What 29 Years of Client Relationships Actually Teaches You About Creative

By Dave Corbett, Founder & Executive Creative Director, Pluto

Someone asked me recently what the secret is to staying in business for 29 years.

I gave them the honest answer: I’m still not sure. But I have a few theories.

The one I keep coming back to is this…we never really treated clients like clients. We treated them like the people we were trying to help. Sounds obvious. It isn’t. There’s a version of this business where you take the brief, make the thing, invoice, repeat. I’ve watched agencies do exactly that for decades. Most of them aren’t around anymore.

The first thing you learn: trust takes longer than you think

The early period of any client relationship is really just an extended audition. You’re proving you can deliver. They’re proving they can give real feedback without softening it into uselessness. Neither side fully trusts the other yet, and that’s fine, it’s supposed to work that way.

What I learned is that the audition doesn’t end when you nail the first project. It ends somewhere around the third or fourth project, when something goes sideways and you handle it well. A timeline blows up. A concept doesn’t land. A deliverable needs to be rebuilt from scratch two weeks before the show.

That’s the moment that builds the relationship. Not the win but how you show up when it isn’t a win.

I can point to clients we’ve worked with for over a decade, and in almost every case, I can tell you the exact project where things got hard and we figured it out together. That’s when it stopped being a vendor relationship and started being a partnership.

The second thing: the best clients push back

I used to think a smooth approval process was the sign of a great client relationship. Client says yes to everything, check clears, everyone’s happy. I know better now.

The clients who’ve made our work better over the years are the ones who ask hard questions. Why did you make this choice? What problem does this solve? I don’t understand this…explain it differently.

That friction forces you to know why you made every decision, and if you can’t explain it, you probably made it for the wrong reason.

The clients who just nod along are the ones who end up disappointed. Not because the work was bad, but because they never told us what they actually needed. You can’t read minds. Nobody can. Great creative relationships are honest ones, and honesty goes both ways.

The third thing: familiarity is an asset, not a comfort

There’s a myth that long-term agency relationships get stale. That you need fresh eyes. That the agency that’s been with you for ten years has gone blind to your problems.

Sometimes that’s true. But I’d argue the opposite happens more often and when it does, it’s worth a lot.

When we’ve worked with a client long enough, we know their business at a level no new agency can match in a pitch. We know what their sales team actually needs, not just what the marketing brief says. We know what got killed last year and why. We know which stakeholder needs to see a certain kind of proof before they’ll move forward.

That kind of knowledge takes years to build. And it shows up in the work. The briefs get shorter because we already understand the context. The rounds of revision shrink because we’re not guessing at what “on brand” means anymore. The conversations get more honest because we’re not performing for each other.

I’ll take a long-term partner over a fresh set of eyes almost every time. Because fresh eyes don’t know what they don’t know.

29 years in

If I had to distill it down to one thing, one thing that separates the relationships that last from the ones that don’t, it’s this:

The client has to believe you care more about their success than your invoice.

That’s it. Everything else follows from that. The trust, the honest feedback, the willingness to push back, the familiarity with their business that makes the work better over time. All of it is downstream of a simple belief: this agency is actually on our side.

We’ve built a team and a culture around earning that belief. Project by project. Year by year.

Twenty-nine years later, I still think it’s the best business model worth having.