A client messaged me this morning. Three words: “Paul, we need to talk.”
If you run an agency, you know what those three words do to your morning.
The call was already in motion. My project manager had set it up to plan the next month of work. So we got on, and he told me what he actually wanted to say.
He had been playing with Claude for a couple of weeks. He thought he could now cover a lot of the smaller tickets himself.
And then he apologised.
He was afraid to tell me
That was the part I did not expect. Not the AI. The apology.
He is in Australia. I am in the UK. On a small ticket, the useful work takes twenty minutes and the waiting takes a day, because the question goes out while he is awake and the answer arrives while he is asleep. If he can now describe that problem to Claude and have it done inside the same twenty minutes, that is not a loss. That is his business running faster.
So I told him it was great. He had put real effort into learning it. He should keep going.
Then I told him the rest. The Trello board stays open. The WhatsApp group stays open. The work chat stays open. If something breaks, or he gets halfway through and is not sure, he comes back and asks. Nothing gets switched off because he needs less of it this month.
We have worked together since February. Cleaned up the code, sorted out the things that made every change slow, and put him in a position where he can operate the site himself. That was the point of it. He is happy with the result, and he left us a good review — the contract closed today.
If the work we did makes him need us less, then the work did what it was supposed to do.
Why the apology bothered me
I keep coming back to why he thought he had to say sorry.
He thought so because in most agency relationships, that news is bad news. There is a number to hit. There is a retainer. There is a contract with months left on it. A client saying “I need less of you this month” becomes a problem to be handled, and clients can feel that, even when nobody says it out loud.
We have never worked that way. No contract, no retainer, no lock-in. I have written about that model before, so I will not make the same argument twice.
But this morning showed me a part of it I had not thought about properly. The reason not to lock a client in is not really the money. It is that the client can tell you the truth.
The same day, the opposite conversation
In the afternoon I was on a call with a large multimedia group. Not one site. A group of them, sitting across different hosting vendors.
The sites keep going up and down. My read is that a good share of it is AI crawlers hitting them far harder than the setup was ever built for. That is not an unusual problem this year, and it is a solvable one. I explained what I would move them to and why it would hold.
They agreed with the diagnosis.
Then they told me they could not do anything about it. One contract runs to March 2027. Another, with a different vendor, runs to December 2028.
So they know the sites are unstable. They know roughly what would fix it. And they will carry it for another two years, because of paperwork signed before the problem existed.
The contract is not protecting anyone
Here is what struck me, having both of those conversations inside one day.
In the morning, a client could say the true thing and act on it that same hour.
In the afternoon, a client could say the true thing and do nothing with it at all.
The vendors holding those contracts are not winning either. They are collecting revenue from an account that now resents them, on a service the client has already decided is wrong. When March 2027 arrives, that client leaves, and tells people why. That is the full return on locking someone in: two more years of guaranteed invoices, and a reputation you cannot buy back.
I understand why long contracts exist. Vendors want to plan. Procurement wants stability, and a signed term is far easier to defend internally than a judgement call. None of that is stupid.
But if you have worked out that something better exists for your client, and the only thing stopping the move is a document, then the document is not protecting the relationship. It is protecting the invoice.
What I took from the day
The morning client will need us less for a while. That is fine. The board is still open, and he knows it.
The afternoon client would like to work with us and cannot, for two more years.
I would rather be in the first conversation every time, including the months when it costs me.