What If the Alternative Wasn’t a Better Agency — But a Different Kind of Person?

If the structure itself is what produces the pattern, then a better version of the same structure will produce a better version of the same result.

So what would have to be different?

I’ll tell you how I got here, because the answer didn’t come from a business strategy. It came from getting scammed.

Early in my career, I paid someone $100 to build my first website—money I didn’t have. I got a template that didn’t work. No support, no follow-up. Just gone.

That’s a small story. But it taught me something that shaped everything after it: I know exactly what it feels like to trust someone with something that matters and have them disappear.

Around that same time, I was being taught to oversell. Promise big, figure it out later. Every piece of advice I found said the same thing — hype, urgency, pressure. I tried it. It never felt right.

So I learned everything myself. Tracking, analytics, tag management, ad platforms — not because I wanted to be impressive, but because I didn’t want to promise something I couldn’t deliver.

Somewhere along the way, I started noticing what I was actually doing in the work — not what I thought I should be doing, but what I naturally gravitated toward.

When I set up someone’s tracking, I found myself explaining what I was doing and why. Not just configuring tools — making sure the person on the other side could read their own data afterward.

When I evaluated whether to work with someone, I found myself asking about their responsiveness. Not to test them — because if they weren’t going to engage with the data, the best setup in the world wouldn’t help. I’d rather say that upfront.

When I could see something that would help someone — whether we were working together or not — I said it.

When I didn’t know something, I said that too.

And when a client’s real problem was deeper than tracking — when the business foundation itself needed attention — I told them, even when it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Even when it meant the work wasn’t mine to do.

I didn’t design these behaviors. They emerged from a simple starting point: I didn’t want to be the person who disappears.

You can look at that list and draw your own conclusions about what it suggests. I’m not going to tell you what it means. You’ve been through enough experiences to know the difference between someone describing care and someone demonstrating it.

The description happens on a page like this.

The demonstration happens somewhere else.

Which raises the question you’re probably already asking: how would you actually know — before any money changes hands?

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