They Didn't Turn Down the Strategy. They Didn't Use It.

I built a social media plan for a client, walked them through the deck, and offered to train their team and handle the day-to-day if they wanted the help. They said the strategy was great, thanked me, and told me they’d take it from here.

For months after that, they posted without any of it. No calendar, no throughline, no plan. Just whatever felt right that day.

Guessing in public

Then they came back and told me social wasn’t working. What they’d been calling trying everything was really guessing in public, one unrelated post after another, with nothing building on what came before. A post about a promotion, then a photo of the shop, then something seasonal, each one starting from zero.

I want to be fair to them, because they weren’t being careless. They were busy, they liked the plan, and they believed they’d get to it. The deck sat in a folder while the days went on. That’s how most plans die: nobody rejects them, they’re just never the most urgent thing on a given afternoon.

The strategy wasn’t turned down. It was set aside, politely, one busy day at a time.

The second time in the room

We got back in a room together. I walked them through the same deck a second time, except this time I sat with them while they used the tools themselves. I didn’t hand over a document and leave.

The next post they put up got more engagement than anything they’d posted on their own.

What I’m still unsure about

It worked, and I’m not entirely comfortable with why. The strategy hadn’t changed since the first pitch. Same deck, same calendar, same advice. What had changed was me, from someone who hands off a plan to someone who sits in the room until it’s running.

That bothers me a little. It would be easier if the lesson were that the client needed to try harder, or that the deck needed to be better. Neither is true, and the uncomfortable version is that the first handoff was mine to get right and I treated delivering the document as the end of the job.

I don’t know yet how far that scales. Sitting with someone while they use the tools takes time, and I can’t do it for every client at once. What I do know is that offering the training was not the same as doing it, and the difference showed up in the results.

Now when I build something for a client, I plan for the part after the handoff, because that’s where it either starts working or doesn’t. Looking back at the first pitch, I’d put the training session on the calendar before the deck was finished, not offer it as an add-on at the end.

When has someone taken your advice on paper but only used it once you were standing there with them?