How do you manage difficult clients?
Alex is the Managing Director of major UK talent agency InterTalent. He represents his clients alongside overseeing the agency's creative strategy, day-to-day operations & acquisitions.
Welcome to Dealmakers with Alex Segal ✍️, a Substack on the realities of being a talent agent, packed with weekly insights to keep you ahead of the game 🚀.
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At the back end of last month, InterTalent held its own panel at Advertising Week Europe in London.
AdWeek Europe is always fast-paced, full of future-facing sessions on the trends driving brand growth today and how to win in a rapidly changing creator economy.
The panel focused on what makes brand partnerships succeed, sharing firsthand insights into how to protect creative integrity while collaborating with brands to build credible, impactful partnerships.
For the first time, I was on hosting duties. A new experience for me, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I invited four of InterTalent’s star clients to join me - GadgetsBoy, Grace Andrews, Charlotte Crosby & Sarel - to talk us through their experiences. All of them have incredibly successful but very different paths, and their experiences of working with brands over the years made for some really useful takeaways.
After we wrapped, I got chatting to a fellow talent agent. He wanted my advice on how to handle a difficult client. He was struggling and was having a particularly bad time working out how to deal with someone he cared about a lot, who is incredibly talented but just unmanageable and never listened to his advice.
He had seen our 4 clients on the panel, all of whom are an absolute dream, and wondered if there was some magic spell I could pass on to him to use.
There isn’t.
But it’s a topic I’ve not covered before, so it got me thinking.
How do you deal with difficult clients?
Let’s go. ↓
First of all, I think it’s very important to note that ‘difficult people’ are not specific to the entertainment industry. They are everywhere, in all industries, in all jobs. Difficult people are everywhere, and there are MANY really good books to read about how to handle certain personality types. I’d highly recommend Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson.
➡️ When it comes to those tricky but talented people in our world, before we get into what an agent can do to handle a complex character, keep 3 really important things in mind…
❓ UNCERTAINTY: The vast majority of performers in our industry are self-employed. That is never a calm or settled position to be in. They are always on the cusp of unemployment, and even when they have a job, their brain is always thinking about what happens when it’s over. It’s an anxiety-inducing way to live, and for those who aren’t great at managing the rollercoaster that is self-employment, it can present itself in intense or complex ways.
🔍 SCRUTINY: Your clients are being judged 24/7 by hundreds, thousands or millions of people who don’t know them. They are known by many people, and everything they do is scrutinised in a way that most of us can’t comprehend. No one comes to my office every day and judges my performance without any understanding, knowledge or context of the hard work that goes into a project. Being judged by strangers, and/or being famous/well known, is an extremely unusual situation. I find it bizarre when someone I don’t know recognises me (either through my job or this Substack!), let alone being judged by the nation. It takes a certain type of person to be able to handle that kind of scrutiny and expectation, plus a lack of privacy.
🛡️ PROTECTION: The act of creating is deeply personal, whether you’re an actor, presenter, creator, musician or other. Whatever they do, your clients are putting a version of themselves out into the world every single time. That level of emotional exposure, repeated throughout a career, takes a toll. What might look like difficult behaviour can often be a defence mechanism built up over years of putting their talent and heart on the line professionally.
All of the above can easily create fragility and a real need for validity and reassurance, so it’s worth considering that when you have a client who is difficult to manage.
That being said, you (as their agent) still have to manage those emotions and personality traits. They might just be really difficult. You have to work out how to get under the hood of the client and work out how to manage someone who at times feels unmanageable. They don’t listen, they don’t take advice, and they aren’t easy to converse with.
Here’s the thing that experience as an agent over many years will teach you: talented clients often live in chaos.
Emotion. Opportunity. Rejection. Ego. Praise. Negativity. Panic. And more!
→ Your job is not to join the chaos.
So how do you do it?
Here are some of my top tips…
🚦 The Start: When you first sign a new client, you have no idea how they will be to work with. It’s only when you start communicating regularly that you start to see where the issues are going to lie. How you start, is how you mean to go on. If you let the client cross boundaries from Day 1, it is extremely hard (often impossible) to claw it back later.
I remember when I first started as an assistant and I had a high-profile client call me to moan about the industry and tell me how it was all so unfair. They moaned and groaned for a whole hour. I let them talk. It was painful. What happened 3 days later? Same thing. They called, wallowed, and it took an hour. It was only after a few weeks that I realised I was being used as a punching bag and nothing I said in return was going in. It was an hour-long monologue. These conversations were not only racking up, but it was putting me behind on my work. I tried to cut them down to 10 mins max. 20 mins even. No chance. They just kept talking. I had given them rope; they took it with both hands, and now there was no chance they were going to return it.
If a client expects you to pick up on the first ring at all hours, that’s because you previously picked up on the first ring at all hours. If they expect a detailed written response to every WhatsApp VN they send you, that’s because you provided one at the start. You’ve accidentally trained them to expect that without even realising it.
How you start is how you mean to go on. The relationships where agents feel most out of control are almost always ones where the boundaries were never clearly established at the start. Set your boundaries early, show them your energy and how you communicate, be decisive and strong from the outset, and really test their communication and listening skills.
The moment a client starts leading you, you've lost. Not just control of that relationship, but your ability to actually do your job, which is to guide their career, protect their interests and make things happen that they couldn't make happen without you.
If you have fallen into this trap and are well beyond the start of your agent/client journey, TODAY is the moment to try and break bad habits. It’s going to be hard, perhaps painful, potentially impossible, but trying to reset today is a little easier than tomorrow.
🧠 Be Smarter: Know more than they do. Always. This sounds obvious but it’s a really underrated tactic to deal with difficult clients. They often think they know best so you have to prove you know even more than they do… and tell them, often. Experienced clients have seen a lot. They think they know how the industry works.
They think they’ve seen it all. And to be fair, they probably do know a fair bit. Your job is to know all of it. You need to be three steps ahead. Know your sh*t. Know what’s going on in the industry that day, who is who, why things happen (and why they don’t). Just shower them with knowledge and information.
Knowledge is your authority.
Once you start backing your advice with facts, my experience says that their resistance drops dramatically.
Difficult clients find it easy to think they are smarter than you but it’s difficult for them to be smarter than the industry itself. Going in with “I actually think…” will never be as effective to a difficult client as ‘“The market now tells us this because…” will be.
BTW, the above is about experienced clients. Unexperienced clients thinking they know best is not only even more infuriating but also even more proof that you need to overpower them with knowledge. Give them so much that they just have to start calming down with their crazy scenarios and just listen to you, who will be a guru of the industry.
🎭 Manage Egos: The mistake most agents make with difficult clients is to match their energy head-on. That rarely works. You need to work out a strategy for you to deliver to them what you need in a way that ultimately makes them believe it was their idea all along, and how incredible they are.
Mirroring them at their level won’t get you anywhere.
Instead, make the right decision feel like their idea.
This is one of the absolute greatest skills a top agent can have: convincing their client to do something that they don’t want to do (for the benefit of their career, of course) and by the end make the client feel like it was their brilliant idea or decision all along. It’s the art of selling. The art of storytelling. Learn both well. It’s an incredible skill which, when honed over many years, will be one of your strongest tools as an agent. It’s an actual art form.
Never tell a difficult client what to do. They’ll fight against it. They’ll reject it. They want the power and want to feel like they’re making all the decisions. Instead, show them a version of themselves they’re excited about. Paint the picture. Play devil’s advocate. Start giving pros or cons. Use the ‘path of least regret’ tactic.
Get them to the point where they do the thing you wanted them to do… but on their own terms, and then let them take the glory. There is only room for one ego in the relationship, and it’s not yours!
🦁 Be Calm & Confident: Difficult clients test your confidence and authority. It’s a power play. Whether they’re acting up and being tricky on purpose or without even meaning it, they’re consciously or subconsciously sussing out how you react and how far they can push their personality. What can they get away with? How much will my agent put up with?
Even if they’re not doing it deliberately, if they’re that kind of character, then they’ll be doing it instinctively. Neither is fun to work with every day.
If you sound hesitant, unsure or happy to just say ‘I AGREE!’ to whatever they say (no matter how wrong or ludicrous it is), then they have control of the dynamic.
Being a ‘yes person’ is a sure-fire way to have no power in the management of your client.
Agreeing with them is the easy way out. It saves you pain, but, in truth, you’re not really being an agent. An agent shouldn’t just agree to an easy life. An agent has to face the difficulty head-on and work through it. It’s part of the gig.
Accepting whatever comes at you for an easy life is failing as an agent. That’s the truth.
If you don’t let the power play affect you (rise above it and have thick skin) it becomes harder for your client to be difficult with you if their tricky personality doesn’t have any actual effect on how you operate. Treat them the same as how you treat the clients who hang off your every word.
All of your clients want leadership; some just have more interesting ways of showing it. That’s just people.
The difficult clients are never going to stop being difficult. That’s part of the deal when you represent brilliant, complex, driven people who’ve built amazing careers on doing things their way. Difficult people are everywhere.
But difficult doesn’t have to mean out of control.
If you know more, listen better, set the tone early and stay confident under pressure, you will manage the situation and excel even more in what is a difficult people business.
📥 I would love to hear from you. Any ideas, thoughts and feedback via alex@intertalentgroup.com are always most welcome.
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See you next time.
Alex
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