One of my clients, an incredible agency that is really thoughtful, very creative, very technically facile, and is very, very good at what they do, got an email from their client that started…

The client was having a rough year, but a new strategic plan from the agency was implemented in late Q1 and was really starting to show incredible results. But during an executive offsite, the client decided that they were going to sunset their e-commerce business and just focus on their wholesale business. The agency had built the e-commerce business from inception, and now it was comfortably generating 7-figures of profit annually. To say it was a gut-punch to the agency is an understatement.

The agency was largely tasked with running the day-to-day operations of the site. They launched new products. When they came online, they optimized text, they created images, they were doing the marketing and the email. Essentially, the agency ran everything having to do with how the site looked and interacted with customers.

Over time, as the teams became really comfortable with one another. The formality of reporting waned. The agency dutifully provided sales reports, marketing campaign reports, traffic reports, all standard, all the sort of pre-packaged reporting where everyone has trained themselves to look for the single item that they are interested in (sales or conversion rate or whatever).

The client CEO saw declining overall traffic & while sales that had improved dramatically from earlier in the year, they still trended a touch below last year's numbers. The CEO made a decision that made sense based on her understanding:

She saw a pattern, decided where it was going and made a call to simplify the business. Wholesale had been the entirety of their business for 40 years before they entered into e-commerce.

What the CEO didn’t see were the underlying numbers showing increasing margins, improved conversion rates and rising AOV. This wasn’t the CEO’s fault - she was reading the information that her team had put on her dashboard 4 years ago. She had been tracking the sales and traffic performance all year and the data was clear to her.

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The agency founder was panicked by the decision. This was their largest client, and it was a relationship that he thought was rock solid. We spoke about the client decision and decided to make a business case to keep the business as is.

We started digging deeply into the numbers and finding these INCREDIBLE nuggets showing that this was a business that was accelerating profit growth and getting significantly more efficient.

I asked if the primary account contact was aware of all of this yummy performance data…and he said something scary: “I DON’T THINK SO…THIS ISN’T IN THE WEEKLY REPORT…”

The client never invested in evolving their understanding of their ecom business, and the agency wasn't continually focused on understanding the strategic goals and outcomes that the client wanted from their direct business.

Should the client CEO have been more curious about their direct business? Absolutely.

Should the agency have been screaming and shouting about the underlying metrics in the business before the sales decline and during the profit rebound? Abso-fucking-lutely.

In so many ways, I think this was a failure driven by comfort rather than by ignorance, but it was a failure that could have been mitigated by the agency assuming leadership rather than safety.

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The agency owner fucked up. Throughout the years they have shown their performance data and expanded the relationship from retention marketing to paid media to connected TV. They are skilled at showing the future opportunity. Nearly every expansion and budget increase over the previous years that was presented to the client was accepted.

Selling opportunity is simple - you are appealing to somebody's self-interest. you are appealing to greed, to increased status, and those are basic, simple human instincts that can be satisfied by imagining a more resource-rich future.

While our imaginations are really powerful and can imagine a different future, our memories are not quite so facile. We have a hard time remembering the journey to get to where we are today. As I said way back in AIC #150 “…sales and revenue are a lagging indicator of your previous effectiveness.” In in this particular case, the agency had done an extraordinary amount of work and delivered an incredible amount of value over the course of four years building a business that was throwing off about $1.3mm in profit every year.

Even when you sell the opportunity as outcome, you still have to justify the strategies, decisions & implementations that you employ throughout your engagement.

Likely, you or your account management team keep this narrative of choices and execution in your head. You might be afraid to tie a strategic decision or a particular execution to a result set because you might be challenged by the client, or you aren’t sure of “causality”.

But your client has completely forgotten about all of the inputs that have lead to outcomes. Without the agency creating a narrative, reporting becomes a stale statement of fact. Disassociated from your thinking & adjustments, those static dashboard numbers have to stand on their own.

Those numbers do not contain the story of the past or the vision for the future. Instead, they’ve become a defenseless artifact subject to a flawed recollection that those numbers would have happened with or without the agency rather than a vital current that feeds your agency-client relationship.

When I was running an agency, I was not really aware of the big picture all the time. I had plenty of places where I was completely focused, and I'd kind of do that on a monthly basis. I would pay attention to something intensely for a month, or sometimes two, and I would improve that part of the business dramatically.

As the agency got bigger and we really started to create business functions, when I jumped in to make an improvement in one area, some other function would start to wobble & bite me in the butt. Because of that, I've created the WTF Agency Assessment. It's free, it takes like 10 minutes, and it's going to give you a grade and actionable plans across the most important parts of your agency.

After her assessment, Sharon from SLT Consulting said, “I feel SO seen!”. Jake from Clearmotive said, “Ouch, I think you see the problem better than we do.” Jeff from MIS said “OMG, now I see it. Shit, I should have been paying attention to that.”

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This is a drama that's still unfolding, but the evidence of profit growth and improving underlying metrics was powerful enough that the client has decided to wait until mid-Q1 2027 to revisit this discussion. The evidence was compelling enough to buy a reprieve.

But this near-death experience is a warning that even in the best client relationships, where you are sure that your work is mission-critical, you can't become docile. You and your team (especially your account management function) have to be relentless in connecting your work to the strategic and financial outcomes that your clients have defined as “successful”.

It doesn’t truly matter if your thinking, decision-making, and execution were truly causal. In marketing there is very rarely direct causality, and almost always simple correlation. That can be enormously frustrating when you know, at the very core of your being, that what you decided, created, and pushed into the market was the reason that the client was able to achieve their stated results. Tight correlation, frequency of correlation, and a great narrative that shows a strong connection between what you do and the outcomes they desire keep the connection between your client's future and your relationship healthy.

Editor’s Note: BTW, if you don’t have clear definitions of what is strategically important to your client, please read AIC #158 - Better is Bogus…especially “This makes you a partner in accomplishing that strategic goal and not just a vendor who tweaks the shit out of their AdWords account.”

It comes from someone who’s been there, done that, and has the receipts. Get ready for Return on Influence Festival ‘26. An entire day dedicated to influencer marketing with speakers running some of the best programs in the world. 

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25 years ago, I got back from walking my dog just in time to see live footage on The Today Show of the second plane crashing into one of the towers. I spent the next few days trying to get in touch with my friends that quite literally lived within the shadow of the Twin Towers.

It was just a few days before my wife and I were to get married, and we had to decide whether we were going to go ahead with the ceremony and the party because 2 weeks didn't seem like long enough to wait after such an enormous tragedy unfolded in New York, Pennsylvania & Washington, D.C.

My friends were OK - but their retelling of running uptown, covered in dust and smoke and ash, was harrowing. They couldn't return to their apartment for months, I think.

for me, that day changed my sense of safety, my sense of what it meant to be an American. It made me so sad that it took a tragedy of this magnitude for us to appreciate each other in this time of significant political, economic, and technological upheaval.

I am always looking for a moment like President Bush throwing out the first pitch at a Yankees game, or the simple embrace of someone who traveled far from home and made it back safely. September 11th is a weird day. It's full of sadness, but also resolve and hope. My wish is that the connection that we all felt in those weeks and months afterward returns, and it finds you today. Take care.