Be The Donkey
I was talking to a contractor a while back, this guy's been doing it 30-something years, started the whole thing with one 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 turns into a shrine to your own product, your case studies start sounding like acceptance speeches. Your social feed is mostly 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. Same idea with Donkey — dragging Shrek, emotionally and physically, out of his swamp and into the journey. Hermione's basically doing it too, holding the whole mission together while Harry reacts to everything.
The sidekick's the reason the story moves at all.
I think about that when I think about brand — less the theory of it, more the actual 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, turning a customer's win into their own press release, tacking "we're disrupting the industry" onto every slide — that one feels like someone hijacking your scene.
I've caught myself doing this — writing a customer story and realizing halfway through it's actually about us, our platform, our impact, and the customer's 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 and BuildOps was just the reason we were in the room.
Be the donkey. Show up, carry the weight, move the story forward. You don't need the credit for it to count.