An agency I'd worked with for six years went quiet last spring. Not a fight, not a complaint. Just nothing. Then a job landed from a new address at the same company, and the brief opened with "We found your profile in our vendor database and wondered if you handle Turkmen."
Found my profile. Wondered if I handle Turkmen. After six years and a few hundred thousand words.
What happened was simple. Lena, the PM who used to send me everything, left. Nobody told me. The new person inherited a database of names and rates, not a memory of who's good under pressure and who goes silent when a file gets ugly. To her I was a row in a spreadsheet with a language pair and a per-word figure. All the trust Lena and I had built lived in Lena's head, and Lena took it to another job in Berlin.
Your account is a person, not a logo
This is the thing nobody tells you when you sign your first vendor agreement. You think you're working with the company. You're not. You're working with one PM, maybe two, and everything good about the relationship — the fact that they know you'll flag a mistranslation in the source instead of copying it through, the fact that they know your real turnaround versus your polite turnaround — that all sits in one human being's memory.
The company's memory is the database. And the database is thin. It knows my rate, my ISO-ish credentials, my email, maybe a tag that says "oil & gas." It does not know that I caught a comma in a shutdown procedure that would have cost somebody a rig. It does not know I once turned a 4,000-word legal file around overnight because the PM begged. Those stories don't survive in a vendor management system. They survive in people, and people change jobs every two or three years in this industry. Faster now, with all the mergers.
So when the PM walks, you don't lose a contact. You lose your entire track record at that account. You go back to being a candidate.
What actually carries over, and what doesn't
Here's what I've learned watching this happen maybe a dozen times over fifteen years.
The database carries your rate — usually the lowest rate you ever agreed to, frozen in there like a fossil. It carries your NDA, so at least you don't re-sign that. It carries your language pair and, if you're lucky, one or two specialization tags. That's the whole inheritance.
What doesn't carry: reliability, judgment, the shorthand you built. The new PM has no idea you two had a running joke about a client who kept changing the source file mid-project. She doesn't know you're the one who reads at editing speed and catches the things the QA tool sleeps through. She's starting from your CV, and a CV is a weak substitute for six years of clean deliveries.
And sometimes it's worse than a cold start. Sometimes there's a merger, and the acquiring company runs its own vendor onboarding, and suddenly you're filling out the same forty-field form again — bank details, tax residency, that dropdown that still doesn't list Turkmen as a working language so you pick "Other" and type it in the free-text box. Fifteen years in and I'm still typing my own language into a text box because their system was built by people who've never needed it.
Insure yourself against the empty chair
So what do you do about it? You stop treating any single PM as a permanent line to the company.
When a PM sends me a job, I keep a short record of my own — date, volume, file type, what the project was about, anything I flagged. Not for them. For me. When the new person emails asking if I handle Turkmen, I don't just say yes. I reply with a two-line history: "I've done roughly 200k words for your team since 2019, mostly upstream oil and gas and some marketing localization, working with Lena and before her with Marco. Happy to pick up where we left off." That does two things. It tells the new PM I'm not a random from the database, and it quietly reminds the company that its own history with me is real even if their system forgot it.
Second thing: when a good PM tells me they're moving, I ask where. Not to be a stalker. Because they're taking their memory of me with them, and that memory is worth more at the new place than my cold profile is worth at the old one. Half my best current clients are PMs who moved and brought me along. Lena, by the way, emailed from Berlin four months later. Different agency. Same trust, transplanted.
Third: don't let the frozen rate become your ceiling. When a new PM "finds" you, that's the moment to note the number in their system is three years old. New relationship, new conversation. They have no baseline to anchor against, which cuts both ways.
The agency isn't loyal to you. It can't be — it's a company, and companies don't remember. The people inside it can, right up until the day they clean out their desk. Build for that, and the empty chair stops being a surprise.