Banner: An All-In Approach
Amanda Marcotte, High Seas

Amanda Marcotte

November 18, 2018

An All-In Approach

At High Seas we view the traditional client-contractor arrangement as a partnership. And boy are we serious about our partnerships.

Partnership means we don’t take on projects lightly. It means we think and talk about our clients all the time — at dinner, at the gym, on the beach. We foster relationships and collaboration, not just business transactions, and we want to make sure we can live up to our end of the bargain — not just for a project but for a sustainable relationship. Some clients aren’t a good fit for our process. Some projects call for skills we don’t have, or budgets and deadlines that that fall outside our boundaries for responsible partnership. Even in those cases, we are always happy to make referrals to our friends and colleagues in the industry.

Having an all-in approach means that you’re not just working with one small team, you have the backing of the entire company.

When we’re all-in with our partners, we take on their challenges as our own. By giving our core leadership team the opportunity to weigh in on every potential project, we can identify holistic strategies and foresight to optimize the collaboration with our clients. Often, the leadership team may not even work on the eventual deliverables — our Creative Director may be called in to consult on pre-existing design files for an exclusively development project, or our Lead Architect may be asked to weigh in on technical considerations for a branding exercise.

Because we have a core roster of brilliant minds on everything from strategy and design to architecture and development, we have created our own end-to-end collaboration translation team. We learn things from each other every day, and this helps us approach projects smarter. An all-in approach means that our team decides, collectively, what the project approach should be. And, while those internal sessions can get highly animated and occasionally contentious, we get the buy-in of the team before we agree to take on that relationship. If the team can’t stand behind the project, we have to pass.

Our best minds want to make sure that your project is not executed in a vacuum. We’ve all seen the fallout of inefficiency that results with a design or technical oversight, or from the communication divide between developers and designers and clients, and we want to save you from that rabbit hole. Often the resulting proposal is more comprehensive than the client’s initial request, because while addressing the immediate goals, our team leaders identified considerations related to the true need of the business. You’ll be glad we did.

Amanda Marcotte, High Seas
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