Selecting clients

One of the themes in David Ogilvy's memoir Confessions of an Advertising Man is the importance of selecting good clients. For example, he advises "never take associations as clients" because they have "too many masters, too many objectives, too little money."

He also recommends not taking on clients that are so large that you would lose your independence and financial robustness by taking them on.

I have never wanted to get an account so big that I could not afford to lose it. The day you do that, you commit yourself to living with fear. Frightened agencies lose the courage to give candid advice; once you lose that you become a lackey.

This is what lead me to refuse an invitation to compete for the Edsel account. I wrote to Ford: "Your account would represent one-half of our total billing. This would make it difficult for us to sustain our independence of counsel." If we had entered the Edsel contest, and if we had won it, Ogilvy, Benson & Bather would have gone down the drain with Edsel.

This sort of thinking was very much on my mind when I was preparing to leave my last job to strike out on my own. As Nassim Taleb discusses in Antifragile, a steady job seems safer than entrepreneurship, but in some ways it's not. With one big client, i.e. an employer, you are less exposed to small risks but more exposed to big risks. Your income doesn't vary per month, unless it suddenly drops to zero.

In addition to looking for good clients, Ogilvy shares several stories of letting go of bad clients. I have yet to resign from a bad client-I haven't had any bad clients-but I value the option to do so. The option to resign from a project makes it less likely that you'll find yourself in a project you wish to resign from.