Culture

As society cautiously begins to return to “normal,” I’m seeing a lot of my friends and colleagues debating whether or not it’s time to bring their teams back into the office after a protracted period of working from home. There are industries where a permanently distributed workforce just isn’t feasible, but digital marketing isn’t one of them; I heartily recommend that any agency owner (or anyone who’s thinking of starting an agency) at least consider permanently moving their business to fully remote work.

Being a fully remote, distributed team has been a core part of the way UpBuild does business since our inception, and working here has really sold me on building a distributed team. The benefits to doing so include:

[Read more…] about Building a Distributed Culture That Feels Like a Culture

This post is about how to do a work-from-anywhere job during times when you don’t actually know where you’re going to be from one day to the next. I didn’t expect to be writing this post until Oregon’s wildfires thrust me into the middle of that experience one week ago today; now, I am finding it difficult to imagine writing about anything else.

See, here’s the sad part. After three months of a rather strict lockdown, we Oregonians were even more excited than usual for the arrival of summer because we knew we could congregate outdoors at greatly reduced risk. Sure enough, June ushered in a bunch of socially distant backyard hangs, and they really were a soothing tonic. We got to see our friends’ actual faces, scratching that ancient itch for immediate social contact that we’d tried to ignore all spring. Never mind that we still had to constantly maintain six feet of distance, refrain from sharing food or drinks, undertake rigorous and convoluted bathroom access protocols, and put up with the thousands of mosquitoes that didn’t get the Covid memo; it was all worth it! We knew that fall would bring an end to this blissful phase before too terribly long, but being that September is typically the nicest month of the year in Oregon, my wife and I had booked thirst-quenching social activity of this kind for every weekend through the end of the month. We could make plans again! Things were looking up.

As Deadwood’s Al Swearingen once said, “announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.”

[Read more…] about Working from Wherever

This past September, my girlfriend and I decided to leave Chicago winters for good and find ourselves a new home. So we packed our car with all our belongings, including our dog Morris, and began our year-long cross country road trip. We got rid of our apartment, sold our belongings, and secured Airbnbs along the way. Making this trip happen took a lot of effort, but let’s make no mistake, our ability to go on this adventure was made possible by one thing: remote work.

[Read more…] about Being a Digital Nomad at UpBuild

Many of us can recall a time when the thought of working from home was merely a daydream we’d have while fighting the traffic on our morning commute to the office. More and more people have been making the switch in recent years: remote work in the U.S. increased by 159% between 2005 and 2017. Even more dramatically, the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 has shifted the work-from-home concept from a rare job perk to a standard protocol worldwide in just a matter of days. Whether you find yourself working remotely by choice or by chance, there’s no denying that becoming a full-time work-from-home employee requires a complete mindset shift from the days back at the office.  [Read more…] about 10 Work From Home Tips From The UpBuild Team

There are thousands of digital marketing agencies out there, and countless more that provide digital marketing services as part of a larger overall offering. We’re not exactly suffering from a shortage of digital agencies in the world. In some ways, this is great news for digital marketers — lots of agencies means a vibrant job market. Unfortunately, as I talk to marketers in our industry, especially those who are just a year or two into their careers, one thing becomes clear: a lot of these agencies really suck to work at.

A cursory search on Glassdoor reveals a litany of complaints from current and former employees of digital agencies across the US. Common themes include too many clients, not enough time to get results, bad management, no on-the-job training, high turnover — the list goes on. If you’ve spent much time working in a digital agency in your career, chances are at least some of this sounds familiar.

Not only are these agencies creating negative experiences (and high turnover) for their employees, they’re also churning out terrible work. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken on a new client and found that their previous agency was using outdated techniques (like focusing on keyword density or PageRank sculpting); engaging in shady practices like using PBNs for link building; or — the worst and, also, the most common — charging a high monthly fee for “services” that boiled down to a canned, auto-generated report on meaningless metrics (like total page views and nothing else), with no further analysis or action items in mind.

As we’ve built UpBuild, we’ve tried to commit ourselves to not only delivering the best possible work and highest value to our clients, but also to being the best possible employer. Here’s a little secret I’ll share with you: it is because we focus on being a good employer that we are able to deliver the highest value to our clients.

[Read more…] about Employee Retention: A Key Metric for Digital Agencies