Fire the client who opens with "we've tried every agency and none of them worked"

Eight years into running Punky Starfish, Justine Nienaber's entire client strategy fits in five words: "we just work with nice people." It sounds soft. It's the hardest commercial discipline in agency life.

Her filter isn't industry. Punky Starfish deliberately serves everything from FMCG to crypto to sparkling water, because in South Africa there aren't enough big-budget clients to survive on one niche. The filter is people: "I want to work with people who don't make me or my team feel pressurised or stressed, who aren't rude." And the economics of that position are stated without apology:

"I would much rather make less money and have smaller bonuses for my team than have them treated badly."

The two she fired, and the one to never sign

In eight years, Punky Starfish has let go two clients. One was the moving-benchmark client, where every KPI was hit and every goalpost shifted: "if we gave them a viral Oreo dunk-in-the-dark moment, they'd ask why forty billion views wasn't fifty." Her honest post-mortem is that the team flagged it long before she acted. "When my team said these guys are a problem, I should have listened sooner." The other client was simply rude to everyone from the start. Both firings were late, and neither is regretted.

Dylan Kohlstadt of Shift One adds the red flag he's now seen three or four times, always from a senior person currently running the marketing:

"When they start with 'we've tried every agency and they never work' — I immediately know this is a fail. There's a client who doesn't want you to succeed, because they want to say: you see, I'm the only one who can save this business."

The client filter

Score every prospect before the proposal goes out:

The decency test. How do they treat your team, and their own, in the sales process? It only gets worse after signature.

The history test. "No agency has ever worked for us" is a prediction, not a complaint.

The benchmark test. Are goals written and fixed, or vibes that will move? Get the KPI into the contract.

The budget-to-expectation ratio. If the ask is heroic and the budget isn't, the relationship is priced to fail. Dylan's rule: cut services, never rates.

The three-month review. Justine's dating rule is that "the first three months tell you who you've signed." Book the go/no-go conversation at signing, so ending it is a scheduled decision rather than a crisis.

The thread running through all of it is that an agency is only its people. Protecting them from bad clients isn't softness. It's how you keep the good people who make the work good.

Try this week: run your current client list through the filter, and identify the one your team already knows about. Then add a three-month mutual review to your standard onboarding, and write your own "we're not for you if…" paragraph for proposals. It repels exactly the right people.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.