The hamster wheel: How we reset chaotic engagements

A chaotic client engagement almost never looks chaotic from the inside. It looks busy and collaborative. It looks like everyone is putting in the effort to get the work right. The chaos only becomes visible when you step back and look at the throughput and realise the team has been working at twice the pace to produce half the output.

I've been in retention and email marketing for over a decade, and I've seen this pattern enough times now to call it a pattern. I won’t blame anybody saying it’s being caused by bad clients or bad agencies. It's caused by the absence of an operating model that both sides are holding themselves to. When that model is missing, good intentions on both sides quietly become dysfunctional.

This is how we recognise it, reset it, and stop it from happening again.

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How do we know we're in it?

If we find ourselves nodding at more than two of these, we know we’re running a hamster wheel.

1. The same email gets edited five times in a week

Every revision comes from a different person, and none of them are coordinating. The deliverable doesn’t seem to progress at all.

2. Real-time feedback, real-time production

We notice comments on Figma even as the design is being built. We are working on the design live, the client is reviewing it live, and no one is in charge of the final word.

3. No "approved" version

Three versions exist. Two of them are nearly identical. Nobody is sure which one is actually going out.

4. The team is burning out without an obvious reason

No single project is unreasonable. Yet, every project eats hours. Nobody acknowledges it until someone breaks on the internal team meeting.

5. We're never even on schedule

Every month is a firefight. Every month, we see several last-minute changes. They become the operating model.

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Read: How Magnet Monster Achieved a 41% Increase in Profit Margin in 2024

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Why it happens

The honest answer is this: agencies like ours are eager to help. We say yes to the late request. We absorb the extra round of revisions. We take the call after hours. I think none of that is bad on its own. Being responsive is one of the reasons clients hire us in the first place.

But responsiveness without process quietly turns into accommodation. Accommodation becomes a habit, which over time, becomes the engagement itself. What started as "we'll handle this one" turns into the way the relationship runs. Nobody decided to operate this way. It just drifted there, one helpful gesture at a time.

The harder truth — and this is the part most clients don't realise — is that the client themselves often doesn't see it. When you're inside the chaos, it feels normal. People are in their morning stand-ups and nobody is thinking, "we've got eleven people commenting on a single email and no decision-maker." 

Instead, they're thinking, "we're collaborative, we're fast, we want to get it right."

That's the point our CEO Adam Kitchen raises whenever we have this conversation internally. If the client doesn't recognise the dysfunction, the conversation about changing it will be incredibly hard. You're not asking them to fix something they know is broken. You're asking them to look at something they've never thought of as a problem.

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The six pillars of resetting a chaotic engagement

When we step in to fix one of these, we don't redesign the email programme first. We redesign the operating model. Six pillars, in this order.

Pillar 1: One source of truth 

A single master spreadsheet. Briefs, segments, send times, approval status — all in one place. The moment that information is also living in Slack DMs, Figma comments, private emails, and a project-management tool, we know we’re losing it.

All we need is one source of truth. Every fragmented engagement we've ever inherited had information scattered across at least three systems, and at least one of them was wrong.

Pillar 2: Strategy locked 70-80% in advance

By the third week of every month, the next month's calendar is agreed. By week four, it's in production. The remaining 20-30% is our buffer for the genuine last-minute moves. For example, the sales target that needs propping up, the product line that isn’t doing well, the surprise opportunity. 

This is what makes urgent ad-hoc work possible. When 80% of your sends are calm and banked, a 24-hour emergency turnaround is easy. But when 0% is calm, every email is an emergency.

Pillar 3: Batched delivery, not piecemeal

We don't send a client one concept at a time. Instead, we send a week's worth at a time. Piecemeal forces real-time review short turnarounds which in turn forces real-time chaos. We also need to remember we have other clients waiting for us to attend to their concepts.

Batching gives the client space to actually look at the work as a whole, collaborate internally, and come back with structured feedback. It's slightly slower at the deliverable level but dramatically faster at the engagement level.

Pillar 4: One decision-maker per round

Internal client conversations belong on the client's side. Our team should never be parsing eleven contradictory comments from eleven different people. The client nominates one person to consolidate all internal feedback into a single revision brief.

Without that, we are left guessing whose comment carries weight. Besides, a lot of commentary is opinion, not direction. “We believe this. We think this. Could we try this?” Those are conversations the client needs to finish on their side before our team looks into them.

Pillar 5: The sandbox file

On Figma, for every batch of email concepts, we create a working branch of the master file. The client team comments, marks up, debates, and collaborates freely on the branch and we don't touch it.

When the decision-maker says "Final," we action everything in one sweep and merge it back to the master. This way, the client is able to collaborate freely whilst we keep a clean production line. Both sides win something they care about.

Pillar 6: Dead-stop dates on the agency's side too

This is the one that earns us the right to ask for discipline in return. We publish hard deadlines from our side as well: 

• When briefs need approval by?
• When feedback needs to be in by?
• When will the final sign-off close?

Reciprocity is what makes the system credible. We cannot ask a client to stick to a system we're not living by ourselves.

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Read: Master the Art of Cash Flow: My 13-Week Secret That Saved Our Agency Multiple Times!

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The hard conversation

Here’re a few practical things we've learned after having hard conversations with clients:

Don't blame the client. Instead, analyse the structure.

"This is how we work with every client" is a much better proposition than "this is what you're doing wrong." It also happens to be true.

Acknowledge our own contribution to the drift

We've been eager to please. That eagerness, well-intentioned as it was, created the conditions we're now trying to fix. Saying that out loud earns us the right to ask the client to change too.

Be honest about the commercial reality

Engagements that need a full reset often need a price adjustment alongside it. This is a structural reflection of the team and process required to service them properly.

We've found clients respect honesty about cost far more than they respect bills that quietly grow over time.

Accept any outcome

Some clients will agree, reset, and the engagement becomes a long-term partnership. Some will push back, negotiate, and you'll meet in the middle. Some will walk. 

For us, all three are acceptable. Walking away from a client you cannot serve sustainably is, in my view, better service than staying.

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The mindset shift

The instinct to say yes is a good one. It's why clients hire us. But the discipline and willingness to say "yes, and here's how we'll do it" will separate us from peers and compound over the years.

Process isn't a constraint on creativity. It's what makes creativity possible at scale. Without it, you don't get more creative work — you get more chaotic work.

Bottom line: The unmanaged process is the villain, not a chaotic client.

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