My most valuable client contributions are often things I didn't know were valuable until after I'd said them.
- Matthew Ireland
- Jun 17
- 2 min read
I was reminded of this recently after telling a therapy client that some problems genuinely do go away if left alone and therefore aren't worth the effort of trying to fix. A relatively throwaway comment, but one that led him to experiment with how he handles a difficult situation with his boss, and transform how he sees disappointments at work more broadly. This from an idea I had believed for years, but never before thought of as being intrinsically valuable to someone else.
I see similar things in the growth workshops I run for agency teams. Recently, a team used their unique insights and experience to identify a real problem that one of their clients hadn't yet articulated and proposed a completely new solution. The energy in the room changed completely, and they became far more creative, committed and interested, right down to the naming of the proposal. I suspect none of them had quite realised before that these were capabilities they had – or that the work could feel so different when they were drawing on what only they knew and could do. So organic growth can be fun!
Account management teams deliver so much value like this every day:
Translating something complicated a client has said into a brief that creatives can actually work on
Connecting conversations weeks apart and seeing the same problem in different clothing
Remembering why something didn't work years ago and subtly steering the client away from doing it again
Hearing what wasn't said in a meeting – political risks, management preferences or whatever the client couldn't quite say in front of their colleagues.
None of this shows on a status report or gets itemised on a SoW, and most of it is buried under the visible signs of effort – slide decks, timelines, email chains and meetings – that clients have been paying for, because it's what they could see.
This matters more now because AI is stripping away that visible effort scaffolding. Decks write themselves, status updates auto-generate and summaries are instant. What should be left are the things that were always doing the real work in the first place – provided our teams can name them, point to them when they happen, and have a proper commercial conversation about what they're worth.
