Are You Making The Right Compromises?
You can tell a person’s vices by their friends, and their virtues by their enemies. *
- Dan McLaughlin (*modified for inclusivity)
It’s been said that if you don’t stand for something in your life, then you’ll fall for everything. This same is true for your brand. Brands that take a stand–that celebrate their unique qualities–feel authentic. People want authentic brands.
An authentic brand has to have a compelling and unwavering vision of itself, and then figure out how to stick to it. Running any business is challenging, and when faced with the temptation to compromise — financial gain, prestige, or attracting a superstar employee from a competitor, for example — it can be easy to forget (or simply ignore) what you stand for. Good brand leaders are able to resist the seduction of such short-term, superficial rewards.
At the same time, it simply isn’t realistic to believe that you won’t make some concessions as your business grows. So, when is it okay to compromise? And when it’s clear that you must, how do you do it in a way that won’t sacrifice the core authenticity you’ve worked so hard to cultivate?
Going All The Way (While Meeting In The Middle)
One of the standards we’ve set for our clients is expressed in our tagline: “We Build Brands For Visionaries.” That’s really what we aim to do–and, more than a lofty goal for ourselves, it’s a challenge to our potential partners. “Visionary,” to us, means that a client:
- Wants to take something that already exists and make it better.
- Wants to create something new that should exist to make things better.
If they aren’t already doing one (or both) of these things, we’re making a sacrifice to work with them–it doesn’t feel visionary. Is there still a way for us to feel good about doing it?
When a potential client doesn’t have a clear vision yet, we’re okay with that. In those cases, we ask them to trust us to act as proxy visionaries for their brand. Even clients with vision don’t need to be visionary about everything–especially not in the same ways that we are. If someone is great at banking, for example, but not so good at telling their story, that’s fine–in fact, we prefer it. They don’t have to know exactly what they want, as long as they know what resonates with their brand. They hire us because they want our vision of their brand to align with what makes them shine.
Occupying this proxy role for a brand can come at a price. We’ve seen some potentially lucrative relationships go elsewhere because the client felt that they couldn’t live up to our standards. We’ve also passed on good-paying work that we simply didn’t believe in. For a small business, this kind of idealism can present a major challenge … as it turns out, genuine vision is pretty rare. And if we simply wait around for true visionaries to come to us (or for us to find them), we won’t be in business for very long.
Go For Right Fit, Not For Right Now
Another area where we encounter the temptation to compromise is Hiring. When an employee leaves, the vacuum they create can put us in a reactive state of mind. Another challenge comes up when we’ve landed a huge project and we need to hire more help. Quickly hiring a new person can feel good at the time, but we’ve learned the hard way that that’s the worst way to approach the problem. The “right now” person can turn out to be the wrong person in the long term, and then we’re back to square one.
This is where we’ve learned not to compromise. When we’re hiring, we focus on finding people who 1.) align with our core values and 2.) are humble, hungry and smart. These concepts are nothing new, but there’s no question about how important they really are.
Every person is unique. What we need to know is: do they check these specific boxes? If they do, we’re willing to be flexible in other areas. Maybe they don’t have as much experience in one area of the job … cool. We can work with that. Are they not available for a month? Ugh, not ideal, but fine. We’ll adjust and make sacrifices for the right team members. We’ve had far more success with employees who align with what we value than with folks who do things the way we already do them.
When We Align, We Shine
Creative work is fun. It’s also volatile and can make everybody feel crazy sometimes. Crafting an agreement that spells out the exact Scope of Work at the beginning of a project is nearly impossible — every project has its own unforeseen twists and turns. Our clients don’t know everything that they need. Our crew doesn’t know exactly how they’ll approach every problem. So, we do our best to be clear about these shared uncertainties. Then we all work as a team to think it through, lay out fair expectations, and agree to communicate and adjust as we go along.
When facing a change, you can face difficult choices. Is the client willing to pay more to make it happen? Can we trade out this new ask for something else that we originally planned to do but is now less relevant? Is it really a one-to-one trade, or are we cutting into our margins?
The customer can’t always be right. In many cases, being too accommodating will cause catastrophic damage to a small business. But the customer isn’t always wrong, either. If your default stance is in opposition to the client, you’ll only succeed in the short term and your reputation will suffer. Either way, it can feel like a sacrifice.
When we face this kind of dilemma, we lean toward sacrificing our profitability in favor of the client, as long as two conditions exist:
- Does it make the work better?
- Does the relationship with our client still feel like a partnership of ideas and ideals?
These are the critical issues for us. There are other questions too. Is the client asking for something that benefits all parties? Are they respecting our needs? If it feels like both of those things are true (and this aligns with what matters most — making amazing work with amazing clients), we’ll usually make the financial sacrifice on behalf of the client when we can. Promoting goodwill is a big part of maintaining our vision of why we’re in business.
What Won’t You Give Up?
In determining how and where to compromise for your brand — and where not to — it’s not simply about choosing what’s important to you. It’s about deciding what’s most important given your current scenario. And it’s crucial to understand and communicate what you aren’t willing to sacrifice. After all, these standards and choices are the things that make you you. When you know what you aren’t willing to give up, you gain the perspective to compromise without tarnishing your brand.
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This is the tenth installment of our series, “Every Decision is a Brand Decision.” Check them all out here. Original illustration by OMFGCO.
