“Pass me the bucket" – why winning work needs a team

A former boss of mine, with a rather direct turn of phrase, once told me this:

If leaders of creative agencies and consultancies were offered the choice between doing new business and standing on their head in a bucket of shit, most would answer:

“Pass me the bucket.”

He was probably talking about sales: cold calling, awkward conversations and the forced charm many creative people instinctively resist.

Still pretty extreme. But if you considered the bucket option, even for a split second, read on.

In many agencies and consultancies, business development responsibility sits with far too few people. Often just one or two. Usually the people running the business.

Sound familiar?

If you’re in that position, you’ll know how exhausting it can become. You’re responsible for setting direction, leading the team, managing clients, protecting standards, watching the numbers and somehow keeping the pipeline full too.

Most leaders who find themselves carrying that weight try all sorts of ways to change it. I certainly did when I was running my design consultancy.

Some worked badly. Some helped a little. Only one worked properly.

The external rainmaker

One of the first things I tried was outsourcing business development to an external ‘rainmaker’ company.

We had a rep called Ian. I don’t think that was even his real name.

‘Ian’ had one of our company email addresses, which was meant to make him look like part of our team. The problem was, if the phone rang and a prospect asked for Ian, the busy team member who answered would understandably forget and say: “Sorry, nobody called Ian works here.”

Opportunity lost. Great.

The bigger problem was the incentive structure. The company was paid to get us meetings. So guess what happened? We got meetings. But most of them were terrible.

The final straw came when three senior team members travelled a couple of hours to an in-person meeting, only to discover that the prospect thought we did something completely different. So we lost the day to travel and all the time spent preparing.

What a waste of time. That was the end of that.

The heavy hitter

Another common approach is to hire a new business ‘heavy hitter’. Someone with a black book of contacts – or, for those of us old enough to remember, a Rolodex.

They arrive with confidence and the promise of bringing work with them. I tried this a few times. My experience was that they often did have contacts, but they rarely had relationships deep enough to cause a prospect to spend serious money with a new, unfamiliar agency.

That distinction matters. A prospect trusting someone personally is not the same as them trusting a business they don’t yet know to deliver.

Of course, there are exceptional BD people who can do this brilliantly. But they’re rare, expensive, and usually not as portable as everyone hopes.

Public relations agencies

PR agencies are another option. I tried that too.

Used well, PR can support the marketing side of business development. It can help build awareness, credibility and ‘top-of-mind’ visibility. Done well, that should create the conditions for more and better inbound enquiries.

That’s important, but it’s usually a slower burn. And it’s not the same as sales.

My main learning from working with PR people was that, as with so many other things, you get out what you put in. You need to provide strong material: research, insights, case studies, points of view, award wins, client stories and evidence of impact. Then you need to review how those materials are interpreted before they’re (hopefully) published.

The relationship needs time to build. The PR agency needs to understand your market, value proposition, point of view and voice. In my case, I never quite felt they captured what we wanted to say.

Your mileage may vary.

Delegating the front end

A more effective approach was to delegate some of the work at the front end of the sales funnel.

It doesn’t need to be too expensive. When briefed properly and given the right tools, a bright marketing or business graduate, or even an intern, can help here.

At this stage in the process, the activity is wide but shallow: high volume, lightweight interactions. It means researching prospects, spotting signals of possible need, mapping organisations, identifying useful connections, and making initial contact.

This worked better because the person doing it was inside the business. They were close to the people leading and delivering the work. They could absorb how we talked, what we valued, what made a good opportunity and what didn’t.

They weren’t trying to win work by themselves. They were supporting the system.

As opportunities progressed, senior people could step in more naturally. By that point, the opportunities were fewer, deeper and better qualified. Workflow improved because the right people became involved at the right time.

But this approach only gets you so far. A junior person, no matter how capable, can’t be expected to land new work on their own. They need experienced help.

Closer to home

The most effective way I found to spread the business development load was much closer to home: developing senior team members.

Not just client service people. Not just the obvious extroverts. But the senior people who understood the work, the clients, the problems we solved and the value we created.

They were the people who could best represent the business. Nobody else could articulate our value as convincingly or with the credibility to back it up.

I’m not talking about turning senior team members into full-time salespeople. That would be the wrong answer for most creative businesses. I mean adding appropriate business development responsibilities to their roles.

I believe that everyone in a creative agency or consultancy with the word ‘Director’ in their job title should play some form of role in business development. Delivery alone rarely justifies the higher salary.

But – and here’s the rub – we creatives are often woefully underprepared and under-equipped for business development.

I found this myself earlier in my career. I could see the value I might bring by contributing more directly to revenue generation. But I didn’t really know how to do it. So I learned on the job. Slowly, awkwardly and doubtless making plenty of mistakes along the way.

Embracing those skills definitely helped my career progress. But the bigger value came later, when I was running my own consultancy. It prompted me to invest in training for my senior team.

It started with helping them understand the value of client service and relationship building, then giving them the confidence and skills to contribute to business development themselves.

Of course, this isn’t for everyone. If you think about your senior team, I bet you already have a pretty good idea who’s suitable to take this on, and who may be better left in a specialist delivery role.

But don’t be too quick to assume. It’s not always the loudest people in the room who make your best new business allies. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by seemingly unlikely candidates – several times.

And remember, many prospective clients are introverts too. They don’t all respond well to arm-waving, hugs and messages peppered with exclamation marks and emojis.

The payoff

After all the unsuccessful experiments, empowering my senior team members to contribute to business development was the set-up that clicked.

Work began to flow in from multiple sources. Our over-dependency on one or two people was reduced. Nobody felt over-burdened by ‘sales’. And I could spend more time setting the company’s strategic direction.

I still took part. I’d show up when the boss needed to be present: sometimes to reassure a prospective client that we were taking the opportunity seriously; sometimes to negotiate; sometimes to close. Occasionally, I’d attempt to sprinkle a bit of magic (hopefully).

With the benefit of hindsight, I can confidently say this was one of the most important factors in my company’s rapid growth and eventual sale. Business development had become a shared responsibility.

We became less dependent on one or two individuals because the senior team became more commercially capable. Growth accelerated and became more resilient.

If you’re doing too much business development heavy-lifting yourself, or your current system isn’t working, it may be time to look inside the business instead of looking outside it.

You probably already have the people who can help. They just need the confidence, structure and tools to do it well.

That’s the thinking behind my Commercial Skills Training programme.

It’s designed for people who are ready to expand their role beyond delivery and contribute more confidently to business development.

It covers the five stages creative agencies and consultancies typically go through to win new work: networking, qualification, credentials meetings, negotiation, and turning losses into future wins.

For goodness’ sake, let’s avoid that bucket.



Is business development in your agency or consultancy shared across the team, or concentrated on too few people?

I built a 100-person international design consultancy, before selling it.
Now I work independently, providing:

GROWTH ADVICE: Invigorating creative leaders

COMMERCIAL SKILLS TRAINING: Boosting creative careers