Why Designers Take Feedback So Personally & The Communication Skill Nobody Teaches

If you've ever felt like a client hated your work, this episode might completely change the way you see feedback forever.

Every designer knows the feeling. You send over a logo, a website, or a brand concept you're proud of, only to get back a wall of revisions, nitpicks, and comments that feel more like criticism than feedback.

Suddenly, you're convinced the client hates the work. Maybe even hates you. But what if they don't?

In this episode of The Angry Designer, we sit down with Carly Kernt, founder of FlyDog Digital and speaker at Creative South, to uncover why designers take feedback so personally, how different personality types communicate, and why understanding the way clients think can completely transform your relationships, presentations, and creative confidence.

In this episode:
• Why designers often feel attacked by client feedback
• The real reason clients and designers misunderstand each other
• How different personality types communicate and process information

Whether you're a freelancer, agency designer, creative leader, or in-house designer, this conversation will help you stop taking feedback personally, better understand your clients, and turn frustrating relationships into productive ones.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So at what point during this growth did you start hating your staff, the people you were working with?

SPEAKER_05 0:05

Let's just get right into it.

SPEAKER_04 0:07

Yeah, yeah. I don't think I've ever hated our team. I've definitely hated some past corporate clients that uh are in my corporate career I've hated people that I've worked with there. But when I get to bring on people onto the team, I'm hiring people that I like, which is a good but also a bad thing.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Please state your name for the record.

SPEAKER_04 0:36

My name is Carly Kernt.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

So I reached out to you even before the event because when I heard that you were going to talk about how not to hate the people you work with.

SPEAKER_03 0:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

I was like, okay, this kind of fits in our world, okay? Because I am sure that that this topic comes up all the time, right? And I mean it's a challenge. People got toxic environments, they got, you know, interesting bosses, they're not sure how to meet, how to manage. And just talking to you yesterday for like two minutes, I was like, oh shit, this stuff's gonna be good. We we need to kind of address this.

SPEAKER_03 1:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

I think you can help people, you know, and save them thousands of dollars in therapy. So I think that's totally.

SPEAKER_04 1:16

I still go to therapy every week, but yes, in theory.

SPEAKER_02 1:20

All right, all right, all right. Okay, so um, and you're also a business owner?

SPEAKER_04 1:23

I am, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Which is awesome. Okay, so where does this journey start?

SPEAKER_04 1:26

Yeah, so I after college, I was what I think everybody would call a job hopper. I bounced around from five different companies, six different jobs, constantly looking for what I wanted to do, and I always did pretty well. I was always promoted in those companies and in those roles, and I just never really found what I where I was supposed to be, I felt like. So I was working for a design build company. They did uh interior design and construction for banks and credit unions, which it's a very niche company. I haven't been inside of a bank in 10 years. So uh when COVID happened, they didn't they didn't quite make it through COVID. I think they've rebranded and they work due dental office or something now. Anyways, I got laid off from that job while I was in COVID and I started to apply for jobs, and this was October of 2020, which was just peak dumpster fire of unemployment. And I probably applied for 40 jobs a day for six weeks. When I say I think I worked harder than applying for jobs than I do now, I'm not I'm not kidding. It I I have so much empathy for everybody that is looking for jobs right now. I I totally know how to do it.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

And the game's changed even more, which is it's a minefield.

SPEAKER_04 2:44

Yeah, and and you know, when I was applying for jobs, I like I said, 40 jobs a day, six weeks, and I don't think I heard back from anyone. I wasn't even hearing no's, I was just hearing silence. Yeah. So after six weeks of that, I said, you know what, if no one's gonna hire me, I will hire me. And I started a social media business just freelancing. I watched, I don't know, a hundred hours of YouTube videos on how to make myself a Squarespace website. And I designed my website, and one of the social media clients I said had said, Your website looks so good, which it did not.

SPEAKER_05 3:22

It did not look good.

SPEAKER_04 3:24

It really did not look good. And she said, Could you make me a website? And I said, I I totally know how to do that for sure. Let me get you a proposal tomorrow. And then I'm like, How do you design websites for other people? Um, so then I started offering website design and social media side by side, which is sort of a weird offer, and then I started getting requests for branding and for email marketing and for SEO, and I said, you know, I could I could YouTube university my way through some of that stuff as well, but I was already feeling at capacity for what I could take on, and I didn't really want to learn anything else. I don't really consider myself that creative of a person. I've been in leadership roles before and I really like leading teams, and so I got to that pivot point of do I continue to learn more things and stay with what I it being just me and charge more, I have the demand, or do I go more of the agency route and start hiring a team? And I really wanted to go the agency route and manage people and work with more clients and offer more services. So today we're five and a half years later, and we have a team of almost 10. We have five full-time employees and four or five contractors that we work with, and yeah, we've worked with 150 brands, and it's been um it's been really quite the journey. So that's where I am today.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

So what what has led to this? Because I mean people would die to be, you know, five years in and you know, 10 employees deep, right? Like that's a substantial business.

SPEAKER_04 4:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:58

Which is wild. I never thought I would be in this. I was just started freelancing so I could pay my rent. Right. You know, and and while I had no job, I I never thought it would be turned into what it is now. I always thought this was just a temporary solution while the job market cooled down. And I was even still applying for jobs after I started the business, just not as frequently. I was so burnt out from all of the custom cover letters that I wrote. Yes. That I was still applying for some that felt really interesting to me while I was doing this on the side, but it was it was probably six months, maybe a little more than that in when I was thinking I could this could be like my my thing. Like this could be just what I do now. A full time. I'm sure how did that happen?

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Well, how does a non-creative person then start growing this agency? I mean, that's interesting. You you define yourself as non-creative, but something's gotta be working. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:54

I I think I have an eye for creativity, but I don't think I'm the person that can create those things. But since I started the business, I have been hyper focused on our client experience, our employee experience, and I really just uh listen.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 6:10

I just listen to what our clients have to say, to the questions that they're asking, and it it's helped me to understand what it is that they need, understand what we need to staff the team, how we can sell to them much easier as soon as you know what they actually want. Yes. And they say, you know, we want a pretty design, but they really want is to have more revenue and have more customers and see more people that are gonna buy from them. So once I understood what they actually wanted, I just say those things to them as this is what we do, and I use the words that they say back to them, and then they feel bought in because they think I've somehow am inside their mind, but really I'm just saying the words they're saying.

SPEAKER_02 6:48

You said something interesting here that we, I mean, we're always stressing to people that just because the clients are asking for something, that's not necessarily what they need. And I mean, if you can actually identify what that problem is, um, you know, and then put it back to them in their words, I mean it's it's gold because you're solving the right problems. You're not just delivering what they're asking for. And it's two very big differences. People don't realize this.

SPEAKER_04 7:11

Yeah, the question that I like to ask, and it's a little bit different, uh, but could very much be applied to design. When we work with clients, let's say social media, for example, and I say, So what would you need at the end of six months to re-sign your contract? What would need to happen? And they say, you know, we just we really want to have consistent posting and to feel really good about our social presence. I said, Okay, great. So let's say we we post every day, which we're that is bare minimum. There's no way that that's not gonna happen. And let's say you feel really good about it, but let's say we don't, you see no additional leads and no additional revenue, but you feel really good about what we've been posting, you're gonna re-sign for six more months, right? And they say, what? Oh no. No, no, we would have we would have to see more more revenue come through. I say, oh, oh, okay. So what we actually wanna see then is revenue. What's the revenue goal? What's the leads goal? What's the sales goal? What do you realistically want us to achieve for you to re-sign that contract? And so I ask them, and then I ask them the kind of inverse of their of their question. We just want awareness. Okay, so then you don't want leads. And then I feel like they really say what they mean. Yes. And then I can actually have a productive conversation. Is it realistic with the marketing tools that we have and what you're asking me to do for us to be able to produce the return or the revenue or whatever it is, or is it not realistic and we can have a true conversation as opposed to they just have a skewed mindset. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

So why do you think so many designers um or um I guess really even account managers stop short of asking these kinds of questions? I mean, you clearly have figured it out, and I think but uh on our team, I know that there's people that don't. Yeah. Right? And again, it's trying to instill this, but there's a disconnect. What do you think?

SPEAKER_04 8:58

I think that people are scared of the answer, and I think they don't know how to sell the answer. Or they don't think that they can realistically achieve the answer. I mentor so many new social media managers that are just starting their business and they say, well, social media is not for sales, it's for awareness. You know, I it's not for sales, they can't say sales, they can't say that, this isn't what it's for. And I'm thinking you're you're not entirely wrong, but it depends on the type of client that you're working with. If you're working with, you know, the uh cafe down the street, they don't have money for awareness. They need that whatever they're investing in marketing to produce a return. And so you're gonna get yourself into the point where they're gonna say awareness, that isn't actually what they mean, then you're gonna produce awareness and they're gonna still say that isn't good enough. You're all just gonna be on, you're having the same conversation, but you're not. You're on totally different pages, but you're pretending like you mean the same thing. And I think that new social media managers or or whoever it is just feel like they can't do what the client is asking, or they have some sort of imposter syndrome or something along those lines. All to say is that I think people are scared of the answer that they're gonna get if they really dig that far down. And I think that depending on what stage of business you're at, you when you're starting out, you're you're desperate for work.

SPEAKER_05 10:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 10:15

You know, and and I've everyone has been there where you take on the projects that aren't a good fit because you need projects. And you need to make money to make this a sustainable thing. And so I think it gets to a point where people will start asking the questions once they're not desperate anymore because they can be a little bit more selective, a little bit more picky on who it is they want to work with. But early on, I think that it's it's scary to ask that because you're scared of what the answer is gonna be, and then if what you're gonna do isn't gonna deliver that outcome, but and you know it, but you still want the business anyways. Right, right, right. And then you get into kind of a moral.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

But then I mean again, doesn't that then um isn't isn't that there where the problem is? Because again, you want the work, but you're only gonna continue to get the work if there's if if you understand what the real results or the expectations are, but if you don't ask them what the expectations are, then you're kind of like one's leading the other, but it's in the wrong direction.

SPEAKER_04 11:10

Yeah, yeah. I think that I mean, and and this is just my personal opinion, but all of the clients that I had early on that were not the best fit, that I frankly didn't do the best work for, you know, I was doing the best work I could at the time. Right, yeah. But I I'm thankful for all of those failures that I had. It taught me so much about what it is that we do now, on the value that we want to bring to clients now, on what other agencies do or don't do. It's just it made me so clear on where I think the problem actually exists in the fact that I was the problem, you know, five years ago. I know how to sell against that now. And so I it there's just a tough point where you need the work, but you also, if you're working, then you don't have more time to find new clients. Right. It's just a balance, it comes all down to finances and what do you actually need to survive in the season that you're in and take on sort of just that amount and spend the rest of the time doing things that are gonna push you forward in the future as opposed to overloading your schedule and your calendar just so you have more projects for the sake of having projects.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Right. So you're early on, first year, and you're growing. How did you know when to bring on each hire?

SPEAKER_04 12:29

That is such a good question. So my first hire happened, I was had six social media clients that we were making five posts a week for, doing their social media engagement. It's about a full-time job for people. Six our social media managers handle between six and eight clients. I was doing six social media clients and then designing and developing two Squarespace websites a month.

SPEAKER_02 12:51

That's a lot.

SPEAKER_04 12:52

It was it was early days, fun times. It was a lot. It was just grind and go, and I was so scared to tell these website clients that I was booked, you know, two, three, four months out because I wanted the business so bad. Yeah. And I was like, I'll just just take it, just work more hours, to work the weekends, just get it done, do the thing. Um, and so I I got to the point where that was not gonna be sustainable for very long. And I hired the first person I hired was the person that I felt like I could trust the most uh in passing work off to. The second person that I hired was the person that I was the worst at doing what they were gonna do. So for me, it was a good easing in to passing off some social media clients. I knew that I could review that work really well, coach them really well on what I wanted them to improve on if it wasn't meeting the mark, and I felt frankly like that was the easiest thing for me to pass off. So I passed it off, I hired a social media manager first, and then my second hire was a designer because I cannot design. And I was thinking these websites are taking me so long because I have literally no idea what I'm doing. And I need someone who is better at it and faster at it than me so that we can take on more. So that was my second hire, and then from there we just continue to grow. But I think the the two routes I like to go are something that you're really good at that you can pass work off to, or something that you're really bad at. If it's taking me, you know, two hours to design a social media graphic, hire a designer that can knock those out in 30 minutes, and then I have significantly more time to free up my workload. So I just think depends on what you're doing, what you're good at, and where the business is growing into for who you should hire.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

Cool. So at what point during this growth did you start hating your staff, the people you were working with?

SPEAKER_04 14:46

Let's just get right into it. Yeah, yeah. I don't think I've ever hated our team. I've definitely hated some past corporate clients that uh are in my corporate career, I've hated people that I've worked with there. But when I get to bring on people onto the team, I'm hiring people that I like, which is a good but also a bad thing. So the session that I gave at Creative South is called How to Not Hate Everyone That You Work With. And it's all about the disc personality assessment, which I don't know if you've heard of disc, but it's like a Enneagram, a Myers Briggs, you know, one of working genius. It's really specific to working professionals, though. And so it breaks you into four different personalities: D I S C discs, to four of them. D stands for dominance, and they are the results-oriented, outcome, competitive, move quickly, move on to the next thing, make a decision. They're uh like a D, you know, like wink wink in what that might also stand for. If you feel like you're getting steamrolled in a conversation, I say there's D.

SPEAKER_05 15:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 15:54

Uh so that's D's. Uh I's are stand for influence. They are our social butterflies, they're the talkative people, the endless yappers. If you can't tell already, I am very much an I certified yapper. Uh we love social recognition, we like talking to people, we like um coming with ideas, but then we really lack on follow-through. We are not detail-oriented. I said yesterday on stage, if you want to know who the very last person was to turn in their presentation, it was me. Uh I can get things 85% of the way done. And then that last 15%, man, it is it is just as hard for me to get that 15% done as it was for me to do the 85%. So uh those are I's uh then S's are uh stands for steadiness, and they are the calm, harmonious people in the office. They do not like conflict, they do not like sudden change, they're super loyal. Um, and so that's who they are, just your your ROC's reliable people. And then the C's stands for conscientiousness, and those are like your Excel people. They are the detail-oriented accuracy facts, data, all T's crossed, all I's dotted. They're like that is two points off. That does not follow the exact text code in the brand standards. I'm going to check. Um, they are those bullet pointed lists of feedback, those are the C's. And so what took me a while before I really started diving in and understanding these personality assessments and how they work together at an office is that I gravitate towards other eyes because I'm like, those are my people.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

We're just like you know, someone's like, How's your weekends? But they're having a great time not doing it.

SPEAKER_04 17:42

That's exactly what it is. They you say, How's your weekend? And then 20 minutes later, you you know heard about their aunt who went to Florida last weekend that is entirely unrelated to anything we were talking about. And so I really gravitate towards eyes, but in a room full of eyes, like you said, nothing is gonna get done. We're all gonna come up with ideas and nobody's actually gonna execute anything. And I have a hard time with some of the other personality styles just because they're not, they don't communicate in the way that I communicate, they look for different things, they kind of bring my like I energy down, but they're so needed to be on the team. So there's some people who hate D's or hate S's or hate C's or hate I's because they're like, shut up, like just move on to the next thing. But they're all needed because they all bring such value to the team. So I when I was hiring, I in the especially in the early stages, I was hiring a lot of I's because that is who I connected with. We'd get on on interviews, and I'm like, so tell me about yourself, and then by the end of the you know two hours interview, yeah, it's two hours later, and I'm like, you want to come over to my house for dinner, you know?

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Like and continue this conversation, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 18:53

And so it was hard for me to hire and interview people that I didn't feel like I connected with because I was like, they're not a good culture fit, you know. They're they're just you asked them how their weekend was, and they said it was fine. And I'm like, Well, mine was also fine, thanks for asking. So it it it's not anybody on the team that I don't like, it was more what I've learned from the past, and then as I was hiring, how I was like, Wow, I really wish we had this kind of person who I really didn't like in my corporate career. I really wish I had them on the team. Like I didn't like them, but they brought such value to what we need now. So it it just was a work in progress for me to learn all the personality, all the personalities.

SPEAKER_02 19:30

It's like a really responsible way of hiring.

SPEAKER_04 19:33

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 19:34

You know, uh unlike ours, where it's like, well, if we can have a beer with them, then they must be great. Right. But I also tend to like all those strange, all the I I think I'm an I, but I get the D's, I get yeah, you know, I I understand the importance of everybody and I try to connect on that level. Yeah. But I see the value of trying to be responsible. I do it a responsible way.

SPEAKER_04 19:54

Yeah, yeah. It uh it was good for us in hiring just to to expand out, but it was also really helpful, all those personality assessments helped us understand our team, but what I feel like it helped us to do even more was understand our clients. Yes. In the way that we were presenting things to them, pitching things to them, the feedback they were giving. You know, you as a designer, you're sending over the first draft of a logo concept or a mood board or whatever it is that you're working on, and you've spent so much time and so many hours, and just your whole soul is in whatever that deliverable is, and you send it to the client, and they send you back a bullet pointed list of, you know, this doesn't have a period at the end of this one sentence, or this spacing is slightly inconsistent and off, and you're thinking, like, so do you hate it? Yeah, yeah. You hate me? But like, what is going on? But that person would be a C, right? They're sending their bullet pointed checklist of that's how they communicate. It has nothing to do with the work that you did or how they feel about it. In fact, they don't have any feelings about it, they don't care about your feelings. They are just comparing it to their checklist of standards. So it was really helpful for us in understanding our clients because we would start to like crash out after some of these calls with clients where you feel like it went terribly because all they gave is negative feedback, and then they seem to be so happy with the final result, and you're thinking, that's so great, but wow was this process so horrible for me. Yes, but the client's not thinking that. They're thinking they sent me this great thing, I sent them some feedback, they implemented the feedback, and now we have a finished product. So it really helped me to understand our clients' communication styles just as much as our teams.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

That's actually really bad, but I didn't even think about that, but that makes so much more sense, too.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Yeah, because how many times do you feel like your clients hate on you? This is exactly what you're doing. But you're right. It's like you send them some concepts and you get that feedback. This there's a no period here. And it's like, yeah, but what is it? Is it good? Please tell me.

SPEAKER_02 21:50

So, how do you apply this then? So I understand companies, you know, uh grading people, scoring them during some of these tests, Myers Breaks and such. Nobody ever goes on about how you should communicate with each other. Because I'm guessing that's the magic of not being able to hate people that you work with.

SPEAKER_04 22:07

Yeah, it's understanding them, but it's also communicating in a way that they want to hear. A lot of as a as a person, you only have control over what you think when somebody tells you the information and then how you want to say information back. Whatever I'm saying to you right now, you could be interpreting this in any way possible. I I only have control over the words that I'm saying, not what you are thinking about the words that I'm saying. So what we do is when we present to our clients is identify as much as we can what personality type they are. And the small talk is usually easy to be able to tell if you ask them how their weekend was and they say fine. They're probably not an S, they're probably a D or a C. And then just depending on what their other communication looks like, you can start to identify what they are. But uh Ds really care about results. So when we pitch things to them and they care about outcomes and competition, so when we pitch things to them, we focus with this is the results that this is going to drive, not here's my 27 drafts, and here's what I was thinking about color theory and here's how this makes you feel. They don't care. I love that. They just want to know what results and outcomes it's gonna drive. Eyes care all about the feelings. They wanna know. They're like, is it fun? Because I want it to be fun. And that is what you need to lead with. You need to lead with the emotion and the feeling. They wanna feel the whatever you're presenting. They don't just want to hear it, they need to feel it. S's in a similar way wanna they want it to feel like harmonious, where for a D, if I'm presenting something and I'm gonna say, this is what we're doing, and we're gonna crush the competition because they're not doing this, and so we're gonna pitch it in this way and we're gonna do this. Instead of that to an S, they would be like, crush someone? We we don't want to crush anyone. We just want everyone to feel harmony and loyal and safe and steady. So for them, we focus a lot on how whatever it is that we're creating is going to make everybody feel safe, make their clients feel steady, make them feel trustworthy, that sort of thing. And then for C's, we focus on the accuracy. Here is the accessibility and readability standards that we have followed, and here are the grid lines, and here is the data decisions that have gone into these things, and they again don't care about feelings, they just care about the checklists about everything that's been done. So if we can identify what uh personality style they are, we tailor what it is that we're presenting to what they want to hear. Because again, I have control over how I'm saying it, I know what you want to hear, so I'm gonna say it to you in the way that you need to hear it so that you understand what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_02 24:38

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_04 24:39

This is gold.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Yeah, this is really honestly. I never thought about doing I mean, I'm sure to sub-level we we we've been doing this subconsciously with the who our clients, who we're interviewing, who we're hiring. But I mean, you're making this uh you're almost making this formulaic where people can understand. So where where did this come from for you? Is this something that you is this something that you did because somebody did it to you? Is this something you just stumbled across, or is this, hey, I need to talk on stage about something, and there's a great topic, so I'm gonna make us work.

SPEAKER_04 25:10

That is a great question. So we at our agency, we have a company book club, and we read a book every quarter. And if you have work for a company and you guys want some small uh initiative to do, the company book club is something that everybody loves at Fly Dog. We every quarter we have them fill out surveys that is, you know, what's your favorite part about working here and what can we improve and that sort of stuff. And almost every quarter, everybody says the book club is my favorite, favorite part. We read, I don't know, 10 pages a week, and it's on some professional development adjacent book, and then we talk about it for 10 minutes at the end of our weekly calls, and everybody just loves it. So one of the books that we read is called Surrounded by Idiots. That is the title of the book, and I can't remember who it's by, but if you Google it, it will come up immediately. It's on Amazon, and it is all about this this exactly what I'm describing. And we read it in our company book club, and I am not kidding when I say it it unlocked all of our brains in the way that we communicate with each other. One of the examples that I like to give is that I'm a yellow, as we have established, and our designer was a C, a very detailed checklist oriented, and I would send her Slack messages like hey, did you see that email from this you know client? Can you respond back and just so that they know that we've had it and they know that you're working on it? And she would reply back, Yes, I saw the email and I will respond, period. And I was like, I would too. How rude is that email? I'm like, I'm like, I can't believe you just said it to me. She hates me, she hates this client, she hates working here, she's probably gonna quit. Should I start looking for a new designer? And when we did this, that read this book and we're talking about it in our book club, I was thinking, you're a C. You're just confirming that you understand. You're the checklist, you said yes, I confirm you understand. We had this whole conversation about it in this book club. So now she'll send things like, Yes, I saw the email and I will respond. Smiley face. So that she knows that I she's not mad, I'm not overstepping, I'm not micromanaging. She'll just add this a little smiley face and we just joke about it. And then I add a little heart emoji and a little like hands emoji on it, because you know, I'm the yellow, all the energy all the time. So it's helped us to within our team to do that. So the first time I uh got asked to speak at a conference, the theme of the conference was Teams. Yes. And I I felt like I really had something to talk about here in reading this book and how it's improved our team and our client experience. I can give you so many examples on ways that we've used this with clients that have turned into some amazing outstanding relationships with clients that have saved relationships, that have saved rounds of revisions and feedback and all the things. And so I just felt like I had something there. So I came up with this kind of funny how to not hate everyone that you work with because it's very relatable. Everyone, you hear it. I I get up on stage and everybody's taking pictures of the screen, and I'm like, yeah, this resonates. If you based off of the cameras that are out right now, I who are you sending this to? Your coworkers for the other coworkers you hate? I know that's probably true. So yeah, I was just born out of uh reading that book and seeing the impacts that it had within our own team and with our own agency when we started implementing some of that information.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

So, what is the breakdown of um, I guess, personality types in your agency? Because 10, using 10 is a great, easy number.

SPEAKER_04 28:41

I think that we skew more eyes, and I think it depends on the people that are needed on the team. We're a social business, we have account strategists who have to be. They are account managers, they are interfacing with clients, they need to have that bubbly personality, they know when to dial it back, but they need that, and they also need to be a little bit of a D because they need to put push decisions forward, tell the clients what we need. S's would shy away and say, I don't, you know, this, I don't know how to ask the client. I sent them an email yesterday and they still haven't replied back. And D's are like, I sent you the email yesterday and you need a response, you know. And you need that in those roles. So I think it depends on what the role is and what the um agency does. I would say that we skew a lot of I, and generally people aren't just one. Yes. I'm a very high I with a supporting D. You're usually two, some people are three. Uh, and everyone as they're listening to this are thinking, well, I'm pretty detail-oriented. I might be in a C, but then you'll think what's actually leading your actions and your outcomes and your decisions, and how you're deciding what projects you want to work on, and how you communicate with people, and you'll start to see more and more which one you gravitate into. All to say is that we a lot of us have a lot of I on our team, within some others that are sprinkled in. Our uh operations manager that we used to have is really, really high C. Really needed when you're creating systems and processes, you need that detail. Otherwise, it's not gonna be what of our SOPs if there aren't details. So we're a good split, but a lot of eyes.

SPEAKER_02 30:15

A little of eyes, yeah. Makes sense though a little bit more. You need to blow this up. Are you going to? I mean, you must.

SPEAKER_04 30:21

Well, yeah, I, you know, the I this is only the second time that I've given this talk in this session. And the first time I got, I mean, out amazing feedback from everybody. And at Creative Styles too, I'm getting great feedback, which is just really feeding into my yellow eye social recognition. Everyone is coming up to me saying, Your session was one of my favorites yesterday. I'm like, you don't need to inflate my ego anymore.

SPEAKER_03 30:44

It already is.

SPEAKER_02 30:44

I already know one great thing.

SPEAKER_04 30:46

I already, I already want everybody to be thinking that, and now you're just telling me that everybody and you're giving me more opportunities to talk about myself. This is a dream. Um so I I thought the last conference everyone was maybe just being nice, but now that I'm getting this feedback over and over again, I really want to put together a workshop that I can do for just for creative and marketing teams, because I think there's something so different about what creative and marketing teams do when you present what it is that your project is. Obviously, there's a bunch of different departments within an organization, but creatives, it is it is you that you have put onto the page. And so feedback and communication is extra ultra challenging when you feel like people are attacking your work when you're presenting it. So one of the things I say is it is the work. You have to take yourself out of it. It is the work, not your work. They are giving feedback on the work, not your work. And so I really want to do a workshop for creative teams, in-house agencies, students on what all of this means. So hopefully that'll be something that I work on here over the next couple of months because I've just the conversations that I've had have been amazing, and everyone is so excited to start implementing this, and I'd love to give more than just a 35-minute, you know, session on some of this and give them really practical, use their own personalities, their own examples, their own clients to yeah, really uh give them some good insight.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

Well, I mean, you can use this as a test subject. We're like a team of 14. I would love to do that.

SPEAKER_04 32:17

Seriously, I'm in, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:19

There's so much value to what I just learned. It's it's mind-blowing people, this is gold.

SPEAKER_04 32:25

I would love to do that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:26

You need to blow this up, girl. Oh, for sure. You need to blow this up.

SPEAKER_04 32:29

Thank you. Yeah, I've I've loved it. I also joke with people, and I I've done some public speaking. My my first ever public speaking was I gave the uh commencement speech at the University of Iowa when I graduated. Um, and that was my first time public speaking to a room of you know 10,000 people, and it was very intimidating, and I was a hungover college kid. And now I am back on these stages and I have loved it, and I've always wanted to do more of this, but I've been so in corporate, you know, just doing my job, and then so focused on growing the agency, and now I feel like the agency's at a place, it's in a really good spot, and I can start to focus on some of these other outside things. So it all feels very serendipitous it coming together in this. So, yeah, I'll I'm I'll do the workshop for you guys. You'll be my my beta, my beta group.

SPEAKER_02 33:15

That'd be great, actually. Oh, it would be. And then I I want exclusivity to the book rights, okay? We'll have to do this. Okay, I'll help you out here.

SPEAKER_04 33:22

I'll get you a signed copy.

SPEAKER_02 33:23

You don't need any help, all right? You don't need any help. This is amazing. How are people going to follow you from here?

SPEAKER_04 33:28

So I have we have two social accounts. My Instagram is byby.carlybridget, and our agency is fly dog digital. So fly dog digital. Yeah, I'll I usually post on my uh page, my buy carlybridget page, more on this sort of stuff, being a CEO, growing a business, those sorts of things. And the fly dog page is more about marketing and and your average marketing.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:53

So yeah, uh Instagram is a great place to be. LinkedIn also a great place to be.

SPEAKER_02 33:57

That's how people Where are you posting? Are you using LinkedIn um to are you actually using LinkedIn to post your content on there?

SPEAKER_04 34:03

Yeah, I do post some good, I think I post some good content. I'm very uh my my LinkedIn has a lot of typos. I'm a yellow, so those details are not my strong suit. Everyone is like, hey, there's a typo in your post. I'm like, whatever. Uh but it's my sort of here's how I'm thinking about things. I'm just gonna post something. It's not planned ahead of time. It is like a threads Twitter, but a longer version of it. So that's what's on my LinkedIn. I still think it's good, insightful stuff, but it's it's like the chaos that's going in my brain. That's what's on there on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_02 34:37

I love it. Thank you so much for this. Honestly, this is really this is so probably some of the no diss to anybody else we've interviewed, but some of the most valuable information I think that we put out there. Honestly, I think it's great. I think it's good. So thank you for coming on it.

SPEAKER_04 34:51

Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

All right. I hope you guys got out of this. This is such gold. So take this, use it, not only internally, but with your customers. I mean, again, what a brilliant concept on how to grow your business. All right, everybody. Yeah. My name is Massimo. My name is Sean.

SPEAKER_04 35:05

You are Harley.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

Stay creative and stay angry.