“Really? No way, does that actually work?”

We typically hear variations of that reaction whenever I tell industry friends that we encourage our clients to work from our own office for extended periods of time. Our NYC studio has at least one of our clients working full-time inside our studio at any given time. They join our daily standups, they have their own desk, and we offer one of our own monitors. Sometimes it’s an early-stage startup co-founder, other times it’s a product engineer or designer. But nearly every experience of having clients collaborate by staying in our office benefits both parties.

The three things we learned from having clients work from our offices is that collaboration starts with our own culture, decisions are resolved in real time, and we earn trust by giving it.

We can’t invite anyone to join a collaborative culture if we ourselves aren’t collaborative.

Healthy collaboration values selflessness, generosity and quality of work above all. The alternative is a political culture of fear where departments desperately try to protect themselves with CYA (Cover your @ss) emails. The healthier your own company culture the better it works when you invite a client to take part.

At its best this establishes relationships where we work with clients, rather than us strictly working for them.

It also helps to have nothing to hide. There’s no secret sauce. There’s only hard work, a disdain for egos, and teams with only the exact number of team members needed and no one else. You can’t fake healthy collaboration. If we’re dysfunctional internally, trying to collaborate with clients won’t be much of an improvement.

This contrasts with agencies I’ve seen or worked at where we disappear for months before triumphantly returning with the magic solution. However, an iterative process values product quality by valuing speed. Having an early stage startup co-founder in our office allows projects to move forward with quicker decisions without wasting time writing emails and waiting for responses. Having client designers and engineers work full time from our studio helps us move in rhythm and in-sync. We’re not really asking clients to work from our office as much as we’re inviting them to join our culture.

As a bonus, having clients in our office is a great opportunity to teach and learn skills from each other. For example we’ve had client-side graphic designers work out of our office temporarily to both work on a project while learning user experience design with guidance of our product designers.

The main benefit for having clients working in our office is that they see how much we actually care about doing good work. You’ll be surprised how many agencies offer lip-service in presentation decks about actually caring and yet their work reflects the opposite. The scariest but most effective way for clients to be convinced of this is to experience it first hand.

If you’re serious about quality, having clients in your office watching how you work day-to-day lets them see for themselves. How we act away from boardroom keynote presentations reveals the company we truly are. It’s one thing to show that you care in the boardroom, it’s entirely different to prove it in the routine, mundane, sometimes messy grind of getting work done. And here’s the best case scenario.

When a client can fully trust you, they become your advocate within their organization. An advocate is similar to a defense attorney, someone who pleads justice on your behalf in court. An advocate is a client who trusts us enough to fight for us within their organization.

This sh*t isn’t just unicorns and skittles. I’ve conveniently failed to mention just how scary it can be to have our clients so close to us.

Conflicts happen. People argue. There are difficult personalities. Sometimes you have to accept an opinion that you know is incorrect. We’ve experienced the growing pains of working with early stage startups who’ve never worked with agencies before. Having a client that’s close also means less gossip and venting when they’re around. (But of course no agency ever does that.) Also, I concede an assumption that you’re working for decent people who care about doing good work (who the majority of us are). Let’s save the post about working with difficult or unreasonable personalities for later.

We’ve found that if we can maintain a healthy culture, care about our projects and earn trust, the benefits far outweigh the negatives.