You don’t think about the chainsaw operator’s gloves until the chain snaps. You don’t think about the earmuffs until the person next to you doesn’t have them. The heavy duty jeans, the boots, the eyeglasses — none of it crosses your mind while the saw is running clean.
The protective gear only matters when something goes wrong. And by then, you either had it or you didn’t.
That’s what Yeetish feels like from the client’s side. You don’t notice the protection until you hear what happened to someone who didn’t have it. This is what it’s like to work with a company that might be too transparent.
Before You Even Sign
The gear goes on before the first cut. You just don’t see it.
From prospect hesitations to client situations, there’s a bridge that happens between the beginning and when we’re done with the build. Before you come on board our boutique web design company, it starts to feel like we’re paying attention from the jump. You should notice certain things we say — not rehearsed lines, not a sales pitch, but things that tell you someone on the other end is listening to what you’re describing, not just waiting for you to finish so they can talk.
And after you come on board, things that you said that might have been in passing might be brought up — because we are expert note takers. That offhand comment about your hours changing, or the product you’re thinking about adding, or the thing you said about hating your current logo — that didn’t evaporate. It went into the build. And when you see it show up later, that’s the moment the guard starts to come down. Not because we did something flashy. Because we remembered something you didn’t think anyone was writing down.
And when we say “done with the build,” that’s not the end. It’s more like there’s the pre-beginning, and then the beginning is when the website starts, and the end is someplace off in the distance. Hopefully when you retire.
There’s this overwhelming feeling that you are in capable hands. There should be a sigh of relief — like you can check that box as a business owner that this is being taken care of and someone is watching out for me. We have an uptime monitor set up on all of our websites — if a site goes down, we get an email right away. It’s a small thing for us. It was easy to set up. But it’s a big thing for our clients, because it means someone is watching even when they’re not.
That’s the gloves going on. You might not see it happen. But the moment something rattles, you’ll know they were already there.
When the Chain Rattles
A client calls out of the blue. Hey — someone is showing up first when I type in my business name.
They’re not even doing SEO with us.
Doesn’t matter. We get on it and see what’s going on. Obviously we’re not going to be able to fix it for free, but we’ll tell them exactly what’s happening. And not in “your topical authority is this, this, and that — you need contextual links” and all the BS. No.
Just taking a look — this person has been around longer than you, and doing a quick scan, they’ve done a little more marketing work than you’re doing. That’s why. And that’s it. That might be the difference between us and your nice but possibly bad web designer. Not everyone can look at your website and tell you what’s wrong.
No jargon. No upsell buried in the explanation. No “well, if you signed up for our SEO package…” Just — here’s what’s happening, here’s why, and now you know. When you find someone like this it might be the right time to get a new website.
That’s what the client expected to never get. They expected the runaround. They expected to be told they need something they don’t understand in order to fix something they can’t see. They expected the conversation to end with a pitch. Instead it ended with the truth, delivered in a sentence short enough to repeat to their business partner over lunch.
That’s every interaction. The client didn’t need a lecture. They needed someone to pick up the phone and tell them the truth in words they could understand.
The chain rattled. Someone was already listening.
Thirty Years of Holding the Saw
When someone who’s been through the whole journey — hesitation, signing, first draft, first mistake, first win — tries to explain Yeet to a friend, what do they say?
They’re straight shooters, and they don’t mess around getting something done.
I don’t think there’s a bigger compliment than that. Not “they built a beautiful site.” Not “they’re really creative.” Not “they have great reviews.” Straight shooters that when your business changes they can move with the changes, they’re adaptable. That’s the word a client reaches for after months or years of working with someone. It means every conversation they had was what it appeared to be. No subtext. No angle. No moment where they walked away wondering what just happened.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because of what’s underneath it.
Jargon and corporate speak is the epitome of a lazy person. It’s what we all start doing in the very beginning. Nearly 30 years ago, you can’t wait to tell everyone everything you know. And now 30 years later, you don’t say much — because you realize you really don’t know much. Because how can you know anything if you don’t let them talk?
That shift is the difference. And that’s what Yeetish allows — because if you just use plain speak, you don’t need to say much, but you convey everything. From what happens when you stop paying your subscription to what happens when things go wrong with your web designer, these things matter to you so they matter to us.
The difference between someone who’s been running a chainsaw for 30 years and someone who just picked one up is a scary difference — because someone who just picked one up doesn’t know about all the ways you can die when you’re cutting down a tree. And that’s real talk. Same thing with communication. There’s no comparison between someone just starting out and someone who’s been doing it for 30 years.
Because here’s what experience teaches you: rarely do clients say what they mean. That’s not a flaw on their part. It’s human nature. It is impossible when you’re feeling vulnerable to say exactly what you mean — especially with people that know you. And so it’s our job as veteran communicators to figure out exactly what they mean and to gently ask them if that assertion is correct. Only then can they feel truly protected and understood.
Carl Rogers, the psychologist whose research on empathic listening defined the field for the last half-century, described the practice in a way that maps directly to what we do:
“It means temporarily living in his/her life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments, sensing meanings of which he/she is scarcely aware, but not trying to uncover feelings of which the person is totally unaware, since this would be too threatening. It includes communicating your sensings of his/her world as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which the individual is fearful. It means frequently checking with him/her as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive.”
— Carl R. Rogers, Ph.D., founder of client-centered therapy. Source: The Counseling Psychologist, 1975
Impossible with a new person with very little communication experience.
What Survives
If everything about Yeet disappeared tomorrow except one thing — one principle, one behavior, one commitment — what survives?
Yeetish. The communication philosophy.
We’ve got AI coming after everyone’s jobs. The degradation of customer service over the last two decades is so noticeable — from restaurants to department stores, online chat, online phone service. If you’re excellent, you’re not the top 1% or even 5% like you were two decades ago. You’re the top .001% if you’re excellent. You’re so far head and shoulders above where standard customer service is that you might as well be a unicorn.
And that’s not a brag. That’s a tragedy. The bar dropped so far that being a decent communicator who picks up the phone and tells the truth makes you an outlier. That’s the world we’re operating in. And Yeetish is the answer to it — not because we invented something new, but because we refused to stop doing the thing everyone else quietly abandoned.
How we treat our clients matters the most.
Every piece of gear. Every quiet system running in the background — the uptime monitor that fires an email before the client even knows the site blinked. Every phone call picked up for a service you’re not even paying for. Every note taken from a conversation you thought was casual. Every backup made before something could break. Every time we gently asked, “Is that what you meant?” when we could tell it wasn’t.
That’s Yeetish. The protection was there the whole time. You just didn’t need to think about it.
That’s the whole point of Yeetish. Not that nothing goes wrong. That when it does, someone was already wearing the gloves.
Yeetish Question
What does Yeetish mean in practice — not as a concept, but when you’re the client?
It means the things you don’t notice are the things someone already handled. The backup that was made before the update ran. The note taken from a call you thought was small talk. The phone picked up when you weren’t even a paying customer for that service. Yeetish isn’t something we explain to clients. It’s something they describe to us after they’ve been through it — usually in two words: straight shooters.