Booted From Longtime Marketing Role for Clients Mean Wife

Hello friends! would really appreciate your thoughts if you’ve ever dealt with something like this.

So… I recently made the hard call to walk away from a long-term client relationship. I’d been running all of their marketing (Google Ads, SEO, content, social, the whole thing), and we helped grow them from a small local team into a multi-million dollar company. It was a big deal, and I poured so much into it.

But over time, someone on the internal team (the owners wife)— who always seemed to have an eye on my role — gradually took over more of the marketing. And the vibe shifted. Criticism ramped up, collaboration went down, she started elluding to the fact that they were trying to reverse engineere our ad strategy, implying they could run the ads themselves (despite zero experience or training) It got really uncomfortable.

Eventually, I realized I couldn’t do my best work in that environment anymore — so I stepped back. And I told them I knew what they were doing and didn’t support it.

He got really mad and Is demanding all assets, access to all of our internal ad (agency) accounts and data. They think they can just go in there and unpause everything and itll run, despite no longer being connected to third party tools…they think they can go on their way generating leads.

I still work with a related business in their orbit, with one of the other original partners.. they’ve been super supportive. But I can’t help wonder how long that will last, or how much influence from the other owner behind the scenes might affect that existing relationship too.

So I’m wondering — have any of you ever been in a similar situation? How did you handle it? Did you say something, cut ties, protect your strategy somehow?

Would love any insight — and solidarity too. Thanks in advance..