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I Lost a Client's Retainer Over One Missing Approval Email, and It Cost Me $3,400
Six months ago a client walked because of a single missed approval step, and it took me almost three months to figure out what actually went wrong. Here is the thing, my process was a Google Doc for each project, and approvals just got marked "OK" in a comment thread. I had four people on that account and nobody could say who signed off on the final deliverable. When the client pushed back on an invoice, we had no paper trail, so we ate the cost and they fired us two weeks later. I finally sat down with my project lead in a coffee shop in Austin and we mapped the whole thing on a whiteboard, and the fix was stupid simple. Now every deliverable goes out through one shared approval link, and I check a Monday dashboard before anyone starts work. The whole rebuild took 11 days, but the fight that started it dragged on for 3 months. If you still track client sign offs inside email replies or Slack threads, what is your backup when a client says they never approved that and refuses to pay?
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the_terry7d ago
Yep, same boat. Email threads are a paper trail straight to nowhere.
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