Is Your PR Agency Getting Ready to Fire You?

Do you appreciate the people who work on your account enough? Do you expect your agency to do twice as much work as you’re actually paying for? Do you take your PR agency for granted?

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you are in danger of being FIRED by your PR agency!

Yes — you thought that clients had all the leverage, but in fact, there’s nothing stopping a PR agency from having a little meeting, discussing all your unreasonable demands and your bad attitude, and deciding to make the tough call to give you the boot.

In all seriousness, this happens more often than you would imagine. After all, this is a business relationship, not a romantic one. If the agency isn’t making money on your account, at some point they are going to say, to-heck-with-it, let’s get rid of this client.

Todd Defren at PR Squared wrote about this a couple of years ago and just re-posted it for old times’ sake.

Defren notes:

Clients think that agencies fire them in a good business environment because the agency can afford to do so; but, that’s not it at all (we are trying to after all, and any newbiz opportunity sucks up precious resources). No, the fact is, that agencies fire clients in a good business environment because we CAN’T afford to lose our people.

You could argue that this is not a “good business environment,” and hence, agencies are more desperate for work, but that would be an over-generalization. In some markets and sectors, some agencies may be seeing serious recessionary pressure and may therefore be hanging on to bad clients because they have to. But here in the Bay Area and elsewhere, there’s no real downturn yet, and hiring remains tight.

So — before you head off on your end-of-summer vacation, buy your agency a box of chocolates and tell them how much you appreciate them. Remember, a little bit of kindness goes a long way.