I live in Wicklow Town, which is 30 miles away, but Adrian (van der Lee, the co-director) lives in Sandymount, which is two miles away, so we both have different time clocks. One of us would be in the office by eight o'clock. It's a habit we got into when we started up the business. It's your neck, so there's always something to do. There are invoices to be filled out, briefs to be written and there's accounting to be done - when we were working for other people, we were just working on projects. It's also great to get work done before the phone rings, because when that happens all hope of sticking to a schedule evaporates.

Advertising agencies can have many different departments and media production units, but we are creative-led - we are creative in strategy. We either out-source or partner up with various media companies to produce the ads.

We have nine people here who generally look after their own projects. We want to provide an environment where people can develop their own work, yet we obviously want to keep an eye on what people are doing. Primarily, we want to have an atmosphere where people will say "I'm not really sure whether this is working, what do you think?" rather than feel they have to hide things from us or be very precious about their work.

As we have so many projects that we're working on at the same time, we don't have a regular day and I would say that one of the pluses of the job. Better to talk about a regular job.

We have a lot of different types of clients who approach us. Sometimes a public relations company will phone us and say "we have a client who wants to run an advertising campaign. Can you help?" Other times, it would be clients like the Euro Changeover Board, Lifestyle Sports, Online.ie, who are on our books, and we would suggest certain ideas to them.

Once it has been agreed an ad is needed, we would agree a brief with the client. For example, we're done an ad for February 9th for the euro which is telling people that there is a year to go before the Irish pound is withdrawn.

Before we started on that, we would have agreed very clearly with the changeover board who we should be addressing and what we should say. If you have a clear brief before you go to the client to present the ad, and they say they don't like it, then you can go back to the brief and see what it was about the ad they didn't like. I don't mean that in a confrontational way, but is does mean that when we go back to change it we can look at the original and see what it is that they feel didn't meet the brief we agreed. That way we can very quickly find out if they just subjectively don't like it. Subjectivity can be the enemy!

We say to clients that they can't expect to love every ad the first time it's presented to them. Of course there will be things they don't like and things to be changed. Ninety nine times out of a hundred you can strip an ad back to the bones of what it is trying to say, who it is trying to say it to and what it wants to achieve.

The creativity, on the other hand, is a process that is, to all intents and purposes, no different from carpentry or bricklaying. They are skills that achieve an end. I'm not saying creativity isn't important, but it is a communication skill. So if a client continually rejects every ad a competent creative team presents, it means something at the very beginning is wrong, ie. the brief.

I like my job very much. It's very different to the job I did when I started in advertising. It's both frustrating and fulfilling, just like many other jobs can be. If it were just fulfilling I'd be suspicious.

In conversation with John Cradden