Why our first client.

§I A risky engagement.

Our first engagement, in 2014, was with a founder who had already fired two branding agencies and was, by the time she arrived in our office, unimpressed with the category. She was impolite, specific, and correct about almost all the complaints she had about the firms that had preceded us. She was, operationally, the hardest possible first client. In hindsight she was the best possible first client.

This is a short piece about what her difficulty forced us to put in place in our first eighteen months that we would otherwise, quite likely, have skipped. Six things. Each of them has become a standing practice. Each of them, had we started with an easier client, would probably have been deferred into a later year or lost entirely. She was, in effect, a demanding founder stress-testing a firm that did not yet exist.

§II The six standing practices.

One: written briefs, on one side of paper, signed by the partner. She refused to accept a brief that ran longer than a page; she had read too many twenty-page briefs that had produced nothing. We have kept the one-page brief ever since. Two: the three-document starting brief. She required that we describe the thesis, the objects, and the forbiddings before any visual work began, because she had seen the mood-board-led output of the two previous firms and would not pay for another. We have kept the three-document structure as well.

Three: the quarterly brand review, framed as a read rather than a performance report. She did not want to look at numbers at the end of a quarter; she wanted to read the work. The practice of reading the work in batch, against the thesis, has become central to how we operate. Four: the editing function, separable from the approval function. She did not want us approving; she wanted us editing. The distinction has informed how we work with every founder since.

Five: the grammar document, the three-document brief, the quarterly review, the editing function — she insisted that each of these be maintained in writing and shared across the organisation, rather than held in the partners' heads. This forced us to make the practice legible to people beyond the room, which forced us to codify it, which forced us to become a firm rather than a pair of advisers.

Six: the annual retrospective memo. She wanted a written year-end document, read aloud at a meeting, that said what had worked, what had failed, and what we were committing to change. We wrote it that first year, reluctantly, and we have written it every year since.

An impolite first client, taken with care, is the single most productive thing that can happen to a firm's first eighteen months. — Jackson Morice

§III What we owe her.

We owe her six practices that would otherwise be missing. We also owe her the habit of treating the client's impatience as the firm's formation. A polite first client would have let us maintain bad habits; a difficult first client forced us to retire them. The firm's early operating standards were, substantially, her standards, and we did not fully realise it for about four years.

What I take from this, now, is that firms are not the institutions their founders claim they are. Firms are the accumulated response to the clients who did not accept the firm's default behaviour. Our firm is, at its operational core, the shape our difficult first client demanded. Every founder reading this who is starting a firm should take the difficult first client, if they are offered it. The practices that result will outlast the engagement.