Director of Client Services in Manchester

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Department: Client Services

Reports to: Chief Operating Officer

Responsible for: Business Directors / Senior Business Director / Group Account Directors

Hours: Full time, Permanent role

Location: Manchester, Northern Quarter. Hybrid working policy: minimum 3 days in Manchester HQ per week.

The Role

We’re looking for a Director of Client Services to lead the direction, performance, and culture of the Client Services Hub while operating as a growth-minded, commercially focused senior leader. This role is central to strengthening our client leadership capability, embedding governance and operational excellence, and driving profitable growth across our global client portfolio. You will set the strategic bar for world-class service, elevate financial and operational discipline, build senior client relationships, and shape the agency’s long-term commercial success. You will partner closely with the COO, CEO, Managing Partner – Finance, and Heads of Department to ensure delivery excellence, margin optimisation, and scalable growth. As a senior member of the leadership team, you will own the commercial performance of the team, lead senior client relationships, elevate ways of working, and ensure the agency consistently delivers exceptional, insight-led, culturally relevant work. This is a role for an ambitious, commercially minded agency leader who can shape the future of our client relationships and delivery, elevate the Client Services discipline, and drive growth for some of the world’s most culturally relevant brands. If you are passionate about the intersection of sport, gaming, entertainment, and culture—and ready to lead from the front—we’d love to hear from you.

Departmental Leadership & Operational Excellence

• Lead and evolve the Client Services function, setting the vision, standards, and frameworks for how we deliver consistent excellence across Business Directors, Account Directors, and Account Managers.
• Implement and enforce operational processes, ensuring disciplined adoption across teams to strengthen continuity, financial accuracy, and delivery quality.
• Identify and embed continuous improvement opportunities that streamline delivery, strengthen cross-functional collaboration, and drive a unified client experience.
• Work with the COO to ensure optimal resource planning, utilisation and commercial performance across the Client Services team.
• Embed KPI-led performance management for delivery, profitability, and client satisfaction.
• Align Client Services with agency-wide objectives, ensuring the department contributes strategically and commercially to overall business goals.

Senior Client Leadership & Partnership Building

• Act as the senior-most point of escalation and counsel for key global clients, building deep, trusted partnerships at Board level.
• Translate complex client challenges into pro-active growth strategies informed by Fan Intelligence®.
• Steer how the agency shows up for clients—ensuring output is strategically sharp, creatively brave, and culturally relevant.
• Lead the development and delivery of annual and quarterly business reviews, ensuring clients have clear visibility of performance, ROI, and future opportunities.
• Drive client satisfaction, manage stakeholders with confidence, anticipate challenges, unlock opportunities, and maintain high levels of client retention and advocacy.
• Have strong experience across campaign delivery; while you won’t be hands on with this you should have a strong understanding of what it takes to deliver fully integrated marketing campaigns for major global brands.

Commercial Ownership & Growth

• Own the commercial performance of the Client Services department, ensuring revenue growth, GP margin delivery, and healthy account portfolios.
• Set and manage financial targets, partnering with the COO and Managing Partner – Finance to forecast, optimise margin, and steer commercial decision making.
• Lead high-value negotiations with clients to ensure the agency is appropriately valued for its expertise and strategic offering.
• Identify white-space opportunities across accounts to deepen relationships and develop multi-year growth plans for priority accounts.
• Oversee business growth plans and ensure each team has clear growth strategies and measurable commercial objectives.

Strategic & Creative Leadership

• Champion a culture of insight-led creativity, ensuring Fan Intelligence® informs every brief, recommendation, and piece of work.
• Partner with Strategy, Creative, and Campaign Delivery leadership to deliver integrated campaigns that influence culture and deliver measurable results.
• Maintain and share a deep understanding of the evolving sports, gaming, and entertainment landscape, ensuring the agency stays ahead of cultural and fan trends.
• Provide senior-level quality control ensuring clarity, consistency, and excellence across strategic and creative outputs before they go to clients.

Team Leadership, Coaching & Capability Development

• Lead, inspire, and grow the Client Services team with clear expectations, accountability, and progression pathways, fostering a high-performance, collaborative culture.
• Mentor senior leaders (BD’s, GAD's, and AD’s), raising the standard of client leadership by elevating leadership behaviours, strategic thinking, and commercial acuity, and supporting them in their career development.
• Work with HR to identify capability gaps and build structured training that strengthens commercial, operational, and client leadership skills, building a professional development pathway for Client Services teams.
• Role-model inclusive, transparent, and entrepreneurial leadership, championing diversity in people, thinking, and creative output.
• Create a culture of accountability, financial responsibility, and ownership across the Client Services function.

Key Requirements

• 12+ years’ experience in client leadership, account management, or commercial leadership within a creative, advertising, or marketing agency ideally within high growth environments.
• Proven experience leading large client portfolios and managing senior relationships including C Suite and Board level.
• Demonstrable success in leading and growing multi-million-pound accounts and improving commercial performance.
• Strong financial acumen: forecasting, P&L management, margin optimisation, and commercial negotiation.
• Deep understanding of the sport, gaming, and entertainment landscape and how culture drives fan behaviour.
• Excellent financial acumen, including forecasting, margin management, and commercial negotiations.
• Strong leadership presence with a track record of developing high-performing teams and establishing best-in-class processes.

The Agency

Ear to the Ground is a global sport, gaming, and entertainment creative agency with a unique model that sets us apart. We are driven by Fan Intelligence®, our global network of 12,000 influential tastemakers and fans. Our real-time insight into what fans truly want enables us to create compelling work that consistently pushes the boundaries of culture. We pride ourselves on being the agency that listens better than anyone to solve our clients' challenges, maximise their sport, gaming and entertainment partnerships, and ultimately build brands that lead culture. We’ve helped clients including Nike, PlayStation, JD, NBA, Coca-Cola and 2K turn fans into consumers by delivering culturally relevant, fan-first campaigns that inspire emotional connection and measurable business impact. As a fast-growing, entrepreneurial organisation, we operate with high accountability, tight financial discipline, and a relentless focus on delivering value for clients while scaling sustainably.

OUR CULTURE

We are dedicated to making Ear to the Ground an amazing place to work where people grow, develop and thrive. We pride ourselves on our dynamic and exciting culture, excellent support of staff and fantastic benefits package. We have made it our mission to lead the way in being an inspiring, future-thinking, creative agency and are invested in our people because they are the ones that will make that happen.

Some of our benefits include:

• Flexible & hybrid working (minimum 3 days in office)
• Birthday off
• Workplace nursery benefit
• Enhanced maternity, paternity and shared parental leave
• Private medical insurance and health cash plan
• Enhanced sick leave
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Personal development coaching + more