What You Learn From Bad Clients

Folks, the life of a consultant may be lucrative. 

But it isn't easy.

Something that happens when you open your shingle to the world is that, well, the world isn't all great people. You run into folks who traffic in bad faith, deal in all or nothing thinking, behave emotionally, and your reward for all of this is, well, the paycheck. And nothing but the paycheck, because the value you add will feel like a bad exchange later. 

During the engagement, you make yourself believe in the client, because not believing in the client is, at least for me, impossible. Once we commit to a job, we're doing the job, but this is all at-will work where the role was available. It's often available for a reason the client won't admit. That's the fun of dealing with people who deal in bad faith.

In the past couple of years, we've had clients who:

> Ranted and raved about colleagues as if they were, well, children (in need of medication)

> Scheduled entire days of meetings, then never showed up on time for any of them, fostering an environment where time waste was endemic

> Forced goals on junior personnel that were ridiculously higher than the historical production rate of past teams as a bad faith exercise in office politics

> Engaged in "I got mine" leadership of more or less washing their hands on controlling the excesses of executives

> Preached values for public consumption that they utterly failed to uphold on a personal level

> Committed the naturalistic fallacy (what is true for me is true for all) as if self-doubt or self-reflection was a virus

> Treated Covid precautions as a sign of weakness and/or mockery

> Assumed the worst of everyone for everything (well, game recognizes game)

> All while claiming that said excesses were made up for by some other virtue (loose hiring, flexible hours, lavish lunches, etc.)

It's sobering. 

Discouraging. 

And in the long run, always, always, always a plus to get away from.

So what have we learned?

> Bank and save, so you can take on fewer red flag clients

> Practice gratitude, so that you don't turn into the bad client

> Trust your gut. Especially on things like using your own credit card for reimbursed expenses.

> Know that even if the bad client seems to thrive from their bad behavior in the short term, they won't be able to escape who they are. Character is destiny, and time wounds all heels.

> Live well. It's the best revenge.

Forward!

What We've Learned (So Far) This Year

Also, that Simpsons Memes = You Are Old

M&AD's business is, as I write this, up over 20% at this time from 2021. (Go us!) We've also got a pivot movement happening right now, as an old major client offboards for business reasons, and a new significant player hops on. So I thought I'd take a moment, as we've got time enough to write and share, to explain what we've been working on, and more of what we've learned.

> Sustainability is the new hotness.

Our pivot involves consulting and SEO work for folks in this space, which just makes all the sense in the world, really. It's a perfect marriage of channel and purpose, and what's encouraging here is that the prospect base aren't just skim and click folks. You have to write for brains as well as thumbs. Just a better place to be when it comes to the work.

This sector was always highly interesting to us from our historic position as a resource for first movers (prior: augmented reality, cannabis, remote learning), but it has special urgency with +$5 gasoline, not to mention the fresh incentive to not buy fossil fuels from terrible people. More of this, please -- and not just for M&AD.

> B2C tactics continue to work on niche audiences.

Some clients in special and highly regulated markets seem surprised when tactics from outside of their industry bear fruit, but the plain and simple of it is that marketing is about offer, list and creative... and the same eyes that looked at that e-commerce play five minutes ago are looking at this B2B one now. We don't magically ratchet up our attention spans, lose our preference for headlines that snap, or put our brain's desire to look at pictures over text away just because it's Business Time. Execute accordingly, while protecting brand.

> Small universal big levers still work and hold their value.

Consider the humble Sender Name in a commercial email. It rarely gets testing focus, and it's a hard thing to test very often for branding reasons -- but when you can if/then test to a winning one? You dine at the +10-15% table for a really long time after that. (Similar bonus point: waterfalling ads by placement to increase fill rates.) Some in this industry scoff at incremental improvements, but at M&AD, it's against our religious business faith to leave money on the table. Especially money from weak execution.

> People see through bells and whistles, even in a recovery.

A recent client was enamored of animation in their decks, all while missing the blocking and tackling required to make a major account feel secure in a commitment. This has been proven over and over again in our 20+ years in the business, but sizzle is a powerful spice. Use rarely and with great care, or risk arousing (justified!) suspicion from your prospect. If every slide is animated, no slide is.

> New holiday, who dis?

Twice in the past 14 months, Wal-Mart got resoundingly slapped down on social media for trying to monetize Juneteenth in a remarkably tone-deaf fashion. We are reasonably certain that at some point in our lifetime, the newest federal holiday will safely and positively celebrate Black Excellence (and, well, capitalism) in a way that won't induce cringing and social media disdain. This is America, after all.

We're also very certain that the movement will not be led via a special ice cream flavor or cookout section at a big box store. (And yes, I'm leaving some things unsaid in this note, and yes, you can ask me about it offline...) 

The Subroutine Problem

Or moles instead of subroutines

So here's a way that I think I can discuss the current political situation in re the Supreme Court that, with luck, will allow me to say something useful... without removing M&AD from professional consideration from a significant portion of the business community.

One of the ways in which I am blessed and useful, in a business context, is that I have a helpful amount of disassociation and distance from my physical self. It's something that I think may come easier to those of us who don't have to deal with, say, the issue of menses, and if I'm speaking to full privilege, the fact that I'm also currently abled, the majority skin tone, not living near heavy industry or under challenging policing conditions, hetero-normative, etc. I am a dream patient for doctors; I deliver the meat bag and I give them no trouble. These are tactical advantages under our current conditions, and will likely remain that way. If you want to end the pay gap, you actually have to pay women more than men, and in some places and industries, you do. Not enough, but it is better than it used to be, and independent of the activities of the week, that trend will hopefully continue.

Steering out of the tangent.

Let's imagine that the human brain is akin to your computer, or if you prefer, your phone. Too many programs (or aps) running all at once will cause heat, slowness, inefficiency, irritation and if done for too long, a system crash. Maybe even viruses and the early obsolescence of the hardware. Too few programs will improve on all of these things, but it will also be, well, boring as hell and not particularly useful. 

Finding the right mix and/or increasing your processing power and speed is the goal, but it's a balance. As soon as you add RAM, as it were, you also tend to add stuff. If you'd like to keep this offline, swap in age and commitments. You can kid yourself into thinking that your machine is special and can handle the abuse, and that may be true (especially if you were born lucky and aren't running all of those other aps I mentioned earlier)... 

But eventually a limit will be reached. Maybe you stop running the Kindness to Fellow Drivers or Service Workers ap, or the Charity ap, and maybe you even pat yourself on the back for being so smart as to do that. Life hack! One that I hope the majority of us will not adopt, because, y'know, it leads to devolution and horror. But I digress, and callous billionaires are heroes to many.

The past (five? who can tell?) years has forced a plethora of subroutines on *everyone*. No matter where you stand politically, you have ran the Covid subroutine. You are probably running the Ukraine subroutine. Maybe you are running Gerrymandering, Dark Money, Climate Change, Culture Wars, Immigration, Crime, Inflation and Media subroutines, too.

Whole lotta subroutines. On top of any of the personal ones.

And now, the Court.

You can, of course, shut down *any* of these. All you have to do is disable them, along with the Conscience and Empathy Aps.

But it won't make the world any better, won't protect those who really need protection, and won't give you any comfort at all when the next turn in the road arrives, and you are just along for the ride.

From a personal standpoint, I can not fathom how some of the folks who I oppose on this matter sleep at night, where they get the absolute self-confidence to know that their flawed position is somehow correct, and why they would want to live in the world that their actions would create. 

I am also sure that they probably think, if they care to, the very same things about me.

So I'll try to remember that these are human beings, and that if I engage my full ire about it... well, I'm just running the subroutine, probably so much that I can't do anything else.

And well, people need me to do more than run that subroutine. 

If only, so that others can.

Good luck getting past your own subroutine issues, folks...