EG's Notes · How we work · Aug 25, 2026
Every project needs a certain amount of clarity to start well. The question we keep coming back to is whether that clarity should be handed to us, or found together.
Most agencies start a relationship with some kind of intake — a brief, a questionnaire, a kickoff form. There's a reason for that. You genuinely can't do good work without knowing what a business actually needs.
We ask for a lot too. Sometimes more than people expect this early. Goals, history, who the real decision-makers are, what's already been tried, what didn't work and why. None of that is optional.
But there's a difference between asking for information and asking someone to hand you a finished brief.
A lot of intake processes are built to extract answers efficiently — get the client to fill in the blanks, so the "real work" can start once the form comes back. It's tidy. It's scalable. And it treats the clarifying conversation as overhead, something to get through rather than something worth doing properly.
We've tried to treat it the other way around: the clarifying conversation is some of the actual work, not the paperwork before it.
Needing information isn't the problem. Handing it to us and walking away is.
The difference shows up in small ways. It's the follow-up question that wasn't on any form. It's noticing that an answer doesn't quite match something said five minutes earlier, and asking about that instead of moving on. It's sitting with a vague answer and helping someone find the sharper version of it, rather than writing down the vague version and calling it done.
None of this makes the process faster. Some weeks, it makes it slower — a proper conversation takes longer than a form submission.
The brief isn't something you hand us. It's something we find together.
We don't think this makes us unusual in principle — most people would say they'd rather be understood than processed. It's harder in practice, because it means staying curious past the point where you technically have enough to start, and being honest when an early answer doesn't quite add up, instead of quietly working around it.
We're still figuring out where the line sits between enough clarity to move, and so much back-and-forth that nothing starts. We don't think we've solved that balance. But we know which side of it we'd rather be wrong on.