02 August 2006
On the 18th April 2005, on a blog far far away... I wrote the following post titled, 'Breaking up is Hard to Do'.I'm reprising it now because of something that happened today, which I'll probably write about tomorrow... so I guess this is kind of an appetiser.
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Recently our main contact at a major client told us she was moving on... news that is always met by a slight turning of my stomach. When you work hard to build relationships with people it always seems a bit unfair when they decide to go in a different direction. For a start their replacement is often someone completely unknown, and may have their own favourite agencies, and sometimes politics means that the old guard (e.g. us) are sacrificed as a matter of course... which appears may happen in this case.
A bummer then...
Well no, not necessarily. I recently put together a weird kind of family tree, a diagram of our clients since June 1997. It makes interesting viewing... because it shows me where my clients have come from.
At Semantic we make a big deal about the fact that we DO NOT ADVERTISE for clients, all of our work is referral based in one way or another. We make a big deal about it, but we've never really thought about it. We rely on doing great work and providing a great service... thus our works (and our clients) become our marketing/sales team.
So this family tree allowed me to see the relationships that have evolved over the past eight years, and how getting one job brought in another, how helping one client delivered another... you get the picture... a kind of biblical, A begat B begat C thing.
It turns out that about 70% of our 2004/5 work can be traced back to a single handshake in 1997. That day I met a guy about a job that came to nothing, but he went away and built a small ad agency, who we worked with for a while. Then, and this is the critical bit, the ad agency died leaving the partners to find new work elsewhere.
My first thought when we heard about their demise was 'shame'... but the Client Family Tree shows how much we have benefited. As the partners moved into other firms they took the 'Semantic Virus' with them... and sure enough, eventually, we have worked with almost all of them again... bringing in some major clients.
So I would like to wish our friend well in her new job, and look forward to speaking to you sometime :-)
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Can you guess what happened today? Sure you can, but I'll tell you more tomorrow.
Posted by Nick Warren at 2:44 PM
