Two clients on the same service, from the same team, to the same standard. One renewed. One didn’t. The easy explanation was that the second client was difficult — until we looked properly and found we’d been delivering the wrong kind of value, very well.
Client work falls into five buckets: revenue, efficiency, risk, retention, and foundation. The bucket isn’t about what you build. It’s about what the client is quietly measuring while you build it. Two clients can ask for identical work and judge it against completely different outcomes, and if you haven’t sorted that at intake, you find out at renewal.
This session covers how to classify work when the inquiry arrives, what changes downstream once you have — who does it, what you hand over, what you report — and why foundation work is the one bucket whose expectations have to be set before you start rather than defended after. Built from real projects, including the ones that taught us this the expensive way.
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