Parliament | You Know What's Actually Sticky? Good Work.
I hear a lot of agency owners talking about “how to be sticky.” And this sentiment always pisses me off.
Since day one, every Hoot client has owned their assets. Their passwords. Their accounts. Their domain.
Everything we build together lives in their name, on their credit card, on their server.
No hostage situations. No proprietary portals they can't log into without us. No dependency engineered by design.
This philosophy runs deeper than asset ownership. From the beginning, we've taught clients how to use what we build — training their teams, providing fractional creative leadership to their people, demystifying a process that most agencies treat like a black box. We want clients to understand their brand so completely that they could brief it to a new hire, a freelancer, or a vendor on their own. That was always the point.
That orientation toward client independence has positioned us well for a moment nobody predicted. AI is changing what's possible for brands to do in-house, and instead of treating that as a threat, we've leaned in. We're using AI with clients and teaching them to use it without us — because their long-term success was always the goal. If a tool makes that easier, we're the first ones to put it in their hands.
Some agencies see that as giving away the store. We see it as building the kind of trust that makes clients call you 16 years later when they start a second company.
There's a model in our industry — and honestly, in a lot of industries — that treats "stickiness" as a strategy. Keep clients in the dark. Make the offboarding complicated. Build workflows that require your presence. The thinking goes: if leaving is painful enough, they won't leave.
We've watched dating apps engineer loneliness into their UX to keep users swiping. We've watched social media companies see their own research on what their platforms were doing to kids, and proceed anyway. The data existed. The decision was made to ignore it, because engagement metrics looked good this quarter.
That's the profit game. It's designed for the short game. And it works, until it doesn't — and when it stops working, there's nothing underneath it. No loyalty. No referrals. No legacy. Just the next customer acquisition cost to plug the hole of the last churned client.
The long game looks different. The long game is: do such good work that leaving doesn't cross their mind. Refer so many good people that your clients become your sales team. Build something real enough that a founder calls you 16 years later because they've started a second company and there's only one call to make.
That's what has kept Hoot sustainable. Not policies designed to protect us. Work that makes clients feel protected.
Savvy clients see through the other model immediately. They've been burned by it — the agency that holds the domain hostage, the software company that makes data export a labyrinth, the vendor who makes themselves essential by making everything else impossible. These experiences don't create loyalty. They create resentment and the very public kind of negative word-of-mouth that no ad spend can outrun.
I'm not interested in being the safe choice because leaving is hard. I want to be the choice people make again and again because working with us is easy and fun, and they feel better when they do.
That requires educating your client to move forward without you. Passing files with class, hearing hard feedback...even soliciting that hard feedback again and again.
It requires, frankly, caring more about the brand than your invoice.
The businesses I respect most — the ones that last, the ones that get talked about, the ones people seek out — all share this in common: they played the long game when the short game was right there on the table.
And the brand I am building will be built on what is left behind, not only what I extracted while I was here.
