In this op-ed, James Ledger, business relationship consultant at Verity Relationship Intelligence, delves further into the trend of agency relationships having a three year expiration date. He provides more clarity and guidance for agencies as how to end this cycle.
There’s a line in Ben McCallum’s recent B&T op ed that lands with uncomfortable accuracy: “We design relationships as if they are disposable, then act surprised when they don’t last.” As someone who spends every day analysing and consulting on relationship health through The Relationship Rating (TRR), I see the same pattern play out across agency models, client category, budgets, and personalities. What strikes me is not just why these relationships fail but how preventable these failures are.
The three-year drop-off isn’t destiny. It’s design.
And if we designed relationships differently, they’d last longer, perform better, and create exponentially more growth for both parties.
The Real Issue: We’re Measuring the Wrong Things
Most agency evaluations – formal or informal – focus on the transactional: deliverables, speed, efficiency, cost. They’re useful metrics, but not the ones that determine whether a relationship survives leadership changes, economic shocks or shifting expectations.
Relationships decay long before deliverables do.
Across thousands of TRR data points, the earliest signs of trouble are almost always landed in perception gaps:
- The client believes the agency doesn’t understand their business enough, or care
enough about them. - The agency feels shut out of strategic conversations.
- Both parties believe they’re carrying more of the load than the other realises
These gaps are rarely visible in a performance dashboard, but they are brutally predictive of churn.
By year three, the compounding effect of unspoken misalignment becomes impossible to ignore. A new CMO arrives. Procurement opens the file. Suddenly the relationship is a candidate for replacement, not because the work is bad, but because the relationship’s immune system is weak.
Continuity Should Be a Capability
Ben highlights the dangerous overlap between CMO tenure and agency longevity. He’s right. But this isn’t a coincidence; it’s a structural vulnerability.
Agencies lose relationships not because a CMO changes, but because they haven’t built institutional resilience – a shared understanding and shared memory that survives personnel shifts.
Here’s what high-performing, long-lasting partnerships do differently:
- They invest in multi-threaded relationships. If a partnership depends on one champion, it’s already vulnerable. Strong, durable relationships look like networks. They deliberately build multiple connections across teams, functions and leadership levels so that advocacy, understanding and trust are distributed.
- They recalibrate constantly, not ceremonially. Annual, or even biannual, reviews are too slow for the pace at which expectations shift. High-performing partnerships don’t wait for formal check-ins to discover misalignment. They make alignment a continuous discipline, checking sentiment, clarifying expectations and addressing friction points in real time rather than after they’ve compounded.
- They surface tensions early, before they calcify. In every long-term relationship, tension is inevitable. What separates high-performing relationships from fragile ones is not the absence of friction, but the speed at which it’s acknowledged. Strong partners don’t pretend everything is fine until it’s not; they create
psychological safety for honest conversations about what’s irritating, unclear, or notworking. By naming issues early, they prevent small misunderstandings from becoming structural resentments.
Procurement Isn’t the Enemy.
Procurement often becomes the villain in these conversations. In truth, procurement rarely kills healthy relationships. It kills uncertain ones.
When a partnership is:
- Strategically aligned
- Emotionally safe
- Mutually invested
- Transparently performing
…procurement sees value, not cost.
When those elements are missing, procurement simply exposes the gap. The opportunity is to build relationships that don’t crumble under such scrutiny.
What the Industry Needs Next
If agencies genuinely want relationships that survive the dangerous third year, we need to evolve the way we manage, measure, and maintain them. This isn’t about adding more process; it’s about modernising the fundamentals of partnership.
This means:
- Approaching relationship management as an ongoing discipline. Just as we track brand health or campaign performance, we must track relationship health with equal rigor. This means measuring perceptions, alignment, trust, clarity, and sentiment, and doing it consistently. When both sides can see the relationship, they can strengthen it.
- Identifying alignment gaps early. Misalignment rarely arrives as a single dramatic moment; it accumulates. The industry needs the courage and capability to surface expectation drift early, before it becomes a reason to review, retender, or replace. Early visibility saves relationships.
- Normalising candid conversations about relationship friction, not just performance. The strongest relationships don’t fear discomfort. They create psychological safety to talk about frustrations, uncertainties, or changing pressures before they escalate. Normalising these conversations is one of the fastest ways to build resilience and longevity.
I see relationships turn around all the time. Not through heroics, but through visibility. When clients and agencies understand where they stand with each other, and what truly matters to the other side, everything changes.
The strongest relationships are intentional. And they don’t fail by year three because they aren’t built to.
