The Art of Client Service: Your Company's Edition
The more stories you tell, the more success you'll see
Welcome back to The Workaround. I’m Bob, your host 👋
You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators who read (or listen—see play button above) to my stories from a career in tech startups and corporate innovation.
I’m here to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
When we look back on a year, it’s hard to remember specific days. Meetings were attended, emails were sent, and clients were served. It’s all a big blur.
But we do recall a handful of events—the big deal we sold, the massive problem we solved, the time the client yelled at us, and when our manager confided in us over drinks.
We remember stories.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could capture all of the meaningful stories from our work and put them down in writing—to share for others’ benefit and keep the lessons top-of-mind for ourselves?
Yes, it is great. I know because I did it. You can start benefitting the same way today.
The Best/Worst Problem in Business
I’ve been telling stories of business and life with a purpose here on Substack for over two years. It feels natural now, but it first came out of desperation long ago…
Flashback to January 2007. I’m two years in as a partner at a small digital advertising agency called Bridge Worldwide. I lead our client success team of about 25 people. This group is the hub of the agency. We work with every client and manage each project's timelines and budget . All revenue and profit bucks start and stop with us. As the leader of the group, all responsibility ultimately falls on me.
And we/I keep fucking up.
Budgets are blown, deadlines are missed, and client communication is dreadful. Three billion-dollar brand clients have put us on “probation” with a list of demands and just a few months to meet them.
Our problem is rapid growth. We’re a digital agency with a superior pricing and service model, and our big brand clients are moving dollars to digital faster than we can cash their checks. Several clients have increased their contracts from five figures to seven figures in just two years.
Yes, rapid growth is the “best” problem to have—but it’s also an existential threat to the success of a service business. Unlike software, service is about attaching people to clients and billing their hours. So I’m hiring quickly, firing slowly, and begging burned-out teammates to stick around at a time when our rivals are in poach mode.
I’m promoting people to manager levels years before most agencies would—and filling their open roles with kids just out of college and others who have never touched a digital project. There’s no time for training, and we’re too busy to help each other figure things out.
No one wants to lead a business that’s so successful it fails. But that’s where I fear I’m heading as I get off another 9 pm phone call about a pissed-off client. I won’t be sleeping for a while. I seriously consider taking up smoking so I could get a few breaks outside during the day.
Thankfully, we get a respite for a few weeks during the holidays. I sit at my laptop on a cold Sunday morning and open a blank Word doc. I start a one-man brainstorming session about how we might break the cycle and improve our work…
The Art of Client Service
I reflect on a recent effort to educate my team that fell flat.
Earlier in the year, I read the classic business book The Art of Client Service. The slim book contains many stories about the author’s career leading ad agencies. I loved it and gave copies to my entire team during a one-day offsite.
I don’t know how many people read it, but I didn’t see its lessons working their magic yet.
A few months after giving them out, I asked one of my managers, Jason, why it didn’t take. He’s an agency veteran who is especially tied into the team’s backchannels—probably because he took so many smoke breaks. Jason says people wanted to improve and liked the book’s concept but had little time to read, and the stories weren’t relevant enough for our business.
Sitting with that blank Word doc, I still love this idea but realize my execution is wrong. You can’t just toss a book on someone’s desk and hope magic happens.
Then I wonder…What if we wrote our own version of The Art of Client Service?
I know the stories—painfully know them. Instead of projecting ourselves into some other characters, we could live through the heroes in our halls who were struggling and learning in real-time, in projects unseen by their peers.
I reflect on how I might share these simply and gradually. Instead of compiling a book, I could write a single, one-page story each week. This thing called “blogging” was just getting started, and people gravitated toward this model of drip-by-drip information sharing.
I spend the next few days at home writing up our stories—as well as an introduction message, which went like this:
The Art of Client Service: Bridge Worldwide Edition
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” - Winston Churchill.
“Humans have been telling stories as long as they have been on this planet. The science behind storytelling is fascinating. As Wikipedia describes, “The storyteller creates an experience, while the audience perceives the message and creates personal mental images from the words heard and the gestures seen. In this experience, the audience becomes co-creator of the art.” In other words, storytelling is a means to transfer experience from person to person, from mind to mind.
Storytelling became a survival advantage wherever and whenever humans lived. One person's life lessons could be shared throughout villages and passed down for generations. The village elder warned against brightly colored serpents. The hunter retold how he struck the mammoth in the right spot to exact instant death and food for months. Second-hand stories saved them from first-hand death.
This advantage drove the development of human language and facial expressions. Over time, technological and cultural advances furthered the power of storytelling. From Biblical stories on papyrus to personal blogging on the Internet, storytelling has contributed to the success of our civilization.
In addition to driving the progression of humankind, storytelling plays an important role in the little village of 150 people called Bridge Worldwide. We share stories at the Monday morning meetings, compare notes at the coffee machine, and ask questions of others who have “been there, done that.” However, as our company grows and some veterans are not around, we must do more to preserve hundreds of years of combined experience and knowledge.
This project aims to record the stories our little village has learned over the years. Some are painful lessons we may prefer to avoid, while others recount glorious victories that we hope to take advantage of again. Either way, each story is invaluable, and we must read, learn, and use our knowledge to chart a better course.
May you keep learning and improving,
Bob Gilbreath—January 17, 2007”
The Stories are Told
When my team arrives at their desks the following Monday morning, they are met with a new three-ring binder with the above intro and the first story inside. As I recall, it was titled “The Good Ship Discovery”—it captured a painful lesson: we needed to do more discovery work on new+big projects. (You can download it from Dropbox here if you’re curious)
I stop at individuals’ desks over the day to explain the project—and start enrolling them to share their stories. People seem…intrigued.
In the weeks ahead, I arrive at the office early each Monday to print copies of the new weekly story and place them in my team members’ mailboxes. (Remember those?) I asked managers to spend a few minutes in their weekly 1-on-1s discussing the stories, and we brought them up regularly in all-hands meetings.
And the stories kept coming…making this job easy for me.
I wrote about telling a client that their team lead was resigning for the second time in a year, and how I softened the blow by bringing a plan of action along with the bad news.
I told the story of our Pringles team leader, Kat, listening closely to a client over lunch and turning his idea into a $200k project in less than a day.
Randy, the project lead of our healthcare business, shared how he learned the hard way to get hour estimates from his creative team rather than dollar estimates.
Another client lead, Anne, discussed keeping a positive attitude with a client who decided to move her business to another agency. We ended up getting the business back when the new agency dropped the ball.
I shared the story of another team leader, Brian (photo above!), who convinced his senior client to hold a monthly 1-on-1 with him. This helped Brian sniff out both issues and opportunities.
A story titled “Projects Don’t Ripen, They Rot” discussed the danger of letting complicated assignments linger too long.
And we’ll never forget when someone photoshopped an eyeball onto a headshot in a company directory, thinking there was an issue in photoshoot processing. We later discovered, with much embarrassment all around, that the individual in the image was missing an eye in real life. Lesson: Ask the client first.
The Magic Starts Working
With a weekly content need to fill, I listen more closely to my team for stories. But this does more than unearth content—I see new patterns and dig deeper into the “Whys.” Telling stories improves my process thinking and coaching skills.
To bring this benefit to others and make sure this is not just “A Bob Thing,” I ask team members to write their own stories—sometimes to celebrate a success, other times to ensure someone doesn’t make the same mistake they did. Creative Directors, Tech leads, and even our CFO start writing stories—all in the spirit of learning together and paying it forward.
As the year progresses, we see positive signs of impact.
People enjoy reading and telling their stories. Almost every team member has been a hero in them, and they are proud to be featured. They see the safety in learning from mistakes—as long as it is a teaching opportunity for others. A spirit of camaraderie arises.
Our culture gets more interesting as people speak in stories. Over beers at Tina’s, the dive bar next door, I hear people quoting stories and saying, “Yeah, we need to use that solution your team came up with.” It’s like my favorite Star Trek episode has come to life.
Thankfully, our business and my stress levels both improve. We make fewer mistakes, our clients are more loyal, and I have fewer regretted resignations to deal with. Our margins improve, and we keep growing at an even faster clip. We hit our company profit-sharing goals at the end of 2007, and all employees receive a couple additional weeks of pay.
Steal this Idea
Years later, as CEO of the influencer marketing company I co-founded, I shared these old stories with our client success team. We built a culture around debriefing each project and shared stories at our “Drink & Learn” all-hands meetings each Friday.
I can’t credit simple storytelling with all of these companies' business and cultural success, but I know it was a key leg of the stool.
It’s also an approach that fits me as a leader and person. And we’re always better off playing to our strengths.
I believe in showing, not telling—giving people much freedom to make and learn from their own decisions. Whether in a biblical text or a blog post, stories educate in a way that is much more powerful than a to-do list or RASCI chart.
Plus, as regular readers of this Substack know, I love reading others’ stories and sharing my own. The process of inspiration and creation, combined with the knowledge that you can help even just one person at a critical time, lights off warm fuzzies in my heart.
Many years later, I’ve got a lot more stories to tell. Having a much bigger audience and platform to share them with is also exciting.
The story approach might be right for you, too.
You don’t have to be a professional writer or storyteller; just write down what you’d say. And there’s help out there if needed.
Writing your company stories helps you retain valuable lessons and creates meaningful memories—which is kind of the lasting point of a good work+life.
So, what’s your story?
How we might work together…
Fleet is our holding company for services businesses. We invest in leaders who are ready to start their own companies (and do some M&A). If this might be you, Hit my Office Hours link.
Revelin is our consulting practice that helps with revenue alignment, growth management, and other RevOps functions. CEO Jess Shuman is standing by to share a no-cost assessment of your business.
Shipwright Studio is our software development agency led by Ross Lewellyn, a CTO who has led multiple successful startups. He loves helping turn your dreams into reality, and our clients trust us for software built to last.
A2 Influence is our content development agency that helps some of the biggest brands and retailers create and distribute authentic content at scale, including social+influencer. The team just scored a partnership with Walmart! CEO Rob Reinfeld would love to share our approach.
Hearty is our boutique recruiting service. Our difference is that you get C-level partners—including me!—to source and screen, resulting in killer talent in less time. When you’re ready, let’s chat.
Feel free to schedule a chat during my Office Hours to discuss questions, feedback, networking, or any other topic. Seriously, any topic! You can also reach me on LinkedIn or by email.
BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?
The ad industry is infamous for many things, including big personalities full of blah-blah. Take Shingy…please.
But there’s at least one exception: Rory Sutherland. He’s got the brashness and cool accent you’d expect in an agency bullshit artist, but he brings real human insight that goes way beyond the commercial world. I read and loved his book, Alchemy, a few years ago (best on Audible so that you can hear the full Rory Experience).
He recently wrote a piece in Behavioral Scientist titled, “Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?” In his typically witty and real-world way, Rory forces us to realize we may have an unhealthy and unexamined belief that faster must be better.
"But there are certain things you shouldn’t try to accelerate. Sex, for example. ‘3.25 minutes, that’s my personal best.’ Not a good idea.”
Rory represents what made me fall in love with marketing long ago: The opportunity to discover what makes people tick and use that knowledge to provide products and services that improve their lives—hopefully with a smile in the process.
If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
Love this. We can all benefit from more story-sharing - failures, successes, surprises, and more. Thanks for the reminder!
This is awesome. And something I feel like i am strongly missing in a mostly remote culture. Very few opportunities to hear stories in an informal way.