In order to positively impact an organization’s bottom line (whether that’s building revenue, growing a community, or supporting a cause with X number of projects) you have to put 7-8 times more time and effort into determining what your website needs to do and how you’re going to get people there than you spend actually building the website.

Therefore, we realized that if we want to help our clients, we can’t just help them build websites. We have to work with them too (1.) build a website that supports their bottom line, and (2.) develop strategies that build and nurture trust and communication (i.e. relationships) with their online communities.

That’s why we use our creative noggins and technical muscle to help our partners create, execute, and deliver kick-ass digital experiences using a strategic combination of:

• Great web development

• Complete SEO

• Inspiring graphic design

• Effective marketing

Inspiration: Were there struggles along the way?

I love the title and tagline in Marty Fukuda’s Entrepreneur article:

Business Challenges Are When Your Team Builds Muscle and Confidence

A firm’s capacity to emerge stronger from adversity is similar to muscle growth in the human body.

We all have heroes, real or fictional, that we look up to. Your hero may be a business mentor, a family member, a close friend, a sports star, or even a Disney princess. Think about this person for a moment. How does this individual act? How do they speak? What makes them admirable?

They’ve probably accomplished a task or state of being that you aspire to. But what is it that makes them inspiring? Is that they just showed up there, at the top of the mountain? Or, is it that they overcame significant obstacles either in their external worlds or in their own minds on their way there?

Rick, for example, had naysayers and critics, but he didn’t listen to them. When I asked him about those people who discouraged him or the mental roadblocks he had to overcome to get to where he is today, he looked at me blankly.

“Why would I focus on those?” “Look,” he said, “I’m about to do a 70-mile run in the mountains, do you think I care what others have to say, or that I listen to the voices in my head that tell me to quit?”

Touché.

But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t forces working against him. Most of these are internal. In the past, Rick’s been so focused on a path, he has neglected to communicate it and bulldozed others in his way. He’s had to learn to be empathetic to those who aren’t as good at ignoring the naysayers. Sound familiar?

That said, Rick refuses to call these challenges anything as dramatic as villains, fogs, and crevasses. Naysayers, finances, having to get out of your own way, to Rick, these are all just bumps in the road.

As usual, he relates everything back to running:

Sometimes, you have to stop and walk. Sometimes, you have to stop and come back to it tomorrow. The important thing is to stay scrappy and keep going even when things get rough.

This is why we’re committed to inspiring our clients not coddling them

At Cheeky, we don’t coddle our clients. If we think something won’t work, we’ll tell you. We’ll offer suggestions on what you can do, but we won’t tell you we can do, say, a $50,000.00 project for $10,000.00. I say this because, ironically, the more simple you would like your website to feel or the more seamless you’d like your audience to find interactions with your organization, the more work and time (and ultimately money) that goes into it.

We ask the hard questions. What do you want to achieve and what are you willing to do to get there?

We take our commitments seriously, and we expect our clients to take theirs seriously. If we need your feedback on something before we can continue, we expect that we will receive it at the agreed-upon time, just like you can expect us to deliver on time.

Working with Cheeky Monkey Media will leave you feeling inspired and excited to tackle the uncomfortable.

• You’ll feel secure, but not cozy.

• You’ll feel motivated and inspired, but not always comfortable.

You’ll finish each stage of every project feeling confident in yourself, in us, and in the project.

Ok, so that’s the first iteration of our brand’s back story and a taste of the following chapters. 

Not convinced that your organization’s brand story is important? Don’t take my word for it …

• Storytelling extraordinaire Kindra Hall, who includes the Hilton and United Way in her list of clients, states that your origin story is “the most important story you’ll ever tell.”

• Paul Smith, former director of market research at Procter & Gamble, explains that she’d be “hard-pressed to think of a company that doesn’t have an interesting foundational story.” She goes on to say,

I suspect there are many that haven’t crafted and told theirs. And they’re important. People want to be part of something bigger than themselves. A nameless, faceless corporation with no real purpose, no story, is not an inspiring place to be. ~ (quoted in Inc. contributor’s Adam Bulstein’s “How to Tell your Company’s Brand Story”)