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| Andrew Blum |
Many O’Dwyer PR readers may have been fired by a PR client or at one point have had their PR contract not renewed or a client puts the work up for an RFP. At times, it goes with the territory in PR. But what do you do if you think the client is not working out for your agency?
When or why should you quit as a PR person for a client or fire them? Sometimes you don’t know until you get into the account and you see all the pluses and minuses. Other times, you may have had an inkling or a strong feeling that the account was not a fit ahead of time, but your agency needed the business. As we all know, PR is a business that needs to be sustained.
In the case of doing PR for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, anyone looking to do PR for them should have seen the writing on the wall beforehand. Recently, Meredith Maines, the couple’s publicist, quit, making her their 11th publicist to move on in five years.
“At a certain point, it’s time to go,” a source close to Maines said of her decision to leave her role as Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s chief communications officer.
In more normal run of the mill PR agency-client situations, few practitioners likely will end up in chaos like that. If you do, watch out!
If you know a client has a history of churning through PR people, be careful.
But there can be any number of reasons why you may end up thinking: Do I fire the client?
Among those are:
- They are not paying you on time.
- They are not listening to your PR advice, or they are trying to take over the PR work in-house.
- There is a personality clash.
- You are a PR subcontractor, and there is something lacking in the direct communication with the client.
Once you get to this point in your thinking, there are a lot of considerations to make.
First, talk to the client to see if you can make things better. If that doesn’t work, figure out if you or your agency can afford to walk away from the client and their fees.
See if you can find a new client to make up for the business you are about to walk away from.
If you decide you want to quit, look at your PR contract and make sure you have an out and that the contract is bulletproof.
When you go to quit, make sure you do so under the terms of the contract.
Give the client time to get their PR house in order, perhaps even more than the contract calls for in the language on parties ending the contract, and try not to leave on bad terms.
Send in a final PR report so the client sees what you have done for them.
Send in your final invoice and make sure you get your final payment in a timely manner.
Learn from the experience, so hopefully you won’t get roped into a similar situation with other clients.
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Andrew Blum of AJB Communications is a PR consultant and media trainer who has directed proactive and crisis PR for a wide range of clients and issues, and has done PR for more than 50 authors, and for professional and financial services firms, NGOs, startups and PR agencies. Email: [email protected] or Twitter: @ajbcomms
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