While we (deeply) love the entrepreneurial world and can geek out with the best of them in marketing discussions, we also recognize its pitfalls.

Yup, we want to earn profits. We also don’t want to give up anything we believe (not a single thing!) in order to do so. We’ve set ourselves up to run a profitable business in order to:

• support our collective team
• support our communities
• be able to make philanthropic investments in causes and organizations that we care about, and
• plan a future

To do that, we need to produce great work for our respected clients.

So, in our collective we try to avoid treating very many challenges as emergencies. After all, we work on websites, apps and servers, not saving lives. Planning methodical approaches, strategically focusing on what individuals can accomplish, and their time, are absolutely necessary in order to do the work we do well.

Treating too much as urgent all at once isn’t sustainable. If everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. Getting work completed urgently means we don’t plan as well as we should, don’t approach our work in a balanced way, and most importantly, don’t properly take care of our team. It backfires, and our communication suffers. Sometimes, the results of our work aren’t as strong as they could have been.

Many wise people have pontificated about the effects of capitalism, and we won’t attempt to dig into that discussion here. But Capitalism IS the reason behind why we charge rush fees when our clients come to us with emergency requests.

Our world runs on money. And the impulse for any system that runs on money is to move faster and faster, making more and more movement “urgent” to earn yet more money. At Quarry, we intentionally limit urgency and the overwork that comes with it. We make an effort to call crashing issues what they usually are: lack of planning.

This is the core reason we make an agreement with clients upfront and charge rush fees.

It’s so easy to rush through and commit to overwork, again and again. It’s way too common to keep saying “yes” and then experience exhaustion or burnout. We don’t want our clients to work like that, we don’t want to work like that, and we don’t want anyone who collaborates with us to work like that.

In order to create a healthy team culture, we embrace planning, pauses, and prioritization. These are our daily sauerkraut, the healthy bacteria that keep our team microbiome up and running. We don’t pretend that we can “do it all.” We’re human, and not apologetic about that.

All this means: we are extremely happy to help our clients, whether they’ve had foresight or not. But because crashing work does have an impact on our team, we charge 1.5x our regular rate. This is intended to get clients to pause for a second and consider their own priorities. Is this truly an emergency? In case it is, all good, we’re here to help!

But we will charge a rush fee. And in turn, Quarry will pass along that extra fee to the individuals on our team who rearrange their planned workload (or cancel their evening plans) to accommodate the crashing items.

Cheers to kraut, and a great work / life balance!

❤️  Team Quarry