Design the Experience. Keep the Client.

I was having coffee with a gentleman in one of my networking groups earlier this afternoon, and we got to talking about pivotal moments in our lives that shifted the direction of our journey. Throwaway comments someone made that prompted us to reassess the path we were on, the career we had envisioned, or (as in my case) forced me to envision a career.

Those people don’t and will never know the impact their comment made, but you do.

Something similar happens in conversation. A small comment, a quiet nudge, opens a window to possibility. Maybe they’d like to hear how you can help them. Maybe they’re open to hanging out, or going on a date. Maybe they too really like anime.

Maybe.

So they open a tiny door and wait to see if you’ll walk through it.

Client retention works the same way. If your clients aren’t dropping hints or clues, encouraging you to serve them, do you lose them? Should you?

We tend to treat retention as a side effect. If the client was happy, surely they’ll return. If we do good work, surely they’ll refer someone else. But retention doesn’t happen automatically. It happens intentionally.

It is a designed experience.

Alan Weiss says clients don’t fire you for overdelivering, they fire you for being irrelevant.

Seth Godin would remind us that people stick with those who affirm their identity and lead them forward.

And Donald Miller would ask: what’s the next chapter of the story you’re helping them tell?

So the question becomes: what’s your plan for staying relevant?

We talk a lot about marketing and lead generation and getting new business through the door. But the most profitable, least stressful growth often doesn’t come from chasing strangers. It comes from staying relevant to the people who already trust you.

Retention isn’t a lagging indicator of satisfaction. It’s not something you measure once the client is gone. It’s something you build. Something you design. And for relationship-driven businesses, where trust, timing, and nuance matter more than a clever funnel, retention becomes one of the most underleveraged assets.

But the truth is this: If there’s no plan, no next step, no obvious or compelling reason to stay…
they might not open the door again.

Or the window.

A fictional example

Let’s take a look at Maya.

Maya runs a boutique creative agency. Her work is thoughtful and distinctive, and her clients come to her when they want to level up their brand and finally be taken seriously in their market. The projects are high-touch, high-stakes, and full of emotional buy-in.

But for years, Maya treated each engagement as a one-and-done. Strategy, design, launch… done. The final files went out, the thank-you note was sent, and the relationship quietly moved into archive.

She assumed that if clients were happy, they’d come back. And while they did return periodically, it felt like she had no control over it.

When she stepped back, she realized why.

There was no plan for what came next. No reason to keep talking. No clear invitation to keep going.

So she redesigned the experience.

Now, well before a project wraps, she has a conversation about what comes after launch. She introduces an editorial calendar for brand content support. Or a quarterly visual refresh for key campaigns. Or a mid-year analytics review to see what’s working and what needs to shift.

It’s not a pitch. It’s an extension of the work they’re already doing together. And because it’s built in, clients don’t have to rehire her later. They just keep going.

The result? More stability. Better margins. And a whole lot less pressure to keep filling the pipeline from scratch.

Maya wasn’t trying to fix a broken business. She was trying to evolve a successful one.

The math

Here’s what it added up to.

• Three clients signed on for light retainer packages at $750 per month
  That’s $2,250 per month, or $13,500 over six months
• One returned for a quarterly refresh at $3,000
• Another re-engaged for a $9,000 strategic brand audit and second-phase execution

Total: $25,500 in additional revenue

No proposals. No prospecting. No discounting to win new work.

She now has a designed experience that makes the next step feel like part of the project itself. The logical, natural continuation of a productive relationship.

What about you?

Think about a few of your best clients. Not the biggest ones necessarily, but the ones who were engaged, who respected the process, who made the work better.

Now ask yourself:

• Did they know what their next step was?
• Did you help them imagine how else you could support them?
• Did they have a reason to stay in the room?

If the answer is no, that’s okay. This is where you start.

Take one active client or recent engagement. Look at the work you’re doing and ask yourself, “What would be valuable three months from now?” Not to you, but to them. What would they need help maintaining, adjusting, reviewing, or expanding?

Then sketch out what it would look like to offer that as the natural continuation. Quietly. Confidently. Before the current work wraps up.

It doesn’t need to be a big pitch. It just needs to feel like the obvious next step.

A final thought.

Retention doesn’t happen because clients remember how good you were. It happens because you stayed relevant. Because you built something worth continuing. Because the next step felt obvious.

If you’d like help spotting where strong client relationships could be turning into stronger profit, let’s do a quick strategy session.

Take a quick look under the hood with someone who knows what to look for.