My father was a great entrepreneur. He came to South Africa at the age of 20 with £5 pounds in his pocket and went on to build one of Johannesburg’s most iconic retail food brands.

When he opened Fontana Highpoint in 1970, it was the first 24-hour convenience store in the southern hemisphere. In keeping with his flair for the dramatic, my father held an opening ceremony at which he threw away the keys, publicly declaring that the store would never close.

But retailing was only one chapter in my father’s business adventures. He was an international trader dealing in electronic appliances, meat, and crude oil. He invested in a commercial explosives factory in Greece and launched the first scratch-card lottery in South Africa.

Looking back, I now realise that my father’s career was defined by his creativity and his courage. But growing up I never quite grasped these things. I viewed business as dull and boring. After a childhood spent working in his stores – packing shelves, checking expiry dates, and serving Cornish Pasties – I was determined to forge a different path for myself. I did not want to be a businessman like my father. I did not want to compete with his shadow. Instead, I wanted to be a filmmaker.

After four years of studying film and television in New York, I returned to South Africa to make my first movie. Unfortunately, funding proved to be a problem. After two frustrating years, I decided to start a web development company instead. It was an act of desperation, a kind of escape from the disappointment of a failed dream.

The company I co-founded, VWV Interactive, rapidly grew to be South Africa’s leading web development company and within 18 months we had sold 49% to Primedia and Datatec. It was an unexpected success. And in some ways it was an unwelcomed one as well, because I felt that it had forced me to deviate from my path.

I decided to leave VWV and return to my goal of making a movie. But Primedia convinced me to join them instead, allowing me to establish an entertainment division. And so my journey as an “accidental tourist” into the world of business continued. Within 6 months we had acquired Ster-Kinekor for R1,5 billion and I was sitting on the board of the country’s largest film company – but I was still no closer to making a film myself.

Within a year, we launched a new, JSE-listed internet group called Metropolis and, at 28 years old, I was the youngest CEO of a Johannesburg-listed company. Most people in my position would have celebrated their success, but I felt like a failure because I had abandoned my dream.

When my two year contract at Metropolis expired, my wife and I packed-up our lives in Johannesburg and escaped down to Cape Town. I dusted off the eight-year old script and went out and made the movie.

Over the next ten years, as I continued with film, new business opportunities opened to me, and, despite myself, I found the idea of launching new businesses creatively enthralling.

I started a creative consultancy, a television commercial production company, and a branded entertainment agency. But they were all small companies, focused on enabling my ambitions as a film director. At some point  I realised that I was getting more creative fulfilment from building these small companies than I was from making the films and TV commercials that I was using them to produce. And that is when I decided to start a real business – one that would not be limited by my ambitions as a filmmaker but that would leverage my creativity as an entrepreneur instead.

After years of stumbling unwittingly into new business opportunities I finally realised three things:

1. Above all else, my father was an artist;
2. Above all else, I am an entrepreneur;
3. Above all else, entrepreneurs are artists who apply their creativity in business.

We were so similar, my father and I, and yet it took me forty years to reconcile his ambitions for me with my own ambitions for myself. Finally, I go to bed at night comfortable in the knowledge that he would be proud of what I have become… and I fall asleep immensely grateful for all the invaluable lessons that I have learned from him.

Great relationships are like Russian Matryoshka Dolls. They are a series of partnerships within partnerships – between client and agency, between agencies, and even between departments within the client’s business. These partnerships are all vital because they ultimately facilitate the most important partnership of all – the one between your customer and your brand.

Based on my 20 years of experience, here are 10 simple principles that can help you transform a rickety client/agency relationship into an unbreakable one:

 A value exchange

In a client/agency relationship, an equitable value exchange cannot simply be based on money. It is not enough for a client to write a cheque, or for an agency to be an order-taker. Great relationships require a deeper understanding of one another’s business. As a client, you need to know what your agency is trying to achieve and then you have to help them fulfill that vision, in the same way that they need to go beyond simply answering briefs in order to help you achieve your goals.

Partnerships

Great client/agency relationships are partnerships – stemming from a profound change in focus. In an ordinary client/agency relationship there is a risk that the parties service different masters, because while the agency is answerable to the client, the client is ultimately answerable to their customer. Being in partnership means that both agency and client work in service of the end-consumer. Firstly, it shifts attention away from the brand and towards the customer, where that attention should ultimately rest and, equally importantly, it makes both parties’ goals congruent.

Remuneration

The right remuneration structures can support goal congruency. In an ideal world agencies would not be paid for their time or effort. They would be paid for their ideas and how well they work. As the team from CP+B has said, “we need to be obsessed by the outcome we create, not the output we make.” A simple performance-based bonus can do a great deal to ensure goal congruency.

Determining what success looks like

The challenge, and the benefit, of establishing a performance-based bonus is that it forces both client and agency to agree on a set of clearly-stated objectives so everyone knows upfront what success will look like. But also translating these objectives into appropriate KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is vital. Many campaigns fail because the agency is chasing arbitrary KPIs that have no real connection with the campaign’s objectives. KPIs must serve as leading indicators signaling whether or not you are on track to achieve your goals.

A common vision

To forge a true partnership, your agency must understand and share your company’s vision. They must also have clear sight of your commercial goals. Armed with that information, your agency can truly begin to live your brand.

Integration across agencies

As the lines between digital, traditional, creative, and media all continue to blur your respective agencies are vying for the same territory, while being told to work together in a more open and collaborative manner. Marketers who want to avoid conflict between their agencies must ensure that those agencies are not pitted against one another. In my opinion, the future will belong to the agencies and marketers who can forge integration across multiple disciplines and businesses.

Motivation

Inspired and motivated agencies do better work than browbeaten ones. This may sound like an obvious thing to say, but many companies still hire bullies to manage their supplier relationships. Companies who are serious about forging great relationships with their agencies must weed out those who abuse their positions of power. They must encourage creativity, proactive thinking, and even failure.

Failure

As we shift from a world of broadcast media to one defined by interactive, participative, and real-time communications, the marketing industry must shift from a linear way of working to a more iterative one. In this new era of lean thinking it is more effective to build, measure, and learn than it is to produce in a linear fashion. In an iterative production cycle, failure is no longer an undesirable end-state, but a vital building block along the journey. As David Droga from Droga5 said, “as an industry we have to learn that when you put something out there, it really is just the beginning”. We can make mistakes but what’s important is how agile and responsive we are in fixing them.

Breaking down the silos

Marketing can no longer exist in isolation. The mobile, social, always-on nature of today’s consumer demands that what you say and what you do are closely related. This means greater integration between marketing, IT, sales, distribution, and all the other parts of your business. In the words of Lee Clow, the legendary adman, “brands have to understand that every touch point with their brand is an ad.” The challenge is that every one of these touch points is often represented by a separate silo in the company.

From formal to fluid