Category: Business

Why late payments hurt agency growth, and what we do about it

Pay me

Celebrating success matters for small teams. We’ve had plenty to celebrate at Distinctive recently, as we take on new clients, win recognition and build a team spanning from Cornwall to Gloucestershire.

We’re part of a wider success story of a growing independent agency sector employing more than 230,000 people and contributing billions to the UK economy. It’s a diverse, resilient, vibrant industry that doesn’t ask for handouts, and innovates in the face of huge challenges. 

There’s plenty to be confident about in 2026. But it’s not plain sailing. And I want to write here about the worst part of agency life that impacts almost every business I know, including ours.

Step forward, late payments. A silent drain on time, energy and momentum. It’s a tricky topic to cover, and I’ve reflected on posting about this for months.

But spending Saturday morning at month end drafting emails to chase for payment pushed me to write something on LinkedIn. This post expands on those thoughts.  

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The collaboration challenge: how places can keep moving through chaos

Chaos images - front cover of Spectator and Economist magazine.

A fast start to the year makes it important to find time to make sense of events and what they mean for us.

Headlines scream chaos at us. Donald Trump’s statements this week alone – on Greenland, threats of increased tariffs, slurs against NATO troops and peace boards with Putin – are enough to make the head spin. And maybe that’s the point.

We can’t know what this means for the global economy, security and the values that many world leaders seemed to share until recently.

Canadian PM Mark Carney’s incredible speech at Davos highlights a ‘rupture’ in these values. His call to other ‘middle countries’ to become beacons in ‘a world that’s at sea’ resonates. Canada’s response to Trump’s aggression – on taxes, investment, defence spending, and closer partnerships with Europe – seem hugely impressive set against the trivia served up here.

Could it be a defining moment? If you have 15 minutes, I’d recommend watching it.

The rupture Carney speaks of has been a long time in coming. Now it’s here, addressing it feels like the biggest collaboration challenge of my lifetime.

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Your call is not important to us: how ‘efficiency’ kills good service

Unsatisfied customer holding frown icon on wooden circle. Conceptual representation of customer satisfaction evaluation, depicting bad service, negative review, and low score.

“We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.”

Cory Doctorow on the decline of tech services in the FT earlier this year

I return to comments like this while processing a constant frustration nagging at me since setting up Distinctive in 2022.

Not the biggest challenge, for sure. Working through disruption caused by the mini budget was more severe. Moving office at short notice just before last Christmas more stressful.

But it’s ever-present, and hiding in plain sight. A barrier to progress, sapping energy, and draining my sense of humour. All made worse by the feeling that it shouldn’t happen at all. But it does anyway.

A post from O2, extolling the virtues of it customer service.

I’m referring to days of precious time wasted trying and failing to contact big organisations – banks, public bodies, utility companies and tech providers.

All say they are there to help. Some sell their services on a promise of simplifying customers’ lives, while making any contact with them complicated, arduous and slow.

They lie. These empty pledges mask a painful reality of badly designed tech that blocks meaningful human contact. This is laid bare in the recent UK Customer Satisfaction Index by the Institute of Customer Service, which found satisfaction levels at their lowest level since 2010.

It’s what writer Cory Doctorow’s ‘great enshittening’ describes; a process of decline in services we rely on, as companies chase efficiency and leave customers wrestling with clunkiness at their own cost.

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DP World storm highlights big questions about our economy

Investment summit backdrop with PM at conference on October 14 2024

In the end, it was little more than a storm in a tea cup.

Weekend headlines led with suggestions that £1bn in investment from Dubai-based DP World was at risk because of a minister’s comments about its operating company P&O.

The comments from Transport Secretary Louise Haigh likened P&O to a ‘rogue operator’. She added for good measure that consumers should boycott the company for laying off hundreds of employees and replacing them with agency workers in 2022.

For all the furore, the government’s set piece investment summit went off today with DP World’s investment in the London Gateway container port intact.

The funding is one of a raft of commitments outlined in a £63bn package today, which promises to create 38,000 jobs across the country.

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Distinctive difference: PR that builds positive value

PR people often say that others don’t really understand what they do. This can make it difficult to explain the value of PR, even if this is clear to us.

It seems that many think of comms people as publicity agents. Media commentators regularly describe PR as a media-serving function. Our industry isn’t great at explaining its purpose, who it serves and how it does it.

This struck me in recent online exchanges following comments I shared from 2022 about Bristol’s political tensions.

Leave aside the irony of such questions coming from anonymous accounts. The comments made me consider whether I could do more to explain who my team supports and why it matters. So, here goes.

It’s useful to get it off my chest. I hope it’s helpful to others who don’t understand the role PR can play on many distinct levels.

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Post Office scandal highlights human cost of deceit

Post Office signage

This post first appeared in The DIstinctive Dispatch newsletter on 12 January.

As I write, Post Office investigator Stephen Bradshaw’s evidence to the public inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal is leading the news.  

Mr Bradshaw investigated and helped convict some sub-postmasters wrongly accused of false accounting and fraud.

Terse, evasive, and lacking contrition, his testimony encapsulated the failings consistently writ large across this scandal.

It came a day after the government took the extraordinary step of confirming its intention to pass legislation to exonerate hundreds of sub-postmasters whose lives were trashed by a once-treasured institution. This is because the outcry following ITV’s four-part dramatisation of the scandal in Mr Bates vs The Post Office bounced the government into responding.

The inquiry will take until next year to get to the bottom of the issues that created this disaster. But it’s already clear that ethical, leadership and governance failings played a part alongside dodgy tech. And it’s troubling to hear about PR executives’ role in working with lawyers to create a ‘narrative’ and lines to rebut concerns, as evidence about problems with the IT system piled high.

Even today, with the scandal leading the news for more than a week, the Post Office has offered little more to address the public concerns than a limp statement saying it’s ‘very sorry’. BBC radio journalists sounded almost apologetic reading it out. Postmasters in the studio sounded incredulous hearing it.

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