Lexa Simon

A long-standing customer had decided to move to a custom-built platform. Their subscription needed content to unlock month by month, and they'd concluded our product couldn't do it. They weren't unhappy with us - they thought we simply couldn't.

I asked for a video call before they committed to anything, and spent it on their actual model rather than on the missing feature. Then I rebuilt the model out of parts the product already had - timed release inside courses, plus a labelling convention - and had it running on a test system while we were still talking.

They stayed. They still run it, and so do the partner trainers in their network.

A multi-year customer lost the internal person who ran their platform. Everything still worked; nobody left knew how or why. Meanwhile their end users were running into payment problems.

I started with the thing that hurt their customers most - traced the payment problems, got people refunded, stopped the cause. Then structure: pricing tiers, access rules, a tidy-up of what the previous owner had left behind. Only after that, growth - building new courses and monetising an archive they'd been sitting on for years.

One consultation became a standing fortnightly session that's still running. The account moved from reactive troubleshooting to actively building new courses and selling content it had been sitting on unused.

At one of our most important partners, the day-to-day platform work sat with an assistant, not the founder. The convention was to take phone calls only from decision-makers.

I made the assistant my main contact instead - took her calls, worked problems with her directly. That kept small issues from turning into escalations to a founder. When I saw the reporting gap she kept hitting in several other accounts too, I wrote it up for engineering: her own wording, the wider pattern, and a request for a timeline.

A recurring complaint became a tracked development item. The account stayed stable, with no escalation.