What does a managing director do?
A managing director runs the agency. Not the creative output (that is the creative director's job) and not any single account (that belongs to the client services team), but the whole machine: the revenue, the margins, the hiring, the culture, the new business pipeline and the relationships that keep the biggest clients in the building. In an independent agency the managing director is often the owner or one of the founders. In a network agency they report to a regional or global chief executive and are measured on the numbers of their office.
The title is more common in the United Kingdom and in agencies with British roots; American shops often use chief executive officer, president or general manager for the same role. Whatever the title, the managing director is the person a client calls when the relationship, not the work, is the problem.
Why it matters
Why a managing director matters
Agencies are fragile businesses. They sell time and ideas, both of which are hard to price and easy to give away, and they live on a handful of client relationships that can end with a single email. A managing director's job is to make the business durable: to keep enough clients, with enough margin, served by enough good people, that one bad quarter is not a crisis. Without that steady hand the creative work has no floor beneath it, and the best creative departments in the world have been dissolved by cash flow.
The role also sets the tone. The managing director decides which clients the agency takes and which it declines, how it treats its people and what it does when a project goes wrong. Those decisions, repeated over years, are the agency's culture, and the culture is what clients are really buying when they hire a shop for the long term.
In practice
How a managing director works in practice
- 01
The week is split between the inside and the outside. Inside: reviewing the pipeline and the forecast, meeting department heads, approving hires and significant spend, resolving the conflicts that rise above the people who should have solved them, and watching utilization and margin closely enough to act before the numbers in the annual accounts are a surprise. Outside: senior client relationships, new business, partnerships, the press and the industry events where the agency's reputation is made or spent.
- 02
A strong managing director is close enough to the work to know when it is good and when a client is being under-served, without taking over from the creative lead. They set the agency's positioning with the leadership team, decide the lanes it competes in, and make the long bets, such as opening a second office or building a product, that no single project would justify.
At RIOT
Managing directors at RIOT
RIOT was founded in 2012 in New York's East Village by a creative director, and our founder and executive creative director still runs the business as well as the work. That is unusual, and deliberate. It means the person deciding which clients we take is the person who will be in the edit for them, and it is part of why relationships like our decade and more with Coach have lasted: the people who made the first film are still answering the phone.
Watch out
What people get wrong about managing directors
Assuming the managing director is the most senior creative. In most agencies they are not, and a managing director who overrules the creative director on taste rather than on business is the fastest way to lose both the creative director and the clients who hired the agency for that taste. The second mistake is the opposite: a managing director so far from the work that they cannot tell a client the truth about it.
The third is treating the job as pure finance. Margin matters, but an agency run only for margin takes the wrong clients, squeezes the wrong people and produces work that quietly gets worse until the numbers follow.
