I got a job last week from an agency I've worked with for nine years. The email opened with "Hi, I see you're already in our system as a Turkmen translator — could you confirm your rates and availability?" Nine years. Two hundred-odd projects. And I'm a row in a database to whoever sent that.
The PM I actually knew there left in the spring. Nobody told me. I only figured it out when the tone of the emails changed — shorter, more forms, no memory of the fact that I don't do medical device work and that their old TM for the mobile client is half-poisoned. All of that lived in one person's head, and that head walked out the door.
The agency is a fiction; the PM is real
We talk about "working with agencies" like they're monoliths. They're not. Your relationship isn't with the logo or the vendor portal. It's with the two or three project managers who route work to you, remember what you're good at, and fight your corner when a reviewer with an axe to grind tanks your LQA score.
A good PM is worth more than a good rate. I mean that literally. I have a PM in Barcelona who, when a client complained about "stylistic" changes in a marketing piece, actually read the source, saw the reviewer had rewritten correct Turkmen into stiff calques, and closed the ticket in my favor. She didn't have to. She did it because she'd worked with me long enough to know which side to bet on. That's not in any SLA. That's a person deciding you're not the problem.
And here's the uncomfortable part: that trust does not transfer. It's not an asset the agency owns. When she moves to another company — and PMs move constantly, the burnout in that role is brutal — everything she knew about me resets to zero. The new person inherits my file, not my history.
What churn actually costs the vendor
Every time a PM leaves, I get re-onboarded by attrition. Not the formal kind with the forms and the NDA — I've written about that tax already. This is quieter. It's the slow re-teaching of things the old PM knew cold:
That Turkmen has two scripts and "which one" is the first question, not an afterthought. That I flag machine-pretranslated segments instead of silently fixing them, and I bill for that differently. That when I ask a terminology question it's because the term genuinely isn't settled in the language, not because I'm padding hours. That my "available Thursday" means available, not maybe.
A PM who's worked with me for two years doesn't second-guess any of that. A new one treats every one of those as a potential red flag. So I spend the first three or four jobs with a new PM proving things I already proved. Re-earning ground I never lost. Unpaid, obviously.
And sometimes the new PM has been told, in some handover doc, that "Agamyrat is expensive." No context. Just the number, stripped of the reason. So now I'm the expensive vendor to someone who's never seen my work, and the cheaper name three rows down looks awfully tempting when the deadline's tight.
How I actually handle it now
I stopped assuming the agency remembers anything. That's the whole shift. I treat institutional memory as something I have to carry, because nobody there is carrying it for me.
So I keep my own record. Per agency: which clients I've done, which TMs are reliable and which are landfill, what I flagged and when, what the past rates were and what they covered. When a new PM shows up cold, I don't get defensive about "but I've been here nine years." That's noise to them. Instead I send a short, useful note — here's what I handle, here's what I don't touch, here's the script question, here's the last agreed rate and what it included. I make their job easier in the first email. That buys goodwill faster than seniority ever will.
I also try, gently, to be known by more than one person. If all your work at an agency flows through a single PM, you're one resignation away from being a stranger there. So when a second PM reaches out, I treat it as a chance to widen the base, not just another job. Redundancy in relationships. Same logic as not keeping all your income in one client.
And when a PM I like does leave — the good ones usually tell you, or you find out — I ask where they landed. Because that relationship, the real one, the one the agency thought it owned? It walks with them. Some of my best current work came from a PM who moved agencies and brought me along like a piece of furniture she wasn't leaving behind.
The agency will never send that follow-up. The person might.
So when someone asks who my clients are, I've started answering with names of people, not companies. That's not sentiment. That's just an accurate description of where the work actually comes from.