4 Goals Identity is Focused On in 2021 & Beyond

Identity didn’t become a Cool Place to Work without focus and intention. Over more than two decades, we’ve set lofty goals to provide mentorship and opportunity to our team, refine our processes to deliver great work, and cement our PR agency as one of the best and most recognized in the Midwest. 

In July we hosted our biannual meeting at The Morrie in downtown Birmingham, gathering our team for two days focused on the bigger picture and bold vision for the agency. 

Thinking big about our future and sharing, discussing and refining our annual goals with the entire team drives us to continually evolve our agency and prepare for our future. 

In addition to exciting announcements about our agency vision, creative ideas, experience shares and team building moments, we spent a large portion of this biannual reviewing our goals for 2021 and beyond. 

Our Redefined Cultural Experience

Coming out of a historically momentous 2020—which upended virtually everything about how we have traditionally worked—we wanted to set fresh expectations to build an innovative and even more so performance-focused culture within the agency. We’ve learned a lot in the past year. We’ve shattered our growth goals. We’ve provided our clients with a level of service and expertise cornerstone to The Identity Way. And, we’ve continued to lead the way by recruiting and retaining the industry’s best talent. 

This meant exploring our company values at a profound level and reimagining what it means to love what you do (#gamelover). Through robust quantitative data and qualitative discussions at all levels, we developed new, generationally current cultural pillars that define our refreshed culture and approach moving forward. 

At a high level, they include:

• Trust as the Metric
• Best of Life Opportunities
• Real Work-Life Integration
• Excellence is Our Standard

This is what we believe will continue to guide us to long-term future success. We want to continue to refine what this means for our team while pulling back the curtain for external audiences to understand why our culture is so critical to everything else we do.

Stronger Mentorship and Training Across the Agency

We believe in doing everything we can to personally and professionally empower our great people. A large part of that duty falls on the senior members of Identity—seasoned veterans who offer decades of valuable industry experience, on-the-job knowledge, relatable anecdotes and battle-tested advice. 

Exposing members of our team—at all experience levels—to these incredible mentors through both new and existing coaching platforms helps new leaders emerge from within our walls. The result is transparent exposure, clearer, consistent expectations and the development of new skill sets. 

New Era of Great Work

Armed with feedback from the organizations we work with, Identity leadership took an incredibly close look at what our most successful client programs have in common to develop a formula for establishing rock-solid relationships. 

Based on these conversations, here’s what we’re known for delivering:

• Clarity—We establish, and are disciplined counselors of, a very clear vision of success and a “north star” brand identity as the guiding principle. 
• Big Ideas—We execute bold strategy and messaging throughout all initiatives.
• Invaluable Expertise—We provide trusted counsel that is not only part of clients’ PR plan, but connected to their overall sales and operational objectives.
• Memorable Good Stuff—We shepherd major moments in time that both our client and our agency can celebrate.

Defining what we know helps us create new client strategy processes that span discovery, internal engagement, big ideas and program-wide roadmaps. It also allows us to strengthen existing client programs with bar-raising goals. 

Fire Up Agency Growth & Reputation

The final goal we reviewed at our July 2021 biannual focused on our agency growth. 

Our vision is to transform our work to be our best example of how we leave a mark and why we are the agency brands need. This introspective directive prompted team members to create and launch a strategy and brand that reflects who we are and deliver great work. 

As a team, we also discussed ways to better communicate The Identity Way to prospective clients, and laid out a developmental plan that helped people visualize the path to success. 

The Road Ahead

Defining and sharing agency-wide goals has served Identity well. We drive them forward as a team. Our team has never been more inspired, and leading this company to the next great place has never been more meaningful and exciting. With the 2021 biannual meeting behind us, we’re ready to tackle our next chapter with a crystallized Identity 2025 plan for the future.