Six weeks earlier, every time

Fernhill Social manages social and content for 41 clients from a loft in downtown Boise. Three account leads share the book, and Jordan Price, who heads client services, is responsible for all of it renewing.

Until last year the system was a spreadsheet with a color beside each client. The leads updated it on Friday afternoons, before a ninety-minute meeting where they went down the list. “Everything was green,” Jordan says. “Everything was always green, because nobody wants to be the person who turns their own client red.”

Replacing an opinion with a record

What changed with Keepwell was not the colors but where they came from. A score is built from hours, reply times, check-ins and invoices that already exist, so no one has to volunteer bad news. The Monday note simply reports it.

In the first month the notes named four clients the spreadsheet had listed as green. One was Marlowe Outfitters, a $7,400 retainer whose approvals had slowed from one day to five and whose hours were running at 60% of scope.

A smaller retainer that renewed

The check-in found that Marlowe had hired an in-house designer and no longer needed Fernhill for creative. They did still need strategy and reporting. Fernhill re-scoped the retainer from 44 hours to 30, at $6,200 a month, and Marlowe signed for another year.

“That is $1,200 a month less,” Jordan says. “It is also $74,400 a year more than we were about to have.”

What happened to Friday

The status meeting is gone. In its place is a fifteen-minute stand-up on Monday morning, where each lead reads out their note and says what they are going to do about it. Jordan estimates it gives the team back three hours a week.

Across the last four quarters, 93.6% of Fernhill’s retainers have renewed, up from 81% the year before. The ones that did not were, in Jordan’s words, “not surprises. We knew, we tried, and it was the right call for them. That is a very different feeling from finding out on a Tuesday.”