Your agency doesn’t have to be insane to produce great work.

We’ve romanticized chaos in tthis business for years.

🙀 The weekly (daily?) fire drill🙀 The wall-to-wall meetings🙀 The indecisiveness masquerading as niceness

Justin Bajan and his partner Dustin Artz wanted something different. After years riding the big-agency roller coaster, they created Familiar Creatures with an explicit goal to prioritize stability.

Okay, maybe they were a little insane to think they could pull that off.

But here they are 8 years later inventing stuff like Protein Vapes for Crunch Fitness—a completely fictional product delivering 35 grams of protein per puff. All while keeping the culture 93.7% chaos-free.

Steadiness hasn’t made the agency less creative. It’s helped create the conditions for creativity:😺 People feel safe enough to experiment😺 Curious enough to follow strange ideas😺 Grounded enough not to chase every new trend

In this episode, Justin and I talk about how to create enough stability for people to do brave work, how to protect your agency’s culture from bad hires, bad clients and bad decisions—and how to remain curious enough to keep stability from turning into complacency.

As Justin says, mystery is where the juice is. (Vape juice?)

—

Welcome to the DesuckifyWork® podcast. The show where we cut through the BS and find ways to make work less chaotic, more human and less ridiculous. All of which makes your business more profitable, by the way.

(If you enjoy this one, please like, share, rate, review or subscribe to the podcast.)

Let the desuckifying begin.

—

Follow Justin on LinkedIn and visit familiarcreatures.com to see what he and the team are creating.

If your agency would like to try this whole stability and creativity thing, let’s talk. Schedule a free half-hour Chaos to Clarity session and we’ll identify one thing that could make your agency 2% less crazy—without making the work any percent more blah.

Type “meow” in the calendar invite and I’ll also send you a free DesuckifyWork® t-shirt.

Bye, everyone!

—

Bonus question from Justin:Why did you choose this business? And what’s keeping you in it?

Networking doesn’t have to involve a room full of strangers.

Or shotguns.

After Greg Roche was laid off, someone invited him to a networking event built around sporting clays—which is apparently like golf, but with guns.

Greg sat in his car thinking:

“There has to be a better way to do this.”

There is.

Networking can be one conversation with someone you already know. No name tags. No elevator pitch. Just two people talking like actual people.

Greg writes a Substack called The Introverted Networker. He helps people build genuine professional relationships without forcing themselves into situations that make them want to fake their own deaths.

And those relationships matter.

The first time Greg lost his job, it took him three months to find another. After intentionally building his network, his next job search took three weeks.

But networking isn’t useful only when you need something.

Knowing the people around us builds trust. It reduces conflict. It makes asking for (and offering) help easier—and work a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

In this episode, we talk about:😼 How introverts can network without “networking.”😼 Why your best starting point is someone you already know.😼 How one good conversation can create opportunities you never saw coming.

—

Welcome to the DesuckifyWork® podcast. The show where we cut through the BS and find ways to make work less chaotic, more human and less ridiculous. All of which makes your business more profitable, by the way.

(If you enjoy this one, please like, share, rate, review or subscribe to the podcast.)

Let the desuckifying begin.

—

Follow Greg on LinkedIn and subscribe to The Introverted Networker for practical tips that won’t require you to “work the room.”

And if you’d like your agency to be 20% less crazy, let’s talk. Schedule a free half-hour “Chaos to Clarity” session and we’ll identify one place to start making the work less painful.

Type “meow” in the calendar invite and I’ll also send you a free DesuckifyWork® t-shirt.

Bye, everyone!

—

Bonus question from Greg:When has a relationship helped you be at your best at work?

Work sucks less when we talk to each other like human beings.

Especially creative work.

People need to feel safe asking dumb questions, challenging assumptions, and saying, “I have no idea what you mean,” before everyone wastes three days heading in the wrong direction.

We try to solve this with process.

😼 We add another Slack channel.😼 Schedule another (ten) meeting(s).😼 Try our 17th project management software in the past 3 years

And no one ever thinks to just pick up the damn phone.

Communication isn’t a soft skill. It’s part of the agency’s creative infrastructure. And I can help you build it.

When people understand one another, they collaborate. They challenge each other. They spend less time decoding half-thoughts and more time doing cool s**t.

Django Weisz Blanchetta gets it. And he’s living it every day as co-founder of Superheroes. Their mission is to save the world from boring advertising. A-freakin’ men.

Django knows the way to do that is to get people talking. You know, that thing we used to do before we started hiding behind tools and screens?

Sometimes that means reminding folks we’re actually capable of it.

At their daily lunch around the big table in the agency, there are two rules:🐱 No phones.🐱 No talking about work.

I can feel your panic through the screen. But you get used to it, and even enjoy it. Django swears.

This is the work.

Meanwhile, we’ve set up systems in most of our agencies that set fire to our collective EQ. The one thing that will actually keep us distinct from the robots.

We should stop doing that.

—

Welcome to the DesuckifyWork® podcast. The show where we cut through the BS and find ways to make work less chaotic, more human and less ridiculous. All of which makes your business more profitable, by the way.

(If you enjoy this one, please like, share, rate, review or subscribe to the podcast.)

Let the desuckifying begin.

—

You can follow Django on LinkedIn and visit hellosuperheroes.com to see how the agency is saving the world from boring advertising.

If communication breakdowns keep producing confusion, rework and unnecessary chaos at your agency, let’s talk. Schedule a free half-hour “Chaos to Clarity” session and we’ll identify where communication is breaking down—and one place to start creating the conditions for better work.

Type “meow” in the calendar invite and I’ll also send you a free DesuckifyWork® t-shirt.

Bye, everyone!

—

Bonus question from Django:What’s one thing your agency does—outside the work itself—that helps people connect and create better work together?