As I write this, I realize that I’ve been co-running this agency with Tammy for about a decade now. It doesn’t seem that long at all, and to be honest, I think that’s because we’ve been lucky. I can truthfully say that about 99% of our clients have been great – some of whom have even become our close friends.

With a necessity to work with a wide variety of personalities and individuals with various job titles, it’s become important for us to whittle down not only how we can foster a great relationship with our clients, but how clients can help improve it as well. Here is what I believe to be a very concise list to help clients get prepared to work with an agency like ours.

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Are you thinking about working with a Marketing Agency for the first time?

It’s almost like a blind date – you’ve got expectations but you’re not sure what might happen. It’s new, it’s exciting, and more than anything, it’s full of the unknown. Plus, there’s the very real pessimism that it might not be what you want it to be.

Well, throw those blind date jitters aside. We have some good basics you should know about working with a Marketing Agency like ours. Here are the top five things you should expect from your relationship with your new crew of marketers.

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Our team is driven – our aim is to get you results. That is why our campaigns begin with creative strategies that are born of research and planning. The truth is, your success is our success, and our clients trust us to deliver on quality work poised for big time results:

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Let’s face it, we spend the majority of our conscious lives at work, so whatever we choose as a career needs to be meaningful. And one aspect, which helps to make for a more engaging career, is the culture at your workplace. Culture is important, it ensures employees are given the room to grow and reach their full potential, in addition to being a place people are excited to be a part of. To be truly creative, it’s equally important to think about the environment you surround yourself with, as it is to think about your internal creativity.

Ask any creative person out there, ‘why is it so hard to be creative,’, and you will receive a multitude of answers – I don’t have a muse, no one around me is creative, my iPod is broken so I can’t listen to music, I sit in a cubicle all day and never see the outdoors. When it’s your job to develop a creative campaign, it can be difficult to be creative when all you see are three beige cubicle walls all day. It’s only when you can get outside, or retreat into a good book, when you can finally get inspired and get your creative juices flowing.

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It’s been over 4 years since I started my career, and I can say wholeheartedly, that without support from mentors, friends, and family, I’d be as lost as the day I graduated. Most things on this list are learned from this support network, and some through my own mistakes and failures. I hope this is as helpful to you as it has been to me.

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Whenever I’m creating something that I feel is significant, I often get that tingly feeling inside. It’s a pendulum-like balance between fear and excitement and although it’s disconcerting, it belongs in my creation process.

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When Tammy moved My Loud Speaker to Vancouver, we drafted a new business plan from inside a cramped room in the corner of our mother’s basement. As many expected, the initial years were caked with failure, disappointment, and more failure. Friends were lost, feelings were hurt, and sometimes it felt like we were drowning in a pool of mistakes.

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In order to narrow down the perfect set of Panelists and Live Case Study Contributors of the upcoming XYBOOM Conference we’re running, I’ve had to do a series of interviews with various types of people from all sorts of backgrounds and industries. One thing I’ve learned during this process: there are so many amazing people out there doing some awe-inspiring things.

I have learned so much just by speaking to these individuals in these short interviews, but the most interesting thing to me is the sheer consistency in the way the most impressive people presented themselves. For many, you can see the level of thought and sophistication put into each answer, and the fluidity in how they angle and answer any given question. However, for the most undeniably impressive individuals, each and every one shared these four common characteristics:

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For those of you that know me, you know that I come from a Human Resources background, and that, in addition to My Loud Speaker, I’m also the Co-Founder of an HR-centric non-profit, XYBOOM Intergenerational Organization. The organization runs an annual conference around the topic of intergenerational relationships in the workplace. It sounds almost irrelevant to my work at MLS, but how I ultimately landed in the marketing industry was really unexpected and complicated – it took a few random twists of fate which, from what I hear, is very common for careers nowadays. So, even though I really love what I do in marketing, it’s understandable that a lot of what I really do at MLS is centered around running a small team of passionate and talented young people. And, in doing so, I’ve learned a few ways to keep them learning and engaged, and for those of you who manage teams, you know this can sometimes be a difficult feat. I’ve highlighted three of our most common practices:

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