My first gig in this industry, I didn't have a title. I was just... there. Helping with this, fixing that, being handed problems that weren't mine to solve because I was the only one in the room who'd actually try to solve them. No official role. No clear scope. Just me being capable in a building full of people who were very busy looking busy.
Somehow I ended up being the one the clients actually wanted to talk to.
Not the CEO. Not the account manager. Me. The intern-adjacent person with no job title, no authority, and a payment that was always, mysteriously, two weeks late.
I got CC'd into emails where clients were asking completely reasonable questions and the response from the team was, genuinely, "let's circle back." Circle back to what, exactly? Nobody knew. They just had a lot of confidence and a Notion board and somewhere along the way had decided that sounding busy was the same as doing the work.
The strategy for one client who needed more reach? A survey page. In this economy. In this century. Nobody is filling out your survey. We are not Victorian children.
They also put me in their CRM at some point. I work for you. Why am I a lead. I had to invoke GDPR to get removed. For an unpaid quasi-intern. Completely unhinged. I don't tell this story to be bitter about it. Honestly it was a masterclass in what not to do, and I took notes. The clients were lovely. The budget was real. The gap between what they were paying for and what they were actually getting was just, enormous. And nobody on the inside seemed particularly bothered by that.
That's what stayed with me.
The other thing that stayed with me was watching the copy-paste strategy in action. Brand X does something, it works for Brand X, so the agency pitches the exact same thing to Brand Y with a different logo slapped on it. Different audience. Different product. Different everything. Same playbook. And then genuine confusion when it doesn't land. You can take inspiration from what's working elsewhere. You can borrow structure, steal the best bits, adapt. But you cannot 1:1 copy someone else's strategy and expect it to work for your client. That's not strategy. That's hoping.
This is why I built Echo.
Not because agencies are bad. Some are genuinely excellent. If you have a clear brief, a solid internal team, and you need someone to execute cleanly, an agency is the right call. Scope, deliver, invoice, done. That model works perfectly for the right situation. But a lot of people aren't in that situation. They're still figuring out what they actually need. They've tried things that didn't work and they're not sure why. They need someone who will think with them, not just nod and start on the deliverables.
That's a different thing entirely. And it requires a different kind of honesty.
I'm pretty brutally honest, including about myself. If something is new to me, I say so. I don't perform expertise I don't have. "This is new territory for me, let me tinker and I'll tell you honestly if I can make it work" is a sentence I say more than most people in this industry would be comfortable saying.
A client once told me that most people in my position would just lie about that. Claim the experience, figure it out later, hope nobody notices. And maybe that works sometimes. But it also means your client is making decisions based on information that isn't real. That's not a creative partnership. That's just a more expensive version of winging it.
When I work with someone, they know what's happening. Not through a 40-slide deck, but through actual conversation. "This won't work, here's why." "This could work but here's what it'll cost you." "I wouldn't do this, but if you want to, here's how to make it less painful." When something isn't possible, I say so. When something needs a pivot, we figure it out together.
My longest client relationship works exactly like this. He's not just receiving files at the end of a project. He knows the process, he's involved in decisions, and when something changes he finds out from me directly, not from a deliverable that landed differently than expected. He's building something, and he knows it, because I make sure he does. That's what a creative partner actually does. It's not about being nicer or working harder. It's about giving a shit about what happens after the invoice.
Finding the right creative person, whether that's an agency or an independent, is genuinely like Tinder.
You might find your person on the first swipe. You might get three "let's circle back" guys and a surprise CRM entry before you land on someone worth working with. The difference is usually pretty simple: do they actually understand your problem, or are they just excited about the budget?
Echo exists for the people who've already swiped wrong a few times.
