Overheard is a new series of industry anecdotes that seeks to capture the honest highs and lows of working in creativity. For our first edition, one of Australia’s most internationally recognized and awarded creative directors discusses the dreaded moment when you realise a lucrative client is costing you more than they are paying you for. It’s a true story, but we’ve redacted the names so no one gets sued.

Got a story? We want to hear from you! Email hello@semipermanent.com and tell us what you’ve got.

SP: You experienced a fairly meteoric rise early in your career. Did you have much exposure to shitty clients during your limited time at the lower end of the ranks?

A: Absolutely, I mean, you can’t avoid that. There are shitty clients everywhere and you always eat shit at the start of your career. We have a philosophy in our creative department, which is that the higher up the tree you are, the more shit you eat. So while juniors should be eating a level of shit, the higher you go, the more you have to deal with business people and clients, the harder and less interesting the conversations become. The shit eating continues… 

SP: You also become more dead inside, so it’s easier to handle as well. 

A: Yeah, that's it. You genuinely go, ‘I don't care about 90% of this shit. It's shit off a duck's back and the other 10% we can fix.’ That's a skill too.

SP: You also learn that sometimes the client is the brief more than the brief itself. Once you figure out what they really want, things move quickly. 

A: I've never been able to convince a client to buy something that's not ultimately good for them and in their best interests. If you are trying to do something that's in your best interest and not theirs, you’re working against the odds. 

SP: Did you feel like leadership was living up to those standards when you were younger? 

A: A lot of my experiences coming up involved leadership—particularly on the C-suite and suit side—failing their staff. There's a certain generosity within most creative departments. Creative leaders want to roll up their sleeves and help because it makes you closer to the work, where I think for many business owners and managers it's kind of the opposite. They pass problems on and leave. There aren't that many business leaders that are happy to support and champion their team, but also have all of the tough conversations that will take away problems versus creating new ones.

SP: Is that the role of creative leadership? To solve more problems than you make?

A: I think so, yeah. The other is that I want to be solving problems that my team never knew existed to begin with. I don’t want them to feel pressure from some shitty client, or global holding company, or the internal finance director. If it's not going to help the end product, then don't pass those problems on. But I mean there's more to it than that. Your ability to inject energy and optimism as a leader is incredibly powerful. The grass is greener where you water it. Show up to meetings with all of the energy; radiate positivity and the belief that things will happen in front of your clients and with your teams and with every naysayer that you come up against. And that's kind of pertinent to our relationship with lots of clients and to this story as well. 

SP: OK, tell me about this client.

A: [REDACTED], they're kind of this amazing brand, right? A brand that's so famous and so iconic that sales are never a problem. Like many luxury brands, the product is limited, so the challenge then becomes ‘how do we protect the future? How do we think 10, 15, 20 years ahead and be sure that we're building the audience and thinking about our legacy versus chasing a sales target in front of you?’ So very different from the FMCG world, where it’s a three to six to 12-month cycle that 99% of businesses have to work on. 

We had been a partner of theirs for six or seven years, and that relationship had really been a strong one. At the core of our team was an incredible suit; one of those suits that will absolutely be a brilliant leader, and was becoming a brilliant leader. So things were going from strength to strength. They weren't a brand that historically had made great work in Australia, for no reason other than they just weren't seeing the right ideas. And no one had quite figured out where the Venn diagram overlapped between what they thought was good and what the rest of the world thought was good, but there was a juicy, juicy morsel in the middle and it just took a bit more listening to figure that out.

But one day, the client changed. Effectively, the relationship went from being like two peas in a pod, with both of us understanding the task and challenging each other and working collaboratively to solve it, to working with someone who was so out of their depth that they had no real ability to define the business challenge let alone the marketing challenge. Quickly, every single motivation was to make it the agency’s fault to cover their own ass and cover up for ineffective management. And that spiralled into an increasingly fractured relationship where the agency had zero clarity around what was trying to be achieved. And it was kind of clear that that Venn diagram would never overlap again. There was no space in the middle.

SP: What were the conversations like with the internal business side of this equation – people whose primary responsibility is to consider the bottom line? 

A: I think that's where good leadership is so critical because the business immediately went, ‘yeah, okay, this is a problem we need to solve’. So the first conversation we had was with the client’s boss to see if there was a receptive ear. We quickly realised in this instance that there wasn't. Then we went, ‘okay, well there's going to be a financial outcome from this’, because businesses can't afford to work with terrible partners that will waste their time and waste their energy. And sure, they'll extract some money out of the partnership, but they're never going to get much value either. So internally we had to ask, ‘can we actually afford to keep this client when it's this toxic for great people?’ Not to mention the inefficiency of how much effort was required to achieve basic steps.

SP: OK, so you make the call to drop this client. What happens internally? Do you make it a big moment? 

A: We didn't make it a huge moment. We spoke transparently around the conversations that were happening. At an all-staff meeting I spoke to the entire team about all the business we’d won, then on the next slide there was an image of a car being towed that just said ‘see ya later!’ And the message was that we had this person who was internally so well respected and added such value to the account, so for her to be so disregarded by a misogynist client…well, there’s no room for that.

SP: Was it a sliding scale, or was it very clear from the beginning that it wasn’t going to work out?

A: When suddenly there is neither the clarity of a brief nor the facility to have a discussion around it, things become clear very quickly. Briefs are often unclear, but you get in a room and figure it out. But for this particular individual… they just didn’t want to spend any time getting to the solution. Maybe they were busy with other parts of their job, I couldn’t say, but I suspect they were just very shit at what they did and so committing to anything would have been raising their head above the parapet. So the safest thing was for them to retreat from doing anything, making anything and progressing anything. I suspect that paper pushing was their strategy for the role. 

SP: What were the conversations like with the internal business side of this equation – people whose primary responsibility is to consider the bottom line? 

A: I think that's where good leadership is so critical because the business immediately went, ‘yeah, okay, this is a problem we need to solve’. So the first conversation we had was with the client’s boss to see if there was a receptive ear. We quickly realised in this instance that there wasn't. Then we went, ‘okay, well there's going to be a financial outcome from this’, because businesses can't afford to work with terrible partners that will waste their time and waste their energy. And sure, they'll extract some money out of the partnership, but they're never going to get much value either. So internally we had to ask, ‘can we actually afford to keep this client when it's this toxic for great people?’ Not to mention the inefficiency of how much effort was required to achieve basic steps.

SP: OK, so you make the call to drop this client. What happens internally? Do you make it a big moment? 

A: We didn't make it a huge moment. We spoke transparently around the conversations that were happening. At an all-staff meeting I spoke to the entire team about all the business we’d won, then on the next slide there was an image of a car being towed that just said ‘see ya later!’ And the message was that we had this person who was internally so well respected and added such value to the account, so for her to be so disregarded by a misogynist client…well, there’s no room for that.

SP: Why should more agencies feel empowered to drop their clients?

A: What we're selling is our time and our expertise. If a client is paying you for that time, but they're not paying you for all of the rest of the time that you end up feeling drained and deflated, then financially they are costing you more than they’re paying for. It’s completely fine to make a financial argument here. That’s what more businesses need to do, is to not just say ‘we believe in creativity’ but to track it back to financials and say ‘we’re not a successful business if we keep burning people, talent, and energy into this vacuum of fun. 

Our industry has to be fun to make good work; you have to be having some degree of fun and you have to feel a lightness to come up with interesting shit. Toxic clients will cost you people and energy. They cost you positivity that could be better spent on other clients, and they’ll cost your whole agency a sense of cynicism for their role. It’s dreadful for juniors and young people to hear because they think ‘oh, we’re on one side, the client is on the other’. No, you’re on the same fucking team! 

You just can’t afford to keep assholes around.