I've worked at them all

Anyone who has worked in marketing or communications for more than five minutes has probably stared across the fence and wondered what life is really like on the other side.

Agency or client. Consulting or corporate. I’ve spent time in all of them and, early in my career, found myself at a genuine crossroads, with an offer from each side sitting in front of me.

For the record, I chose the small agency where creativity was survival, moved on to a global agency where process ruled, a year in a start-up, then into a top-three consulting firm that turned ideas into systems, and finally into a multinational so vast it felt less like an organisation and more like a continent.

What each world really teaches you

In the small agency, you do everything. You pitch, plan, design, write and deliver, sometimes before lunch. Budgets are tight and the coffee is alarmingly strong. It is a crash course in momentum, in saying yes before you know how, and in discovering that craft and chaos often travel as a pair.

At the global agency, you move from improvisation to orchestration. The briefs are bigger, the processes heavier and you begin to understand what scale actually feels like. You learn to collaborate with strangers, to navigate politics and to fight for ideas that need to survive three layers of cautious approval before they see daylight.

Consulting forces you to think with both sides of your brain. Creative storytelling underpinned by intellectual rigour. You learn to frame ideas, to persuade through structure as much as sparkle. At its best, consulting is a kind of alchemy, turning vision into discipline and inspiration into a plan someone can actually execute.

And then there is the corporation. Corporations sit at the centre of the ecosystem, commissioning agencies and consultancies while trying to align enormous organisations behind a common direction.

From the outside it appears steady and monumental. From the inside, it often feels in constant motion, with shifting priorities and decisions that need to travel across large, complex structures before they reach the point of execution.

Its scale allows you to build things intended to last, but that same scale can introduce drag. Progress often depends as much on alignment and navigation as it does on talent.

Finding the sweet spot

From whichever vantage point you’re standing, the other side always seems to offer the thing you’re missing. Agencies admire the stability and influence of corporate life. Corporates envy the agility and freshness of agencies. Consultants, if they are honest, envy the simplicity of actually making something. Yet they are all just different expressions of the same creative instinct.

In the end, it isn’t the side you choose that matters, but what you carry with you from each. The urgency of the agency, the precision of the consultant, the patience of the corporate. Blend them well and you start to move differently. Fast but considered. Ambitious yet grounded.

The best communicators I know have worked in more than one world. They carry pieces of each with them, and that breadth shapes how they think, create and lead.