Turning down work is not easy for a small business owner. You never know where the next client or customer will come from —or if they will come.
But that’s how we built our company Tribe into what we like to call a tiny global agency for internal communications. Since we started turning down work that didn’t fall into the very narrow niche of internal communications, we’ve attracted clients ranging from Amazon to PlayStation to U.S. Steel.
Not much left to lose
I started Tribe as a traditional ad agency in 2002, doing magazine, television and other advertising. We grew quickly, partly because of a flooring account with some of my favorite clients ever. That account kept growing until it eventually became about 70% of our billings. But in the housing crash, their business suffered, and they could no longer afford their monthly retainer with us.
That meant we could no longer afford a lot of things, including the staff we’d expanded to service that account. We instantly became a much smaller agency.
Opportunity to pivot
But it also gave me a chance to reinvent. I looked back at the past seven years and realized that the most interesting work we’d done, and in many cases the most profitable, was internal communications for large consumer brands.
We looked around at the competition in the internal communications landscape and noticed that, at the time, not many agencies were offering high-level creative branding. We made the decision to commit our entire practice to internal communications and to build real expertise in that field.
Turning down work — at a scary time
It took discipline and courage to say no to work that didn’t fall into the internal communications niche — which meant declining advertising accounts or any communications that weren’t specifically targeting the employee audience.
We’d be sweating cashflow and a potential client would call about an ad campaign or marketing strategy. Despite our slight revenue, we would politely decline and usually recommend another agency that we knew would do a great job for them.
Saying no created space for growth
It’s counterintuitive but turning down work enabled us to build back our business — more quickly than we expected. Soon our internal communications clients included Porsche, UPS, The Home Depot and Coca-Cola Enterprises. Our work with those clients attracted other clients.
Eventually my husband Steve joined the company. Like me, he’d spent a big chunk of his career in ad agencies. But we continued saying no to advertising work, remaining committed to that sweet spot of internal communications. That commitment created room for the business to grow — and for us to learn more about the challenges large companies face in engaging and aligning their employees.
We began seeing the same challenges across industries and company cultures. What we learned developing solutions for one client gave us a shortcut for reaching a solution for other clients. Over the years, our expertise continued to build.
Turning down an unkind client
Our culture at Tribe is pretty chill. We work hard, but we spend a lot of time laughing together. We nurture our employees’ talent and offer a pleasant work environment with flexibility and plenty of time off to enjoy their lives. One of our four values is Be Kind, and we try to make decisions in favor of kindness.
We had a former client who wasn’t kind. She was rude to our people and, in some cases, borderline abusive. When talking with her didn’t seem to change things, we completed her project and moved on.
Years later, she landed at an enormous global beauty company. She emailed about hiring Tribe for some internal communications work. It was a great project. At first, we dithered around trying to compose the perfect email response, but finally, I just picked up the phone to call her.
Maybe she’d changed
My thought was that she’d been quite young when we’d worked with her before and that maybe she’d matured and learned how to work with an agency in a more collaborative and respectful way.
The call started out pleasantly enough. We discussed her new job and the weather in New York. But then I mentioned that we’d been surprised to hear from her, after the experience of working together at her earlier job. Her tone completely changed. She criticized the Tribe people who’d been working on her team, questioned the work we’d developed and began raising her voice.
It was a short phone call. But by turning down work from her, we created the space or karma (or whatever) to attract another global cosmetics company a few years later. One with beloved brands and really lovely people we thoroughly enjoy.
I use that experience as a reminder that saying no to something that’s not quite right can open the way to something else that will be a hell yes — even if it’s scary. Would I make the same decision now? Definitely. As I said in an earlier post, I’m too old to put up with that kind of drama.
