Ep 162: Client Retention Strategy: Speak Their Appreciation Language
SUMMARY
You've got a client who loves a handwritten thank you card. You've got another who couldn't care less about the card but lights up when you show up to their launch party. Same appreciation, two completely different receipts.
Most creative business owners default to one appreciation move and run it on repeat. A gift here, a shoutout there. It feels generous. Sometimes it lands. Sometimes it just kind of sits there.
That's the problem worth naming: retention isn't a gratitude problem, it's a translation problem.
Where This Started
Years ago, Dustin read Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages. It's built for marriages, but the core idea travels well beyond them: people give and receive care differently, and assuming everyone receives it the way you give it is a quiet way to miss the mark.
Layer in Giftology, a short book on the practice of active listening in service of better gift giving, and you get the seed of an idea Dustin has been testing with his own partners for three years: what if client appreciation worked the same way?
The Five Business Appreciation Languages
Mapping the five love languages onto business partnership, four translate cleanly.
Words of Affirmation. Recognizing wins out loud. Complimenting the vision. Saying the great thing you noticed instead of just thinking it.
Acts of Service. Noticing a problem before they raise it, and solving it without being asked.
Gift Giving. Remembering meaningful details and marking milestones with something thoughtful and personal, not generic.
Quality Time. Investing in the relationship beyond the transaction. A coffee, a cookout invite, a lunch where the phone stays in your pocket.
The fifth, physical touch, doesn't translate. In its place, Dustin identified a fifth business-specific language:
Advocacy. Actively promoting someone else's work. Referring business their way. Treating their success like it's your own.
The Simple System That Surfaced the Real Answer
Rather than guess, Dustin built a short survey. Five categories, rated one to ten, plus one open question: describe a time a vendor, partner, or colleague made you feel genuinely valued.
The scale gave him the data. The story gave him the picture behind the data. Together, they told him something he didn't expect.
Why This Matters for Retention
This isn't a nice-to-have exercise. Dustin's read on it is direct:
Creative businesses are especially prone to silo. You're heads-down shifting between projects, and it's easy to let the relationship run on autopilot, assuming the work itself is the appreciation. It isn't. The people doing business with you and alongside you are looking for a signal that they matter beyond the invoice.
What Now
This system is still being built in real time, which is part of why it's worth sharing now rather than waiting for a polished version.
If you want to try it with your own partners:
Identify your five to ten most important client relationships.
Send a short, private survey: rate each of the five languages one to ten for how much it makes them feel valued.
Ask one open-ended question: describe a time someone made you feel genuinely appreciated in a working relationship.
Look for the gap between what you've been doing and what they actually rated highest.
Adjust one relationship at a time. Don't try to overhaul how you show appreciation to everyone at once.
The Bigger Picture
Creative businesses get siloed. You're heads-down on deliverables, shifting from one fire to the next, and you forget there are people who can link arms with you: clients, partners, adjacent colleagues. Appreciation, spoken in the right language, is one of the simplest ways to remember that you're building this together.
You create. We operate.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Not every partner receives appreciation the same way, and assuming they do is the fastest way to under-invest in a relationship you think you're over-investing in.
⚡️ The gifts he'd been giving were well received, but they weren't always the thing that made the relationship memorable. For several partners, the real answer was advocacy or quality time, not gifts at all.
⚡️ Appreciation that matches the right language is retention infrastructure, not a nice gesture on top of the work.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Sometimes people may not give you the full truth to your face, but if they can do it sideways on a digital form, they might be more apt to share how they really feel."
💬 "When we do that well, it's our best marketing tool, our best scalability tool, and our best longevity tool as a business owner, especially as a creative business owner."
💬 "I don't have an answer for this. I'm still wrestling through it, but I feel like we're onto something."
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
Everybody, welcome back to the Chief Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder and owner of Chief Creative Partners, where you get to create because we operate for you. Today we're back on the front porch. If you've been around the podcast for a minute, you know that every now and then I do what I call the front porch editions.
If you haven't heard it already, we got a new wind chime for our 20th wedding anniversary this year, given to us by our amazing in-loves, as we call them. My goal with these front porch editions is to give you something I've been thinking about, something I've been wrestling with and trying to figure out the best way to go about, in life or business. Today I want to share something I've been tossing around with several of our partners, and it's this idea of business appreciation languages.
Where this came from was a mix of a couple places. Years ago I read the book by Gary Chapman called The Five Love Languages. If you don't know it, especially if you're in a spousal relationship, go check it out. It helps you understand how each of you give and receive love. Translating that into business for me over the last three years, because I always want to make sure I'm speaking the language of my partners in a way they feel the most valued.
We're business owners, especially creative business owners, and we value those relationships. We get to create together. We get to collaborate together. So how do we do that, and in which ways are they going to best receive it?
If you've been around the podcast, you've heard me talk about the book Giftology. It's an amazing short book that teaches you the practice of active listening so you can gift better to people, so you can show them you're really caring and paying attention rather than just handing out generic gift cards. You're really practicing active listening so you can show them real, true, valued appreciation.
I started practicing that in my business and had some fairly good feedback at first. But what I started to notice was that not everybody feels appreciated by gift giving. That's hard for me to understand, because I love gifts. I love to get gifts, I love to give gifts. If you're listening or watching this and you want to send me a gift, I would love it and feel greatly valued and appreciated by that. But there are other ways to feel valued and appreciated, and I think it's important for us as business owners to make sure we're speaking the language of our partners in the area of appreciation. It's not a romantic love relationship, but we do love working with our partners.
So what does that look like for us? I started thinking that if the gift thing isn't hitting everybody, maybe it's more than just gifts that speak to their level of how they receive appreciation, how they feel appreciated as a business partner of mine. We call our clients partners. But whether you call them clients, customers, or partners, it doesn't matter. What does it look like for you to actually appreciate the people you're doing business with, or doing business alongside?
I believe that when we do that well, it's our best marketing tool, our best scalability tool, and our best longevity tool as a business owner, especially as a creative business owner. So I began to explore and have conversations with some friends and partners about what if, instead of just Giftology, there were also other languages of appreciation. That took me back to the five love languages with Gary Chapman.
There's acts of service. There's words of affirmation, high on my list. There's gift giving, obviously right there in Giftology. There's quality time, spending quality time together. And in the five love languages, there's physical touch. That's where I thought, okay, we're tracking through the love languages, I can see how these match in the business partnership world, but physical touch, I don't know how we do that.
So I started having conversations and exploring, and everybody said, yeah, words of affirmation, acts of service, gift giving, quality time, I can see how all of those pair into our business relationships. Physical touch, not so much. But then I started thinking, what's missing out of those four already? And I think it's advocacy. What I mean by advocacy is actively promoting someone else's work.
If you follow the stuff I do, I love curating content. I love taking other people's content and pointing to it, pointing other people to it and saying you should read this, you should watch this, you should listen to this. More often than not it's not my content, because I believe everyone has something to say, something to share, something to contribute, and I want to point people to that. Advocacy is a way of pointing. Hey, my business partner, my client, my associate, they're really great at landscaping, do you need a landscaper, because I know a great one. You're going to connect those two, and you're going to become an advocate for your client to get more business.
So I started thinking maybe these aren't necessarily love languages, maybe they're appreciation languages. Words of affirmation: we recognize wins, we compliment the vision, we tell someone out loud when something is great, not just in our heads. Acts of service: noticing a problem and solving it before they even know about it, going out of your way to solve something that's going to serve them in their business. Gift giving: easy, read Giftology, learn all about that. Quality time: investing in the relationship beyond just the transaction. Hey, do you want to grab a beer after work, do you want to grab coffee, want to grab lunch, we're having a cookout this week, would you like to come over. That's quality time. And then advocacy.
I started thinking about what my partners are when it comes to these business appreciation languages, so I just started asking them. What is your business love language, what is your business appreciation language? I explained the five, and I sent out a form to them. I love forms, I love surveys, I love to collect that data so I can actually know, because sometimes people may not give you the full truth to your face, but if they can do it sideways on a digital form, they might be more apt to share how they really feel.
I asked them to rate each of the five, one to ten, on what makes them genuinely feel valued as a partner. Words of affirmation: does this person recognize my wins, compliment my vision, tell me when something looks and feels and is really great about what we're doing? Acts of service: do they notice problems I didn't ask them to solve and just go ahead and handle it anyway? Gift giving: do they remember meaningful details and acknowledge milestones with thoughtful, personal gestures? Quality time: do I feel the most appreciated when they invest in the relationship beyond just the project, a call to connect, lunch, genuine presence, not spending time on your phone while you're hanging out? Advocacy: does my partner actively promote my work, refer business my way, treat my success as their own success?
I ended it with this. After they rated each one to ten, ten being they feel most valued when that happens, one meaning it doesn't really move the needle, I asked them to describe a time when some vendor, partner, or colleague made them feel genuinely valued. What did they do? That gave me not just the context of the scale, which was eye-opening, but also a story example, a visual around how they actually received that appreciation.
I don't have this all figured out. I'm still wrestling through it, but I feel like we're onto something. I don't know what the copyright situation looks like for doing a book on this, and we're already in the middle of writing my other book right now. But I think there's something to business partnerships and relationships and true, authentic community and collaboration and growing and building our businesses together. We're better together. I think that's especially important for us in creative businesses, because we get so siloed into our own little world, having to shift over here and change this, and we forget there are people who can link arms with us, whether it's our clients or other business associates and colleagues adjacent to us.
So I wanted to share that with you. That's my front porch thought. I'll do these front porch conversations whenever there's a fifth week. You may have noticed we've shifted the podcast to the first and third Thursday of the month, with the second and fourth Thursdays being a segment or a clip from the podcast. That gives me a little more time to make sure I'm giving you the best possible content. I'm working on some more interviews for the show, so you're not always hearing from me, and we're able to curate some of those conversations for you.
I'd love to hear from you. Which one of these business appreciation languages resonates with you the most? I've already started getting feedback from partners, and some of it surprised me. What I realized after doing this is that some of the gifts I gave, they liked them, that was cool, but it wasn't the thing that made it the most memorable. When they answered the survey, I found out they're actually more advocacy and quality time, or more acts of service and words of affirmation, than they are gift giving. If it's gift giving, great, I've got that figured out. If it's the others, I'm wrestling with what the best way is to do that on a regular basis, and not make it solely milestone based.
That's the show today. Next week we're picking back up on the book I've been writing. I'm excited to bring you the next chapter, which we're calling the Capacity Compass. How do we, as a creative business, understand and navigate what our current capacity is on any given week as we begin to take on more and more work? If we say yes to everything, we're setting ourselves and our teams up for failure. So how do we actually put that in black and white, on paper, and say here's the capacity we can handle right now? Manufacturing industries have become brilliant at this, and I studied them a little to understand what makes a good capacity compass for a creative business. We're going to talk about that next time on the Chief Creative Podcast. Y'all have a good week.