisions in 3 seconds"

Some of these maxims are perfectly valid. Some are based on kernels of truth. Others have become accepted wisdom despite having little evidence behind them. The problem is it can be extremely hard to tell the difference, especially when one directly backs up or contradicts a design choice. 

The reality is that good digital work sits somewhere between evidence and experience. The best platforms aren't built by blindly following statistics or slogans. They're built by understanding which evidence matters, which assumptions need challenging, and where thoughtful experimentation can create something genuinely better.

Often it’s not scientific certainty, but the combination of evidence and judgement, that can make the difference.

Sources

Nielsen Norman Group research on scrolling behaviour and usability testing.

That's #7 — more to follow