📣 Please note, these events are for Agency Hackers’ members only.

If your agency isn’t a member yet, get in touch with Anne or sign up here.

Every agency has that client.

The one who constantly moves the goalposts. The one who loves your ideas – until they suddenly don’t. The one who nitpicks your work but forgets to pay their invoice.

Some are demanding. Some are just delusional. And some even make you question why you ever started your agency in the first place.

Some just have wildly different expectations to reality:

• “They get dead excited at the beginning. You put together loads of ideas, they sign them all off… and then just as you go to start, they unsign them off. And then expect the same results, even though they’ve pulled the campaign.”
• “They had a CFO who was meddling with their Google campaigns — which we’d been paid to manage. But he just kept interfering. They were constantly asking us to do things, then turning around and saying, ‘I didn’t tell you to do that.’ It was awful.”
• “I worked with a drinks brand where we spent the whole year writing proposals. They never signed them off. And then they’d be like, ‘Yay, should we do an idea for this?’ We’d work it up… and it would never see the light of day.”

And some are just not nice to work with full stop:

• “One client we worked with recently was just vile. They treated one of my team like absolute shit. We couldn’t afford to resign them, but we did it anyway. The team matters more.”
• “We resigned a client in their first meeting with us because they made the team cry.”
• “We once worked with a client who was awful to work with. They were coercive, manipulative, and gaslit their own team as well as ours. They would be on calls making their team members squirm and visibly upset, and they did the same to mine too.”

Yikes. With those examples in mind, how do you set the right boundaries, protect your team, and, crucially, stop situations like these from happening in the first place?

We can’t solve it for you – if only we could! But what we can do is give you the space to talk it through with fellow leaders and founders, and hash out what to do in situations like these.

If you’ve ever thought, “I should have walked away from this client six months ago,” then this session is for you.