The Rule of 10: Why Your Best Media Buyer Is Quietly Quitting While Your Worst Gets All the Attention

Work out what it costs you the day your best media buyer hands in their notice.

Most estimates put the bill at roughly half that person's annual salary once you add it all up: recruiting, interviewing, onboarding the replacement, the months they spend getting up to speed, the risk they don't work out, and the accounts that wobble while the seat is warm. On a senior hire that's tens of thousands of dollars walking out the door. And that's the clean version, before you count the client who quietly loses confidence because the person who knew their account is gone.

Here's the part that should keep you up at night. That person almost never leaves loudly. They don't storm out. They go quiet, do good work for a while longer, and then one day they're just gone, usually to someone who paid attention to them when you didn't.

Meanwhile, the loudest, messiest person on your team has had a disproportionate share of your week for months.

I've watched this play out in marketing teams and agency pods over and over, and I think most leaders have the maths exactly backwards. So let me lay out the lens we use, and then five things we actually do about it.

The Rule of 10

I picked this up a few years ago and I can't unsee it now.

In any group of roughly ten people, you'll tend to find three groups. Call them the twos, the fives and the threes.

The twos are the dream contributors. Two in ten, give or take. You don't have to tell them what to do because they've usually done it already. They keep your ROAS stable through a rough month, they ask where they're falling short, they pick up the slack nobody assigned. They're famous on the team for showing up that way.

The threes are the other end. Feet in the mud, status quo, quietly checked out, there for the paycheck. You know exactly who I'm describing on your own team. The person who came to mind first, that's who I mean.

And then there are the fives. On the fence. The biggest group, and the one that decides what your culture becomes. They're watching to see what gets rewarded.

Here's my take on why this matters so much. The fives don't stay neutral. They get enrolled by someone. Either your twos pull them up, or your threes drag them sideways. Nobody drifts toward great. Left alone, the gravity runs the wrong way, and the fives slide toward the three mindset by default.

The attention asymmetry that quietly kills good teams

Now overlay how attention actually gets spent in most teams.

Where does leadership time go? To the fire. To the detractor who's acting out, the account that's on fire, the drama that needs managing this afternoon. The only time a lot of people get a proper conversation with their manager is when something has gone sideways.

Think about the signal that sends to the room. It says the way you get attention here is to act out. It's the family dynamic where the troubled kid gets all the love and the steady one flies under the radar. Your twos are holding everything together and getting radio silence for it, while your threes soak up your best hours.

So the achiever who keeps things stable gets neglected. The performance-improvement-plan machine grinds away on the people going backwards. And the fives are watching all of it, learning that stability is invisible and chaos is how you get seen.

That's the asymmetry. And it's how you end up with a top performer halfway out the door while your worst gets a standing weekly meeting.

The fix isn't complicated to say and it's hard to do: fixate on your twos, enrol your fives, and stop pouring your week into your threes. Here are five rituals we use to actually pull that off.

1. Run a weekly read on every person, not a quarterly one

The classic failure is the 90-day lag. You find out someone's checked out, or about to leave, a full quarter after it started.

We do a short weekly sync with each manager, five to fifteen minutes depending on how many people they run, and the question is just: how is each person showing up this week? Anything good, anything concerning. It's a conversation, not a form.

The point isn't surveillance. It's that you can't hold up your standard-setters if you only notice them once a quarter, and you can't catch a flight risk while there's still time to do something about it.

2. Separate a bad week from a bad pattern

One rough week is not a verdict. Someone's dog died, their partner's sick, their head's not in it. That's a state, not a trait.

The mistake cuts both ways. You overreact to a great fortnight from a five and call them a two, or you write someone off for one bad sprint. With a few weeks of honest data points you can tell the difference, and you stop making big calls off a single moment. You can live with a wobble. It's the persistent pattern, good or bad, that you act on.

3. Build the time for your twos that you'd normally spend on a crisis

This is the hard reallocation, because it feels indulgent.

When someone's keeping ROAS steady and asking nothing of you, the instinct is to leave them alone and go fight the fire. Resist it. Give your twos real coaching time, stretch projects, a clear line of sight to where they're heading next. Hold them up where the fives can see it, so the on-the-fence crowd learns that this, not the drama, is what gets the good attention.

The cheapest retention there is, is your best people feeling seen before a recruiter makes them feel seen.

4. Make your best people ask for more, not less

Here's a counterintuitive one I love. Some of the strongest people on a team don't want an easier run, they want a harder one.

We've had top performers effectively raise their hand and say: make my job tougher, I want to get better faster. So we lean into it. They pick a skill or an area to stretch into, find someone to learn from, and we treat it like piano lessons. The expert gives feedback, then you go practise, and the growth happens in the practice.

What this does is give your achievers somewhere to climb that isn't out. A two who's bored and unstretched is a two who's reading recruiter messages. A two who's mid-stretch is compounding.

5. Use a shared language so feedback doesn't land as an attack

A lot of churn isn't about the feedback, it's about how it was heard.

We use a simple phrase internally: "the story I make up is." A manager goes to someone with the read they've got and says, the story I make up is you've checked out, but I know there's more to it, what's actually going on. Half the time what comes out is something happening at home you had no clue about. Sometimes it turns out the manager was part of the problem.

It costs nothing and it changes everything, because it turns a verdict into a conversation. People can take a hard truth when it arrives with goodwill instead of a paper trail.

Where to start

If you do one thing this week, do the snapshot. Privately, sketch out who your twos, fives and threes are. Then ask yourself an honest question: where did my time actually go last week, and who got none of it?

If your best people are getting the least of you, that's the leak, and it's a far more expensive one than any underperforming campaign.

This is most of what our pods do behind the scenes, and it's a big part of why they don't churn off a client's account. If you want to swap notes on how you're holding up your own standard-setters, reply and tell me what's working for you. I read every one.