Five years ago, Ruby Keable joined Sowden & Sowden as a Digital Marketing Executive with no agency experience and no idea she’d end up in client services. Four roles later, she’s been promoted to Senior Client Manager and selected for Future Humber’s inaugural Humber Leaders Programme.
She shares what she’s learned about finding your voice, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable and why good client service sometimes means saying: “Actually, I don’t think that’s what you need.”
Five years ago, I took my chance. I’d known about Sowdens since I was about 17, when I volunteered with the media team at Freedom Festival, one of the agency’s clients, and crossed paths with some of the Sowdens team.
It stuck in my head.
My mum’s an artist, so creativity had always been around me, and Sowdens felt like one of those places where people got to make and deliver genuinely interesting stuff for a living. It had, and still has, a special energy about it.
My route there wasn’t particularly neat.
I went to MediaCity in Manchester to study Multimedia Journalism, realised university wasn’t for me, came home and did a digital marketing apprenticeship with a local telecoms company instead.
Then Covid gave me one of those slightly uncomfortable opportunities to ask myself: what do I actually want to do? A job came up at Sowdens. I applied.
I joined as a Digital Marketing Executive with no agency experience and absolutely no idea that five years later, I’d be writing about becoming Senior Client Manager.
Careers always look much neater when you tell the story backwards. Mine certainly wasn’t.
But these are probably the five biggest things I’ve learned.
1. You don’t need to know what you want to be when you grow up
I certainly didn’t. When I joined, my plan was basically: learn everything, get better at digital marketing and take whatever opportunities came my way.
Client Services wasn’t part of some carefully mapped-out career plan.
Then I covered a colleague on one of our retained accounts, and something clicked. I started dealing directly with the client, helping manage the retainer and getting much closer to the relationship behind the work.
I liked understanding what was happening in their organisation. I liked joining the dots between what they were asking us for and what they needed.
That experience led to my first promotion into Digital Account Manager and ultimately changed the direction of my career. I’ve since progressed to Client Manager and now Senior Client Manager.
If there’s one thing I’d tell someone at the beginning of their career, it’s not to become too attached to the plan.
Sometimes the thing you’re best at is something you haven’t tried yet.
2. Feeling out of your depth doesn’t necessarily mean you are
I’ve had imposter syndrome at pretty much every stage. Every promotion has brought a slightly upgraded version of the same internal monologue:
This is brilliant.
Closely followed by:
Oh God. Can I actually do this?
My first move into client management was probably the biggest example. Paul and Polly Sowden, the father-and-daughter co-owners behind the agency, backed me to take that step before I was entirely convinced I was ready for it myself.
That’s something I’ve come to appreciate about good leadership. The best bosses don’t just recognise what you’re good at now; they spot what you might be good at next. Sometimes they have more confidence in you than you have in yourself.
And maybe that’s part of the answer to imposter syndrome.
I used to think confidence had to come first: I’ll do the scary thing when I feel ready to do the scary thing.
Five years on, I think I’ve got that completely backwards. The confidence has usually come after I’ve done it.
After the first challenging client meeting. After the presentation that pushed me out of my comfort zone. After making a recommendation without looking around the room for reassurance. After taking on a bigger account and realising, a few months later, that I was handling it.
I recently read neuroscientist Tara Swart’s take on imposter syndrome, which really resonated with me: rather than waiting for self-doubt to disappear, notice it for what it is and act anyway. Over time, you give yourself new evidence about what you’re capable of.
That’s probably what’s happened to me without consciously realising it.
Later, changes within the team meant taking responsibility for some of the agency’s Tier one and longest-standing clients.
Again: exciting. Also: daunting. But I’ve learned that discomfort and inability aren’t the same thing.
Presenting is a good example. Five-years-ago Ruby would have been horrified by the prospect of standing in front of a room pitching new business or challenging a senior stakeholder.
Now I do both.
The nerves haven’t magically disappeared. I’ve just stopped treating them as evidence that I shouldn’t be in the room. And that might be the most useful thing imposter syndrome has taught me: you don’t have to believe every thought you have about yourself.
3. Taking a brief and doing exactly what it says isn’t always good client service
This might be the biggest professional lesson I’ve learned. Early in my career, I thought being good at agency life meant a client asked for something and you delivered it brilliantly.
And, obviously, delivery matters.
But now I think some of the most valuable conversations start with:
Why? Or occasionally: Are we sure that’s actually what you need?
Different clients and projects have taught me different versions of this.
I’ve learned how important it is to become part of a client’s extended team rather than simply delivering a list of outputs. I’ve learned how creativity has to work alongside commercial targets and business objectives. And I’ve learned that to advise any organisation properly, you need to understand its products, people and priorities – you can’t bluff your way through it with a nice PowerPoint.
That’s probably the biggest difference between how I work now and how I worked two or three years ago.
I’m less interested in what are we being asked to make? I’m more interested in what are we actually trying to achieve?
4. Clients don’t need “work Ruby”. They need Ruby.
This has taken me longer to learn than it probably should have. I used to think there was professional me and normal me.
Professional Ruby was presumably meant to know all the answers, say suitably intelligent things in meetings and generally behave like somebody who had never sent a stupid WhatsApp in her life.
Over time, I’ve realised it’s all just me. And the strongest client relationships I’ve built have come from being myself.
That doesn’t mean treating every client identically. Client services is partly the art of understanding people: who wants the detail, who wants the headline, who needs challenging, who needs reassurance and who absolutely does not want another Teams meeting.
But authenticity matters, and so does honesty.
The difference between managing an account and becoming a genuinely valuable partner is trust. And you don’t build that by agreeing with everything.
Sometimes you have to have an awkward conversation. Sometimes you have to say something isn’t working. More often than not, you’ll need to challenge the brief.
The important thing is that the person opposite knows you’re doing it because you’re on the same side.
The best client relationships I’ve had eventually stop feeling much like “agency and client”. They feel like a team trying to solve the same problem.
5. Being good at your job doesn’t automatically make you a good leader
This is the lesson I’m probably still learning.
My promotion to Senior Client Manager has coincided with being selected as one of 15 people for Future Humber’s inaugural Humber Leaders Programme, which came at a pretty perfect time. The programme focused on leading through change – things like self-awareness, psychological safety, accountability, collaboration and influence.
What I particularly liked was learning alongside people outside marketing. Agency life can become its own little bubble. We all know the terminology. We can become used to our own ways of doing things and convince ourselves our way of working is the way of working.
Then you sit next to somebody from a completely different sector and realise they’ve got an entirely different way of approaching the same human problem.
It made me think a lot about what leadership is.
Being good at managing a client doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be good at developing another person and being experienced doesn’t mean you have all the answers.
And being the most senior person in a room doesn’t mean you need to be the loudest.
The leaders I’ve responded to best have been approachable, willing to get stuck in and able to do two things at once: back you and challenge you.
That’s the kind of leader I’d like to become. I’m still working out what that looks like. And I think that’s probably healthy.