Why you’ll only ever talk to one of us.
Account management exists to protect the people doing the work from the people paying for it. We took the opposite bet, and it changed how fast things move.
In most agencies of any size, the person you talk to and the person doing the work are different people, on purpose. The Account Manager absorbs the client, the makers get protected time, and information passes between them in scheduled summaries.
It is a reasonable system for a business with forty staff and thirty concurrent projects. It is also where most of the loss happens.
What gets lost in the relay
Every handover is a compression. You explain something for five minutes, it becomes three lines in a brief, and the person building it reconstructs your intent from those three lines. Usually they get it roughly right. The bit they lose is the reasoning. Why you wanted it, what you were worried about, what you had already tried.
That missing reasoning is what makes revision cycles long. The work comes back not-quite-right, you explain again, it goes through the relay again. Two weeks disappear into a misunderstanding that would have taken thirty seconds to clear up on a call.
Revisions come back in hours rather than weeks, because nothing had to be explained twice.
The opposite bet
You talk to Ben. First call to final sign-off, same person, and that person is running the project. Feedback goes directly to someone who can act on it, and decisions that need making get made on the call rather than taken away and returned.
- No brief-writing overhead between what you said and what gets built.
- Context accumulates in one head instead of being reconstructed each time.
- Nobody is protecting anybody from anybody.
- If something is a bad idea, you hear it from the person who would have to build it.
What it costs us
It does not scale infinitely, and we do not pretend it does. It means we run fewer projects at once than a studio our size could. It means holidays are planned around builds.
What we get back is clients who have stayed seven years, and briefs that arrive as a phone call rather than a document. Will Fewkes came to us before his company existed. Robert Fellowes has used us across six years and several parts of his business. Neither of those relationships would have survived a relay.
Three more
worth the time.
Content architecture is the least glamorous part of a project and the part that decides whether the site is still usable in three seasons.
Nobody tells you that you have been deprioritised. You notice the calls take longer to come back, and that the person who pitched you is on somebody else’s account now.
Every business runs on workarounds it stopped noticing years ago. Most of them exist because building the right thing used to be unaffordable. That constraint has moved.