The mantra I have repeated inside every company I have run is that we are only as good as our last job. People hear it as a motivational line. It is closer to a warning, and I can tell you exactly when I learned to mean it.
We had a client for years. They liked us. I would have said we were friends, and I think they would have said the same.
In November 2017, we were shooting a documentary; my motorcycle was hit head-on by a car that jumped into my lane to pass. It was near enough to fatal that the distinction felt academic for a while, and for weeks afterward I could not sit upright, let alone run an agency. During that stretch, that client dropped us.
He was entitled to
Their website updates were late. That was the whole of it, and it was true.
My circumstances were not their problem. I have thought about this a great deal since, and the conclusion has not shifted: expecting a client to carry your personal catastrophe is not loyalty; it is an invoice you never agreed to send them. They bought a service. The service did not arrive. Everything else was, from where they sat, noise.
Goodwill is a balance, not a credit line
This is the part owners get wrong, and I got wrong. Years of good work do not accumulate into a reserve you can draw down when you fail. They buy you one thing: a conversation. Someone will pick up the phone before they replace you, rather than after.
That conversation is genuinely valuable, and it is not a pass. If your answer is an explanation rather than a fix, the relationship ends anyway, and you’ve spent your one advantage on being understood.
What it actually changes about how you operate
The lesson is not to work through injury, which is a stupid lesson that I have watched people take from this story. It is that a service business has no institutional memory in the mind of its client. Every month, the whole relationship is restated.
Which means the redundancy has to be structural rather than heroic. Somebody other than the founder has to be able to deliver the work. The client needs more than one line into the company. What must go out has to be visible to more than one person. If the answer to what happens if this person is unavailable for six weeks is that the client finds out, you do not have a company yet — you have a person with clients.
I had been running businesses for thirty-five years when I found that out properly, which should tell you something about how easy it is to know a thing and not have built for it.