• “This time last year, we were making a loss every month – closing our eyes and praying that everything will be alright,” says Andy Headington, CEO at Adido.
• “Now we’re back to making a profit, but we’ve got too much work!”
• In this session, Andy tells the story of how his agency turned things around after losing its biggest client – as well as the other harsh lessons he’s learned from running a 20-year-old business.
What do you do when you lose a big client?
Andy Headington was faced with this problem last year, when his agency lost an account worth 25% of its annual revenue.
“In the middle of last year, they said, ‘We think it’s time for a change. We want to review our whole website and do things very, very differently’,” Andy says.
“But we’d told them that these things needed to fixing or to be changed. We’d given them ideas and proposals to help to do that. Then someone else came into their team and blamed us for the website being the way it is.”
The client still asked Adido to pitch for the work, assuring the team that they wouldn’t ask for a pitch if they didn’t think they had a chance of winning.
“We didn’t win the pitch. And they went to some funky London agency that didn’t even have a proper website. We never had a chance.”
To make matters worse, all of Adido’s other leads dried up too.
“At the end of last year, we were back to making a loss every month – closing our eyes and praying that everything would be alright.”
Then, three things happened:
- “People got more confident because 2022 wasn’t such a bad year after all, so in 2023 more people were looking to spend.”
- “Google announced that they were shutting Universal Analytics and people needed to migrate to GA4, so there was still an essential need in the market for people to spend money and learn something new.”
- “The right clients with the right money came along at the right time – we came back in January and had a retainer within a week!”
As it stands, the agency won’t hire any more staff. Andy’s challenge now is how to manage an increased workload with no extra people.
“We now have clients coming to us who want websites delivered in four months. But we can’t start for four months because we’ve got too much work sold,” he says.
“So we’ve gone from, ‘How are we going to make any profit? Are we just going to have to take a loss?’ to, ‘Now we’ve got profit, we’ve got too much work. What on earth do we do?’”
In this session, Andy tells the story of how his business bounced back from losing its biggest client, as well as some other harsh lessons he’s learned from running a 20-year-old agency. If you’re feeling at a loss with clients and are in need of some inspiration, be sure to come along with some questions.