The Cobbler's Kids

I run a content company. The content company is, by most reasonable measures, working. We make a lot of content for clients. Their team gets engagement. Their team gets recruiting inbound. Their team gets a brand the executive can read out loud at a board meeting and feel like that brand is actually them.

I have been running it for a year and a half. For most of that year and a half, my own personal website said something like “Hunter Canning is a New York actor and photographer,” and the photo on it was from a play that closed in 2019.

This is a thing about people who run agencies that nobody really wants to admit. We are bad at our own work.

The line I caught myself saying

I was on a call with my partner Michael about something else, and I said the line out loud. I said something like, “Eh, no one is going to my website. It does not matter.”

Michael did the thing he does where he just looks at me. He did not have to say anything. I heard the sentence I had said. The sentence was insane. The sentence was insane in a specific way that pattern-matched to almost every client we had ever helped. The clients had said versions of that sentence to us in their first call, and we had gently said, “Hi, the reason you hired us is to fix exactly this. Most of the people who would buy from your company are looking at your website and deciding within seven seconds whether you are the kind of company that is paying attention. The website is the entire conversation.”

I was the cobbler. The cobbler’s kids did not have shoes. Specifically, the cobbler’s kids had a portrait from 2019.

Why this happens

(One small meta-note before I get into it: “agency owner personal brand” is, it turns out, a search term people type. You probably didn’t know that. I didn’t know that until I was deep enough into building this website to start caring about such things. The fact that you are reading this means someone searched for exactly that phrase and Google decided I was a credible answer. Which is funny, given what I am about to admit.)

The reason this happens is not laziness. It is a specific cognitive trap that creative service businesses fall into.

When you are making the thing for someone else, you have a deadline, a contract, a client expectation, and a check at the end. The work has external pressure. The work gets done because the work has to get done. The pressure is what makes you finish.

When you are making the thing for yourself, the deadline is “soon.” The contract is with yourself, which is to say it is with nobody. The expectation is “this should be perfect because it is me.” The check is “I will feel slightly better.” Every one of those has less force than the client version. So the personal thing keeps slipping, and the client thing keeps shipping, and a year later your personal thing is older than the website you redid for the client three months ago.

The other reason this happens is that doing your own brand requires you to look at yourself, which is the part most operators trained on craft never want to do. You can see the client. You cannot see yourself. The lens does not turn around. So you make the client’s brand, because you can see it, and you do not make your own.

What changed

What changed is that I lost a deal because of it. A real deal. The prospect Googled me. The prospect found the 2019 portrait and a very, very old IMDb page and an article about a play. The prospect could not tell that the person they had been talking to for forty-five minutes about an AI content engine was also the person on the portfolio site. The prospect ghosted. I will never know if the website was the actual reason. I am pretty sure it was at least one of them.

A week later I cleared a Sunday and started writing the version of this you are reading.

The sentence I am stealing from myself

The sentence the agency was telling clients in their first call was: the website is the entire conversation. Most of the people who would care about you are seven seconds away from a different decision.

That sentence was correct about you. It was also correct about me. The cobbler’s kids deserved shoes. So did I.

So this is the new website. There are real essays here now. The portrait is from this year. The bio reflects who I actually am, which is an actor, an interviewer with eight hundred conversations on tape, the founder of two companies, the keeper of a twenty-year theater photography archive, and a person whose mother is almost eighty and now uses ChatGPT.

The kids have shoes.

Cheers.