"Wait – but why?" is a helpful inquiry to discover what we're doing, why we're doing it, whether we're taking an effective route to accomplish it, and whether it ought to be done at all. Set good defaults. It's as important to keep a list of what we won't do as it is of what we will do.
In practice
Imagine we hold weekly client meetings because that's just what agencies do. We'd ask: are these meetings actually achieving the goal of the engagement? Or are they just maintaining the status quo—communicating that we're 'busy' and 'doing stuff'? If they're ineffective, we examine why and either improve them or find a more effective substitute.
The same inquiry applies to dashboards, weekly reports, and other routines agencies take for granted.
Size the opportunity and then take actions that actually matter and move us closer to our goal—or at least a signal of success or failure. Steak over sizzle. Action over motion. Skills and aptitude over showmanship and rhetoric.
In practice
Instead of manually improving the copy of 100 landing pages for an incremental improvement, we might recommend implementing Google and Apple Pay—a more impactful action with clearer ROI. We communicate the tradeoffs and backlog the lower-impact work.
We opt for clear, actionable documents and spreadsheets over decks.
Be agentic. Demonstrate preparedness, set expectations, and tempo. Think through the plan and its dependencies. Leave things better than you found them.
In practice
We provide a User Manual and an Onboarding Document to each client at the start of an engagement. This gives us an immediate understanding of their business, processes logistics in a single pass, and shares how we like to work and communicate.
We strive to identify and communicate strategic and tactical opportunities early and often. We surface blockers before they become surprises.
We hold ourselves and each other to high standards, with honesty and compassion. We seek to find and reveal the truth, not hide it. We seek and share the truth fully and quickly, even when it's inconvenient or painful.
In practice
We treat clients' businesses, time, and money as if they were our own.
If we make a misstep, we own it, fix it, and prevent it—without defensiveness.
Assume others can't read your thoughts, that we have unique brains, and that your thinking is valuable to others and others' thinking is valuable to you. Test your assumptions, develop objective observations, and form clear hypotheses.
In practice
We add empirical proof to statements like, "Test six single image ads to raise CTR 15% and lower CPAs by 12%." We share our rationale for important decisions, and often quantify their impact.
We ask clarifying questions over playing along, and share explanations that a five-year-old can understand. We're against chart junk.