At GLAD WORKS, we believe that doing business isn’t one-dimensional. You have to step outside your own area of focus at times in order to cultivate and excel within the relationships that will ultimately support your business success. That’s why we make it our business to know our client’s business. We invest time to understand their industry so that we can gain insight into their daily challenges as well as the ones they face in the future. This is how we make customers happy and create lasting relationships.

This is how we become an extension of your internal team.

We frequently hear from our clients that they value our obvious commitment to helping their business grow. They appreciate that we spend the extra time to align our thinking with their goals rather than advancing our own creative agenda regardless of whether it fits their needs or not. This seems to be something that some agencies do.

If you’ve ever seen a totally awesome, gorgeous commercial but been unsure of what’s being advertised, you’ve witnessed an agency that’s working to improve their own reputation rather than the client’s. Sure, a great deal of talent created that commercial, but did it make any sales for the client if customers don’t know what the ad was for? 

Before any ideas are generated by anyone at GLAD WORKS, we study first. This is especially true when we encounter an industry we’re not already familiar with. We research our client’s business; ask them a million questions, read trade publications, blogs and journals. We gather all the information we can and pour it all into a single document that is then shared with the team. Everyone from copywriters and designers to photographers and coders participate in a discussion as we talk about our insights into our client’s challenges and opportunities. After that, we start talking about where our creative input can take them.

We do all of this preparation because it’s worth it. We want our clients to come back to us for more projects, so putting in a little extra time up front to learn about them and truly understand them is absolutely a wise investment. Happy clients will return, and the only way to make them happy is to do a really good job. The only way to do that is to make darn sure we’re serving them in the best way possible.

Even when we have an idea that we’re in love with, we still don’t automatically run with it. We think carefully about whether our ideas have the potential to help meet the client’s goals because it’s our responsibility to come up with solutions. Real ones.