Diplomacy, and a good bottle, go a long way at a table for two.
Every agency likes to talk about how deep its client relationships run. The real answer is sitting in your agency’s expense reports.
Pull the last twelve months. Look for the line items that show where you, or one of your team, actually sat down with a client, one on one, off the clock. Not the client appreciation events. Not the group dinners with six people from your side and four from theirs, everyone performing for everyone else. I mean actual dinners. One of your senior people, one of their people, a table for two.
I’d bet the number is embarrassingly small.
This isn’t a new problem. I watched this kind of 1:1 time with clients erode throughout my career, agency side, but it’s gotten markedly worse over the last twenty years. For me, the dinner was never optional. It’s how I was trained, early enough that it became instinct. You don’t wait for a reason to sit down with a client. You make the time, because the time is the point.
There were stretches where I hadn’t seen a client, or a former client, or a prospect in a while, and I’d manufacture a reason to be in their town. Nothing elaborate. Just enough of an excuse to justify the trip, so we could sit down and have dinner. They felt it too, getting an hour or two of real one-on-one time, no agenda, no deck. And I felt the relationship move from what Arthur Brooks, in his book From Strength to Strength, calls deal friends to real friends. That’s a different category entirely. Deal friends stay loyal as long as the deal makes sense. Real friends give you the benefit of the doubt when it doesn’t.
I can point to the exact moment that played out. For years, I’d fly to Indianapolis for meetings with Elanco and time my arrival so I could get dinner the night before with their Director of Marketing, Roger Foulks. Some of those dinners ran into the early morning. We talked about work, sure, but we also talked about his toddler daughters, Big Ten basketball, politics, farming, money, whatever came up. Nothing on the table but dinner.
A few years later, Fletcher/Mayo was acquired by Carmichael Lynch, and Carmichael Lynch ran on a very different compensation model than we had. It turned out we’d over-invested close to $350,000 in the Elanco account, hours we’d never billed, and Carmichael Lynch didn’t write off billable hours. So my boss at the time, Dick Damrow, and I sat down with Roger and told him the truth. He took a long draw on his Marlboro, the kind of pause that could have gone either way, and said, “Then let’s figure out a way to get you paid. Can we pay you in equal installments over the next six months?”
That’s not luck. That's the return on years of showing up with nothing to sell: a client who solves the hard problem with you instead of one who lets you eat it.
Getting my own team to do it was another matter. I could model it every week and still watch people default to the thirty-minute check-in instead, because a check-in fits on a calendar and a dinner takes three hours and has a personal investment and doesn’t show up as billable anywhere. It wasn’t laziness. It was that nobody had trained them the way I’d been trained, so it never became instinct for them the way it had for me. You can’t inherit a habit. You have to build it the same slow way I did.
The dinner does something the status update can’t.
This is where trust actually gets built, not talked about. This is where ideas get hatched before anyone’s ready to defend them in a room full of stakeholders. This is where a client, three glasses in, tells you what’s really keeping them up at night, and it’s rarely the campaign. This is where you stop understanding their business from a deck and start understanding it from the inside, because now you know them, not just their org chart.
And this is where you stop being their ad agency and start being someone they call before they’ve decided what they need help with.
You can say “strategic partner” in a QBR. You can say it at the holiday party with a drink in your hand and forty other people in the room. It won’t land the same way it does across a table for two, where the pretense drops and both people are being a little candid, a little vulnerable, and neither one is performing for an audience.
Roger didn’t say yes because we wore him down in that meeting. He said yes because years of unhurried dinners had already made the decision for him before we ever sat down.
None of this shows up on a scope of work. Neither did the $350,000, not until it almost had to. You can’t bill for this kind of trust directly, which is probably why it’s the first thing your team will deprioritize unless you make it unmistakably clear you expect it. It’s the highest-leverage, lowest-visibility investment most agencies have quietly stopped making, and it usually dies with the founder who used to do it without thinking.
Agency owners know which of their client relationships are real and which are just deals. So do the clients.
You sleep differently on the accounts where it’s real. The question isn't whether you or the client screws something up. It’s when.
And, you sleep even better when that depth doesn’t rest on you alone. When someone else on your team has it too, the relationship survives your bad quarter, your bad week, even you leaving the business altogether.
So go back to those expense reports. Count how many of those line items were a real dinner, table for two, no agenda. Then ask yourself whether you’re still doing it yourself, and whether anyone on your team would know to do it if you weren’t.