Learning to Translate

By Ragunauth Ramsaroop Excerpt from “From Teller to Director” 11 min read

In 2019, I walked out of banking and into something that looked like a completely different industry: digital strategy at a Guyana agency called Toucan Ltd.

People asked why. Banking was respectable, stable, and heavily regulated — the kind of environment that rewards the habits I had spent five years building. An agency, by contrast, lives on deadlines, client reviews, and the constant pressure to make ideas visible. Why trade a career with a clear structure for a world with tight turnaround times and expectations that shifted weekly? The honest answer was that I had learned to be precise, and I wanted to learn to be understood. I did not know yet that the two would turn out to be the same discipline.

My role was Account Manager. I led digital strategy, client relations, advertising campaigns, performance reporting, and team coordination, and I managed communication among clients, production teams, and service providers. On paper it was a commercial job. In practice it was a translation job, and that is the lesson I want to spend this chapter on, because it turned out to be the most transferable skill I own.

The different currency

At the bank, precision was measured in dollars and cents. A drawer balanced or it did not; a transaction was recorded or it was not. The standard was binary, and the consequences of failing it were immediate.

At the agency, precision was measured differently: in words, in deadlines, and in expectations. A campaign brief could be perfectly accurate and still be useless if the people receiving it could not act on it. A report could be full of true numbers and still fail if the client could not see what the numbers meant for their business. The currency was meaning, and the job was to make sure meaning survived the journey from one person's head to another's.

That is what "communication is performance" means to me, and it is the first thing the agency taught me: you have not communicated until the other person has understood. Speaking clearly is only half the work. The other half is confirming that what they heard is what you meant — and adjusting when it is not.

The agency also ran on a rhythm that was new to me. Banking days were structured: the counter opened, the transactions flowed, the drawer balanced, the day closed. Agency work moved in cycles — proposals, revisions, production, reviews, launches — and the cycles overlapped constantly. Several projects were always in motion at once, at different stages, with different people expecting different things from me on the same afternoon. I learned to keep the whole board in view: what each client needed, where each project stood, which deadline was real and which could flex. That discipline — tracking many moving obligations without letting any of them fall — became second nature, and it is the same discipline I apply today across regulatory deadlines, government submissions, and stakeholder commitments.

Sitting in the middle

Every agency project has at least three languages in the room. The client speaks the language of outcomes: what they need their business to achieve, what success looks like to them, what they are prepared to spend. The creative team speaks the language of impact: what will move people, what will be remembered, what will look and sound right. The technical team speaks the language of delivery: what can actually be built, produced, and measured, on what timeline, within what constraints.

These three groups are not in conflict. They are simply not speaking the same language, and without a translator in the middle, each one hears the other two as unreasonable. The client thinks the creatives are expensive dreamers. The creatives think the client has no taste. The technicians think everyone is ignoring reality. All three are wrong, and all three are right, and the account manager's job is not to take sides but to make sure each side understands the others well enough to deliver something that works.

I learned to translate in three steps. First, listen to each group long enough to understand what they actually need, not just what they are asking for. Second, restate that need in terms the other groups can act on — converting the client's ambition into a brief the creatives can work from, and converting the creatives' ideas into a schedule and a budget the technicians can defend. Third, carry the truth back in both directions when something has to give, because something always has to give.

That last step is where the discipline lives. The counter had taught me that a promise kept is a reputation built. The agency taught me that an expectation honestly managed is a crisis avoided. The most valuable conversations I had were the ones that happened before the work: the honest discussion about scope, timeline, and what success looked like — including what it did not look like. Over-promising is the fastest way to lose a client; under-communicating is the second. I learned to say plainly what I could deliver, and then to deliver it.

Reviews also taught me how to receive critique — which is a skill of its own. When your work is reviewed, the natural instinct is to hear every comment as a judgement on you. The agency forced me past that. A comment on a brief or a campaign was information about the work, not a verdict on the person; the question was always what it told me about what the client or the audience actually needed. I learned to listen for the need behind the note, to separate what was useful from what was noise, and to revise without resentment. That habit — receiving feedback as data about the problem, not as an attack — is the same calm the counter had taught me with difficult customers, applied to my own work. It is one of the most valuable things the agency gave me, and I use it every time a regulator or a colleague reviews a submission.

What transferred from the counter

It would be comforting to say the agency was a completely new education. It was not. Everything I had built at the counter transferred, mostly without my noticing.

The difficult-customer lesson transferred most directly. Clients arrived in every state: clear, confused, enthusiastic, anxious, occasionally angry about something that had happened before I was in the room. The counter had taught me to separate the emotion from the problem, and that skill worked exactly the same way in a client review as it had across the bank counter. Frustration is information. The question is always the same: what does this person actually need, and how do I help them get it?

Follow-through transferred as well. If I told a client I would come back with an answer, I came back with an answer — even if it meant a late evening or a difficult conversation with a production team. My word was my professional signature before it was ever attached to a title, and the agency reinforced that it had value in every currency, not just banking.

Even accuracy transferred, in a form I did not expect. The agency ran on performance reporting — numbers that had to be right because clients made spending decisions on them. I had spent five years making a drawer balance to the dollar; making a report balance to the decimal was the same muscle, applied to a different ledger. The lesson was not that accuracy matters. It was that accuracy matters everywhere, in every industry, at every level. It is not a banking skill. It is a professional skill.

The service lesson transferred too. At the counter I learned that serving is not subservience — that I could do the work with pride without being less than the person I was helping. At the agency, the client was not a monarch to be obeyed but a partner to be served honestly. That sometimes meant delivering news they did not want: a timeline that could not be met, an idea that would not work, a budget that was unrealistic. Honest service, I learned, includes the difficult conversation delivered early and clearly. The client who knows you will tell them the truth before the work — not after the failure — is the client who trusts you with the next project.

Commercial discipline

The agency also taught me something the counter could not: that a relationship is a commercial asset, and that it compounds.

In banking, the customer relationship was real but bounded — the transaction, the advice, the trust in the moment. In the agency, the relationship was the business. I worked on account retention, service quality, visibility, and revenue growth. I learned that keeping a client was cheaper than winning one, and that the difference was made in the ordinary months, not the dramatic ones: the call returned promptly, the report delivered on time, the honest warning delivered before the problem instead of an apology after it. Those small acts of reliability accumulate into a standing a client can rely on — and when a difficult moment comes, as it always does, the relationship that was maintained during calm periods is the one that survives.

That is not a sales technique. It is a way of working, and I would recognise it later in settings that had nothing to do with clients: in regulatory relationships, in government engagement, in community relations. The agency gave me the commercial language for something the counter had already taught me by instinct. Trust is built in small deposits, and it is the only currency that earns interest.

What the agency could not teach

For all that it gave me, the agency had a limit, and knowing the limit mattered.

It taught me to communicate. What it could not teach me was what happened after the message landed — how a decision actually got made inside a large organisation, which information moved a decision and which sat in a file, how different departments with different mandates and different timelines came together (or failed to) on a single outcome. An agency sees organisations from the outside. You can infer how they work, but you cannot see it.

I wanted to see it. Not because I had a plan — I have established that I did not — but because the questions I was asking myself kept pointing the same way. If communication was performance, what was the stage? If trust was the currency, where was it spent? The answers were inside the organisations that hired agencies, not in the agencies themselves.

So in 2020, I made a move that looked, to almost everyone who heard about it, like a step backwards. I left the agency and took an entry-level role at AGM Inc., a large-scale mining operation: Administration Secretary, in General Administration. The title was smaller than the one I was leaving. The salary was certainly not the reason. People asked why, and the honest answer was simple: I was not stepping backwards. I was choosing the job that would let me learn the one thing I still did not know — how a serious organisation actually worked, from the inside.

When I look back at the agency now, I do not think of it as a detour from banking or a detour into mining. It was the missing lesson between the two: the place where I learned that the habits I had built in one industry were not tied to that industry at all. I left Toucan with the same way of working I had arrived with — sharper, more disciplined, and translated into a language that would work anywhere. I did not know yet how much that language was about to be tested.

The role came with a phone, a filing system, and a title that sounded smaller than the work would turn out to be. It became the most important entry-level job I ever took, and the next chapter is about why the in-between job is where the real education begins.

Key Points

Communication is performance: you have not communicated until the other person has understood.
Translation between disciplines is a core professional skill — the person in the middle decides whether the project works.
The honest conversation about scope and expectations happens before the work; over-promising is the fastest way to lose trust.
The habits of accuracy, calm, and follow-through transfer across industries unchanged — they are professional skills, not sector skills.
Trust is built in small deposits and compounds; a relationship maintained during calm periods is the one that survives difficulty.
Sometimes the step that looks sideways or backwards is the one that teaches you what you actually need to know next.