How to move from account management to commercial ownership.
The move is from being judged on how the account runs to being judged on what the account earns. You start reading the fee, the hours and the margin on every account you touch, before anyone asks you to.
Nobody hands you commercial ownership. You take it, one account at a time, until the people above you notice that your accounts are the ones whose numbers they do not worry about.
What account management trains you for
Account management is where the craft lives. You learn to read a client, write a brief the creative team can use, run a review that ends in a decision, and keep delivery reliable week after week. Every senior commercial person I respect did those years and did them well.
What account management does not show you is the cost side. The hours behind the fee, the rate each hour should earn, the utilisation of the people doing the work, and the difference between a busy account and a profitable one. Those numbers usually sit with someone else, and the account manager only sees the effect when a scope is cut or a headcount is frozen.
Four habits that make the move
- Read the margin on your accounts every week. Fee minus the hours at their real rate. A full calendar and a good month are two different things, and the only way to tell them apart is to look every week instead of at the quarter.
- Know the rate card and quote from it. When a client asks for more, the answer has a number in it. An account manager who can price a request in the meeting has already started doing the commercial job.
- Forecast your own accounts three months out. Which ones renew, which ones grow, which ones are at risk and why. A forecast is a list of conversations to have before the quarter closes, and the person who writes it is the person who owns the accounts.
- Own the fee conversation. The hardest part of the move. Raising a price, holding a scope, saying that a piece of work is outside the fee. Handing those to someone more senior is comfortable, and it is also the exact moment ownership stays with them.
What it looked like for me
At JWT I was a Senior Account Manager with two account executives, running accounts across banking, FMCG and telco. I was good at the account and I did not see the number.
In 2017 I started my own agency in Dubai, and every decision for the next eight years had a number attached. Rate cards, forecasting, margin, payroll. I learned the cost side by carrying it, across a seven-figure portfolio and more than 50 clients.
The habit that made the most difference was the weekly margin read. It is how we productised our delivery, cut delivery time by 25 per cent, and held margin while demand rose. Today, as Business Director at an agency in Dubai, it is the first thing I look at each week.
None of it required a finance background. It required looking at the number every week and being willing to say what it showed.
Where the move gets hard
The temptation is to over-serve. Delivery is visible and margin is not, so the extra hours feel like good service right up to the month they show. Commercial ownership means saying what an account can have for its fee, and saying it early enough that the client can choose.
The other risk is losing the account skills on the way up. The number is built on the relationship, and a commercial owner who stops reading the client will soon have nothing to read the margin on.
The longer version
- Own the bit that was never in scope →
- Have the call before they ask for it →
- Why agencies lose the clients they should keep →