Venturing into the unknown… together.

Three years ago, my sister Kelly and I were both in places in our careers where we decided we needed a change. Kelly had been contracting in the media and video production space for years, and I was a diligent public servant working policy and strategy roles. While my role had lots of good things going for it — job security, interesting subject matter, great colleagues, challenges to sink my teeth into — I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t on the right path. I knew I didn’t want to go into management, and I couldn’t really see an exciting, challenging long-term alternative where I was. And while there is so much to be said for an impartial, neutral public service, I wanted to be able to use my own voice to speak up and out about what I believed in without having to navigate the minefield that came with doing so as a public servant. 

On what now seems like a bit of a whim, Kelly and I decided to start a business together, I quit my job, and just like that, Antistatic was born. Sort of. We did some significant initial planning, writing and website-making in the first year, but for much of the year we each carried on doing separate contract roles with clients we already knew. For a while, it felt like we were committed to Antistatic, but not that committed. In retrospect, I think I had told myself “if you don’t really try that hard, it’s not such a blow if we fail and everything turns to shit”. I had one foot in my old work world and hadn’t fully committed yet.

It was late 2017 when we both decided to go “all-in” on Antistatic. This meant taking a bunch of small but deliberate steps, one after another. We started telling our separate clients we wanted to be hired together as a team, and while this was terrifying at first, no-one really batted an eyelid. It had also become clear that we had some big gaps in our knowledge. While we knew how to do the actual work, we had no clue about how to get new clients, talk about ourselves, pick a niche, develop an elevator pitch — the list goes on. We enlisted the help of Business Mentors NZ, an organisation that matches new businesses with a free mentor for a year, and before long I was meeting with my mentor, Steve, each month. 

Slowly, we overcame fears of talking about ourselves and our work, imposter syndrome (an ongoing battle) and started to build connections, expand our knowledge base, and identify and really embraced our niche. We also made the mental switch for thinking of ourselves as individuals with skill sets, to a collective entity, a mindset shift was much easier said than done! Since Kelly lives in San Francisco and I am Wellington-based, we also had to work out how we wanted to work. Over time, we’ve come up with a process works for us and accounts for our respective strengths and time zones. 

So, what exactly do we do at Antistatic, you ask? In a nutshell, we do communications and research on issues surrounding technology, the environment and social impact. We work with clients to translate complex technical issues that have big impacts on people’s lives into stories and content that different audiences can understand and connect with. Our outputs look really different from client to client, highlighting that there are so many ways to bring clarity to complex issues. 

Three years on from making our website, and two years on from starting in earnest, we’re in a really good place with Antistatic. We still exist, which is a huge achievement. While I definitely have the odd moment of panic and think it would be nice to have a “normal” job, we feel really optimistic about Antistatic’s future. Much of what we do feels like muddling through — and maybe that’s the same for everyone who is building their own thing. In saying that, it’s amazing what you can do if you just put one foot in front of the other, keep doing things in a general direction and go all in. 

Story by Anna Pendergrast

Supportive comments are welcomed.

Antistatic is a communications and research group based in Wellington and San Francisco. We work with clients across the board, but focus on a few key areas: the environment, technology, and social impact.http://www.antistaticpartners.com/

Featured photo by Jessica Papini