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Question
Agency Identity Crisis: "Dmitry" or "The Company"?
Agency owners (and everyone else), I need your advice with self-identity, branding and self-positioning "me" vs "my company".
I run a small Cloud Consulting agency
#hazelops
where we build/troubleshoot Cloud for small-to-mid startups (Terraform, AWS, EKS, Docker, etc).
I do at least 50% of work myself, and if it's interesting R&D or complex troubleshooting I'm really excited to do 100% of it myself. I plan on doing so going forward as well. Important note that incoming work mostly comes through my network.
It might be myself overthinking, but even so, I think I need some sort of baseline.
Is there any advice you could give or are there any good books on typical patterns? Main dilemmas revolve around:
I run a small Cloud Consulting agency
I do at least 50% of work myself, and if it's interesting R&D or complex troubleshooting I'm really excited to do 100% of it myself. I plan on doing so going forward as well. Important note that incoming work mostly comes through my network.
It might be myself overthinking, but even so, I think I need some sort of baseline.
Is there any advice you could give or are there any good books on typical patterns? Main dilemmas revolve around:
- When I post about some technical achievement (let's say figured out some cool way to simplify some Terraform, or found a cool tool and I've integrated it at a customer). Do I post it as my own achievement or my agency's achievement?
- When I finish a project that I did myself 90-100% (via
- When I work on troubleshooting at a customer, and want to publish interim results (if legally permitted), should it be my own R&D or should it look like the company is doing it?
I'm pretty sure I'm missing some basic truths here, so anyone with a clear opinion is welcome 🤗
(be ready I'll ask more dumb questions in return)
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depends on what type of clients do you want? I had the same dilemma, went with personal branding for everything - I prefer clients I can form personal bonds with and they prefer that too. I was never attracted to agency type work, most of my clients have a "no agency" preference as well. I think that's quite common in the small to medium sized startups area. After thinking about it from this angle, it was a no brainer for me. Personal brands also tend to do better lately than impersonal companie? (when I work with others I just credit them) btw Chris Do is great at breaking this down and he has a lot of resources on this topic
It does resonate with me. Thank you.
Thanks for Cris Do recommendation, I’ll check them out.