Why I'm Sending My Clients Less

I’ve cut how often my retainer clients hear from me — in half, and on purpose. Before you read that as a cutback, give me a paragraph, because it’s the opposite. And it took me longer than it should have to see why.

Here’s what pushed me to it. I noticed the work I was doing was arriving faster than it could actually be used. Every week, another report, another set of recommendations, another thing to read and sign off. Diligent, on paper. In practice it was a pile — the genuinely useful work buried under its own frequency, sitting there waiting on a decision nobody had found the time to make. I was quietly measuring my service by how often I showed up. And showing up every single week had become the point, instead of the work I was showing up to do.

So here’s the shape of it. Instead of a report every week, it’s a proper piece of work every fortnight — one substantial thing that shifts where you actually stand, rather than five small ones that each nudge it a millimetre. The monitoring never stops; the site is watched every day regardless. What changes is that when I do land in your inbox, there’s weight to it.

If that still sounds like less, read it the other way round. A weekly cadence rewards activity. It fills the slot whether or not there’s anything worth saying, because the slot is there and it has to be filled. A fortnightly one only earns its keep if there’s something real in it. The schedule stops doing the talking, and the work has to.

This is the same instinct behind running the business as one operator who owns the whole job rather than a committee that never goes deep on anything. It’s the same reason a dashboard full of green numbers can be a decoy for whether anything is actually being fixed underneath. Frequency is the easiest thing in the world to manufacture. Substance is the hard part, and it’s the only part that was ever worth paying for.

So here’s the question worth carrying into your own suppliers this week, whoever they are. Are they shipping you substance, or activity? A weekly email that says “all looking good” costs them nothing and tells you less. The one that arrives every so often with something you can genuinely act on — that’s the one doing the work. Count the second kind. Ignore the first.

One more thing before I go — and this time I mean it literally. I’m taking a proper break this year, from Saturday the 5th of September to Saturday the 19th, away from the desk for a full fortnight. (The dates in the emailed version of this issue were wrong — my typo, corrected here and in the following issue.)

Here’s what that changes for you, and it’s really the same point I’ve spent this whole email on: almost nothing. The monitoring doesn’t stop because I’ve stepped away — it runs every day regardless, and if something genuinely breaks while I’m gone, it gets caught. A break that long is the real test of that, which is rather the point: I’d only take it if I trusted the whole thing to hold without me hovering over it. It does, so I am.

If you email me I’ll still see it, but I’ll more likely be swimming in the sea somewhere in the north of Scotland than sitting at my desk — so give me a little longer than usual, and anything that can wait will keep until I’m back on the 19th of September. If something’s properly urgent, say so in the subject line and I’ll find it. Otherwise I’ll see you on the other side of the break, and we’ll carry on where we left off.

Tony Cooper We Build Stores

tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk 07963 242210

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P.S. The change takes nothing off the table that was actually being used. What it removes is the pile that builds up when work arrives faster than anyone can act on it. If your own inbox carries a stack of “just checking in” from people you pay, that pile is telling you something — and it isn’t that they’re busy on your behalf.