When the Work Happens in Another Company

DMA sold the work and owned the client relationship. Most of the work itself was delivered through a partner company, part of a network of more than 200 people, most of whom did not report to me. That arrangement let a young agency offer far more than it could have staffed. It also meant that almost every leadership problem I had at DMA was a problem of coordination across a company boundary.

The emails from those years are mostly about five things.

1. Handoffs are where clients are lost

In January 2021 one of DMA’s account leads was leaving, and his clients were moving to an account manager at the partner. The partner’s business head asked how the transition was going. My answer:

I have asked [the departing lead] to work with [the new account manager] on this a few times as well and requested a 4-6 video calls with each client so that they are very comfortable w/ [him] by the time [the departing lead] departs on March 15.

Not one introduction email. Four to six calls per client, with both people on them, before the departure date. A client who has to start over with a stranger at another company has every reason to leave.

2. The client gets one door

In May 2021 our chief performance officer proposed giving the content team its own client-facing address, alongside the ones already in use for operations, project management and performance. He quoted my earlier objection back to me and asked for a decision. I wanted to talk it through first, but I restated the principle:

I do appreciate a single point of contact idea though; creating a billion emails for a client; insanity.

The more organisations sit behind a service, the more important it is that the client sees only one of them.

3. Commitments are made in the client’s name

That June the partner set turnaround times for the proposals our sales team needed: 48 hours for simple projects, four to five working days for custom ones. A few days later, one of their people had promised to come back to me after a call and had not. My note was short:

Again, just trying to point out that any commitments made to a potential client should be lived up to.

And then, so it would not be read as a personal complaint:

And just to make it clear; I am a lot more forgiving; because I know you folks. So this really isn’t about me. It’s about the potential customer experience and that’s all we are trying to tidy up.

A partner can be late with me. It cannot be late with the client, because to the client there is no partner. There is only DMA.

4. Report on a rhythm, and report outcomes

The cadence mattered more than the format. In September 2023, after sending detailed feedback on a planning document, I waited ten days for the revision:

I never heard anything; it’s been 10 days. At this rate, what change can we really make that makes an impact?

In January 2025 the partner proposed a weekly pipeline report every Friday and asked how often I wanted a check-in. I accepted, and said what I hoped the report would show:

i hope the spreadsheet has closed deals that have been won and tons of leads so that i don’t have a bad weekend every time.

A rhythm turns silence into information. If the Friday report does not come, that is itself the report.

5. Know what would end it

In April 2025, after a meeting about a run of cancellations, the partner’s head wrote that client lifetimes in our industry are typically six to nine months. My answer laid out why I thought the issue was “multi fold”: repeated attempts to reach their account lead that were met with talk of Slack and Skype, and a pattern of lost clients “that has been there for years.” Then:

At this time, we are no longer interested in sending any new leads to [the partner].

That was the end of the lead flow. The rest of that story, and the tension between letting people own their areas and stepping in when something is off track, is in Not Needed for Everything.

What it comes down to

Running work through a network that large is not mainly a question of managing people. Most of them I never managed. It is designing the joins: one door for the client, handoffs that take weeks rather than an email, turnaround commitments in writing, a fixed reporting rhythm, and a clear sense of what would make you stop.

Designing those joins, for a business whose delivery sits outside it, is part of the leadership work.