Five things I’ve banned in my new creative business

Starting an agency from scratch in 2026 is a gift.

Not only can you bin the old playbook, you can finally address all the low-level irritants and outdated habits that have plagued creative businesses for decades. Kat Thomas, founder, Knock Three Times, reports.

Our rethink goes beyond reinventing old-fashioned processes and ditching timesheets, although we’re all over that. You have permission to interrogate everything, including the business-as-usual stuff we've normalised into blindspots.

There goes the fear

Greg Hahn talks about "ambient fear driving everything" in agencies, and he's not wrong. I've thought endlessly about this. Fear of losing pitches. Fear of client reactions. Fear of rocking the boat. The most insidious manifestation? Showing clients what you think they want to see in a pitch, not what they actually need.

You steer them toward a route that validates their brief and present work that won't make anyone too uncomfortable. You win the business, everyone exhales, and then you spend eighteen months delivering incremental nothingness because the wrong stakes were too high.

We’ll be upfront with prospective clients from day one: hire us because you want a partner that has thought long and hard about your business, not our own pitch conversion rate. 

Fear-based agencies optimise for not losing, rather than winning.

I firmly believe that winning work is work that helps the client win, not work designed to inch an agency closer to a quarterly financial target. This shouldn’t be a radical idea, but it is.

While we’re at it, here are five more things, big and small, that I'll be eliminating…

Cameras off during creative presentations

I honestly have zero tolerance for this one. If you're not showing your face, you're not getting the good stuff. Presenting creative work requires reading the room, clocking the micro-expressions, catching the person who leans forward when something lands. Creatives pour weeks into ideas, and we deserve more than presenting to a grid of initials and black squares.

The shit sandwich (also known as 'the banker')

This is fear in action. The safe idea you chuck in because you're worried the brave stuff won't land or might scare. The filler that nobody on your team actually rates but gets wheeled out because “at least it gives them options.” Here's the problem: Sod's Law dictates they'll pick it. Every time. If you wouldn't be thrilled to make it, don't put it on the menu.

Asking for favourites

Clients love to end a presentation by asking which idea is our favourite. I get why they do it; we've sat with the work a lot longer than they have. But really the agency’s favourite should be irrelevant. Similarly, creatives need to bin the thinly disguised "any questions?" slide that actually means "please validate us immediately even though you've had twelve seconds to process what we just showed you."

Both behaviours are rooted in anxiety, not rigour. Let the work breathe.

Give people time to think. And lovely clients, a polite request: try and resist the urge to poll the room like a game show. That's defo one to take offline. It's like bearing witness to someone reviewing your kids and ranking them best to worst, before your very eyes.

WeTransfer links and download faff

Here's a Kat stat: less than 5% of clients actually download a WeTransfer link, whereas 95% will forward an email attachment internally with their endorsement behind it. I confess this is unscientific, but I have it on great authority that clients hate an unnecessary download link. They want the deck in their inbox, ready to share with their boss, their colleague, their CFO. Attachments win. Always.

The excruciating rendition of Happy Birthday

Finally; one especially close to my heart. For businesses supposedly built on creativity, nothing is quite as soul-destroying as thirty adults mumbling through Happy Birthday like a robotic choir with dying batteries. It’s like nails dragged down a blackboard. It's the antithesis of everything we claim to stand for. Awkward, endless, and it makes everyone involved wish for a trapdoor. Cake is absolutely welcome. The group singalong is not. Let people enjoy their vicky sponge in peace.

These five might seem trivial at first glance, but they're about respect, craft and creating an environment where good work and people actually have a proper chance to thrive. The road to hell is paved with good intentions of course… but at least mine come with a slab of cringe-free cake.