No fancy finish lines. No crowds cheering. No medals; no snacks.

Just my family helping refill my water a couple times and toss me bags of dry cereal.

My self marathon on 12/9/18, will forever resonate with me related to Principle #7 at Data Driven Design - THERE ARE NO BLOCKERS.

As I document the top things I believe all small businesses and marketing directors for mid-size to emerging brands, our company's principle #7, THERE ARE NO BLOCKERS is a big one.

For those of you not familiar, a "blocker" is a term that big agencies use during internal "stand-up meetings" to basically make excuses for why work isn't getting done.

Picture groups of 3-10 employees standing around for 15 minutes at the beginning of their day, talking their status update on one or more projects.

One of the questions asked from project managers to developers is "what are your blockers?"

It's basically a way for a developer or designer to give a project manager an excuse that the agency can take back to the client and put back in the clients' court as to why the work that the client is paying for isn't getting done.

So to be clear, we don't do that at Data Driven Design.

We push forward for our clients to help them solve their problems before they even know they have a problem. And if we're not doing that, WE'RE IN THE WRONG, and we own up to it.

Case in point from my personal life, I missed the sign up / registration for the Valencia Marathon this year. I really wanted to run. It was on Sunday, December 2, 2018.

Instead of getting mad about it and folding, I decided to map out my own route, plan out snacks and water, and ran 26.2 miles by myself today - a week after.

So, not only did I still run the Valencia Marathon, I put up my best time ever.

Point being, we don't let silly shit slow us down. Can't pick the right image? We can A/B Test that. Can't even find one image? Don't have web copy? Want a video but don't have one? No problems. We have solutions. We're going to keep moving to make our client's lives easier.

It's all mindset.

We know that when we don't keep he project moving, it's at risk of all falling apart.

We want our clients to get the most value, and we push things forward.

THERE ARE NO BLOCKERS.

We are only interested in people with this mindset working at Data Driven Design. Whatever it takes, get the work done for the client. Right or wrong, it's how we operate and it's what works for us.

Click here to view all of our company principles.