Below is a practical four-stage model that will help you diagnose where you are, what leadership style you’re currently using, and what you need to become next.

1) Start-up: Doer-in-Chief

In the start-up phase, the founder is the engine. You sell, deliver, hire, invoice and—inevitably—fix the printer.

The leadership style that works here is direct and personal:

• speed and decisive action

• clear standards (because you are the standard)

• relentless prioritisation

The danger is that you mistake heroics for progress. The agency becomes dependent on your energy and availability. Your team learns, quietly, that most decisions eventually come back to you. It’s efficient. Until it isn’t.

Signal you’ve outgrown this stage: you’re drowning in decisions that shouldn’t need you.

2) Growth: Player-Coach

Growth demands repeatability. The agency needs to deliver good work consistently without the founder starring in every scene.

This is the player-coach phase. You’re still close enough to the action to set the tempo, but your real output is delivered through others.

What changes now is the discipline:

• roles and accountability stop being “implicit”

• client management becomes a method, not a personality

• pipeline and forecasting move from hope to hygiene

• performance expectations are explicit, not “understood”

This stage can feel unglamorous. That’s because it is. But it’s also where firms either become scalable—or remain founder-led boutiques with a payroll problem.

Signal you’ve outgrown this stage: the business grows, but quality and profitability wobble because the system can’t keep up.

3) Transformation: Architect

Transformation is where many agencies stall. Not because they don’t want to be more profitable, but because the old model is comfortable.

To move up the value chain—and push productivity beyond £150,000 per full-time employee—you must design a different firm. That requires the founder to become an architect rather than a cheerleader.

This phase is dominated by fewer decisions, but bigger ones:

• what work do we stop doing?

• which clients do we politely outgrow?

• what is our distinctive point of view?

• how do we price outcomes, not hours?

• how do we create senior leverage, so the agency isn’t simply talented people sharing a postcode?

The paradox is that transformation often means disappointing people who liked the previous version of the firm. Including the founder. It’s not just a strategy shift. It’s an identity shift.

Signal you’re in transformation: you’re making trade-offs that improve focus and margin, not just top-line growth.

4) Sale: Steward

When you’re heading towards a sale, you’re not just running a business. You’re preparing an asset.

Leadership becomes stewardship. The priority is predictability, governance and reducing key-person risk. You stop being the hero and start building conditions a buyer can trust:

• stable margin and consistent delivery

• dependable forecasting

• a credible leadership bench

• client concentration under control

• a story that survives due diligence

Buyers do not pay a premium for magic. They pay for repeatability.

Signal you’re ready for this stage: the firm can perform well with you absent for a month. If it can’t, you don’t have an asset yet—you have a job.

The real question

The question isn’t “what’s my leadership style?”

It’s: what stage is my firm in—and am I leading for that stage, or for my own comfort?

If you match leadership to the stage, growth becomes less exhausting, profitability becomes less accidental, and the firm becomes something that can thrive without your constant supervision. That is the point.

As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.

So let me take you through who they are and what they do.

However, before you hire professionals to execute the transaction, you need to make sure your business is in the best possible shape to sell, partly because the professionals will charge you a monthly fee, and if you’re not in the best possible shape, you’ll be clocking up fees unnecessarily, whilst you sort yourself out.

There’s lots of people out there who can help you get into shape, me included.

When you are ready, the first people to hire are the corporate finance guys.

These are the people who have to get an auction going, to get you the best possible price.

First of all, they’ll sit down with you and discuss your objectives, and because they know the marketplace extremely well (and they should – but not all do), they’ll be able to take you through the various types of buyers there are: buy and build; strategic; international; various types of private equity; and so on.

And they will work out from that discussion which buyers they think are best suited to you.

They will also know whether the buyers are in the right place to do a deal. A particular buy and build company, for example, might still be busy digesting its last transaction. A particular private equity firm may be in the middle of another deal, and so have no bandwidth to consider you, and so on.

Then, their job is to prepare a teaser document, which is anonymous and gives the bare bones outline of your firm and what you are looking for, and they circulate that to the right parties, to generate interest.

They will assess and discuss the responses with you, and then put together the Information Memorandum, for serious buyers. This is a “brochure” that goes into much more detail on your firm, and should be enough to enable potential buyers to put in outline offers.

The IM for my company was 45 pages long. Not everybody does an IM of that length, but basically it’s a serious piece of work.

They’ll arrange various meetings with shortlisted buyers, which will be whittled down to one, and they will conduct the initial negotiation on their outline offer, negotiate adjustments to your P&L, balance sheet, things of that nature.

Accountants come next.

These are not bookkeepers. You may have used an external firm to keep your books and send returns to Companies’ House, and other administrative tasks. But these firms are not the people to use for a sale.

You need to go for a firm of chartered accountants, and the reason for that is they’ll almost certainly have to do an audit at some point, and they’ll have to do various tax calculations.

They will have to negotiate with HMRC on all manner of tax related issues, and they may have to do working capital analyses, and other pieces of technical accounting; we had to have a Monte-Carlo simulation done at one point, to estimate the P&L impact of share options. Bookkeepers can’t do this stuff.

Then come lawyers, and let me tell you, these folks are indispensable.

Their main job is to put together the Sale & Purchase Agreement – the “Bible” for the deal – and there’s a whole raft of other documentation as well. We had 683 pages of legals in total, and I don’t think that’s unusual.

They’ll also keep you safe, with warranties and disclosure letters, and look out for your interests throughout.

They’re tremendously important. And because much of the drafting will take place long into the evening and under some pressure, you have to hire lawyers who are not just proficient; you have to be able to get on with them, too.

It’s a mistake to hire any of these professionals, if they don’t have specific and extensive experience in the sector. There’s no end of (presumably good) people out there who do deals all the time. But the intricacies of the media sector (PR, advertising, design, etc) means generalists can’t cut it, in my opinion.

I’ve worked with the following firms and people in this space, and think they are very good. They are shown in alphabetical order, and have different strengths and weaknesses, so it’s horses for courses:

Corporate Finance – Peter Hemington, Mark Madsen, Moore Kingston Smith, SI Global.

Accountants: HW Fisher, Moore Kingston Smith.

Lawyers: Lewis Silkin

As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.

If you would like to see a <3 minute video that covers this, head over to YouTube by clicking here.

There is a problem, which is what you think the promotion’s about, and what they think the promotion’s about, could be two different things.

As far as you’re concerned, this promotion is all about building strategic capability for the firm.

For the person being promoted, the danger is that they think:

• Great, at long last, a reward for my hard work.

• Actually, the money isn’t that great. I thought I’d get more as a manager.

• And now I’ve got management responsibilities, I can fight for my team, because they need more money, too.

What they think is happening is this promotion is a medal ceremony.

What you think is happening is this promotion is a calculated risk.

So you need to sit them down and have the following conversation with them.

First off, you have to say to them that this is not a reward for past success.

They have already been rewarded for that, in pay and in bonuses.

This is a new opportunity, a different job, and it’s much harder than the old one.

For a start, they’re no longer just leading their team. They have responsibilities across the entire company, and that means they may have to do things their old team find difficult and uncomfortable.

You need to take them through the accounts and the objectives for the company.

Most people being promoted have never seen a P&L. They have never seen a Balance Sheet. They don’t know how they work.

So you need to explain to them what you’re aiming for financially, and you have to take them through the KPIs you use.

I always find, when you explain to people about the staff cost to gross profit ratio, their eyes open in astonishment, because most firms are aiming for between 50% and 60% of GP, and they are usually at the higher end of that.

And when the person being promoted discovers how little room for manoeuvre there is, they’re astonished. They might even start to have second thoughts.

I remember vividly, when I was promoted to Director of Valin Pollen, they managed to get a one-line story in the Times newspaper, about my promotion.

And the Chairman, Reg Valin, sent me a copy of the press cutting, attached to a note, and the note said; “Congratulations on your promotion, Chris. The hard work starts now.”

I read that, and I thought, I have no idea what he’s talking about. My God, I found out, in the weeks and months and years that followed! So start having that conversation, so your newly promoted colleague can start working hard, straight away.

As always, time is short, and there’s much to do, so good luck to you, and get cracking.

And if you grow it and sell it, the money you get from selling it could fund freedom of all sorts.

Before you take that step, I think there are five questions you need to think about very carefully, and the time between Christmas and New Year is great for that.

First of all, have you got a good idea?

If your idea is, “I hate my job, I want to do something different”.

That’s not enough. You’ve got to have something of great value that clients will want to buy.

What is that?

Second question you have to think about, is, who could you do this with?

Please try and avoid the trap of going it alone. You will just become a human bottleneck and your stress levels will rise incredibly.

You may be very good at running an existing business, but starting a business from scratch and getting it off the ground is a different proposition entirely. So, who could be a co-conspirator?

Third point, have you got the social capital you need to succeed?

Are you well regarded in your industry already? If it’s PR, do the press, know who you are, do clients know who you are, do influencers and intermediaries know who you are?

In other words, have you got connections? If you don’t have a corpus of social capital behind you, you will really struggle.

Next, have you got financial capital?

Setting up a business is not free. You have to put money aside for legal fees.

You have to put money aside for all the accounting you’re will be doing. And marketing doesn’t come free.

You will have to network, you will have to attend and host events, you will have to get out and about and meet people. You will drink more coffee and have more lunches than you thought possible. It all costs.

So, you need to sit down with a spreadsheet and do your arithmetic.

And finally, do you have what it takes?

You have to be very resilient. You have to be resourceful. You really have to be a self starter. You have to be really good at new business and marketing. You have to be good with staff.

So take a good look at yourself.

Are you the kind of person who could, against all odds, get something off the ground and flying?

If you have done your thinking and you are determined to press on - that’s great news. The next task is to sit down, refine your thoughts, turn them into a plan, discuss it with your co-conspirator(s), and then….take a deep breath and press go.

Over the years, I’ve encountered a great many strategies that richly deserved to be lunch. These usually announce themselves with lofty intentions: “We’re going to be the best PR firm in our sector,” or “We aim to be the McKinsey of communications.” Admirable ambitions, but often expressed with the nutritional value of a rice cake.

A quick reminder: an effective commercial strategy requires a serious amount of thought and research to answer three deceptively simple questions:

1. Who are we selling to?

2. What, precisely, are we selling?

3. How will we deliver it—consistently, profitably and at scale?

Once you answer these, dozens of other crucial questions cascade down: positioning, pricing, service design, team structure, measurement, and so on.

This matters particularly if you’re trying to move your company up the value chain—a journey many PR agencies talk about but fewer manage. Selling higher-value work means selling work that is different from what you sell today. And doing different things demands behaving differently.

Which is where culture elbows its way onto the stage.

A strategy that requires you to upgrade your offer—to build new intellectual property, to change your delivery model, to challenge longstanding habits—stands no chance if your prevailing culture resists the very idea of change. Moving up the value chain demands better research, more rigorous thinking, different team configurations, and a consistently higher standard of delivery. That means discomfort. That means disruption. And disruption requires a culture that welcomes it rather than politely ignoring it.

It is worth pausing to remember what culture actually is. At its most basic, culture is how people behave when nobody is watching. If you have built an environment in which people willingly stay late to get something important over the line—because high-value clients tend to be demanding—then you have a fighting chance.

But if your culture is one in which individuals bridle at being asked to come into the office more than twice a week, or in which the concept of “going the extra mile” is met with the sort of defensive posture normally reserved for cold-calling salespeople, then you have a problem. In such cases, sorting out the culture is a prerequisite to designing a strategy, not something you can retrofit afterwards.

Which brings us back to Drucker’s supposedly 25-year-old aphorism. Regardless of whether he ever uttered the line, the underlying principle still holds. Strategy may set the direction, but culture supplies the traction. Without the right cultural foundations, even the most elegantly crafted strategy will go nowhere fast.

So yes—Drucker is still right. Perhaps even more so now, when firms are trying to reinvent themselves faster than their people are prepared to move.

Now, one of the markers of a highly professional business is that their people keep their promises. If they say they will do something, you can take that promise to the bank, because you know they will do their damnedest to deliver. Meet that budget, win that business, or whatever.

Two tips for helping with that:

First, next time you ask one of your team to undertake an important piece of work - launch a new training initiative, start a new service offer, or what have you - have them produce a brief, following your verbal instructions.

Having a brief gives clarity on what you have asked for and by when. Having them write the brief lets you see what their understanding of your instructions is, so you know that you are both on the same page (it also saves you some time).

Without a written brief there is just too much room for misunderstanding, whereas a brief eliminates the “oh, sorry; I didn’t realise you meant X” response, which can otherwise be all too common.

Second tip is to outlaw the use of the word “try” in your organisation, as in: “I will try to speak to that client”; “I will try to finish that proposal by Friday”, and so on. What you want instead is their commitment to execute whatever it is they are supposed to be doing.

In my experience, when people use the “try” word - and you let them - you are jointly complicit in allowing what is in effect a semi-promise, which is therefore semi-allowed to be broken. And this seeps into the culture of the firm, making it harder to reach a high level of professionalism, and hard therefore to reach high productivity numbers; high revenues; high profits and so on.

Planning, for example, becomes that much harder when you have a bunch of projected numbers, and you don’t know if the people who promised to “try” to achieve them really will, or not. And since many businesses for sale are valued based on, in effect, a promise to achieve budgeted numbers, that makes life very difficult for you.

Peter Hemington, when he was head of BDOs M&A practice, told me that “the quickest way to kill a deal is to miss the numbers.”

I have found the easiest way to outlaw “try” is simply to announce, in an SMT-type meeting, that the word “try” is henceforth banished. Explain what you mean; when individuals promise things, they need to commit to them. Say it often enough and the message soon spreads. And your life as founder or CEO starts becoming that little bit easier, and your business that bit better.

As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.

I know why people say this. It’s because they think that clients buy, based on professionalism, and so it makes sense to put your professional credentials right up front.

The trouble is, that completely misunderstands how clients think.

You see, they don’t buy assertions of professionalism, they buy demonstrations of professionalism. And your credentials are just one long assertion.

And clients get bored reading your credentials. Why?

Well, they didn’t pick your firm’s name out of a hat. They did research. They’ve been to your website. Maybe they have spoken to other people about you. Perhaps they have been to an event you held.

They already know what your credentials are, and so you’re just repeating stuff they already know, perfectly well.

And secondly, your credentials, I’m sorry to tell you, are probably exactly the same as everybody else’s. Everyone else claims professionalism, expertise, partnering with the client, senior team, understanding the issues, all that kind of stuff.

And so when the client’s got to read, maybe, four or five of these things, one after the other, it gets incredibly boring. Hint: it’s never a good idea to start a document or pitch, by boring your client, and that’s exactly what you would be doing here.

So, the quickest way to improve your proposal documents is to take the credentials out.

You can send them to the client in advance (excellent idea, as it shows you are on the ball - most firms struggle to get documents ready on time, so by sending them something promptly, you stand out - and it gives you a reason to get back in touch with them), or you can put them at the end of your document, or in an appendix, or in a separate document, but don’t lead with them.

And it’s exactly the same when it comes to pitching.

Don’t lead with your credentials (yawn); lead with the client’s brief, the many challenges ahead, your responses to them, and then paint a picture of how great the future will be if they follow your advice (this is a storytelling arc, which is why this structure is so powerful).

As always, time is short and there’s much to do, so good luck and get cracking.

It’s a boiling frog thing. The numbers tell you that marketing / new biz success is slipping over time, and lower success rates just become the new normal, without anyone realising it.

The most telling signs are from the way your staff (sometimes senior staff) behave. Opportunities to pitch are greeted with a yawn, or excuses not to participate, rather than excitement. Marketing and pitching (including proposal production) are done on autopilot, with no real thought or creativity. The point of marketing events gets lost and the holding of events becomes an end itself, rather than the means to an end. Networking gets skipped. Losses are greeted with a shrug and “C’est la vie”.

And of course, performance suffers and you find the firm growing at a slower rate than should be the case.

So, what’s to be done?

Well, shouting doesn’t work (been there, done that). Neither do motivational speeches. Formal bonuses might bring short-term relief, but then things will revert to (new) normal.

What’s required instead is:

• Take a good look at the process your people are supposed to be using (I was asked by one of the world’s biggest law firms to review a major, failed pitch. The Partners concerned had adhered to none of the firm’s - perfectly good - processes. It’s a common problem).

• Check you are using the most up-to-date methods (Insight, Challenger and Experiential techniques). Check they haven’t lost sight of the immutables: try to win before the pitch; treat marketing and sales as a contact sport, etc.

• See what’s working and what’s going awry. I suspect people will be just going through the motions, in a large number of cases.

• Here’s where you dive in. Roll your sleeves up and get your people re-trained on every aspect of your marketing and new biz processes. Make it fun (it is supposed to be the best bit of the job, pretty much).

• Get personally involved in the next few pitches. Inject energy into the process and again, fun.

• Praise those people whose behaviour starts to change. Encourage them. Hand out spot-bonuses (doesn’t have to be money) to the teams that win.

• Look at those folks who still aren’t getting it. You need to think why they are not responding. If you can fix them - great. If not, you need to stop any negative energy from impacting the others.

And watch the numbers, carefully, to warn you of when it might be time to reinvigorate folks again.

As always, time is short and there’s much to do, so good luck and get cracking.

And this is generally for one of two reasons.

Either they have accidentally recreated the business they had just left (including everything they hated about it), or what they have created is just a low margin, hand to mouth, treadmill of enormously hard work.

Here’s a tip to avoid that fate.

Daydream. And then interrogate, refine and repeat.

I mean that completely seriously.

Before you register your domain, before you start doing cash flow spreadsheets or anything else, daydream, seriously:

• Do you imagine yourself working from home, in your kitchen, in your slippers, with two or three like minded colleagues doing the same?

• Or do you see yourself in a corner office of a skyscraper in downtown Beijing, with 10,000 people reporting to you?

Take that daydream, interrogate it, refine it, and repeat.

What sort of clients will hire you to work from home? Multinationals with global accounts, with huge fees at stake? How many clients, with what fees will you be able to handle in those circumstances? What support will you need and where will they be located? How will you go about networking in, say, London, if your kitchen is in, say, Devon?

If you are dreaming of a larger alternative, how are you going to secure your first major account? What growth rate will you need to meet your aspirations? How many new clients is that a year? How will you finance the growth - how much will you need in the bank as a buffer? What kind of culture does this business of yours have? Is it eat what you kill, or is it more collaborative?

Do you see yourself running this thing for a dozen years and then selling it? Or do you see it running in perpetuity? If the former, how old are you now and how long have you got before a sale becomes problematic?

So daydream, interrogate the daydream, refine it, and keep going.

This does two things for you.

The first thing is it sets your direction, so you get off on the right foot, because getting off on the wrong foot is what’s caused a lot of these other firms to go awry, before they have even begun - they are doomed from the word go. It makes planning easier, because you know what you are aiming to achieve. And if the plans and dream diverge, you can give that serious thought, before you make any irrevocable decisions.

And the second thing is, it helps you create a really compelling, vivid picture of what you want your company to be, and you can sell that picture to others: recruits, sources of finance, potential clients, and so on.

So, daydream really seriously, interrogate, refine, and repeat.

As always, time is short and there’s much to do, so good luck and get cracking.

One such technique I have called “the explosion”. It works like this:

You are well into your pitch and, seemingly out of a clear blue sky, the client ‘explodes’ in (simulated) anger. Some even bang the table. It’s quite off-putting - and that’s the point.

To illustrate the technique, imagine you are a London-based PR firm, pitching for the opening, plus follow-up, of a significant hotel in Scotland. You know the majority of the important, relevant media are based in London. As are most of the relevant influencers. And you can handle the digital and design components from anywhere.

In your pitch you mention that the work will be handled from London, with monthly visits to the location. You start to move onto your next point, when the client, face contorted with rage, bangs the table and shouts “how on earth can you possibly think that running the account from London is even remotely feasible!”

What happens next determines whether you win the pitch or not.

What are clients looking for when they disrupt pitches?

You see, as well as trying to work out if your team has understood their business, its objectives and challenges, and has a convincing and creative strategy, the client is also looking to see how you - you, personally - react. They are not buying an abstraction called ‘your firm’, they are buying you.

If you immediately back down, flustered, and offer to base some staff North of the border, you are telling the client that (a) you are not standing by your initial advice, (b) you can’t think on your feet, (c) you lack backbone. Your reaction to the ‘explosion’ tells them all they need to know about you.

What’s the best way to deal with client disruption?

So how to deal with this? Well, firstly, if this hasn’t happened to you yet, it will. So don’t be surprised when they try it on. Remember, it’s a trick, a bit like ‘the wince’ in negotiating (where the client reacts by flinching or wincing dramatically to your fee proposal, in the hope you will think you have caused mortal offence and so need to drop your demands immediately).

Secondly, rehearse, rehearse and rehearse, especially what you regard as difficult questions or topics, so you are confident you have thought them through and can articulate your points effectively.

Finally, when the ‘explosion’ takes place, stay calm (a couple of deep breaths through the nose helps), and when the ranting has subsided, reiterate your point and your thinking, calmly. If they disagree with what you are saying, calmly engage with them on the point.

That’s what the client is hoping for: someone who is calm, collected and thoughtful when the going gets tough, whether real or confected.

As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.

This one happens over a “working lunch” or “working dinner”, but it’s not a convivial meal with wine and small talk. But the kind where you never reach the main course because you are the main course.

I’ve been grilled in this way a few times. A deputy permanent secretary once used the technique on us at a dinner, when we were sniffing around a major privatisation. Another time, I found myself opposite a senior executive at the world’s largest consumer goods company, in one of their private dining rooms. The food was untouched. What mattered was the hour-long cross-examination on everything from macroeconomic stability to what we’d say if called upon to defend a scandal-hit government minister.

Noticeably absent: any reference to their actual company. Or their brief. Or our firm, or indeed anything connected to the pitch. This was no oversight. It was deliberate. The executive wasn’t trying to discover if we’d read their annual report. He wanted to know if we could think on our feet. Could we handle unexpected pressure? Could we remain credible when blindsided? And, most importantly, were we people he’d want around when the phones started ringing at 2 a.m. on a crisis day?

Fast forward to today and the topics might be different—perhaps the communications aspects of the deputy prime minister’s property dealings, or our thoughts on the Bank of England Governor’s musings at Jackson Hole. But the principle is unchanged: clients want to see how you think, not just what you know.

This is one of the unwritten rules of pitching: sometimes the test is not about your deck, your fee proposal, or your media contacts. It’s about you. Do you sound like someone they could trust with their reputation on the line?

So, how do you arm yourself in case this happens to you? There’s no substitute for being curious and well-informed. Think of the FT and The Economist as being your friends here. To use that old expression: read widely and have a well-furnished mind.

So if you find yourself “invited to lunch” during a potential or live pitch, don’t be surprised if the menu is never opened. You may already be on the grill.

As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.

Three numbers matter more than the rest: 60, 3, and 150.

60% is your maximum staff cost ratio. Add up every penny you spend on staff—salaries, bonuses, National Insurance, freelancers—and divide by gross profit. If you’re north of 60%, you’re skating on financial thin ice. That’s because if you spend more than this on staff (and the best aim for just over 50%), you simply won’t have enough money left over to pay all the other bills. Agencies that tell themselves they are “resourcing ahead of the income” usually find themselves resourcing ahead of the bankruptcy notice.

3 months is the cash buffer you need. Clients don’t leave when it’s convenient. Economic downturns don’t wait for your financial year to end. Having three months of overheads in the bank buys you time. Without it, you’re making panicked decisions while watching the overdraft limit creep closer. I have been there. Having at least three months’ overheads in the bank means you can sleep easy, or at least easier.

£150,000 is your productivity benchmark: annual gross profit divided by the number of full-time equivalent staff. It’s a brutally honest number because it’s the market’s judgement on how important your firm is, and it can’t be gamed. If your productivity is £200k per head or more, then the market is saying they think so highly of you, they are willing to pay £200K for each member of your staff. You are clearly providing an indispensable service. If it’s £70k, the market is telling you that you’re just another interchangeable supplier.

The beauty—and cruelty—of these numbers is that they’re simple, universal, and unforgiving. Ignore them and you’ll be the proud owner of a very creative, very insolvent company.

This law is wrong.

Credentials have their place — just not in the opening act. Sending them separately not only avoids boring the client early (they already know your credentials, because they did their homework before inviting you. Plus, your credentials are most likely pretty much the same as everyone else’s), it positions you as organised and efficient.

Imagine this: your competitor is still wrestling with a 30-page Franken-proposal; you’ve already demonstrated your professionalism, by sending a sharp, relevant credentials pack and followed up with, “Anything missing?” That prompt might reveal a hidden priority (“We’re big on data analytics”) — intelligence you can build into your pitch.

If case studies are part of your credentials, use the SCARR framework:

• Situation — context

• Challenges — obstacles

• Action — what you did

• Results — what happened

• Relevance — why it matters to this client

Irrelevant details — foundation dates, decade-old awards, the managing partner’s gap-year anecdotes — are dead weight. Pricing mismatches are even worse: the Rolls-Royce-for-£50k problem. Underpricing premium positioning is an instant credibility killer.

At Hogarth, we (actually, I was the most guilty party) would proudly tell clients we’d been in business for five years. We thought it meant “hungry and dynamic.” They thought it was “irrelevant.” Lesson learned.

In short:

• Demonstrate, don’t assert

• Be relevant

• Lead with insight, not ego

The client will thank you. Or, more importantly, hire you.

On the grounds that clients get bored answering long lists of questions, and they dislike those that make them feel uncomfortable (which is kinda at the heart of the Consultative process).

And at all costs never ask that hackneyed and naive question “what keeps you awake at night”, because no-one is going to confide that to a stranger (especially in front of their subordinates).

However, you cannot avoid questions at all, and there are two in particular that are crucial to your success.

1. What is the client’s commercial strategy, or rationale for your services?

If their brief doesn’t cover this, you may discover - too late - that the client’s commercial strategy actually dictates something different from what the brief asks for.

This was brought home to me when pitching to one of the world’s largest and most successful management consulting firms. They specialised in what they called “jumbo” contracts; nothing to do with the aircraft, but with the size of their fee: $200 million a year.

Their problem was that their founding partners were retiring, and no-one else knew how to attract and win such massive mandates. They assumed that more and better PR would result in more leads, which would inevitably lead to more mandates; hence the beauty parade.

This was the wrong solution. Their PR was dwarfed by their bigger competitors, and so what they needed was a transformed marketing and sales operation (although PR played a role in recruitment and post-purchase reassurance).

None of our competitors had asked the question, and so their approach was completely wrong (and, interestingly, identical): “We know the City Editor of the Daily Telegraph”.

2. What do you need to do to win?

This is not one of those “what do I need to do to get you into this used Vauxhall Cavalier today; help me to help you” type questions. In fact it’s generally not a question you ask out loud (because of its used car sales connotations).

But think of it like this: if you don’t actually know what the client really, really wants, then you stand little chance of delivering it.

And what the client really, really wants (for example, to endorse an idea the client head of operations has espoused; to make the marketing director look good to head office; to crush their competition; to save that struggling regional branch that’s threatened with closure; etc, etc, etc) often does not make it into the formal brief.

Next time you are preparing a pitch, try asking the team “are we confident we know exactly what we have to do to win this” and I guarantee they will hesitate, because most folk will be aware of the existence of unspoken agendas, even although they don’t know what they are.

So you have to discover these, and using an Insight / Challenger approach will get you there quicker than anything else.

Whatever sales approach you favour, bear in mind these two questions and make sure you get answers to them.

As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.

The unsuccessful attempt to do this by looking for rabbits they can pull out of hats. Maybe they come across something shiny and new, an innovation, a trend, the new zeitgeist, that seems to have tremendous promise, and they cast around trying to turn that into a service that will - tada! - elevate their business at a stroke.

Never mind the detail, go for it and strike whilst the iron’s hot, is their mantra. I have never seen this work, and I have seen an awful lot.

What does work is something altogether less dramatic - effort. Thoughtful, unglamorous, well-informed effort, and I was reminded of this when reading a recent article in Fortune (July 31st, by Lila Maclellan), about Accenture’s CEO, ex-lawyer Julie Sweet.

To quote from the article:

“Those who have worked with Sweet say she regularly makes bold leaps following a specific recipe: She rigorously studies the topic in question (war, the cloud, agentic AI), seeks insights from a wide range of people, and then makes breathtakingly swift decisions”.

My advice to clients seeking a step-change in their business is similar and comes, not from Accenture, but from working in and observing highly successful marcomms businesses:

• Speak to clients and other senior contacts, about what services they are buying now and, importantly, are thinking of buying in the future;

• Look at competitors’ services and those of adjacent professions (ad agencies, digital firms, lawyers, management consultants, etc) to see if they have services that, with some amendments, could be repurposed for your business;

• Don’t stray too far from what you know. They less you understand the potential new service, the greater the chance of something going wrong. It’s not “stick to your knitting”, more “stick to your near knitting” and understand it inside out;

• Find someone in your business who is sparky, (but sensible) and willing to try to turn the idea into a service you can sell for a premium. It’s likely to require several iterations before you can roll it out.

Do all this and then take the risk. By this point, it will no longer feel like one. And if a rabbit does appear, it will be because you bred it, not because you pulled it from a hat.

Losing clients is as inevitable as a British summer washout. It happens to everyone.

When I was running what is now Webber Shandwick, we decided to conduct an analysis of when, exactly, we lost clients.

We excluded cases beyond our control, such as clients selling themselves to other firms (our record for shortest-lived client was a biotech company we retained for a grand total of ten days before they agreed to an unsolicited takeover). And, of course, we excluded those we had politely—or less politely—parted ways with ourselves.

The result? The losses fell neatly into two categories: within 12 months and after seven years.

The latter is easy to explain. The seven-year itch is not just a marital affliction. Clients, like spouses, occasionally want something fresher, shinier, and more exciting. Sometimes, they simply grow tired of your face.

We should have been better at predicting this, and taking prompt action to keep the love alive.

The within-12-month losses were much more uncomfortable. These, frankly, were cases of overpromising and underdelivering. It’s a pattern I have since observed in many agencies—so at least we were in good company.

But this is more than just an interesting data point. There are three key lessons to take away:

1. Don’t Chase Everything in Sight

Winning business outside your sweet spot—where you cannot deliver real value—is an invitation to future disaster. Winning work you cannot service properly is not a victory; it’s simply deferred humiliation.

2. If You Win It, Service It Properly

This is the most obvious lesson, but also the most ignored. If you take on a client, you must deliver exceptionally well. Occasional overpromising is inevitable, but systemic overpromising—or worse, plain incompetence—is fatal.

You may hear from senior colleagues that all is well, that accounts are being run flawlessly, and that client losses are just part of the cycle. Do not take this at face value. If I were you, I’d dig deeper. There is always the possibility that the real problem is not the junior staff but the senior ones assuring you that everything is fine.

3. Other Firms Are Just as Fallible as Yours

If your well-run, competent firm can lose clients within 12 months, or after 7 years, so can your competitors.

So, if you lose clients — even to a large, polished, seemingly invincible competitor—do not assume the game is over. Stay in touch with the client. Remind them, discreetly, that you have learned your lesson and are still interested in them.

Should they find themselves regretting their new choice, they may not have the energy for another exhaustive selection process. Instead, they might opt for an informal chat with you.

And as we all know, informal chats are simply pitches in disguise.

As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.

Leap Two is selling your firm. The due diligence will be thorough. Lawyers will earn their keep. Your buyer will nod solemnly and talk about alignment, vision and values. Your advisers will nod too, slightly faster, at £450 an hour. And still you’ll go to bed wondering if you’ve just handed your life’s work to the wrong people.

Leap Three arrives after the earn-out, when your handcuffs turn from gold to brass. You could retire, of course—become one of those people who emails friends photos of sunsets captioned “My office today”. But if that sounds like a punishment, not a perk, you’ll be itching to do something. Anything. This is where things get interesting.

Not least because you may find your options constrained. If your sale agreement was drafted with anything approaching competence, you won’t be setting up a rival firm across the road with “New” awkwardly glued to the name. Other restrictions may apply: clients you can’t poach, sectors you must avoid, and a non-disparagement clause which means you can’t even say what you really thought of the internal comms team.

So what now?

There are, broadly, two types of post-exit founder. The first is the cliff-jumper, thrilled by the breeze of uncertainty.

My mate Alex Challoner is one. He built and sold a respected public affairs firm, Cavendish, which was so good the acquirer eventually took its name. Then, after a period of integration and respectability, he leapt again—this time with no plan, no pitch deck, no cash-flow forecast. Just a reputation, a phone book and the rare confidence that comes from knowing people actually want what you do. As it turns out, they did. Clients showed up. Work followed. So did revenue.

The other sort of founder prefers steering wheels to parachutes. People like me. We enjoy control (or at least the illusion of it).

After my own exit, I took up coaching PR firm founders (still do). But I also spotted a delicious gap in the professional services market: business development. Or rather, the total absence of it. Lawyers, accountants and consultants—clever people all—were often spectacularly inept at selling themselves.

So I started advising them. It went well, mostly. I even found actuaries to be a lively and receptive bunch. (Who knew?) Lawyers, on the other hand, were harder work. Many operated in eat-what-you-kill cultures, yet became oddly offended when someone tried to teach them how to hunt.

Eventually, I tired of billing stress as a service. Just then, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries asked me to deliver a talk—on how to shorten board papers. I did. Unbeknownst to me, a chief actuary from one of the world’s biggest firms was in the audience. He liked what he heard. A contract followed, and with it, an entire line of business advising global giants how to write less and say more. No one saw that coming—least of all me.

So, what to conclude?

If you had the grit to start a business, and the stamina to scale it, then you almost certainly have what it takes to leap again. Just don’t expect the landing zone to look like the PowerPoint slide.

Some will plan. Others will leap. Both routes can work. The only wrong move is to freeze—clutching a payout, terrified of doing anything that might blemish a perfectly good ending.

Yes, it’s a leap of faith. But if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably quite good at those.

It’s this last one that I think has been forgotten.

During lockdown I shared a glass of wine with friends, whilst participating in a Zoom “pub” quiz in the evenings. And during the day, I liaised with clients over Teams calls.

And I think some folks got so used to the ease and familiarity of Zoom and Teams, they still use them for new business. Some go further and use email as their main means of engaging with potential clients.

This misses all the benefits of getting out there and meeting clients, face to face.

At its most basic, it shows the client that you are prepared to do more than your competitors, and actually show up.

And its much easier to demonstrate your professionalism, in person, than remotely. Remote contact loses so much nuance - assuming the tech works; if it doesn’t, it makes you look amateurish.

You can’t use tools like diagrams and placemats remotely, whereas in person they are a rich source of clues to the client’s actual priorities.

And, just as they are looking at you for clues as to your professionalism, you can look for clues about them, too: is their office full of expensive furniture, or cheapo Ikea? Do the photos and certificates lining the walls tell you they are narcissists? Are they all business or is it a more relaxed atmosphere? And so on.

So, if you are still in the habit of engaging with clients remotely, may I suggest you ditch that mindset and get on out there. You will find it improves your pitching, no end.

Best get out there and get cracking.

I remember going along to one particularly wily client. We had arrived early and set up — checked the projector (the client did not have a screen in the meeting room); made sure the laptop with the proposal PowerPoint was linked correctly; put out the leave-behinds. We had even worked out where we would sit and where the client would go. The choreography was considered. We were ready.

We’d been working on this presentation for ages. The thinking was good. The messaging clear. The visuals elegant and persuasive. I couldn’t wait to start. It was one of those great moments when you feel not just prepared, but genuinely excited to share your ideas.

The client walked in, looked around, and said: “I’ve never liked this room. It feels so unfriendly. Come on through to my office, it’s much better. Just leave your things here.”

So we did. And in doing so, left everything behind — laptops, slides, leave-behinds, the lot.

In his office we were ushered onto big, squashy sofas and chairs; the kind you sink into so far it feels as if you are being gently swallowed. His PA entered and gave us each a cup of tea and a plate with some biscuits, with all the ceremonial calm of a vicar handing out hymn books.

Thus trapped — plate in one hand, cup in the other, knees slightly too high — the client smiled and brightly said: “Right, what was it you wanted to tell me?”

It was, I realised, a clever trick. A quiet stress test. It separates those who really know their stuff from those who rely on the presentation, like a crutch. The latter is far too common, in my experience — the people who know the story only when it appears in front of them on a slide. Strip that away and all that remains is uncertainty and waffle.

What to do about it? Well, being at the top of your game is a good start. And good, old-fashioned rehearsals (plural) help enormously. Not just running through the slides — that’s the easy bit — but really drilling what you would say if everything disappeared. No laptop. No notes. No script.

Rehearsing not just what you want to say, but what you think the client is likely to ask, and what you hope the client doesn’t ask — for instance, “Do you have a New York office?” when your only US presence is in LA. Or “Tell me about your experience in fintech” when your deck leans heavily on FMCG. These are the moments that make or break your credibility. Not because the answer needs to be perfect — but because the way you handle the question tells the client everything they need to know about whether they can trust you in the room with their CEO.

If you’re well-prepared, this type of situation can actually be energising. The adrenaline kicks in. Your mind sharpens. You become more present, more connected. And you stand out — especially against less-prepared competitors who visibly deflate the moment the tech doesn’t work or the script goes out the window.

So the next time a client invites you to sink into the sofa, smile. It’s not a trap — it’s an opportunity. If you’ve done the hard work, there’s nothing more comfortable than knowing you’re ready — slides or no slides.

After all, great pitches aren’t about the props you use, or how slick the deck is. They’re about what you know, how you think, and whether you can stay sharp — even with one hand on a biscuit and the other on a teacup.

I have - with some stellar colleagues - turned around one of the biggest PR firms in Europe; started, grown and sold my own business for ~8x. I have advised firms in how to overcome a plateau and scale successfully, and watched others continue to struggle. This is what I know:

If you don’t have the fundamentals right, you are going to find it really difficult as budgets are cut, clients get more demanding, and competitors cut rates. What I mean by getting the fundamentals right is:

• Having a solid commercial strategy. Not something that takes five minutes to dream up, but one informed by data, market research and much thought: what are you selling, to whom (segment, client type) and delivered how.

• Having a compelling value proposition. One that is big, simple, unique and true.

• Having a marketing and sales machine that uses insight, challenger and experiential methods to demonstrate your firm’s superiority (whilst others simply assert they are good).

• Paying close attention to the numbers, especially productivity (to tell you what the market really thinks of your firm), staff cost / GP ratio, cash, client profitability, staff utilisation, pipeline numbers and win / loss ratio.

• Facing problems head on. Especially the difficult ones.

• Biting, scratching and fighting for every bit of business you choose to go after.

If you have these in place, then there’s no shortage of tips and tricks out there that will help you that wee bit further. But if you don’t have these things sorted, your business is built on sand.

The good news is that it’s never too late to get the fundamentals right. For most people, it means tweaking or changing what’s already there. And the sooner you start, the faster you will pull ahead of the competition. How about this weekend?

As always, there’s much to do and time is short, so good luck and get cracking.