The clients I did not keep.

Six months, and then an email.

Three lines long, no reason given. An orthopaedic hospital in Abu Dhabi, 2023, and the account was finished before I understood it had been in any trouble.

We had the whole account. Their social media, their Meta and Google advertising, their search, and the results were good.

I drove to Abu Dhabi every month for the video shoot. The quarterly review happened once, and I presented the numbers to their MD myself.

He asked what more we could do to grow faster.

I knew about one problem. Before us, their Arabic had been written in-house, by someone on their customer support team.

Our Arabic was correct. The note that kept coming back was that we were missing the dialect. They sent it back, we rewrote it, they sent it back again.

Dialect is hard to argue line by line, so nobody argued it. What settled instead was a view: the agency cannot write the language their patients actually read.

So I fixed it. I changed the copywriter, then changed the replacement.

None of it had happened anywhere they could see.

Fixing the Arabic quietly was the mistake. By the time the copy was coming back with almost no changes, they had already made up their minds about us.

Nobody there ever confirmed that for me. I filed it under bad luck before I filed it correctly.

I had treated their frustration as a production problem. It was a relationship problem wearing production clothes.

A client who has decided you are not good at something stops noticing when you get good at it. By then the decision is made.

The quiet fixing was only half of it. The other half took longer to see, because I was there in person every month.

A quarterly review is where the good numbers go. The frustration was living somewhere else entirely, in the weekly back and forth over copy, and I was nowhere near those conversations.

I had seen that gap, and I had already put someone into it. I hired an account director, so that somebody senior was holding the relationship every week instead of once a quarter.

The account director had joined a few weeks earlier, with no history with this client and none of the standing that comes from having solved something with them before.

Every time I asked how the hospital was, the answer came back calm and reassuring. Nobody ever picked up the phone to the client and said the hard part out loud.

I took the reassurance as evidence, and I never checked it myself.

Their side had no senior client lead. My contact there was junior and new, holding a budget considerably bigger than her authority.

She was not the problem. Nobody had given her the standing to tell her own management that the agency was wearing them down, and no one on my side ever asked her how bad it had got.

So the relationship ran between two people who had both just arrived. Both sides had a reason, and neither reason kept the account.

When the account ended the revenue stopped that month. The salaries did not.

Ten people stayed on the payroll while I went looking for another account to replace the revenue, and the pitching that followed cost money the hospital was no longer bringing in. Lighter weeks for the team, same salary at the end of each one.

Owning an agency is different from working in one. You go back over every loss looking for the part you caused.

Not every lost client is a client you could have kept.

A clinic in Dubai went under while we were still working for them. Three years together, and then the market turned competitive, their margins disappeared, and they carried on buying marketing to squeeze the last revenue out of a business they already knew was closing.

They were in liquidation for the last four months, and we found out when they stopped existing.

Nothing I could have done differently would have changed that ending. I have gone back over it and the answer does not move.

Some clients leave because of something you did. Some leave because their own business was already ending. Blaming yourself for something you could not have prevented will make you second-guess everything, and calling your own mistake bad luck will make you careless.

You usually cannot tell the two apart until long after the invoicing has stopped. The hospital was my own mistake, which is why it is worth writing about.

In the end the work was fixed and it changed nothing. I was visible on that account without ever being close to it, and the person I put there was close to it without being trusted yet.

Fixing it in your own building is not the same as handling it.

So I changed how I ran every account after that one.

Tell them what you have seen and what you did about it, and tell them especially when the problem is already fixed. Waiting until you have good news feels like good manners, and in the meantime the client makes up their mind.

Take responsibility for the gap where their own senior person should be, even though no contract mentions it. When your contact cannot carry the relationship, carrying it is the work.

Put a new person in beside the client rather than in front of them, and stay there yourself until the client trusts that person the way they trusted you.

And let the client own the wins in front of their own people.

None of it is strategy. One rule, showing up at four different moments.

I made all of it non-negotiable, because I had learned what the alternative costs, and the whole cost lands in a single month.

I am reasonably sure I know why they left, and I was never owed the explanation.

What I got instead was six months, a monthly fee I still remember, and one rule I have not broken since: a problem is not handled until the client has watched me handle it.

Eighty per cent of my clients renewed, year after year. I did not learn any of this from them.

Until the next one,
Karim

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