Simplify Everything.
By yellowleaf
October 13, 2016
First of all, welcome to our new digs! We’re really liking the new look and feel of our humble internet abode… We hope you like it too. If you’d be so kind, leave a comment below and let us know what you think about the new site. We’d appreciate it. Sure it’s new, but it’s also purposeful. Why all the changes? …I’m so glad you asked.
Simplicity.
Our family has experienced a lot of changes over the last 14 months. I won’t go into detail here, but let’s get coffee soon and I’d love to catch up.
During this time (new job, new house, new baby, selling that new house, moving, and on and on), I’ve learned to value something I really haven’t before: simplicity. While this idea is new-ish to me, it’s a way of doing life that’s stood the test of time. There is always something that can be simplified if you’ll just have the eyes to see. If not your home, then your garage or kitchen, if not your garage or kitchen, then your closet. If not your closet, then your desk… you know, what I mean?
“Simplicity is freedom. Duplicity is bondage. Simplicity brings joy and balance. Duplicity brings anxiety and fear.” – Richard Foster
Courtney, my lovely wife, joined our team late last year as our Client Experience Director. She has helped to streamline so much of what we do. She’s a systems girl… and I’m the better for it. Working together, as a married couple, has its ups and downs – yet it’s so gloriously refining that you can’t help but just get better.
Through this time of learning to work together again, Courtney and I have had to make some hard decisions with the direction of our company. We’ve had to part ways with some clients and partners we love – all in the name of the ever-pesky bottom line (who, by the way, gives zero craps about your feelings). These decisions weren’t made easily and we felt the repercussions from each decision. I found along the way, that so much of my identity was wrapped up in the success of “the little engine that could” also known as Yellow Leaf Marketing. When we started to cut away pieces of the business, I felt parts of me being cut away with it. But, praise God for a faithful wife, who helped me see that in holding so tightly to so many areas of the business in an effort to flourish it, I was actually squeezing the life out of it.
So, in the process of giving a lot of our stuff away, downsizing to a smaller house and reorganizing our priorities, it was also time to let go and simplify the business.
Leading us to right where we are today. Right here.
If you ever stumbled across our old website, it kind of felt like this:
“YES-WE-DO-ALL-KINDS-OF-MARKETING-AND-WE-WILL-SAY-YES-TO-WHATEVER-YOU-WANT-US-TO-DO!”
…We were just getting started, and we felt like we needed the world to know, “yes, we do that!”
Over the years, we’ve realized that we are better at some things than others and on the flip-side, we’re very bad at some things and should just refer you to a friend instead of trying to figure it out along the way.
We hope our new website communicates these lessons learned. This time around, we’re leaving out all the fluff and marketing mumbo-jumbo and just focusing on the facts – what we strive to do really well in order to help you do what lasts. So we’ve broken that up into four areas of service:
Sure, this short list enables us to to hopefully say “yes” to many new projects, but even better, it will enable us to say “no” to projects that don’t align well with our core offerings. That’s important. And our clients will be better for it.
In addition to our service areas, we’ve taken a lot of time to dial in on who Yellow Leaf Marketing really is. Courtney and I spent hours with big ideas of who we are, who we serve and how we do it. We whittled it down and arrived at this: We’re a creative digital agency who works alongside cause-driven businesses, foundations, and ministries to help you develop your identity, reach your people, and mobilize your champions.
We’d love for you to take some time to get to know our team a little bit better, read our values and our philosophy of work and of course familiarize yourself with the story of the yellow leaf. We’re also going to do a much better job of shining a light on our amazing clients and the work we do for them. We’re excited to finally launch a platform for case studies and project recaps.
Thanks again, for stopping by today. It’s great having you here in our new “home”. Please join us on this journey of simplifying what we do for the greater good of our family, our clients and ultimately our souls.
– Danny
“If what we have we receive as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety. This is the inward reality of simplicity.” – Richard Foster
P.S. You can follow our journey as we share ideas that inspire the way we live and the way we do marketing by subscribing to the YLM blog below.
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