Working in public is one of the highest-leverage strategies for agency owners today.
Why?
Because it allows people to join you.
“Joining you” can take many forms. It could mean:
All of these outcomes start with the same decision: working in public.
Simply put, working in public is when you let people see the process, not just the polished output. It’s about making the decisions just as apparent as the deliverables. Bonus points if you can share them real-time as opposed to at the end.
Whatever you’re doing, you’re on a journey. People can’t join you on the trip if they only find out about it after you’ve returned.
I’m constantly encouraging agency owners in my Make More Money program to work in public more. Nearly every day, I see a Slack post or DM that says, “Just sent this proposal to a client! 🤞” Usually, I have dozens of suggestions as to how it could have been made better, but I—as well as everyone else in the community—didn’t have a chance to help because we found out about it after it was sent. At best, we could provide input for next time, not this time.
Sharing what you’re doing while you’re doing it invites others to opt-in.
Does working in public mean firing up a livestream 24/7 and letting people watch you design, write emails, and send invoices?
Yes.
But that’s only one form of it (likely the most transparent form). Like most things, there are levels.
A good place to start is my “Say, Do, Say” framework. Whenever you can, say what you’re about to do, do it, then say what you did, ideally with a link or reference to what you did so people can see it.
I suggest doing this daily, at the very least.
If you work in tech, this format may seem familiar to you. It’s very close to a daily standup ritual that’s baked in to most agile software development practices. Daily standup is a great example of working in public.
The next piece is deciding what you want “public” to mean. Yep, you get to pick! For you, “public” could mean:
There’s no right or wrong answer here. Pick the version of “public” that has the highest concentration of people that you would want to join you.
Because I like to practice what I preach, I like to say what I’m going to do a lot to my social media followers. And a decent subset of my posts are essentially updating them on what I’m doing that I said I want to do. For example:
Especially when your version of working in public is targeted at social media followers, it’s easy to be distracted by platform metrics. But working in public isn’t not about likes or views or comments.
It’s about finding people like you, who believe what you believe. These are the people you want to join you on your journey.
If you follow me on LinkedIn, X, or Instagram, you may have seen me post screenshots of my fitness tracking after basketball games. Actually you might not have seen it, because they are, by far, the worst performing posts I have. Very few views, almost no likes ever, a reply or two every once in a while.
But I still post them religiously. Not for the engagement, but because I’m working in public. In last year’s annual review, I talked about how much I enjoy playing basketball and a few goals around it for this year. I write about business using basketball metaphors, like Shoot Your Shot and Big For Nothing. Despite the lack of platform engagement, basketball in one of the first things people who know me from the internet talk to me about. That’s real engagement.
This happens for me in so many other areas too. Someone sent me sneakers as a thank you for some career advice I gave them. Someone took me to a Sixers game as a way to get dedicated time with me to pitch a business idea. I took a photography trip mostly with people I’d only met on the internet.
And also, some people have also told me they can’t be friends with me because I believe in God. Others have told me they “hate my brown face” and that I need to “stop everything and get a haircut.”
Good, bad, and ugly, because I keep myself accountable by working in public, I’m able to find people who like what I like and believe what I believe, people who can join me on the missions that I’m on.
Working in public isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s a relationship strategy.
It gives people a way to understand how you think, decide if they agree with you, and figure out where they fit.
Some will follow. Some will hate. Some will support. Some will leave. Some will buy. Some will block. Some will work with you. Some will DM. Some will quietly cheer from the sidelines.
You’re not trying to convince everyone. Working in public makes it easier for the right people to find you… and easier for them to say “I’m with you” when the moment comes.
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