Elements of a Successful Agency-Client Communication - Garrett Winder, Ariel Kidwell - S2 Episode #4

Today we are joined by two special guests who run a very successful agency together - Garrett Winder, Owner & Ariel Kidwell, Director of Strategy at Goodwork. They are a team of expert developers helping design agencies build things for web and mobile. 

Garrett has a proven track record for leading high-quality large-scale web projects for clients like PBS Frito Lay and Tito's handmade vodka and Ariel is a seasoned marketer and consultant who specializes in helping businesses achieve sustainable growth.

Discussion points - 

Q1 - Smash a myth, bogus strategy, or misconception. What do you guys want to set the record straight on? What do you want to clear up? 2:19

Q2-  A lot of agency struggles with managing expectations, how do you manage those boundaries? Are there some tips and tricks that you can share that you guys have found that make it work? 03:36

Q3-  When the clients start getting angry or agitated because of the deadlines not being met, How do you handle such a situation? 7:51

Q4 - How do you make sure that your clients deliver what they owe you so you can stick to that timeline without padding it so much? 13:21

Q5 - How your experience has been in working with the other agencies?  How the relationship has been? What did you enjoy more? What were the pros and cons, of working with each of them, like, what are the wins? And what are the losses for you? 15:34

Q6 - Do you have you know, a process in which you make sure that your team is have been utilized for a certain amount of time when the institution happens? 20:21

Q7 - How do you work with the team, outside of email and phone calls and stuff like that? Are there tools that you guys have found that you've used? 22:56

Q8 - How do you tackle your quality checks? 30:08

Q9 - How did you start this business? How did you get into this? What's your what's your origin story? 32:52

Q10 - What's exciting you about the future? 34:52

Show notes - 

• We really focused on process, because we figured process has to at least be the foundation for that, right? Like, you have to be able to have expectations not only within your company but also setting them with clients so that everyone can at least start aligned. - Ariel Kidwell 05:17
• If you really sit down and have a thorough gut check with your team on what's realistic, and also with the client. What's realistic for them? When can they deliver the materials that you need? When can they do realistic QA turns and content entry, you can kind of set these milestones and timelines that are achievable- Ariel Kidwell 06:11
• Wishful thinking is one of the worst things you can do in our industry because it rarely happens the best way, you always have to be proactively working towards the worst-case scenario. - Ariel Kidwell 09:18
• We do have a pause clause, so there's a certain amount of time, but if they don't get back to us, we just say, we're going to take it off of our schedule, we'll move on with the other things we're working on. - Garrett Winder 14:00
• They (agencies) could say, Hey, we're doing this in July, and July comes around, and they say, actually, we're doing it in November. And all of a sudden, we have a hole in our schedule. So that would be one of the one of the dark side of working with the agencies. - Garret Winder 17:32
• We found that the more we work with these agencies, the more we learned from each other, the more they really appreciate the more we give them to help make the project better. - Ariel Kidwell 18:55
• We actually moved from Trello to GitHub for so that these projects are tied to the code changes, which helps us a lot because our clients are long-term. You know, something can happen in two years where we kind of want to look back and see oh, that was this project and we touched to this thing. - Garrett Winder 24:58
• A tool that I use that I've told so many of our agency friends about and they love is called To Do. It's an app, you can have it on your phone, you can use it in the browser, it's so simple, but it can help so much keep track of all the little emails and status updates. - Ariel Kidwell 26:35
• As clients get more advanced and mature with websites in general, we keep seeing that relationship between us and them change.- Garrett Winder 37:01

Myth Busted - Agencies have to be chaotic, stressful, and reactive in order to keep their clients happy.

Links - 

Garret’s LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettwinder/ 

Ariel’s LinkedIn-