Studios should fail a lot more with their clients (just win 54% of the time)

I find the least inspired work comes from a place of “I don’t want to lose.” I’ll never forget the first and only time a client fired us. Even though it was a relief (ultimately) for both sides of the table, it really stung and made me doubt a lot of things.

But we learned so much in that engagement. Our biggest takeaway: you can’t play to lose. We were conservative in our positioning work. We obscured our own point of view throughout the process. We focused on trying to make the client think we were smart. We didn’t challenge the client. We were trying to minimize mistakes, instead of maximizing impact.

I think a big part of that mindset is that the traditional agency world puts a lot of weight on polish, instead of provocation, probably to justify giant fees. Coming from the traditional agency world, I’ve seen so many over-designed, underwhelming decks intended to please, not push ideas.

But the reality is, you can’t get to the big ideas, the bold designs, the breakthrough lines without completely missing. At Yung Studio, we think a lot about the Roger Federer speech, where he revealed he only won 54% of his points throughout his career. So yes, you can ultimately win a lot (and that should always be the goal, an ultimate win), but you should probably be losing a good amount too.

What do I really mean by that? I don’t mean delivering total crap or nonsense to your clients. I mean hacking your way through the woods with entrepreneurs and founders in pursuit of the right ideas, knowing you’re going to make wrong turns. Making the work less about presentations and more about conversations. I mean asking raw questions, pushing people’s ideas, and challenging people’s positions. It means showing some shockingly unbeautiful plain-text slides, knowing it’s important to get a discussion going around an idea before it’s cemented.

We’re ultimately very thankful we had that jarring loss with that client. We learned about who we are and we learned to fundamentally change how we work with clients. And now we play to win with our clients (knowing we’ll lose a few points along the way).