What’s up. I’m Daniel DeMaina, Head Content Creator and Writer here at Inspire Agency. We’re hiring for new positions, starting with Vice President of Client Services. Check the Client Services VP job description and apply here. Our new Veep will oversee our agency’s accounts and delivery of services to our inspiring clients, champion our current vibrant culture (more on that below), and accelerate our growth. More positions will be posted soon, too, so contact us here or hit us up on LinkedIn.
To coincide with these content marketing and branding agency job openings (did you like that bit of SEO there, fellow marketers), our Chief Inspirer, Juliette Bogus, asked me to write up a blog post about more than our open positions, but about who we are as a company. (Yes, we call her Chief Inspirer. Yes, it’s corny. But we kinda like corny here. Even my snooty Yankee self.)
So what’s it really like to work for Inspire? Like, not the usual touting you’ll see from companies, but what the day-to-day is like. Let’s travel [extremely movie trailer voice] BEYOND THE JOB DESCRIPTION.
All Together Now (And Biz Markie!)
On Mondays, we hold our weekly company call where Juliette gives us a rundown of what’s happening with the agency. If there are critical client-related items to cover, we’ll run down that list, but this is more us getting all together as a remote team each week. There’s a lot of joking around, talking about what we did over the weekend, and what’s going on in our lives.
If you join the team, you’ll find that’s common for us, even on client calls. Being All-Business just ain’t our style. So when you see in our values that we “place people first,” that’s part of what we mean. We always make space for people as individuals, whether team members or clients. And we want to have fun while we work—maybe even whistle.
We end each call with praise reports and prayers, taking a moment to call out team members who deserve praise, and asking for prayers for people in our lives. It’s a gratifying, fresh feeling to spend a few moments before the work week begins thinking not of ourselves and everything we want to get done, but of other people.
Makin’ Time, Writing Lines, for People to Believe In
Then we’re off and running for the week on whatever’s on our to-do lists. You can probably guess from my title that I spend most of the week writing, but we all wear a bunch of hats here.
That shouldn’t sound like “doing a lot of things that aren’t in my job description.” It’s more that everyone here is willing to pitch in, take on tasks, and help each other out. Teamwork makes the dream work. For instance, I’m real process-oriented, so I’m always scrolling through our project management board on Monday.com making sure everything’s up-to-date. It helps out my co-workers, and is part of what keeps me productive and unstressed.
I don’t have many standing meetings during the course of the week. Actually, at the moment and looking at my calendar, I have three standing 45-minute meetings over the course of five days. That gives me plenty of space and flexibility to run my shop and divide up my work however it fits my schedule.
YMMV with regard to meetings, of course, depending on your role. But we value the time of both our team members and our clients, striving for efficiency so that nobody feels like they’re stuck in a too-long meeting and anxious about when they’ll get their other work done.
Not to say I’m working in remote, virtual silence. We all communicate through Slack, either in direct messages to one another or in a channel with everyone working on a particular client.
Sometimes we’ll jump on a quick call through Slack or Zoom if we need to discuss something a little more in-depth. Otherwise it’s quick hit updates, questions, and gifs. (That last one is me. I probably gif a little too often. I spend too much time on reddit.)
Much of our team communication happens through Monday.com, our project management tool. Everything we need to do gets input into Monday as a task, assigned to a person, and given a due date. Then we tag people when it’s ready for internal review, when we need to send it to a client, revise or rework, and so on. It’s been a pretty good way of tracking what we need to do, and what we’ve already done for reporting later.
That covers the nuts-and-bolts. You’ve gotten some idea of our culture, but to expand on that, we really are motivated to inspire and have fun. We love bringing ideas to our clients and each other that we’re excited about. There’s space to explore, brainstorm, and let our personalities shine throughout our work.
While we have fun, we take pride in our work, too. We’re not satisfied with just “getting something done.” We want every task to reflect our integrity, our resourcefulness in solving problems and how we strive for excellence.
We’re also serious about putting people first, having empathy for our clients and ourselves. Personally, I’ve always been given the space I need for my mental health—taking sick days when I need, fitting in therapy appointments, and having the support to put myself first when I really need it.
This is already getting a bit long for a blog post, as is my wont, so I’m gonna drop my email here—ddemaina@inspire-agency.com—and ask you reach out to me if you’ve got any more questions about our work and culture that I can answer honestly and sincerely for you. I hope you found this useful, and if you join our team, I look forward to giffing you until you laugh.
