What makes a great client?

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.

Nov 13, 2025

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 🚀.

Having negotiated £40m+ in talent deals 💼 and grown company turnover 5x in 5 years 📈, I am sharing my experiences and knowledge of 17 years representing some of the biggest stars in the UK.

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Since starting Dealmakers, I’ve been asked to take part in a number of panels, conferences and podcasts, and been interviewed for various publications. It turns out more people are interested in the thoughts of a talent agent than I realised.

Finally, we’ve actually been noticed!

I speak often about the huge positives of creating a personal brand and how it can elevate your work. It could make all the difference to the number of opportunities that arrive at your door, and having this Substack is, of course, my main way of creating my own one. Many of my recent panels have been on the topic of a personal brand given it’s not a natural thing for most talent agents, and so I actually dedicated a whole post to it here. I think now more than ever, it’s something everyone should give serious thought to.

One of the more unexpected opportunities that has emerged since starting this Substack has been in consulting for research firms and investment companies that work on behalf of businesses that are interested in either investing or acquiring talent agencies in the UK and overseas. These firms go out, assess the market and report back.

These firms have reached out to me to help them paint the picture of the talent agency landscape. I’ve been asked to explain how our industry works in extremely specific detail, the pros and cons of buying a talent agency along with previous examples and a whole host of other quite complex questions to help them put together a dossier that they will then present to their client.

(Just for clarity, these conversations have never been regarding InterTalent, and I never actually know the agencies their clients are considering. They wouldn’t tell me even if I asked… and trust me, I did ask, multiple times. I’m an agent after all.)

In the most recent conversation I had, I was actually asked one of the most basic questions ever, but it’s one that I’ve never tackled here: what makes a great client?

I always get asked what makes a great agent. It was the first blog I ever posted (check it out here). But a great client? Not often. I think people just assume it’s someone who makes a LOT of money… not quite.

So I thought I’d lay it out here.

Let’s go. ⬇️

Ok, here’s the truth:

Representing a great talent isn’t the same as representing a great client.

They’re completely different things.

Talent is why we are excited by someone at the outset. It’s the reason for wanting to meet a potential client in the first place, and to start exploring what that could look like… but talent isn’t always enough by itself.

There are many more attributes that are needed for someone to be considered a great client which we’ll get into. If they have the full package, then that is what every agent is craving.

However, the chances of every client ticking all the boxes is not realistic. If the majority do, which should be the aim, then that’s a win because let’s be honest, talented people are often very complex characters. We work in the difficult people business. That doesn’t excuse bad behaviour or rudeness, but the reality is some very talented and successful people are also the hardest to deal with, and sometimes you still sign them. That’s ok. No one’s going to judge you for representing someone difficult. It’s not ideal, it’s not what we truly want from the partnership, and it might not be that fun to do, but it happens all the time. I’ve represented a few incredibly talented people over the years who, if I’m honest, I didn’t particularly like as people. That’s fine. It’s business. The idea that every client you represent in your career will be perfectly polite is unrealistic. Your job is to ask the right questions when you first meet and spot the signs early to make sure you know all of this before you sign them.

However, for the sake of this blog, let’s be aspirational about it all.

Here’s what I think makes a genuinely great client to represent… ⬇️

🎯 Ambition: It’s really important that they are incredibly ambitious. Not everyone is. Or at least they’re not very good at showing that they are. If an agent is running at 100mph you want your client to be running at 120mph. They’re the team captain, after all. You want them to be on it, to be quick in replying, to be creative and to have huge goals. They have real strategy. When you have a client who doesn’t have that it feels like you want their career more than they do, and that’s a really frustrating place to be. That often feels like an uphill battle. You really want your client to have huge ambition and know what they want to achieve.
💬 Communication: There is absolutely nothing worse than a client who doesn’t reply, doesn’t pick up the phone and doesn’t tell you when they’re doing something. If I hear about a client doing something from someone else, from a newspaper or from their social media and I had no idea then I’m fuming. This is a partnership and just like any great partnership, you need strong communication. It’s the quickest way for cracks to emerge if your client can’t communicate as often as is needed, and be clear in what they’re saying. Clarity of both response and thought is essential.
🤝 Trust: This is something that will build over time. Trust is often earned. However you do need to start from a place of your client trusting you to do a great job, to do the best by them and to handle their business professionally. I’ve started to notice this very new thing, especially with young creator talent, where they either want to be CC’d into every email or be on some kind of team email so they see what’s coming through. That is a major red flag for me. I would never agree to that. Already that tells me that they don’t trust me. You want your client to trust that you have everything under control and that they don’t feel threatened or concerned otherwise you feel constrained or trapped. You don’t have freedom. It’s like your boss watching over you. It’s important to set these boundaries at the outset and ensure there is mutual trust.
🧠 Self-Awareness: You want a client who understands their strengths, weaknesses, and where they sit in their market. This isn’t to be confused with ambition as it’s important they show they want to hit new heights but it’s very hard to manage your clients expectations when they are completely misaligned with the reality of where they are in the world. You can never win because you can never achieve the level they believe they’re on. It’s really important that your client not only knows how the industry sees them but that they allow you to be truthful with them at all times. When you start telling white lies because you know you’re not on the same wavelength, your client will soon become unmanageable.
💪 Work Ethic: Lazy clients are so frustrating. There’s nothing worse than talented people who take short cuts and don’t give 100%. You want someone who shows up when they know it’s right, take the meetings they need to and follow through on their promises and not pull out of work last minute and let everyone down. That reputation spreads quickly. You also don’t want someone who solely relies on their agent. You want a client who brings ideas to the table and will sell themselves alongside you.
🌟 Professionalism: A great client is always a nice client. They treat everyone well, from the bottom to the top, because as I say above, reputation travels fast. We’re in an era of calling out bad behaviour and your clients are ambassadors for your talent agency. The best talent genuinely understand that being booked for jobs is as much because they’re a nice person as it is about being talented.
🕊️ Patience: They understand that careers are built over time. Things take time and in most cases we need someone else (a producer, commissioner, ad agency, brand etc) to say YES to our talent. Results are often out of our hands. Some things happen over night, some things take years. Having the patience to know that all good things will come if everything else is positive is a really special skill. Most people are impatient, I know I am, but it’s really important that your client remains calm and doesn’t start panicking unneccessarily.
💡 Openness: Your client doesn’t have to tell you everything about their life. On the flip side, some clients overshare which is also not ideal… but it’s very difficult if you represent a client who is a closed book and doesn’t tell you what they’re thinking because then it doesn’t feel like your team mates. In fact, you feel like you’re not a team at all. Simple things like opening up about concerns or talking about mental health can be really important for an agent/client relationship to grow. Like trust, this can take a bit of time, especially if they’ve recently come from a bad agent/client relationship but if you have a client who shares and let’s you in, it really allows you the freedom to ensure that you can protect their interests to the absolute best of your ability.
❤️ Gratitude: It doesn’t take a lot to get thank you. It can be rare… but a great client is someone who recognises the effort their management team put in to their career. Someone once told me that they don’t say thank you to their agent because the thanks is their commission. I don’t agree with that at all. The commission is a payment for the work you’ve had to do (and all the work that doesn’t lead to anything). A bit of gratitude goes a long way.
🏆 Success: Ok, so it’s not just about being a good person. This is showbusiness after all. You do need a client to not only be talented but to also book some great jobs and earn both of you money. You can be considered a great client if you don’t work or bring in income. For any client who has all these attributes but rarely works, I wouldn’t call them a great client, I’d call them an easy client. That’s very different. Easy clients are no bad thing: they cause you no problems, they’re great to work with but when push comes to shove they don’t hit the heights of others. Great clients need the full package.