An agency's clients never see us. That is the job.

An agency whose clients expect the website to just work

Merrick Creative describes its work as "Branding, marketing, PR, and podcasting for brands and places that refuse to blend in." Websites are part of what it delivers, and once a site is live, the client expects it to stay that way.

The person who feels that expectation is the account lead. They own the client relationship and they promise the launch date. If a client's site goes down, or its inquiry form goes quiet, they take the call. Every outage, expired certificate, and slipped launch lands on the agency's name, and none of it is the work the agency was hired to do.

Servers were never supposed to be the agency's job

Before we came in, the agency looked after hosting on servers they ran themselves. With a few sites, that is manageable. With more than thirty, counting the ones still in development, it becomes a second job: updates, certificates, backups, and a server that wants attention on a Saturday.

Each hour spent there was an hour a creative team was not spending on creative work. And when something went sideways, the account lead was the one explaining a hosting problem to a client who had hired an agency for its ideas.

The agency wanted someone to take that whole layer off its hands. It did not want a second vendor its clients would have to know about.

How we run it without anyone seeing us

We stay invisible. No FatLab name, logo, or support link appears on any site we host for them, so the agency's clients only ever deal with the agency.

We work inside their process. Requests reach us through the agency's own project system, and our project manager answers there, so the account lead never has to learn a new tool or forward an email.

New sites launch onto hosting that is already live. When a redesigned site replaces an old one, we move the new build into the place the old one occupied, so the domain, the certificate, and the firewall stay where they are. The account lead does not have to ask a client for a registrar login on launch morning, and nobody waits on a DNS change.

We check the inquiry forms around every launch. A rebuilt site can look finished while its form notifications quietly go nowhere. For a site whose whole job is collecting inquiries, that means lost prospects nobody notices for weeks. So we send real test submissions before the cutover and again after it, and we confirm they arrive.

When the agency's developers need somewhere to build, or a client needs somewhere to review, we stand up a staging site on request.

What the agency no longer thinks about

Today the account lead promises a launch date without thinking about servers. Developers ask for a staging site and get one, along with access to the sites they are working on. The agency's clients see the agency, a site that loads, and inquiries that arrive.

The client relationships stayed where they belong, with the agency. The server work moved to us. We remain in the background, which is where this arrangement needs us to be.