Why You Should Only Work With Good People.
Caution: naughty words.
Hear me now, believe me later: focus on finding a creative partner that represents your business goals and fits with your values or risk being stuck in a frustrating and unproductive collaboration that holds your business back.
Sunk cost bias forces some businesses to stick with a creative agency or studio even if they're not a good fit or worse, one (or both) may become unresponsive and difficult to work with.
This kind of mismatched relationship can happen because of a lack of transparency or communication skills on the part of the studio, and all too often, a lack of selectiveness in choosing clients and projects that align with their own service offering and values.
With so much time, money, and effort already invested, a lot of business owners feel like they should continue in order to make the previous investment worthwhile.
Typically people don’t bounce around from agency to agency, so it’s a good idea to find someone you like working with and stay with them. Good companies plot their team members on the Cultural Fit vs. Performance axes and monitor their growth over time, and hiring a creative agency or designer should be no different — it’s important for you to hire according to their cultural fit with your business, just as much as their performance.
That is, unless you’re happy to pay competent assholes?
During difficult economic times and shrinking budgets, bullshit radars are on high-alert for insincerity. People gravitate towards other people that they love and trust.
If you’re tired of these one-way exchanges chipping away at beating hearts and personalities living within this philosophical construct called consumer capitalism, you’re not alone!
When we started Happy Medium Studio, our founding principle was to 'only work with good people'.
But what does that mean?
We believe that when it comes to creativity, it's just as important to be approachable as it is to be serviceable.
Working with good people means finding synergy; in values, ideas, goals and in the spirit of collaboration. While some clients might consider it a win by saving cash and working with a vendor that just treats every client like a transaction — these ‘wins’ have a negative effect on the quality of the work and working relationship going forward.
In our experience, people are looking for someone they can trust — they are looking for the care factor.
It makes sense to us that working with a good designer and having a good experience with a creative agency is worth the investment.
At Happy Medium, we believe there are no problems, only solutions yet to be found. We listen twice as much as we talk. We communicate. We collaborate. We are responsive.
To us, every project is unique and has unique meaning for the person behind the idea. That’s why we don't do rinse and repeat. By the same token, we seek out clients that look beyond the billable hour. We love to work with those ambitious enough to turn their side-hustles into reality, and are willing to invest with just as much commitment.
Being easy to work with doesn’t mean that the key to winning business is to necessarily be the most enthusiastic, or to make promises you can't keep.
‘Things of quality have no fear of time’, and that should apply to creative partnerships as well.
We believe good clients are willing to pay for deep expertise, and the right clients will also be willing to pay for the right fit, too.
Read more about Our Process.
