How much contact a client actually wants

Silence gets read as absence

A client who has heard nothing for two weeks does not conclude that work is progressing steadily. They conclude, with no evidence either way, that nothing is happening, and the longer the silence runs the more firmly that impression sets.

This is the single most common complaint about small suppliers, and it is rarely deserved. The work is usually being done. What is missing is any signal that it is, and from outside a one-person business there is no other way to tell — no office to walk past, no colleague to ask, nothing but whatever you choose to send.

An update exists to let them act

It is worth being clear about what the client needs the information for. Sometimes they must schedule something around your delivery. Sometimes they have to report progress to somebody else. Sometimes they simply need to stop worrying about it and think about something else.

Those require different updates. A client managing their own dependencies needs dates. A client reporting upwards needs something they can forward. A client who is anxious needs reassurance and very little detail. Sending the same kind of message to all three is why some updates land well and others produce four follow-up questions.

Too much contact has its own cost

The opposite failure is real, if less common. Constant messages consume the client’s attention, which they are paying you partly to preserve, and a stream of small questions suggests that the work can’t proceed without supervision.

There is also a subtler effect: frequent contact invites frequent input, and frequent input is how a scope drifts. A client asked to comment on every stage will comment on every stage, and some of those comments will become changes nobody has priced. Fewer, better-organised communications tend to produce fewer of these.

Agree the pattern at the start

The efficient solution is to say at the beginning how the job will be reported: a message at these points, or on this day each week, plus immediate contact if anything significant changes. It takes one sentence in a proposal.

Having said it, keep to it even when there is nothing to report, because a scheduled update that arrives saying work is proceeding as planned is doing its job. The clients who chase are almost always the ones who do not know when they will next hear from you, and a stated rhythm removes the reason to ask entirely, at a cost of perhaps two minutes a week.

What a good update contains

Lead with status rather than detail: whether the job is on track, and if not, what has changed. That is the only thing every client wants and it is frequently buried under a description of what you have been doing.

After that, anything they need to act on, clearly separated and with a date attached. Then detail, if it is genuinely useful. Most updates from small suppliers are the wrong way round, opening with process and arriving at the point three paragraphs later, by which time an inattentive reader has formed their own impression.

Bad news does not improve with keeping

The instinct when something goes wrong is to wait until there’s a solution to present alongside it. That is understandable and it is usually the wrong call, because the client’s ability to respond decreases as the deadline approaches, and being told late is what converts a problem into a grievance.

Told early, a delay is a piece of information they can work with, and handling it well often improves their opinion of you rather than damaging it. Told late, the same delay reads as either incompetence or concealment. The rule that serves best is that anything affecting their date, their cost or their obligations goes out as soon as it is known, with whatever you propose to do about it.

The medium is worth a moment of thought as well. Anything that changes what was agreed should be in writing, whatever else is said in a call, because a verbal explanation leaves no record and both parties will remember it differently in a month. Ordinary progress can go by whatever the client actually reads, which is not always the channel you would prefer. A message sent somewhere they never look is functionally the same as silence, and it produces exactly the same complaint.