I found out in December and it was too late to do anything about it.
A long time client had already checked out from our agency, and I had no idea until there was nothing more I could do about it.
Anyone who has lost a long time client in an agency knows that pain. It can feel a little personal even though it isn’t.
It taught me something I didn’t want to learn the hard way but did anyway.
For most of us, September is a scramble. Heads down, full force, everything at once and that’s just what the season is.
When I was heavily involved in running our agency, there was one thing I didn’t let slip, even in the middle of that exact chaos.
It’s the thing I think made the biggest difference to how my Q4, and honestly my whole next year, actually went: an existing-client growth review.
I know how this can sound, like just another thing to add to an already overloaded month. It wasn’t that. This was the work that made the rest of the busy month actually count.
The review looked at three things:
- Renewal risk: the quiet signals that a client relationship was cooling before it turned into a December surprise I couldn’t do anything about.
- Expansion: this isn’t about preventing a loss, it’s about not missing a gain that’s already sitting inside a relationship I already had. If a client was building something new, I wanted to be part of that conversation from the start.
- Additional services: an honest look at the gap between what a client needed to hit their goals and what we were providing them, and choosing to be the one who named that gap instead of waiting for someone else to.
I won’t pretend I ran this perfectly every year after that.
Some Septembers I caught the right signal at the right time and had a real conversation before a decision was already made. Other years I missed it and it stung.
What mattered more than getting it right every single time was that the habit itself never got skipped, even in the years I was too slammed to do it well.
If you’re in the thick of your own September scramble right now, I get into the specifics of how I ran this review, what I was actually listening for in each client conversation, and where it went wrong for me, in this week’s episode of Small But Mighty Agency.
This is one of the things that comes up with other agency owners, especially this time of year. There’s so much value in being in a room with people going through the same season, at the same time. That’s what makes it easy to see yourself in what someone else is saying.
That’s actually a big part of what I’m doing at the Mastermind Mingler on September 17th, here in Vancouver. It’s an in-person night, real conversations, agency owners talking through top of mind subjects like new business, agency operations, AI, performance marketing and content strategy.
