We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Meg Schlabs. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Meg below.

Hi Meg, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

At Wizardly, my business partner Josh and I have intentionally created space for *all* our employees to find true community. During covid, there was a massive growth of 1099 employees on the market, coupled with a basic human need to connect in new ways. In our world of design, we began to notice how lonely contractors were. We recognized a need for contractors to not just be paid a fair hourly wage and offered stable income, but to have community in the workplace. They needed to be offered a job family, be recognized for the value they bring, and be evaluated alongside other employees. We nurture contractor relationships by inviting them into our team. We don’t give in to the “churn and burn” mentality that exists in other design agencies. We have intentionally pushed for policies and practices that allow for sustainability in all levels of our company. And so far, this is working well. We recruit great people and we do our best to keep them in our world for as long as possible.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Wizardly was founded in 2016 by myself and my business partner Josh. We had been collaborating in the world of website design and development since 2012. Now our company has become a team that offers a range of services, such as branding, UX research, and website projects, with a focus on caring for the entire lifecycle of a brand. We have seen too many clients who have been given an ok website but then couldn’t access the team that designed it, to make changes after launch. Wizardly aims to be accessible to our clients, problem solving alongside them. We focus on client care, but that doesn’t keep us from designing beautiful, engaging, and data-driven websites. It’s work that we are very proud of.

One thing that makes Wizardly special internally is how we treat our team. My career advancement as first Graphic Designer, then Web Designer, then Creative Director has paralleled the birth of my three wonderful children. I’m hopelessly un-compartmentalized. It makes sense that I began to bring my parenting energy into work. Using what I’ve learned at home raising kids, I realized that my role as a boss isn’t really about getting from our team, but instead it’s about giving to them. I aim to nurture the journey of my employees’ careers, remove obstacles to their success, and proactively offer assistance. I approach each team member with an assumption of their best intentions until given reason to believe otherwise. I’m grateful for their contribution to our team for any amount of time they choose to be with us. This shift in my perspective had a remarkable impact on our team, generating beautiful design work with unparalleled energy.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience is one of our core values at Wizardly. So I would love to share a story that highlights emotional resilience at work. In 2020, after being a two-person team for a number of years, my partner and I felt burnt out and burdened down by our work load. What had previously been a manageable load, was all at once crushing and anxiety-ridden. Covid had just started and all our clients were pivoting – launching online platforms, services and products. We were loaded down with massive projects.

These are things that I have words for now, in hindsight. :) I didn’t at the time. What I felt back then was simply – anger. Not only was I over-worked, but I had let some serious conversations build up between me and my partner. I wasn’t sure we could survive getting our head above water on projects, much less, having tense, heart-to-heart conversations about our partnership. I directed a lot of my anger at him, not really knowing who was to blame. I made the choice to isolate myself for a few months, not discussing partnership issues out of fear, burnout and genuine confusion about where all this anger was coming from. Since it was covid and everyone I knew was re-thinking their career, I started to do the same. And instead of taking steps to fix my work problems, I almost gave up on it all together.

I see now that it was a defining moment in business. It was time to decide if we would scale up to a full agency or stay where we were as a two-person team. Alongside that revelation, I learned another life lesson that I will carry with me into every other domain. If there are two people who value honesty, growth and are committed to open communication, then there’s nothing they cannot achieve together. I see now how, given the chance, people are capable of change, myself included! And finally, I learned that if you simply say out loud what you need (before the desperation sets in), it creates an opportunity to work towards those needs, making compromises and planning for small steps of change along the way.

If I had given up on Wizardly in that very emotional moment, I wouldn’t have seen what was right around the corner for us as a company. Not just growth, but fulfillment and joy in being a boss and having a team to work alongside. We still design and develop amazing websites, but now we do it in a way that makes space for basic human needs and time with our families.

Emotional resilience is tough because it forces you to be positive. It’s easy to think the worst of someone and walk quickly down that emotional path of anger, fear, resentment. It is more nuanced (and potentially complicated for you) to give them the benefit of the doubt. People aren’t perfect, and making space for your own imperfections and the imperfections of others, actually hurts sometimes. If you have complex emotional insides and wear them on your shirtsleeves, I am with you. Next time you’re frustrated at work try asking these two questions:

1. What if this person is having a bad day and it has nothing to do with me?
2. How can I state what I need in the most basic, unemotional way, and then be open to a compromise?

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

I’ve talked a lot about our team and internal structures. But, I haven’t yet spoken about how we care for our clients. We care a lot about brand consistency for the lifecycle of a brand, so we’re pretty “high-touch” with clients, even when it costs us. We keep a larger group of clients on a low-budget retainer for their website hosting, and this allows us to be completely accessible if and when they need us for more branding collateral.

Out of the larger group, we’ve identified a handful of special clients and given them an internal designation – Magic Clients. Their companies have values that match ours at Wizardly, which fosters mutual respect for one another. We genuinely want them to succeed in business alongside us. So for the Magic Clients, we are constantly looking for ways to add value to their company or rethink their design, marketing and websites to match their goals for each quarter. We don’t wait for those clients to come knocking, we think about them each week and stay in their inbox with ideas for their business.

We give a lot of freebies at Wizardly. If a Magic client comes to us with a design idea, we always pause to ask ourselves if there’s a way to do it for free. If it takes us the same amount of time to execute the idea than it would for us to build a proposal for costs, then why not? We would have spent that time either way. But if we had gathered and sent costs to a client, we might come away empty handed. With the “freebie” mentality, the client will always walk away with something from Wizardly. This is one of the ways Wizardly fosters client connection and drives revenue to our client’s company and our own.

Contact Info:

• Website: wizardly.co
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wizardly/about/

Image Credits
Headshot and Portfolio Work – credit to Fluff Media. (https://www.fluffmedia.com/) All other polaroid images – credit to Bridget Schlabs, my 8 year old daughter. She helped me in a pinch on her camera, the night before submission because I didn’t have any recent headshots. :)