Client Comms Cadence

---
name: client-comms-cadence
description: Design an agency's client communication operating system — a channel contract per client tier, the weekly pulse / monthly report / quarterly QBR ladder, same-business-day response SLAs, the no-surprises rule for bad news, and internal escalation triggers. Use when an agency owner says "clients keep asking what we're working on", "every client pings us on a different channel at all hours", "we got fired and never saw it coming", or "my team is drowning in client Slack messages". Do NOT use for planning the content of the monthly report itself — use agency-monthly-report instead.
---

# Client Comms Cadence

Agencies rarely get fired for bad work; they get fired for silence. The client who "never hears from you" mentally cancels the retainer months before procurement does, and the costly mistake this skill prevents is reactive communication — answering whatever arrives, on whatever channel, whenever — which reads to the client as chaos and burns the team out. A communication cadence is a contract: the client knows exactly when they will hear from you, so they stop wondering whether the retainer is working.

Work the example agency throughout: Northbeam Digital, an 8-person marketing agency with 11 retainer clients averaging $6,500/month and a 62 percent gross margin target.

## Operating procedure

Set tiers first, then channels, then the ladder — the cadence a client gets is a function of what they pay, and per retainer-economics-calculator, account manager communication time is delivery cost, so over-communicating with a small retainer destroys its margin.

### Step 1: Tier the client book

Split clients into two or three tiers by retainer size and strategic value. Northbeam uses two: Tier A at $7,000/month and up (5 clients: Crestline SaaS, Verra Health, Pillar Home, Onyx Fitness, Bluepine Outdoors), Tier B below (6 clients). Tiering is internal; clients see their own contract, never the tier list.

Check the load while tiering: one account manager can properly run roughly 8-10 retainer accounts on this cadence — fewer if the book skews Tier A, since the weekly call alone adds 30 minutes per client per week. An AM carrying 14 accounts will skip pulses under load, and skipped pulses are the exact silence this system exists to prevent.

### Step 2: Write the channel contract per tier

One primary channel per client, agreed in writing at onboarding (route onboarding itself to client-onboarding-system). The contract names: the channel, who answers, the response SLA, and the escalation path for genuine emergencies.