You should know the people working on your site.
Most agencies sell you on the senior people in the pitch and put a junior team on the build. Classic City is four humans who each do real work on every project.
The “B Team” drives me nuts. You meet the senior partners on the sales call, sign the contract, and then somehow your project gets handed to people you’ve never spoken to. It’s the single most common complaint I hear from people coming off a bad agency relationship.
The fix is the size of the team. If you’re in the collective, you’re talking to clients and active in the build. There isn’t anyone to hand you off to. The names below are the names on every invoice line item, the names in every meeting, and the names you’ll text at 4pm on a Tuesday when something needs to get done.
The collective
Chris LaFay
Founder. 20+ years building websites, mostly for service businesses. Runs strategy and creative. Has a hand in the backend of sites we ship.
Andrew Booth
Lead developer. Knows all the backend systems. Started in .NET and specializes in Shopify and WordPress.
Claude Ball
Designer. Builds the visual systems with an artisan’s eye. Keeps developers on their toes
Dawn Audano
Project lead. Keeps every build on time, on budget, and surprise-free. The person you’ll talk to most after we kick off.
How we work together
Four principles that explain why a four-person agency feels different from a forty-person one.
No “A Team / B Team”
We staff by project, not by tier.
Every project gets the people best suited for it. The names in the proposal are the names on the calls, in the back-end, and at the launch. There’s no junior bench we hand you off to.
Real introductions
Everyone meets you.
You don’t get sold by one person and handed off to another. The people building your site are the ones you talk to from week one. We do our best to align schedules to get everyone in the room.
Transparency
Decisions in a day
“Let me check with the team” means turning our [virtual] chair. Direction changes that cost a big agency two weeks of meetings cost us one call.
Honesty
We tell you when we’re not the right fit.
If your project would be better served by a freelancer, a different agency, or a different stack entirely, we’ll say so. We’d rather refer you to a friend than take a project we shouldn’t.
Friends of the collective
When the right answer isn’t us, it’s usually one of these people. We send work their way the same way they send work ours.
GreenMellen
Mickey Mellen is one half of GreenMellen and his team’s entire focus is making sure websites are maintained well.
Shock Social
The trio of Shock Social folks run your social media. Side note: they also do all of our Content Day video!
MMG Design
Andy Milligan and his team is the bomb at Webflow websites. They have a specialty in healthcare, but are my go-to for anything Webflow related.
Studio Hawk
Sophie Brannon leads the Studiohawk (SEO all day, every day) team in Atlanta and has also co-hosted a number of events with me.
Revive Marketing
Meet Amy Blum. She runs Revive and has an amazing crew who will absolutely crush your Meta and Google Ads out of the park.
Questions people have asked
In most cases, yes. The first or second call usually has all four of us on it. I can’t guarantee everyone’s schedule lines up perfectly, but that’s the goal. You should know who’s building your site before you sign anything.
Dawn. She runs project communication once we’ve kicked off. You’ll still hear directly from Claude on design calls and Andrew on dev questions, but Dawn is the one keeping the threads straight.
With a four-person team that question is mostly hypothetical, but the answer is: we don’t ghost. If someone has to step back, the rest of us absorb the work and finish what we said we’d finish. We’ve never failed to ship a project we committed to.
Yes. For the same things you probably do. Speeding up code, drafting first-pass copy, generating reference imagery. We don’t use it to replace strategy, design judgment, or client conversations. The page you’re reading was a collaboration between Chris and a Claude (the AI, not Claude Ball. That confusion comes up often).
Not actively. We’ve been four for a while and like the size. Small enough that everyone touches every project, big enough to ship real work. If you’re a designer, developer, or PM who’d thrive in a place that works the way we describe above, send a note anyway. We keep a list.
Meet us first. Decide later.
Grab time on the calendar and we’ll set up a 30-minute call with whoever on the team makes sense for what you’re building. No pitch, no pressure.