As the cliche goes, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” 

It’s not true, of course. Not in a literal sense anyway. No matter how much you love your job, it will definitely still require work. Emails, meetings, mundanity. But if you think about the phrase in a slightly different perspective, that “if you are passionate about what you do, you’ll find more satisfaction in the work,” you’ll find a lot more truth there. Even in the advertising industry.

It may be hard to believe, but at Elasticity, we don’t just take every dollar someone offers us. There are a number of factors in which clients we accept or pursue. Many of those reasons are business related – projections, opportunity costs, industry volatility, trustworthiness, etc. But our own team’s interest and passion does often enter the equation. Because the best work often starts with passion. 

Elasticity’s Director of Client Relations, Meg Ryan, outlined her thoughts on how to get the most for a client from our team on the newest episode of the Stretching Boundaries podcast: “I think what’s really important is making sure you’re aligning the right client relationship manager with the right account and the right client, making sure it’s in line with what they’re already passionate about.”

The University of Oxford agrees, with researchers in a recent study finding happy workers are around 12% more productive than their unhappy colleagues. And while happiness takes a number of metrics into account, fulfillment with what you do is one of them. 

So when we respond to an RFP or consider a proposal, we try to weigh our team’s excitement for the project into our equation. We have a very diverse team with varied passions – music, surfing, video games, we’ve even got a person who’s on a curling team. Those interests (ok, maybe outside of curling) often overlap with our clients, their industries or their partners and projects. And when you can align those interests, you start to see better work with more impassioned results.

Not every job has to be fun exactly. These are still jobs at the end of the day. But aligning projects to your team’s interests and tastes can have big and lasting benefits, both for your clients as well as your own team. 

Learn more about the role of client relationship managers and how they add success to our agency by listening to the full episode of the new Stretching Boundaries podcast here.