Embracing Marketing Mistakes
Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the world’s leading irreverent podcast for senior marketers who are tired of the polished corporate b*llshit.
Join Chris Norton and Will Ockenden, founders of the award-winning Prohibition PR, as they sit down with industry leaders to dissect the career-ending f*ck-ups they’d rather forget. The show moves past any pretty vanity metrics to uncover the brutal, honest truths behind marketing disasters, from £30,000 SEO black holes and completely failed companies, to social media crises that went globally viral for all the wrong reasons.
We don't just celebrate the f*ck-ups; we extract the tactical blueprints you need to avoid them yourself. If you are a business owner, or a CMO looking for a competitive advantage that only comes from real-world experience, this is your weekly masterclass in resilience and strategy.
- Listen for: Raw stories from top brands, ex-McKinsey strategists, and industry disruptors.
- Learn from: The errors that cost thousands and the recoveries that saved careers.
- Get ahead by: Turning other people's nasty disasters into your unfair market advantage.
If you have a story to tell and would like to appear on the show, tell us your biggest marketing mistake and drop us a line.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes
FAIL: When your business feels like your baby, you take the losses personally
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Chris Simmance, Founder of OMG Centre, opens up about the hard leadership lessons learned through emotional reactions to business setbacks and poor financial management in agency life.
• Letting emotional responses to client departures negatively impact team management
• Acknowledging how leadership mistakes create lasting negative impressions that can't be fixed with apologies
• Taking business losses personally while attributing wins to others
• Failing to properly understand financial numbers despite having management accounts
• Experiencing cash flow crises when client departures coincided with new hires
• Not properly provisioning for expenses like VAT bills
• Learning significant lessons that led to starting additional agencies
• Expanding into multiple businesses outside the digital industry through openness to learning
Is your strategy still right in 2026? Book a free 15-min no obligation discovery call with our host: 👉 [Book your call with Chris now] 👈
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Discussing Business Fuck-ups
Speaker 1You said that you've learned from your mistakes. This show is all about I can swear now fuck-ups. This show is all about fuck-ups. So come on then, give us your fuck-ups. What fuck-ups have you made that you've learned? And you pull into your mentorship and your agency advisory role.
Financial Struggles and Cash Flow Issues
Speaker 1So, from a leadership and management perspective, I let the emotional aspect of the business impact the way I worked with the team. So, client left, I took an emotional personal feeling behind that rather than how can we make this not happen again, which then made me a pretty bad manager, slash leader, and I think that you know, as a big mistake was probably anyone listening to this that worked with me when I ran. One of the agencies will probably be nodding right now and going, yeah, that guy's a dick and they'll never not think that I'm a dick because at some point they won't listen. If they think you're a dick, will they? Well, I probably just. Yeah, maybe they'll just be burning those effigies somewhere still. But you know, sometimes you realise that it's your business, it's your baby, all the wins are someone else's. But you know, sometimes you realize that it's your business, it's your baby, all the wins are someone else's, all the losses are yours and sometimes you get a punch in the face and, metaphorically, a client leaves or something happens, something goes wrong, and you shouldn't, but you do take it out on someone else. And that I learned the hard way because I realized introspectively later I shouldn't have done that and you can't apologize for that later. It doesn't work just by saying sorry and the.
Speaker 1The other stuff was genuinely I did not have a proper handle on the numbers. I thought I did, I had management accounts, had all that sort of stuff, but cash flow was what was coming in and I thought we were doing great. And then, when one or two clients left in in the same period of time, just as you've hired one or two members of staff in the same period of time you suddenly realize, ah, crap, where's the vat bill coming from? Um, and you haven't really provisioned for it properly. That that's I mean the.
Learning and Business Expansion
Speaker 1There are a lot of agencies that are probably thinking right now, as they're listening to this, that yeah, I'm doing that right now. Crap, okay, and that's what happens a lot, because they just you, I, I, I. I thought I got it, I thought I had a handle on it. I didn't. And when I did eventually get a handle on it. I kind of realized that I've learned, like I've learned, something significant here and this isn't worth kind of just sitting in in one, hence starting the second agency. Yeah, I own a few other businesses outside of the digital industry and all of that's come from learning these things that I've just kind of, I say, happened upon but been open to learning as I go.
