Fire the client who opens with "we've tried every agency and none of them worked"

Her filter isn't industry — Punky Starfish deliberately serves everything from FMCG to crypto to sparkling water, because in South Africa there aren't enough big-budget clients to survive on one niche. The filter is people: "I want to work with people who don't make me or my team feel pressurised or stressed, who aren't rude." And the economics of that position are stated without apology:

"I would much rather make less money and have smaller bonuses for my team than have them treated badly."

The two she fired — and the one to never sign

In eight years, Punky Starfish has let go two clients. One was the moving-benchmark client: every KPI hit, every goalpost shifted — "if we gave them a viral Oreo dunk-in-the-dark moment, they'd ask why forty billion views wasn't fifty." Her honest post-mortem: the team flagged it long before she acted. "When my team said these guys are a problem, I should have listened sooner." The other client was simply rude to everyone from the start. Both firings were late; neither is regretted.

Dylan Kohlstadt of Shift One adds the red flag he's now seen three or four times, always from a senior person currently running the marketing:

"When they start with 'we've tried every agency and they never work' — I immediately know this is a fail. There's a client who doesn't want you to succeed, because they want to say: you see, I'm the only one who can save this business."

The client filter

Score every prospect before the proposal goes out:

- The decency test. How do they treat your team — and their own — in the sales process? It only gets worse after signature. - The history test. "No agency has ever worked for us" is a prediction, not a complaint. - The benchmark test. Are goals written and fixed, or vibes that will move? Get the KPI into the contract. - The budget-to-expectation ratio. If the ask is heroic and the budget isn't, the relationship is priced to fail. Dylan's rule: cut services, never rates. - The three-month review. Justine's dating rule — "the first three months tell you who you've signed." Book the go/no-go conversation at signing, so ending it is a scheduled decision, not a crisis.

The thread running through all of it: an agency is only its people. Protecting them from bad clients isn't softness — it's how you keep the good people who make the work good.

Try this week: run your current client list through the filter, and identify the one your team already knows about. Then add a three-month mutual review to your standard onboarding, and write your own "we're not for you if…" paragraph for proposals. It repels exactly the right people.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.