Lead the handoff or lose the renewal.

The last quarterly review I sat in was a video call, in 2023.

A healthcare client, AED 30,000 a month, a year into the relationship. The team was strong, the client was happy, and for most of the call I had nothing to add.

So I stopped going. I stopped reading the room.

I handed it to an Account Manager who ran the day to day better than I did, and I told myself it was a promotion for her and a saving for the agency.

About six months later, the account did not renew.

Nothing had gone wrong with the work.

There is a version of that moment on every account. The people who won the work step back and someone else carries the relationship. It can happen the week the contract is signed, or a year in, when the account looks settled enough to leave alone.

It has a name most agencies never say out loud. It is the handoff.

The handoff is also where most senior people quietly step away. The handoff feels like the natural end of their job. The work is won, the relationship is warm, and someone else can run it from here.

That reading treats the account as a job now finished.

It is closer to a test. The handoff is the first time anyone finds out whether the relationship holds without the person who built it.

What had gone from that account was the client's sense of the person who won their trust. A capable team they felt no attachment to turned out to be easy to replace.

None of that was the Account Manager's doing. She ran it well. What she could not do was be the person the client had signed with, and a client who feels nothing in particular about their agency will always find a reason to test the market.

I ran my own agency for eight years, and I stayed close to my accounts. Close through the win, close through the launch, close through the slow months when nothing was on fire. They renewed, most of them, year after year, and for a long time I put that down to the work.

That healthcare account was the one I stepped back from, and it taught me what I had been getting right without knowing it.

A renewal turns on a relationship the client can feel. The handoff is the point where that feeling either crosses to the new team or drains out of the account, and being in the room is what decides which.

On the accounts I kept, it was never about doing the team's job for them. What held them was a familiar face in the room when the work changed hands, a question asked before the client thought to ask it, a sense that the person who made the promise was still the person answering for it.

Presence has a cost of its own, and it is not small.

Sit in every meeting, keep your senior hours on an account that is already running well, and you protect the renewal by bleeding the margin. Senior time costs several times what junior time costs.

The discipline is to stay close through the first few meetings of the new phase, long enough for the trust to cross over, then step back. Present enough to hold the connection and keep the work on plan. No more than that.

When an account leaves, the work was usually fine. What changed is that the person who won it was no longer in the room.

Senior hours are expensive everywhere except across a handoff. A renewal is where the profit on an account is actually decided.

On that account the arithmetic was plain. AED 30,000 a month is AED 360,000 a year, and it turned on the quarterly reviews I decided I did not need to be in.

Winning a client is expensive, and the first year often pays that cost back slowly. The profit lives in the years after, and each of those years turns on a renewal.

The quarterly review is also where you hear what is coming next for the client, and where you shape the work around it before anyone else does.

Skipping it to save a few senior hours is the falsest economy in the business.

Those hours get cut because a renewal you protected leaves no evidence behind. The account carries on, the invoice repeats, and nothing in the numbers says it was ever at risk.

Presence does not guarantee that an account renews. Absence does nothing to protect it, and that gap is the whole case for staying.

I never found out which review it was. Somewhere in those six months, on a video call I was not on, the account stopped being mine to the client. It had not yet become the Account Manager’s, and the work carried on without anyone noticing.

Nobody renews a supplier they have stopped recognising.

Until the next one,
Karim

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