It started with a…
BANG! We officially launched United Yeah today after close to 12 months in the making. It’s been a long and unexpected journey to get here, so thanks for joining us.
In this post, I’m going to share some information on how we work. If you want to learn more about who we are, Dan Godkin is in the “process” of writing something spectacular around this to share with you all soon, so set yourself a reminder to tune back in.
Small teams working in collaboration with clients. Together.
Our working model is based on teams made up of staff and clients working together on projects. It’s not a client / agency model, it’s a group of collaborators all working toward the same shared goals.
From the beginning of each project, we ingrain ourselves in a client’s business to really understand them. Their people, culture, business goals, environment and their end-user. This approach provides us with better insights, helping us find more opportunities to deliver better outcomes.
In trialling this model, we also made the decision to drop the traditional account manager role in favour of Producers who manage client, team and project requirements hands-on. Every team is led by a producer, who ensures everything moves forward.
Try and fail. Try again. Success
We fail every day, and it’s the only way for us to grow. Without failure, we don’t learn, we don’t challenge our own way of thinking and ultimately it leads us to comfortable ideas that no one is going to notice.
Operate with honesty.
It seems pretty straight forward, but we like being honest. For us, that means having real conversations about projects and outcomes. With our try:fail:success mentality, this often means discussing things that didn’t work.
Not every project is the same — adapt and change.
Having a process is good, but dropping a client into a template of steps means limiting our opportunity to innovate and provide the right working model for the requirements of the project. We explored a few ways to counter this before landing on “open workflows”, which is our approach to all projects.
This allows our teams to decide on the best approach to each stage of a project, based on all requirements.
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We don’t claim it to be a perfect system, and it doesn’t work for every client (or every agency), but for the partners we have been fortunate enough to work with over the last few months, it’s been received very positively, and we’re continuing to see improvements in the model.
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to dive into a few of these areas (and others) in more detail. I’d love to hear your own thoughts on how you’re currently working with your agency / client.
J.
