How we communicate our experience—that market coverage of capabilities and our inherently diverse DNA beyond saying, “Hey, we’re led by a woman and two Cuban guys”—has been where we’ve spent the majority of our energy. You don’t want to know how many iterations of our creds and website we’ve gone through.
Launching with clients
This methodical approach to who we are and what we offer is one of the reasons we were able to land clients so early. Even though in this new form we were an unknown entity to many of these new clients friends, they understood what we could do for them.
This was a very measured consideration for our launch; we weren’t launching publicly until we had clients. Having clients for whom we were managing major campaigns was key to legitimizing us as an agency, and not being seen as freelancers.
Agreeing early on regarding who we are and who we are not—and being very honest with ourselves about what we can pull off as a small agency—has also been very helpful in deciding what not to pursue. When you no longer have personal income coming in, it can be too easy to chase down the wrong things. To take anything that comes your way. We will always take a call, but exit the conversations quickly when it doesn’t feel like a mutual fit.
Agencies have always been terrible at following the same advice we give our clients. But one thing we’ve been very clear about is that we cannot be for everyone.
It’s good to be small
We’ve trained ourselves to not be apologetic about being a small agency. Actually, let’s borrow a trick from real estate and rebrand “small” as “boutique.”
As a boutique creative agency that’s only been open for business for two months, clients aren’t coming to us for what a holding company would do; they come to us wanting badass creative that will produce an outsized market reaction. One of the big benefits of being small is that we don’t really believe in a scope of work. We believe in building partnerships with reasonable clients based on people, time and objectives, which can be applied both to project- and retainer-based engagements.
If an agency is basing its entire fee and model on a scope of work, the team inherently does not understand digital, social and cultural relevance. New social platforms appear overnight. Best practices change with algorithm updates. It’s not responsible to lock in specific deliverables a year out because then you’ll spend half the fee renegotiating the contract mid-year.
