The race is on.
With summer already hitting hard, it’s time to double down before the world goes on summer holidays.

Focusing on more content creation, it’s been a productive week.
With new blog posts, more videos, and a new studio, things are looking promising.

What are your summer plans?

In today’s Storyletter:
• This retention method helped me retain six-figure work a year
• Building in Public
• Fun stuff – trailers and music

Key learning

What if you could double client retention without changing your product, price, or pipeline?

When we talk about clients, we tend to use words like lifetime value (LTV), retention, and other success metrics. Most of these are built to measure if we got what we needed out of the client.

But very few businesses have another column: satisfaction metrics.

Years ago, we added one simple metric to our client reports at my agency, and it changed everything. Our average contract length went from 14 months to over 24.

We all know it’s harder to get a new client than to retain an existing one. But very few companies have a real retention plan baked into the customer journey. Not agencies, not SaaS platforms, not most brands.

Everyone says they care about relationships. But if you look at their reporting, it’s all numbers.
This one change, adding a retention plan into your customer journey, can turn your revenue upside down. And it might be the lowest-effort fix you ever make.

Yes, like anything else, it takes work. Retention is a habit. But you can build it into your systems with very little effort.

Here’s how to start:

Create an ongoing client satisfaction metric
Add two simple columns to your existing reports:

Column 1: Client satisfaction status
Track this weekly or monthly. Use traffic light colors:

🟢 Green – The client is happy. They got everything they needed, on time, said thank you, and the numbers look good.

🟡 Yellow – We’re doing okay. Either the metrics or the service is slipping a bit. Something is missing. When this shows up, the whole team should be alerted to check in, ask better questions, and go the extra mile.

🔴 Red – Something’s off. We missed a deadline, the numbers are bad, or the client is unhappy. This needs a weekly action plan to move back up to yellow. Communicate, clarify next steps, and escalate if needed.

Column 2: Bonus value
So a bonus could be another post, a connection, a catch-up call, or even an idea. In e-commerce, we can add a quarterly discount.

How we implemented it
Our weekly update meetings ran 15 minutes for account status and another 10 for team ideation. That was it.

This one small change probably had the biggest impact on our bottom line.

If you’re struggling to implement this, ping me.
And if you have your own retention tricks, I’d love to hear them.

Building in public

How much time are you spending in the business vs. on your business?

It’s a common question asked between EO members, from the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. While I felt guilty for years about working too much in the business, my shift now is roughly 30% working on the business.

This week we fixed many issues on the website. The color scheme is getting a revamp, with blue becoming the next big color while red will focus on the Pitch to Win concept.

Working with Toffu.ai to turn my content into a traffic generator has been really interesting. I should have done that years ago. Then again, we didn’t have AI, and SEO was a bit of a guess; with most professionals focusing on the wrong things.

With three new videos recorded and a new lease for a studio, I feel very optimistic.
On the downside, I’m really struggling to scale this newsletter. The open rate is about 50%, but without a marketing spend, it seems the newsletter is struggling to get traction.

Ideas? Thoughts? Would love your input. What do you think? What do you like? Open to chatting.

Social numbers
I’m happy to start sharing my growth numbers here from now on. If I want to keep moving forward, I want to see progress, so why not share it with you all?

Each week, I’ll post my social numbers. One post that did well, maybe one that tanked? The numbers will be here, and I hope this becomes another reason to keep pushing forward.

Just for Fun

Weekend Vibes - Enjoy

🎧 Music
This week’s newsletter was created while listening to NPR In Living Color

🎬 Pizza Hut
A documentary about iconic Pizza Hut locations turned into different businesses.
Watch the short film

🍿 The Roofman
Channing Tatum stars in this true story about a former Army Ranger who starts breaking into businesses.
Watch the trailer

Resources

💡 The Business Storytelling Guide - A complete guide on how to implement storytelling to improve your business quickly. Available here 

📕 My Amazon best-selling book F*ck The Slides - How to Create a Winning Pitch. Available here: Kindle/Print/Audio

📺 My YOUTUBE Channel: Interviews, tips and some fun content Available here