Be The Donkey
I spoke a while back with a contractor — 30-something years in the field, built his company from a single truck. And at one point I asked him what makes him trust a vendor. He didn't talk about features or pricing or demos. He said, "When I feel like they actually give a shit about whether I succeed."
That stuck with me. Because most brands don't operate that way. Most brands operate like they're the main character.
I get it. I've done it. You build something, you're proud of it, and your instinct is to tell everyone how great it is. Your homepage becomes a shrine to your own product. Your case studies read like acceptance speeches. Your social feed is just... you, clapping for yourself.
Meanwhile your customer is out there trying to solve a problem and you're asking them to care about your founding story.
There's this thing in every good story where the hero only moves forward because someone else carries the weight. Samwise literally carries Frodo up the mountain. Hermione holds the entire mission together while Harry reacts to everything. Donkey drags Shrek — emotionally and physically — out of his swamp and into the journey.
The sidekick isn't a lesser role. The sidekick is the reason the story moves.
I think about that when I think about brand. Not the theory of it... the feel of it. What does it feel like to interact with a company that isn't trying to impress you? That just shows up, helps, and gets out of the way?
It feels like trust.
And the opposite — the brand that centers itself in every conversation, that turns a customer's win into their own press release, that says "we're disrupting the industry" on every slide — it doesn't feel like inspiration. It feels like someone hijacking your scene.
I've caught myself doing this. Writing a customer story and realizing halfway through that it's actually about us. Our platform. Our impact. The customer is just... set dressing for our narrative. That's an ugly moment when you see it clearly.
The best stuff I've made at work — the podcast episodes, the content that actually resonates — is the stuff where we disappeared. Where the contractor's story was the whole thing. Where BuildOps was just the reason we were in the room, not the subject of the conversation.
Be the donkey. Show up, carry the weight, move the story forward. Even when nobody's watching.
Especially when nobody's watching.