The Art of Not Being Hard to Work With

Before I got my degree and before I entered the world of digital marketing, I spent a good chunk of time working in low-wage, client-facing jobs. I’ve flipped burgers, folded clothes in retail stores, and answered a seemingly endless queue of customer service calls. If you’ve ever survived that kind of work, it teaches you an unshakeable rule: the person on the other side of the counter doesn’t care if you’re having a bad day. They don’t want to inherit your baggage. They rightfully expect a polite, positive experience.

Building a website is complex work—it takes massive amounts of research, looming deadlines, and alignment among teams and clients. But somewhere along the way, the agency world decided that making the process complicated was a sign of sophistication.

At our agency, we look at things a bit differently. We live by a very simple line: Our team is not hard to work with.

But what does that actually mean when you’re staring down a consequential digital project?

Putting the Audience First

Whether you’re working on your company’s website or your own personal brand, it’s natural to want to tell your origin story. The important dates, eureka moments, and influential people you met along the way are all sacred to you… but they might not be vital to your audience.

Look, your corporate timeline and historical archives are great. They matter. But if we aren’t careful, those walls of text can start to feel a little self-indulgent.

When we talk about taking an “audience-first” approach to design and copywriting, we’re communicating a basic truth of marketing. It’s a gentle reminder that your audience is naturally wired to care about one specific thing: How can you help me right now? They care far less about the year your building was constructed than they do about whether you understand the problem keeping them awake at 2:00 AM.

When we recommend a specific layout or rewrite a page of text, we are acting as your audience’s proxy. The goal is to strip away the corporate ego and center the customer as the hero of the story. When your message stops sounding like, “Me, me, me!” and starts to connect with the audience’s needs, the entire dialogue changes.

Word Docs and Mouthwash

Not being “hard to work with” means holding loosely to our own preferences as creators, writers, and designers.

If I am working with a client who hates video calls because their internet connection lags out every three seconds, I’m not going to force them onto a Google Meet session just because it fits my calendar workflow. I’m going to pick up a phone and call them. If a client feels overwhelmed by shared cloud folders and wants me to email content as a standard Microsoft Word file attachment, I’ll format the Word file.

Does digital-only collaboration work? Absolutely. We build relationships with people all across the country via screens every single day. But when the stars align, we prefer to look people in the eye and shake their hands.

Sure, meeting in person requires you to tuck in your shirt and gargle another cup of mouthwash, but that raw, human interaction establishes a baseline of trust faster than any remote meeting could. It’s tactile, it’s real, it’s three-dimensional.

From Each According to Their Knowledge to Each According to Their Skills

Approval bottlenecks are the silent assassin of project timelines. We’ve all seen it happen: an agency drops a massive, text-heavy blueprint on a client’s desk and says, “Hey, look this over by Friday!” Suddenly, the business owner feels like they’ve just been assigned a dense mountain of homework on top of their day-to-day responsibilities.

To fix this, we treat client collaboration like a craft. You don’t dump the whole digital sandbox on one person. You divide the feedback loops based on actual human expertise.

When we were restructuring a digital presence for a historic winery, we didn’t force the owner to rewrite technical distribution guidelines. We had their master vintner speak strictly to the highly technical data required by wholesale retail buyers. We had the marketing director focus entirely on their patio, hospitality, and event experience pages. Then, we had the owner anchor the narrative around the deep regional history.

We also learned a valuable design trick after noticing that clients were often slow to approve text-only content. By placing their text within a visual design template, we found it helped them feel more confident about the content and made it significantly easier for them to suggest specific changes. The moment someone sees their words living inside a designed layout, the abstract becomes real.

Outgrowing the Brick and Mortar

When we launch a custom website, we intentionally hand over the keys. If a business wants to act as a hands-on digital co-captain making their own updates, we train them to fish. If they never want to look at a backend dashboard again, we anchor the ongoing optimization phase for them.

But the most gratifying moment of this whole collaborative puzzle isn’t the launch day celebration. It’s what happens months down the road.

Every now and then, a digital strategy performs so aggressively that our client literally outgrows their physical office space, or has to completely restructure their internal staff to handle the sheer volume of inbound customer interest. When digital craftsmanship triggers that level of real-world scaling, it’s a win-win-win. The audience finds the exact value they were looking for, the business thrives, and we get to see our work at its most meaningful.

If you distill the entire messy, creative, marathon journey of building a digital presence down to a single core promise, it’s this: Build real relationships, and success will naturally follow.

What would your daily operations look like if you focused on making the person across the table from you feel heard?