Medbury 🍓 | Summer Volume 1

No one - no one! - listens like an attuned creative.The emotional regulation required for spreadsheet work. And Elin Hildebrand.

Hi friends.

Here's a new format I'll be piloting each week this summer: What I'm thinking about. A LinkedIn Tip for People. A LinkedIn Tip for B2B brands. And a link or two.

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What I'm thinking about:

Emotional labor in client services - sometimes it's an edge, and if you're doing it mindfully and with consent, it can be a superpower.

I'm reading one of Elin Hildebrand's many Nantucket-based beach reads, The Blue Bistro. Mostly I read her books from the infrared sauna at my gym, or sometimes I read them in bed at 3am if I can't sleep, and each time I pick one up I think "Okay, forget the cape. How the fuck do we get Whole Summer on Nantucket Rich??" Like most of the HB oeuvre, this one's about a woman working in hospitality - my girl Adrienne has worked at some of the best five-star hotels in the world and recently stumbled into a job at the hottest fictional restaurant Nantucket has ever seen. Many paragraphs detail the blur of mini-crises, interpersonal minefields and delicate customer-facing moments of any given night in the restaurant industry.

And it's making me think a lot about agency work.

I worked in restaurants from 15 to 23, and that work - for better and worse - calcified large chunks of my neural pathways and seriously informed how I think about client service. It made me really good at reading the room, staying diplomatic, maintaining dignity in front of important & mean people, being productive in a "crisis," and being ballsy and brave when I have to be. Can't think of anything I'd trade those hard-won skills for.

But that work also enforced some negative tendencies around people pleasing, over-empathizing with assholes, over-working to feel "good," and being better at knowing what other people need than what I need. Like all millennials I'm working on it in therapy and bummed that self-awareness doesn't immediately lead to joyful behavior changes, but here we are.

Here's how this connects to agency work: If you're doing it right, you don't have clients - you have guests. People who enter your digital space (emails, content, meetings) who need to be delighted, surprised, and made to feel seen and taken care of. You need to do emotional work, attune to their needs, and not be resentful about it. It's part of the job.

Those guests also need to feel like they're getting just a bit more than they paid for. While the "know your worth and charge for it!" contingency won't like this, most long-term, successful client relationships aren't some 50/50 covenant of mutual respect and nurturing. It's 65 vendor / 35 client because it's a competitive world and it's easy to get dropped.

Here's how we try to embody this at Medbury (and we’re always working in it and evolving, and I’m sure missing opportunities at times):

Intentional attention to detail: When we're ghostwriting for executives, we clock their favorite shows, foods, and general vibe so we can send personalized gifts during big moments. A limited edition Diptyque candle to say thanks, a book they mentioned wanting to read, champagne they like when their site launches. Once I saw a gorgeous Sezane blouse in the exact shade of muted sunshine yellow that was at the center of a client's rebrand, sent her the link - she bought it and wore it in her brand photos. Glorious. ☀️

Compassion through action: Last month, a client's assistant showed up to a call in tears because she'd just put down her family dog the day before. We sent her and her daughters flowers and got a wildly grateful note back (which made me cry).

Doing the tedious but high-impact work: Sometimes being attuned means doing work that's boring but essential. We absolutely deliver great content and polished outreach - that's table stakes. But we also dig into the tedious backend work that most agencies skip: cleaning CSVs for proper tool integration, troubleshooting Sales Navigator exports, wrestling with API connections between platforms to extract every possible advantage.

And yes, there are moments when I'm deep in spreadsheet hell with the team and thinking 'this is not why I got into marketing.' But that willingness to push through the boring operational stuff - on top of great creative work - is often what separates good results from exceptional ones.

This is emotional labor, too - managing your own frustration with boring tasks and processes, staying motivated through the unglamorous grind, caring enough about the outcome to do - and often to push to do - work that feels thankless. Most people want to skip to the fun parts, but real results require emotional discipline around the stuff that doesn't feel rewarding in the moment.

And then there's the real superpower: listening. Jesus, no one listens like a ghostwriter who needs to come up with strong, nuanced content that gets approved and also performs well. Ghostwriters and content creators, to borrow a phrase from that late great Jane Austen, tend to “listen with their whole bodies.” We're parsing tone in Slack messages, reading between the lines of feedback calls, catching micro-expressions and the thing they didn't say but meant. Being this attuned is a blessing and a curse that requires mountains of self-care. (Hence: Hildebrand in the infrared sauna.)

But this is the intentional part - we choose to keep doing it because when you approach client work as emotional labor done with consent and care, those moments become more than just business transactions. Life is short, and a moment on a client call is still a moment of our actual lives. We're all just humans trying to do good work, pay bills, and maybe feel something real. So why not lean into that? Why not actually thank and care about the person on the other end of the Zoom? It doesn't make you weak - it makes the work worth doing and transforms what could be transactional into something genuinely meaningful.

In the age of AI and a race to the bottom on agency pricing, I believe a smaller, more curated client base combined with genuine human efforts to be helpful, valuable, connected and empathetic in a sea of chatbots is not nothing.

And if anything gives female agency owners an edge (we're a tiny minority and need all the edges we can get), it's this: seeing what people need and being generous and competent enough to give it.

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LinkedIn Tip for People:

Here's one that blows people's minds: if you put a link in your post, it won't get as much reach. LinkedIn wants you to stay on the platform, not click over to Harvard Business Review.

Sometimes folks get around this by saying "Link in comments." These days, if a client wants to link out, we just do it and know it's going to be a grower not a shower - more clicks than a comment link, but fewer impressions than no-link posts. Doesn't matter. Most people don't see most of your posts anyway, so you get lots and lots of at-bats. Mix it up.

🍓🍓 🍓 Want to work together? Book time here to chat LinkedIn + Medbury. 🍓🍓🍓

LinkedIn Tip for B2B Brands:

Create a dedicated engagement channel. Slack, Teams, whatever - add everyone willing to like, comment, and share. When a new post goes up, drop the link ASAP and ask for early engagement. Those first few likes and comments really matter for how the algorithm treats your content. We do this for many clients and it absolutely makes a difference. Think of it as priming the pump - early engagement tells LinkedIn this content is worth showing to more people.

A Link I Like:

For my first communion my grandmother gave me this beautiful, crazy fragrant Violet Verly soap from Germany. I kept the purple-tissue-paper-wrapped soaps in my sock drawer for years so my socks would smell nice and I kept the pretty box they came in to store my restaurant tip money. Then my cash smelled like violets, which was also nice

The other week I was feeling wildly nostalgic and hunted down the now-discontinued OG packaging on Etsy and am keeping it on. my desk. Smelling it for a few minutes each day makes me happy.

Thanks for reading. Reply back if you'd like. Or book time here to chat LinkedIn / Medbury. And that's all she wrote.

xo,
Meredith

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This newsletter is produced by Medbury. (We say it like “Med - Berry” 🍓) We’re an agency focused on LinkedIn strategy and content for leadership teams and brands. Check out our site, follow us on LinkedIn or book 15 minutes to learn about our work.