Emina Demiri talks surviving firing your biggest client

On episode 352 of PPC Live The Podcast, I spoke to Emina Demiri Watson, Head of Digital at Brighton-based Vixen Digital, where she to shared one of the most candid stories in agency life: deliberately firing a client that accounted for roughly 70% of their revenue — and what they learned the hard way in the process.

The decision to let go

The client relationship had been deteriorating for around three months before the leadership team made their move. The decision wasn’t about the client being difficult from day one — it was a relationship that had slowly soured over time. By the end, the toxic dynamic was affecting the entire team, and leadership decided culture had to come first.

The mistake they didn’t see coming

Here’s where it got painful. When Vixen sat down to run the numbers, they realized they had a serious customer concentration problem — one client holding a disproportionately large share of total revenue. It’s the kind of thing that gets lost when you’re busy and don’t have sophisticated financial systems. A quick Excel formula later, and the reality hit harder than expected.

Warning signs agencies should watch for

Emina outlined the signals that a client relationship is shifting — beyond the obvious drop in campaign performance. External factors inside the client’s business matter too: company restructuring, team changes, even a security breach that prevents leads from converting downstream. The lesson? Don’t just watch your Google Ads dashboard — understand what’s happening on the client’s side of the fence.

How they clawed back

Recovery came down to three things: tracking client concentration properly going forward, returning to their company values as a decision-making compass, and accepting that rebuilding revenue simply takes time. Losing the client freed up the mental bandwidth to pitch new business and re-engage with the industry community — things that had quietly fallen by the wayside.

Common account mistakes still haunting audits in 2026

When asked about errors she sees in audited accounts, Emina didn’t hold back. Broad match without proper audience guardrails remains a persistent problem, as does the absence of negative keyword lists entirely. Over-narrow targeting is another — particularly for clients chasing high-net-worth audiences, where the data pool becomes too thin for Smart Bidding to function.

The right way to think about AI

Emina’s take on AI is pragmatic: the biggest mistake is believing the hype. PPC practitioners are actually better positioned than most to navigate AI skeptically, given they’ve been working with automation and black-box systems for years. Her preferred approach — and the one she quietly enforces with junior team members via a robot emoji — is to treat Claude and other LLMs as a first stop for research, not a replacement for critical thinking.

The takeaway

If you’re sitting on a deteriorating client relationship and nervous about pulling the trigger, Emina’s advice is simple: go back to your values. If commercial survival sits at the top of the list, keep the client. If culture and team wellbeing matter more, it might be time.

View the full article