Agencies
Eleven clients,eleven plans,eleven reports.
Running one business's channels is a chore. Running eleven is a different job entirely, and the part that breaks is never the writing — it is the last Friday of the month, when eleven reports have to exist and each one has to answer the same awkward question: what did the retainer buy.
The shape of the problem
An agency holding a content retainer is selling two things that look like one. The first is the work: posts appearing on the client's channels, in the client's voice, at a rhythm somebody agreed to. The second is the account of the work — a monthly document that lets the client see what they are paying for without having to go and look at eleven Facebook Pages.
The first is what the agency thinks it is selling. The second is what gets the invoice paid, and it is the one that gets done at eleven o'clock on the last Friday of the month by somebody copying figures into a template. That is the part FABLS is aimed at.
One account,
one plan per client.
Each client is a separate business on your account, with its own writers, its own plan, its own channels and its own report. Nothing leaks: a writer built for the dental practice does not know about the fitting company, and a plan does not draw on another client's themes.
What is shared is you. One sign-in, one brand per client, and in each one the same publishing queue: waiting for approval, going out, didn't go out, published. The approval work stays with the person who knows the client, and it is one account rather than eleven separate logins.
The Business plan is the one built for this — several businesses on one account, and priority support for when a client's Page does something unexpected at four in the afternoon.
- 1Nowak BakeryInstagram on autopilot since March. Blog and Facebook wait for you.
- 2Dental practiceEverything on approval, and every draft read for its caveats.
- !Fitting companyTwo Facebook posts didn't go out on Saturday. Facebook's own words: the token expired.
- 3Eight othersApproved one by one, brand by brand.
- 4Month endEleven reports already counting, from each platform's own numbers.
Separate plansA queue per brand
Nine clients, nine voices,
and not one of them is yours.
The report is the product
One report per client.
What each reader takes from it.
Each client's report shows planned against published, per channel and per day, with the top posts and the failures. It stays in FABLS and downloads as CSV; FABLS does not send it by e-mail, so the handover is yours.
The client's marketing person
The full CSV: planned against published, the breakdown by channel and by day, the top posts and the numbers each platform reported.
The client's owner
Frequently a different person, who has seen none of the posts and will read one page. Planned against published and the month's top post: the version that answers "is this worth continuing". You write that page; the report supplies the numbers.
Your account manager
The publishing queue and every failure, in the platform's own words, because the point of an agency is that the client hears about a problem from you rather than the other way round.
- 1Planned vs published17 planned · 16 published · 1 failed.
- 2Against the agreementBlog 4 of 4 · Facebook 6 of 6 · Instagram 6 of 7.
- 3ReceptionRead from each platform's own figures. Gaps stated as gaps.
- 4FailuresOne Instagram post, in Instagram's own words.
- 5CSVDownloaded on 1 December, for the client's folder.
- ·Handed overBy you: the CSV to the marketing lead, one page to the owner.
Counted, not typedNobody assembled it
Why this settles the awkward conversation
Content retainers get cancelled in a particular way. Nothing goes wrong; the client simply cannot see what happened, and after four months of not being able to see it, the line item starts to look optional.
A report that is ready on the first of the month, comparing what was planned with what was published, changes that conversation before it starts. It is not a persuasion document — it is the plainest possible account of a month — and that is exactly why it works.
It also protects you in the other direction. When a month was thin because the client never sent the photographs, planned against published shows exactly which posts did not go out, and you can say why. That is a much better conversation to have in writing on the first than by phone in March.
The honest bit: eleven clients is eleven queues of drafts, and somebody in your agency reads them. FABLS takes over the planning, the drafting, the publishing and the counting. It does not remove the judgment, and an agency that runs every client on autopilot to save the reading time has recreated exactly the service its clients could have bought for nothing.
Practical notes for the first month
Build one house writer of your own, for the pieces that go out under the agency's name, before you build any client writers. It is the fastest way to learn what a good persona description looks like, and you will rewrite the first three regardless.
Set the shares with the client, in the meeting, before the plan is compiled. Shares adding to a hundred is a constraint that makes for an honest conversation about what a retainer actually covers, and it is much easier to have that conversation in advance than in a report.
Connect every client's channels in week one. A channel connected in month four has no numbers before month four, which is the least convincing possible introduction to a report.
What Business includes What is in a report