Every growing business eventually faces a question that is easy to postpone: are clients buying the founder, or are they buying the company the founder has built?
At first, those may be almost the same thing. Your taste shapes the work. Your relationships bring in clients. Your standards determine what leaves the building. But as the organization grows, the strengths that helped you build it can also become the reasons it cannot move without you.
That is why I make a distinction between a founder-centric company and a founder-dependent company. One carries the founder’s point of view. The other requires the founder’s presence to function.
My conversation with Cat How, Founder & CEO of HOW+HOW, explored that distinction through the realities of running an independent branding and digital agency across London and Los Angeles. Cat is not offering a neatly packaged answer from the other side of the problem. She is working through it now, with her husband and co-founder, Roger, and a team of about 25.
That honesty is what makes her experience useful. Great organizations are not necessarily built by people who already have all the answers. They are built by people willing to ask better questions, including uncomfortable questions about themselves.
Key Takeaways
Founder-centric companies carry the founder’s principles; founder-dependent companies need the founder to keep functioning.
Values become usable when they appear in policies, onboarding, recruitment, and everyday decisions.
Delegation requires clear authority and a founder willing to stop bypassing the leaders responsible.
Difficult moments can reveal missing processes and become opportunities to strengthen the organization.
About this article. This is episode 51 of The Business Philosopher Within You podcast, Are They Buying You or the Company You Built? | Cat How. The video above is that episode. The YouTube version is at the bottom of this post.
The video is the original work. This written version was drafted by an AI tool, videotoblog.ai, from the recording, and I edited it only lightly, so read it as a companion to the conversation rather than as something I wrote. The questions and the frame are mine, and everything in quotation marks is the guest’s, said the way they said it. The prose here is not mine.
From Critiquing Design to Building a Creative Business
Cat’s route into design was not a straight line. She studied literature, but kept returning to writing about art and design. After university, she became a design critic for a national newspaper, turning opinions she had always held into paid work.
Then she began questioning the position from which she was judging other people’s creativity.
Making something and putting it into the world takes courage. A creative person can invest an enormous amount of themselves in work that someone else dismisses in a few sentences. Cat began to wonder whether she wanted to remain the person assigning the judgment, or become the person doing the making.
When she and Roger moved to Australia, she retrained in graphic design and worked in studios, learning through practical experience and mistakes. She later returned to London for an MA at Central Saint Martins, where she deepened both her theoretical understanding and her ability to apply it.
Meanwhile, she and Roger discovered something important about their relationship: they enjoyed working together.
While Cat was studying and Roger was working at the BBC, they ran market stalls on weekends. They sold things they had made, bought and sold other items, and met people in London’s creative community. Those modest experiments eventually led to two businesses:
An e-commerce business selling the work of designer-makers and creatives, which they ran for roughly six years before selling.
A series of coworking spaces for creatives.
Those businesses taught them things that creative training often does not: profit margins, supplier relationships, and the practical mechanics of keeping a company alive.
A designer working in one of their coworking spaces encouraged them to start an agency. They had creative experience, business experience, and a network of talented people. They began with small projects and founded HOW+HOW in 2020.
The partnership also brought complementary strengths. Roger’s background in radio and broadcasting contributed an understanding of audio branding and audience behavior. He also leaned toward accounts and finance. Cat brought the creative direction.
Today, the agency works with technology companies on brand strategy, verbal and visual identity, websites, web builds, and campaigns. Its London team also supports web production as Cat grows the agency’s presence in Los Angeles.
Values Become Real When They Change How You Operate
One of the freedoms of founding a company is that you can decide what you do not want to reproduce from the industry around you.
For Cat, that includes unequal pay. HOW+HOW has a transparent, tiered salary system. The salary tiers are published in a spreadsheet pinned to a general Slack channel, where the whole team can see them.
The intention is straightforward: people at the same experience level should know where they stand, rather than wondering whether someone else earns more because they negotiated harder or felt more comfortable asking.
That is a useful distinction between a value and a statement about a value. Equality is not simply expressed in the company’s language. It is built into a system people can inspect.
The agency is also a certified B Corp, a process Cat said took a couple of years. For readers unfamiliar with the designation, B Lab’s explanation of B Corp certification provides context on its social and environmental standards.
HOW+HOW wants to work with companies that help people and the planet, and it will not take work from oil and gas companies.
These choices do more than communicate an external position. They help prospective employees understand whether the company is somewhere they want to work. Shared values become a way of bringing together people who can operate from similar principles.
For me, this is an important part of reducing founder dependency. If a principle exists only as something the founder feels strongly about, people may need the founder to interpret it. When that principle becomes a visible policy, the organization has something it can use.
A Founder’s Taste Does Not Have to Become a House Style
I asked Cat how much of her own design signature appears in the agency’s work.
She described her personal preference as expressive, colorful, and full of personality. It would be reasonable to expect that preference to become a recognizable agency aesthetic.
But Cat is proud that HOW+HOW does not have a fixed house style.
Some agencies produce work you can identify almost immediately. Their aesthetic is unmistakable. HOW+HOW takes a different approach: the work should feel distinctively like the client, not simply like the agency that created it.
One company may need a minimal visual identity. Another may need something exuberant, bright, and deliberately bold. Cat described a recent project with a strong use of pink that called for a very different treatment from more restrained work.
The process begins with strategy whenever possible:
Uncover the company’s story. Establish the narrative and the truth the brand needs to communicate.
Develop that story in words. Language gives shape to the positioning and personality.
Translate it into visuals. Explore the aesthetic that fits the strategy, rather than applying a preferred look in advance.
As the team has grown, Cat’s original style has become less dominant. The agency remains expressive, but expression takes different forms depending on the client.
This matters because a founder’s influence does not have to survive as a repeated visual formula. It can survive as a way of approaching the work: understand the client, find the story, and make the result true to that company.
Are Clients Buying Cat, or HOW+HOW?
The agency’s team includes designers, copywriters, creative directors, a strategy director, a head of copy, client services, and studio and resource support. A senior partnerships manager helps triage incoming requests.
But Cat and Roger remain central to sales, networking, and the initial conversations that establish whether a client and the agency are a good fit.
So I asked the obvious question: would clients still buy if Cat were not making the sale or driving the design?
Her answer was more nuanced than a simple yes.
Cat still has visibility across the projects that move through the studio. Her public presence also attracts business. Some people arrive because they have encountered her work, her LinkedIn presence, or a recommendation from someone who knows her.
In that sense, clients are still buying something of Cat.
But that part of her is also distributed through the team. She described one creative director, Chris, as sharing much of her taste and judgment. The alignment means that decisions do not always require her direct involvement.
The question, then, is not whether the founder contributes to what clients buy. Of course the founder may contribute. The more useful question is whether that contribution has become an organizational capability.
Founder-Centric or Founder-Dependent: Is Your Presence Necessary?
Cat offered a distinction that gets to the heart of the issue: the amount of time she spends in the business matters less than whether the business needs her there.
A founder can be highly involved because they enjoy the work and add value. That is different from being involved because nothing can proceed without their approval.
In a founder-centric organization, the founder’s taste, instincts, and point of view help shape the culture and standards. Those principles are clear enough for other people to apply.
In a founder-dependent organization, decisions, quality, or tone begin to deteriorate when the founder is absent. People wait for the founder instead of acting on shared principles.
Cat regularly tests herself with questions like these:
Can the team make a decision that fits the brand without my input?
Does the work maintain its quality when I am not reviewing it?
Have I documented my point of view, or does it remain inside my head?
Do people understand the principles, or do I keep explaining them again?
Are clients buying my personal involvement, or the organization we have built?
These are diagnostic questions, not declarations that the issue has been solved.
The eight-hour difference between London and Los Angeles makes the consequences especially practical. If London needs to wait for Cat, a decision can lose valuable time simply because she is on the other side of the world.
Yet she also knows she can sometimes improve a piece of work by stepping in. That creates a genuine leadership tension: when is intervention useful, and when does it prevent someone else from developing judgment?
I appreciated that she did not pretend this was easy. Knowing you can make something better is not the same as knowing you should take it over.
Why the Team Wanted to Keep the Founders’ Name
Cat does not necessarily want to remove herself from the brand. She wants the brand to remain true to itself without requiring her continuous involvement.
That distinction appeared in an unexpected way during the agency’s rebrand.
Cat and Roger proposed moving away from the name How & How. They wanted the company to represent more than the two founders. But the team wanted to keep the name.
The founders were the people arguing for a change, while everyone else argued for continuity.
They kept the name, but changed the visual expression from an ampersand to a plus sign, represented as H+H. To Cat, the plus sign suggested a collective: people adding to something together.
It is a small graphic decision, but it carries a larger idea. The company can retain its origins while expanding the meaning of who belongs within it.
The founders still represent the agency in conversations, pictures, and relationships. Clients often appreciate that access. The work is to make sure that the organization behind those public faces also represents the wider team.
A company does not become independent of its founders merely by changing its name. Independence has to appear in how people make decisions and carry responsibility.
How Values and Judgment Reach the Newest Hire
I wanted to understand the mechanics. How does a founder’s point of view actually travel through an organization?
At HOW+HOW, it happens through several channels.
Leadership conversations
Cat holds one-to-one meetings with her leadership team, alongside leadership meetings. Those conversations give directors access to her thinking and a place to work through decisions.
Because of the time difference, Cat and Roger get up early to create a window in which their London colleagues can speak with them.
A values deck and direct onboarding
New employees receive a values deck as part of onboarding. Cat and Roger then talk them through it, explaining what the company believes and what those beliefs mean.
The values include team spirit and expressiveness. The deck gives people something they can retain, while the conversation lets them hear directly from the founders.
Careful recruitment
Cat is particular about who joins the company. Skill matters, but so do personal values, respect for colleagues, and the ability to contribute without making everything about oneself.
This is not simply about finding people who agree with the founder. It is about building a team whose members can trust one another enough to work through disagreement.
A documented principle helps. A leadership conversation helps. But the people interpreting those principles matter just as much.
Hiring Beyond the CV: Work, Aptitude, and Attention to Detail
HOW+HOW begins with portfolios when hiring creatives. Cat looks at the work, the tools and platforms someone uses, their previous experience, and how they present themselves.
For visual design, an experienced creative leader can often identify fit quickly. Copywriting can be more nuanced because the assessment depends on language rather than immediately visible choices.
The agency also uses TestGorilla, which has been a client, for aptitude assessments such as problem-solving and attention to detail. These are not design tests. They complement the portfolio rather than replace it.
Cat described the platform’s aim as reducing reliance on CVs and the unconscious bias that can enter when people evaluate them. Her agency combines the assessment results with the evidence of the creative work.
She also pays close attention to preparation and presentation:
Can the candidate explain their thinking clearly?
Have they prepared for the meeting?
Does the portfolio demonstrate care in typography and language?
Are there spelling errors or other details that should have been caught?
For a graphic designer, beautifully considered typography is not a decorative extra in a portfolio. It is part of the evidence.
Cat connects this to a principle she shares with clients: a brand can be understood as a person. It has a way of speaking, a way of appearing, and a way of expressing itself.
A candidate’s presentation similarly offers clues about how they might communicate with clients and handle their work. Those clues are not guarantees, but they help make the discussion more concrete than a list of credentials alone.
Strong Opinions Are Not the Same as Ego
Creative businesses need people with opinions. Cat wants leaders who will challenge her, not merely wait for instructions.
That creates an interesting hiring and leadership problem. How do you distinguish someone who cares deeply about the work from someone who cannot tolerate being challenged?
Cat has become clearer about the difference over time.
When two leaders disagree because both want the best result for the team or client, they may still be working from the same underlying purpose. The disagreement can be intense precisely because they care.
Ego is different. It places the individual’s agenda, status, or need to be right ahead of that shared purpose.
The presence of disagreement does not prove the presence of ego. What matters is what the disagreement is serving.
To explore accountability in interviews, the agency asks candidates to describe a mistake they made that affected someone else.
It is an uncomfortable question. People naturally want to present their best selves in an interview. But Cat finds the response revealing.
A candidate who can acknowledge a mistake, explain its impact, and describe how they tried to repair the situation demonstrates something important. A candidate who shifts blame onto a junior colleague provides a very different signal.
Everyone makes mistakes. The useful distinction is whether someone can accept responsibility for their part in what happened.
Delegation Is Not One Big Handover
When I asked whether someone else could take on more of her role, Cat explained that the agency was looking for a managing director in London, not a replacement CEO.
The need is partly strategic and partly personal.
She wants time to market and grow the agency in Los Angeles. She also has two children and wants to be available for ordinary family moments, including breakfast and getting them to school. Calls running from early morning through much of the school routine make that difficult.
The existing pattern is not something she wants to preserve indefinitely.
But stepping back requires clarity about authority. Which decisions remain hers? Which decisions genuinely belong to someone else?
Cat wants to retain ownership of how the agency presents itself on its website, because that is central to her marketing role. She has already relinquished much of the day-to-day creative direction on projects led by the creative directors.
Recruitment is less straightforward. She and Roger share responsibility for vision, hiring, and the financial health of the business, with Roger leaning more toward finance. Hiring the right people remains fundamental to the company’s future.
Still, that does not mean Cat needs to make every hiring decision. The questions become more specific:
Does she need to be involved in recruiting freelancers?
Should her involvement focus on director-level appointments?
Could London recruitment sit with London leadership?
Should she concentrate on building the Los Angeles team?
Sales presents a similar challenge. The agency needs someone in London who can help handle UK and European opportunities without waiting for the founders on the West Coast.
Passing some sales responsibility to London would allow Cat and Roger to focus more on developing business in Los Angeles.
The pattern is gradual rather than absolute: transfer a responsibility, see how it works, and clarify where the founder still needs to contribute. Delegation is not one bucket that gets handed over all at once.
The Habit a Future CEO Might Wish You Had Changed
I asked Cat to imagine a conversation 20 years into the future with a CEO who had taken the company to new heights. What might that person thank her for, and what might they wish she had done differently?
Her answer exposed a very practical founder habit: going directly to designers instead of through their creative directors.
In the early agency, that direct connection made sense. Cat designed the original website, Roger built it, and she led the work that became the first 15 case studies. She was involved in sales, design, creative direction, and getting the finished projects onto the website.
As the organization grew, the habit remained.
If she saw something she wanted changed, contacting the designer directly felt quicker. But her creative directors kept reminding her that they were now responsible for that interface.
From the founder’s perspective, the message may be a small shortcut. From the team’s perspective, it can bypass the structure that gives leaders responsibility for their work.
Cat is trying to adjust to working through a smaller circle of leaders rather than reaching into every part of the team herself.
To me, this is one of the most concrete lessons in the conversation: you cannot give someone responsibility and then routinely route around them.
A founder may need to change habits that once made the business successful, not because those habits were wrong, but because the organization is no longer the same size.
What Success Looks Like From the Inside
From the outside, a growing creative agency can look exciting and glamorous. I wanted to understand what that picture leaves out.
Cat described a particularly difficult period when the agency closed its Lisbon office.
The business had started in Lisbon and later established a London presence. When Cat and Roger decided Lisbon was no longer right for the business, they offered employees the possibility of moving to London or Los Angeles, but the Lisbon office still had to close.
At the same time, a senior leader needed an extended period away for personal reasons. Cat took on additional responsibilities while also navigating decisions that disappointed people.
The combination was painful: more work, difficult conversations, and the knowledge that not everyone would welcome the change.
There are also less dramatic but persistent pressures. Slow quarters. Uncertainty about the pipeline. Concerns about people in the team. Questions about AI and how it changes the industry.
Growth does not eliminate these pressures. It can produce larger problems and unfamiliar responsibilities.
Cat is grateful to have Roger alongside her. She also credits journalism with helping her develop a thicker skin. Not everyone will like every decision. Not everyone will like you. Leadership requires accepting that without becoming careless about the people affected.
Her account was neither pessimistic nor polished into an inspirational success story. Difficult days coexist with genuinely rewarding work.
Turn Pain Into a Better Process
When I asked what she would offer someone going through a similarly difficult period, Cat shared a principle Roger often brings into their work: move toward the painful issue rather than avoiding it.
The point is not to glorify discomfort. It is to ask what the discomfort is revealing.
A clash between leaders, for example, might expose an unclear boundary:
Was the decision-making authority ever explained?
Did both people believe they owned the same responsibility?
Was a process missing?
Had an expectation remained unspoken?
Once the underlying issue becomes visible, the business has an opportunity to improve how it operates.
Cat also recalled her son sharing an idea about Thomas Edison and experimentation: an unsuccessful attempt can reveal another route that does not work, rather than simply ending the effort.
The useful lesson is the shift in perspective. Failure can become information. A difficult conversation can become a clearer agreement. A recurring problem can become the reason to establish a process.
That does not make the experience painless. It makes the experience usable.
Staying Grounded When Everything Keeps Moving
Cat operates in an industry shaped by constant change, while also managing a business across continents. I asked what helps her stay grounded.
Her answer was refreshingly physical.
She and Roger live near the beach in Santa Monica and walk there every day. They recently got a dog, which adds another reason to get outside. Roger runs early; Cat prefers coffee before beginning the day.
She also does weight training. The physical activity gives her a different focus, even when part of her mind is still working through business questions.
Living somewhere with an active outdoor culture helps reinforce those habits. But the sea offers something beyond exercise: perspective.
Looking out at the ocean reminds her that the business, however demanding, is not the whole world.
That matters. Building a self-sustaining organization is not only about making room for another leader. It is also about making room for the founder to have a life beyond being constantly needed.
A Company That Carries Your Voice Without Waiting for You
The central question from my conversation with Cat is not whether a founder should disappear.
It is whether the founder’s judgment can become clear enough, shared enough, and trusted enough that the company continues to express it without waiting for the founder at every turn.
That applies well beyond branding agencies. A consultancy, professional practice, or firm built around a founder’s expertise can face the same tension.
You may still be the person clients want to meet. You may still set the vision and contribute to the work. But if every decision returns to you, your influence has not yet become the organization’s capability.
Cat’s experience gives us a practical place to begin: examine what is documented, what is delegated, who is trusted, and which old habits still pull decisions back toward the founder.
The goal is not to remove your voice from the company. It is to build a company that can carry that voice without needing you in every conversation.
For a deeper exploration of this idea, read Founder-Centric or Founder-Dependent? It Depends on Whether Your Point of View Exists Outside Your Head.
