Four weeks of standardised, weekly outcome tracking — built to move every account as far up the ladder as it will go, and hold the floor while we do it.
In July we lost 8 accounts and net churn hit 8.51% — the highest of the year. The part that should change how we respond: the exits came out of the green base. Green fell from 74 to 65 against 9 offboardings. Red and amber barely moved.
We were not losing accounts we were already worried about. We were losing accounts that looked healthy — because "healthy" only ever meant "no signal reached us." Working the red list harder would not have caught any of them. By the time an account reaches escalation the decision is usually made: cancellation requests saved 0 of 3 in July.
Green accounts are also where every referral and expansion we have ever had came from. Referrals were historically our largest growth engine, and they have gone entirely organic.
Two problems, one answer. Working green accounts harder is simultaneously the churn defense and the referral offense. A green account is not a won account — it is an account where nothing is currently wrong. That is a floor, not a finish line.
So this is not a churn sprint. Zero preventable churns is the floor. The purpose is the climb above it.
Every standing outcome sits at a level. This is the bar the team is coaching toward, and the thing both EAs and AMs need to be fluent in.
Because your EA is on it. Reliable, manual, dependent on one person remembering.
Not on memory. Documented, repeatable, survives a handover.
It happens on its own. Your EA handles only the exceptions.
It is not a definition of automation. The level describes what the client experiences, never the mechanism. Automation is the usual road to L3, not the meaning of it. And it is not a grade. Level is a state that moves over months. We measure movement, not altitude — most of the bench will not reach L3 everywhere, and an account that climbs L1 → L2 on three outcomes is the sprint working.
Where an outcome can't reach L3, the gap is either a skill template we can supply, or the honest basis for an upsell conversation. AI & Automation is no longer one of the standing outcomes — it was never a tenth thing you do, it is the dimension that separates L1 from L3 on all of them. Standing outcomes are now eight.
Tiered the way the ladder is. Holding the floor is necessary and not sufficient.
Signal coverage — the share of accounts where every signal artifact actually exists. A good result on partial coverage is luck, so this gets stated before any other number.
Preventable churns. Tier movement. Outcome rows on track. Divergence between what the EA sees and what the client feels.
Accounts that moved up a level. Accounts with a named 10/10 path in their brief. Referral and expansion conversations opened.
The ask is a moment every week on every account: something the client did not expect and would notice. A saved deadline, a problem caught before they saw it, a small thing done unasked. It does not have to be big; it has to be unexpected.
We deliberately do not count them — a tracked wow moment becomes a fiction the week it becomes a target. But every Account Brief carries a standing answer to one question: what would be a wow moment for this client? Specific, named, refreshed when it has been used. An AM who cannot write one does not know the client well enough yet, and that is worth knowing.
What we measure is what those moments cause — accounts that climb a level, and clients who start talking.
Referral counts report at 90 days rather than inside the sprint, since the lag between a wow moment and a referral is longer than four weeks. A reporting note, not a reason to aim lower.
No new reports. The grading lives on a new tab in the EA Role Scorecard the client already has. SODs and EODs continue unchanged — they answer what are you working on; this answers what did you deliver.
Every account tiered red / yellow / green against a shared definition. Account Briefs updated where something moved.
Marks each standing outcome on track, at risk, off track or paused, with one line of context. Files a short note to their AM.
Catches anything urgent and preps the EA for the client conversation. Deliberately does not judge yet: the client hasn't spoken.
The client grades the same outcomes in their own words, in their own column.
Now both grades exist. Where they disagree is the signal — and it is what the AM works next week. Live conversation only where something triggers it.
About 10 minutes per EA per week and two hours per AM across a full book of 17–22 accounts. AM capacity was already flagged as at its limit in the July EOM, so the design deliberately adds a tab rather than a report, and keeps most of the weekly loop asynchronous.
Not a big-bang rollout. The first two weeks are a supervised pilot, because nobody has run a 10/10 conversation yet — including me.
Each AM picks one or two accounts. I join the actual EA conversations and client gradings, live. The bar gets set by demonstration rather than description, and coaching happens in the moment instead of a week later through a report.
AMs run it themselves across the rest of the book, using what phase 1 taught. Coverage becomes measurable here, and level movement gets recorded across every account.
We give up two weeks of book-wide visibility, and visibility is how we catch the next green-base exit. Accepted because a cold week-one rollout across 81 accounts would have produced unreliable coverage data anyway — and because the coaching signal is worth more right now than the breadth. The coverage goal is deferred, not dropped. All ~81 accounts still get tiered weekly from day one; it's the grading motion that phases.
Seven artifacts. Templates are standardised; judgment is left to the AM.
What the end-of-sprint report measures against.
| Measure | July 2026 |
|---|---|
| Active clients | 86 at month end · 81 as of Aug 4 |
| Offboarded | 8 terminated (1 buyout) |
| Net churn rate | 8.51% — highest of 2026 |
| Escalations | 11 total · 4 saved · 4 churned · 3 pending |
| Save rate (closed escalations) | 50% |
| Health distribution | Red 5 Amber 12 Green 65 |
| AM workload | Wela 24 · Bits 22 · Mel 20 · Chaddy 17 · Cesar 3 |
Do these four measures capture what success should look like — or would you judge it differently?
Anything you would add or cut before this goes live the week of the 18th?
Running this against a real book of 20 accounts — what breaks first?
Previewed with Chaddy, Mel and Colin. Bits and Wela are out this week and will roll out to their EAs a week behind.