Client Retention Strategies: Tips to keep your clients, longer (feat. Eric Lalonde, CEO of WriteUpp)

What if the secret to client retention had nothing to do with doing better work? And what it does have to do with is 100% in your control, and currently being totally ignored in the back-end of your business?

Jenna opens this episode with a story that might make you uncomfortable — about a service provider whose backend was so polished, so organized, so buttoned up... that it bought them months of grace they didn't deserve. And it completely changed how she thinks about client retention strategies.

Keeping clients coming back to your practice doesn't means working harder, undercharging, or saying yes to everything. In fact, that approach is a fast-track to burnout.

In this episode, Jenna sits down with Eric Lalonde, CEO of WriteUpp — an all-in-one practice management platform used by over 47,000 clinicians across 35+ countries, to talk about what how to KEEP your best clients coming back.

In this episode:

• The counterintuitive story that'll reframe how you think about retaining clients
• Why your backend systems are building (or destroying) trust before you've even delivered anything
• What Disney figured out about client experience that most small businesses completely miss
• The 3 invisible systems doing the heavy lifting on client retention
• Why Eric says communication is the single biggest factor in whether clients come back
• How WriteUpp brings scheduling, records, invoicing, reminders, and more into one place — so your experience feels seamless without you managing five different tools

If you've ever wondered why great work alone isn't keeping clients around, this episode is going to hit.

🔗 Learn more about WriteUpp at writeupp.com

Read the Client Retention Strategies Blog: https://jennaharding.com/client-retention-strategies-back-end-systems-to-help-your-practice-keep-clients-long-term/

This episode is sponsored by WriteUpp ❤️ Thank You! 

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Jenna Harding (00:00)
Let me take you back to a few years ago where I hired a service provider I was so excited to work with. And I thought they were gonna be amazing. When I signed on with them, they were so organized. The onboarding was crystal clear, beautiful. Every time I talked to them, they had so much confidence.

I thought that I was in safe hands, I handed over my money. And then after working with them, it proved that they really didn't know what they were doing and they couldn't give me what I needed and the relationship ended. Now that is a sad, sad story, but it does teach us something. It teaches us how critical first few moments with a new client are. When you're...

back end of your business is organized. When your communication and your invoicing and your booking calendar are organized with a client, they breathe a sigh of relief. They trust you more and you set yourself up for having a good relationship with them. Which is why today we are talking about how having an organized back end of your business

can help you retain your clients so they don't leave, so they stay happy. And I've brought in an expert to talk to us about it.

Sitting across from me in this virtual box, I have Eric Lalonde, who is the CEO of WriteUpp, which is essentially an all-in-one clinic admin system. So this is a newer company, right? Eric, how old's the company?

No, actually we've been around for 12 years. my gosh, what? Are you newly to Canada? Yes, we've really recently brought it to Canada. Okay, so that's what I was thinking about. So you know what you're doing. It's old hat. Yes, very much so. And basically it's a program to help clinics be completely organized on their back end. Practices, You mentioned med spas, vets, all sorts of, if you've got this business that people come to. Yes.

I'm explaining it so poorly. You explain it. No, I'm loving it. So from every kind of walks of life, what I like to say is anybody that essentially is in the business of providing a service to a human or an animal seems like we can support. in Canada, actually one of the groups that's found their niche with us is nurse practitioners. because there's more more nurse practitioners led clinics.

And so they found their niche. So as I said, anything from psychiatry all the way to animal care, have, It's been real interesting. when I first started looking into you guys, I was like, this is such a good way to keep clients happy because I work with so many service providers who have these businesses and they got into business because they like working with people.

Right? They have a way to change someone's life. And then they look at finances and booking calendars and communications, there's all this back end bull that they need to handle. And it's overwhelming. Yeah. Yeah, very much so. So essentially you're describing the ideation of WriteUpp right? If you think about the basic concept is exactly what you said, right? Let's pick a physiotherapist went to school to help a human feel better about some ailment.

And then they get into the business on their own, they run the place, they start seeing people and then they're like, no, I gotta book stuff, I gotta maintain files, I gotta maintain files securely, right? They know nothing about IT infrastructure, I keep those files in order to be secure and compliant with Canadian laws or wherever they may operate. so it just keeps piling on and on on on. And at some point you may end up with 16 different service providers. So.

The idea behind a company like WriteUpp is how can we provide all that in a single experience? Our job is to bring the business in a box and their job is to, once they operate with that, they can focus on the clients and the people that they want to be supporting. Okay, let me ask you this. Can you think of a business that you hired personally that retained you for a century or however long and what made you stay with that company?

I would say to me it's always about the experience, right? If you think about, if you're talking to me personally, I'm someone who's extremely busy, not a lot of time, travels often. So to be able to be knowledgeable when I show up, right? To be able to communicate with me on my own terms, because unfortunately I don't meet their standard requirements and all that.

So to be able to keep track of me whether that would be a care plan or whether that would be like, I know why you're coming in today, not having you try and imagine, right? You're suffering from knee pain and you go back to the same place or a physio and all that. And every time you walk in, they're like, why are you here again? So on a personal level, when I think of people that have retained me is they were prepared, organized. They knew what was that about. Communication was key.

and least but not least meaningful is the ease of interaction. If every time I come in, you don't remember who I am, you don't know what kind of payment I take, the insurance form isn't filled out, like all that kind of stuff can be quite And that's too much also for solopreneurs to keep in their heads. absolutely. Right? You're gonna forget one. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I have two service providers that come to mind right now that I work with.

who I'm obsessed with and both of them I love and both of them don't always hit their deadlines. And you know what? I do not care because, do you wanna guess? Good service. Well, yeah, mean good service. They're really good at what they do, but because of communication. Like if they're gonna miss something, I get a letter that's like, hey Jenna, it's gonna be in tomorrow.

One, I know that there's a reason. I know that when it arrives, it's going to be excellent. And they told me instead of just lying or hiding or rushing it. absolutely. here's a fun little story for you. One of the things I'm partially obsessed with, and I will thank my wife for this because my wife works in healthcare as well, is she made me read this book years ago. What would happen if Disney ran your hospital?

you just described there is if you think about your experience in a retail shop, if you're waiting in a long line and you have no idea why you're waiting in a long line, you're frustrated with it. What has Disney done, for example, is that they found a way to make the line fun they're explaining to you why you're waiting and the time spent and whatnot. So all of a sudden you're waiting three hours, but it's part of the fun it's not as fun, but they've explained it along the way, right?

if you make the experience meaningful to the person engaged, they tend to forgive a lot.

they have a university over there that we can just take like business school at Disney? There is? What?

yeah, you can actually attend. Yeah, you can attend business class at Disney on the Disney way. Absolutely. And they have different, depending on if you're retail or big business or healthcare. Absolutely. my gosh. I actually have quite a few friends who live around Orlando who've been like Disney people for life and whether they're catering or experience. Yeah. So I, not to say that it has guided me, but there's quite a few things that I took from there as from the importance of the experience in communication.

I mean, in terms of client retention, like they keep people for decades, like your entire life, you'll be a fan. when you're a little kid, you're like watching the Disney Channel and you want to go and ride. And then when you're an adult, you become your Disney adult and there's different things like university to tickle your fancy absolutely.

Sorry, I was looking behind me to see if I could find a Disney, reference or a Star Wars reference, not that they bought Star Wars years ago. I'm like, yeah, maybe. right. Cause you've got all your, your toys and fandoms on the wall behind you there too. That's correct. That's correct.

So just like individuals grow alongside Disney, I think a lot of the systems that business owners set up in those first one to three years are not scalable. know for me, when I was doing social media management for various entrepreneurs, and I've told this story before, but I started organizing my clients using

cue cards cut in half and each one had my client's name on it and I laid them out on my desk and I had a crystal for each person. And when I was done their account for the day, I would put a crystal on it and that was my project management software. I love it. I can visualize it. It's amazing. And then not to mention like invoices were being made as Word docs and like exported as PDFs, know, like

And then as the business grew, you're now getting, it's this double-edged sword because you're getting busier, so you don't have time to focus on your backend, but your backend is the thing that's slowing you down. And then you think that you don't have more capacity, but you actually do have more capacity if you took an afternoon off to set up new systems to open up that capacity. Yeah. So that's a great point. And there's so much to unpack here. I kid you not, I could probably talk to you in the next.

half hour about different angles to this. There's so much. So as you said, right, often when you start out, you don't want to invest too much. You're, you're obviously careful with your span because there's no cashflow and all that. So you set up little systems here and there and what you don't realize, and this is from experience of like a decade of talking to different providers is that system ends up eating your time to the point where you will often hear of burnout in the solopreneur space.

because that takes over everything else, right? Because they're trying to fill their days with meeting patients or people that they wanna provide service to. And then like, damn, I gotta do my practical notes or my legal notes at night or my insurance papers or my invoicing. The number of people I've met over a decade that have to schedule a Saturday and or Sunday. I remember a specific case, there were a couple providing mental health services,

and they had one weekend a month where all the kids had to come back home and they did invoicing on the Saturday and Sunday. my goodness. like those systems to your point, right? They don't scale because you're trying to piecemeal as you get along. And that's why an offering like WritteUpp for example, will say, well, no, we're trying to think of every one of those elements. Not only that, over time, as know, industry grows, the trends will change and whatnot. We will come back and add features and make them optional for you.

If it fits for you, get to add the option. of the things that I've highlighted before is our new offering for mobile payments, a payment terminal. It's been a pain forever to deal with the bank, to pay for the terminal in-house or to pay an aftermarket or plug in your Square. Sometimes they break down, you don't know what to do. There's troubleshooting. Now we fixed that. It's in your phone. It's an app. You have nothing to do but to download it.

people now know how to do this, right? This is an evolution that if they're stuck in their old ways, They don't know it exists. As where when you have a solution like WriteUpp you get an email and they, hey, by the way, if this pertains to your business, it's now available. If it's not, you know, hope you like our next innovation. This also makes me think of when I was a bartender back in the cash bar days, but like at end of the night, there was a lot of credits going through.

And we had a POS terminal that was on a wire because we didn't have the cordless ones yet. that held things up. I think it's a metaphor, Eric, but like imagine you're at this busy bar and it's two o'clock and everyone's trying to cash out, two o'clock in the morning and everyone's trying to cash out and you've got this terminal with a wire. So whenever bartender A has passed it to someone across the bar, bartender B can't.

travel behind the bar because that wire is in her freaking way, right? And it took forever and our bosses were not around at two o'clock in the morning. And we had to like advocate, if I recall correctly, to be like, can you please get us a cordless terminal? Like we will make you more money faster and get out of there so you can stop paying us hourly if you get us a cordless, like sometimes it's a tiny thing. Yeah, but again, there's so much to unpack there. I'll add an angle that you haven't mentioned, customer experience.

how many clients were upset that they had to wait in line at two in the morning before checking out and go home, potentially slightly impaired because they had to wait in line to pay. this all has to go with the experience. And going back to your initial question, how do you keep clients happy over time is making the experience and making the communication seamless. You knew behind the bar that that wasn't a good experience. You knew it. just didn't have the tool to fix it. And if the boss is not around to witness it, out of sight, out of mind, right? Like it's,

It always ties in. Yeah. I would never make you speak ill of a competitor. I wouldn't. I would never ask you to. Eric, but there is a company out there and I won't say their name. I won't even, I won't even say it because I don't want to be bashing other companies. But I know a lot of service providers use this company to make it easier for them.

and I've had multiple service providers where I'm the client and it makes it so much harder for me. Like it's harder for me to pay, it's harder for me get my materials, it's harder for me to communicate and they like it because it's easy for them. And so I just really think if we can open up a little bit of space in our very busy practices to think about that client experience.

And how much more valuable it is to keep a client rather than to get a new one all the time. yeah, I love that you brought that up. Like the client satisfaction and making it comfortable for your customers and easy to pay and, you know, don't give me too many logins, like all of that. No, that's painful. And what are you talking about? That retail experience or that for say mental health experience? These people talk, right?

I had a terrible experience at the bar. I had to wait 20 minutes in line to pay at two in the morning. What the heck is this? Can we find another place? Right? People talked, I'll tell their friends, especially if it's a community place, like you're going to hurt your repeat business and you don't even know that that's happening. Right? So there's stuff like that. While I never talk ill of competitors specifically, I'll speak of what we do really well. So here's one of the things that I love to mention and my CTO absolutely hates me for it.

WriteUpp up is present in over 35 countries. So we have clients active in over 35 countries. And in all of 2025, we were down for four minutes. That's good. So no, no, no system slow down, like nothing meaningfully impacting. Imagine when we're doing virtual counseling or therapy, like we are now imagine if you couldn't start the video session on time.

Or if it wasn't available, it hurts your business. It hurts your reputation, even though you had nothing to do with it. So picking the right partner is super important. So that's one of things I'm extremely proud of is that in all of 2025, we were down four minutes. your CTO hates that because they were the worst four minutes of their life or what? No, because he thinks I'm going to jinx him and it's going to get worse. Okay, copy. Hasn't happened yet this year again.

He's going to hate this part. Well, Eric, thank you so much for being here to share your wisdom and for like making this all sound easy. this is the stuff that business owners hate to do. And you know, that makes us break out into a cold sweat and you and WriteUpp are making it so easy and accessible. So thank you for that. My pleasure.

Jenna Warriner (15:23)
Today's episode is sponsored by WriteUpp And just so you know what we are saying, it's W-R-I-T-E, like write with a pencil, U-P-P, Writeupp You just heard the CEO break it all down. So you already know the deal. But I do want to add this: the businesses that retain clients best aren't always the ones with the best service, as you heard me state at the beginning of this episode,

I think the people who retain the most clients are the people with clean systems, the best communication, and I'll also add who are genuinely fun to be around. But maybe that's my bias.

Anyway, WriteUpp helps you with client records, scheduling, invoicing, automated reminders, online booking, even video consultations. It's all in one place under the WriteUpp They have over 47,000 clinicians already using it and their support team responds in an average of seven minutes because, like we said, communication. Check out all the info for WriteUpp underneath this episode. That's all from me.

I'll see you in the next one.