One year in with Servito Machinery. Big thanks to their team, and to ours, for making it happen.
There is no clever framework behind this one. No buzzwords. Just mutual trust and a proper partnership, which is a boring sentence and a rare thing.
Why a Year Is Worth Marking
A first month is easy. Everyone is on their best behaviour, the problems are still theoretical, and nobody has had to deliver bad news yet.
A year is different. A year means something has gone wrong at least once and you handled it in a way that did not break the relationship. It means the client has seen how you behave when the news is not good, which is the only test that counts.
What Keeps Clients, and What Does Not
Contracts do not keep clients. I run an agency with no retainers, so I know exactly how little a contract protects you. What keeps a client is that leaving would cost them something real, and that they do not want to.
The mechanics of that are unglamorous. Answer quickly. Own the problem even when it is not your fault. Tell them the thing they do not want to hear before it becomes expensive. That is it. I have written about clients who have stayed three years with nothing holding them there, and the mechanism is identical.
Onwards.