Why I don’t lock clients into long contracts

The standard agency contract is twelve months, sometimes with an early-termination fee attached. The justification is always the same: this work takes time to compound. And it's true. There's a lot of heavy lifting that first and second month.

SEO does take months. But "this takes time" and "you owe me a year" aren't the same sentence.

A long contract doesn't make the work compound. It makes leaving expensive. Those are different problems, and only one of them belongs to the client.

Here is what I've watched happen inside locked engagements — I've been on both sides. Month three arrives and results are thin. In a month-to-month relationship, that's a hard conversation and a change in plan. In a twelve-month contract, it's a report with more charts in it. When a client can leave, an agency finds out fast whether the work is working. When they can't, it never has to find out at all. Same people, same effort, completely different pressure.

It cuts the other way too, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. A contract locks me in as much as it locks you in. I've been at the stage of my career where I needed the work badly enough to absorb whatever came with it — someone rude on every call, complaints as a communication style, a nice contact who leaves and gets replaced by someone impossible. I'm not there anymore. I get to choose who I work with, and I intend to keep it that way. No amount of money covers being miserable at work.

So my terms are simple. Pricing is published on the site — vague isn't the same as professional, and I'd rather tell you what the investment is than make you wonder or ask twice. No long-term lock-in. If circumstances change — a client's business shifts, budget disappears, or I'm simply not the right fit anymore — they should be free to do what serves them, not what serves my forecast.

The two questions I get:

Doesn't that make revenue unpredictable? Somewhat. It also makes it honest. And in practice people stay, because the reason they would have left was usually the thing a contract would have hidden from me.

Doesn't someone take the strategy and run? Occasionally. The strategy was never the moat. The execution and the judgment are.

There's a version of this that's just a nice-sounding policy. Mine isn't that. It's a forcing function. Knowing a client could leave in thirty days keeps me looking at whether the work is actually moving something, which is the same standard I'd want if I were writing the check.

And it means the people I work with are there because they want to be, on both sides of the table. That's not a perk of the arrangement. At this point it's the reason for it.