We don’t mean to speak ill of everyone in the industry. We’ve worked with some truly brilliant creatives, who do stunning work at fair prices. But also there are many bandits. You and probably every other owner you know will have stories about sloppy work.
In a way too this is a confessional. We broke some of these rules ourselves, and part of growth is recognizing why and taking a new and better approach.
- Self honesty
> Sometimes the problem is you not knowing what you want, not trusting the experts, and/or
- Fee structures, retainers and mandatory minimums
> Why are you paying before the results? It’s not to say this should never happen. People need food on the table. But you should never be in a situation where you’re pre-paying too far ahead, nor being locked into ongoing payments that may not be tied to real value. - Are they doing a business assessment like us
> Intuitions fail, often and for all kinds of reasons. No two businesses even in the same industry are exactly alike. No two customer bases are exactly alike, or sometimes alike at all.
- Body of work (experience)
> It’s not just about having testimonials and a nice portfolio. It’s about the experience of wrestling. It’s about having a sense of failure and learning why things failed. I’ll take the guy who has a filing cabinet of post-mortems about the many things that didn’t work over the guy who never took chances. You want to Chesterton’s Fence the status quo.
- Continuing education, are they staying updated in their field and in tune with how the industry has changed
> What was true for Google even six months ago may no longer be true. But there are trends and there are stable baselines. New tools emerge that are wildly useful, and some that are wildly overhyped.
- They are clear about what they are good AND bad at (like us)
> You can be good at many things, but even Michael Jordan had to pick a sport. Maybe he could have been a Hall of Famer at baseball. But you’ll always be splitting attention, and you’ll frequently overcommit (something we’re both guilty of historically). You need to learn your limits, identify what you can do that few others can do at that same level, and hone those strengths. This is why we don’t have an extensive menu of things we offer clients. The cook is never going to make the thing someone orders once a month as well as the special he serves up every night.
- Man in the arena (someone who has actually worked in businesses before and not just a marketing grad)
> No disrespect to those who went to business school. But the reasons businesses fail isn’t often for reasons you find in the textbooks. What makes your website fail
Here is what a footnote looks like1