What do they do all day? St Luke’s Barnaby Kelly on the role of a business director

It’s my job to be both the first and last point of contact for my clients. I head up South Western Rail and lead a team of an account director and an account manager; at my level, you usually have a minimum of one person reporting to you or working with you.

Above me, there is our managing director. But they’re not involved in the day-to-day unless something has gone horribly wrong. I’ll have a bi-weekly check-in with the client. I’ll be in meetings, but I also have a one-to-one when we talk more about business objectives and the direction of the account rather than day-to-day stuff like whether banner ads are up to spec. It’s about discussing what the biggest business issue or opportunity is so that we can try to get ahead of briefs.

By having a partnership and having face-to-face or Zoom meetings, you end up becoming a bit more trusted by them. And they see you as more of a sounding board.

As an agency, you’re brought in for your expertise. You are brought in because you are meant to be the experts and, therefore, it’s good for the marketing team to have someone else to bounce something off, to be that external voice that also has knowledge from other areas of the industry.

I knew that I wanted to work in advertising. I was very fortunate; back when I was 17, I went to Leo Burnett for a kind of summer camp. They explained each of the departments and gave us a fake brief from McDonald’s that we worked on together.

You got to understand the strategy, creative and account management elements of the business and I realized I quite liked the latter. It’s a traditional way into an ad agency, allowing you to branch off into multiple areas; I know several account handlers who became creatives after two or three years.

There’s a combination of IPA, industry-accepted certificates and training that you should do, but really you also learn from all your peers and from the wider business – before I made this jump [from account director], I’d worked a lot with Neil [Henderson, St Luke’s CEO] because of the nature of a smaller agency.

The joy of our role is that we represent the client in the building. And then, when we’re with the client, we’re representing the agency. It is probably one of the few roles in which you get to work with every single department, from finance to IT to the strategy department, the creative department, the producers. You become a linchpin. I think I’ve probably worked with everyone in St Luke’s in some capacity.

You can be strategically minded, you can be creatively minded, you can be a blend of both, but for people who like being able to see something through from start to finish, all the way to the end, account management is the perfect role for that. You really get to see the whole process.

As told to Sam Bradley.