Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026

Quick question before you read anything else.

Think about the last company that genuinely impressed you as a customer. Not the best product. The one that made you feel something.

Now try to remember the whole experience. Every email. Every invoice. Every step.

You can't. Nobody can.

What you remember is a moment or two. The guy who remembered your name. The handwritten note in the box. The time something went wrong and they fixed it so fast you actually liked them more afterward. And probably how it ended.

That's the whole memory. Everything else got tossed.

Here's why that matters to you this week. Your clients are doing the exact same thing with you. They aren't keeping a running tally of every task you completed this year. Their brains are quietly picking two or three moments and filing the rest under "fine." And when they decide whether to renew, refer you, or leave you a review, they're not reaching for the tally. They're reaching for the moments.

Most owners never design those moments. They just hope a few good ones happen by accident.

Today we fix that.

Back in 1993, Daniel Kahneman and a few colleagues ran an experiment that sounds like a fraternity prank.

They had people stick a hand in painfully cold water for sixty seconds. Then, separately, they had the same people do a second trial. Sixty seconds at the same painful temperature, plus thirty more seconds while the water warmed up by a degree or so. Still cold. Still unpleasant. Just a little less awful at the very end.

Then they asked which trial people would rather repeat.

Most picked the longer one. Ninety seconds of suffering over sixty. Because it ended a little better.

Kahneman later found the same pattern with colonoscopy patients. The way the procedure ended shaped how people remembered the whole thing, more than how long it lasted.

Researchers call this the peak end rule. When we look back on an experience, we mostly judge it by two points. The most intense moment, good or bad. And the end. Duration barely registers.

Chip and Dan Heath built a whole book on top of that idea, called The Power of Moments, and it's the book of the week in Friday's roundup. Their argument is simple and a little uncomfortable for service businesses. Most of what you do for clients is forgettable. Not bad. Forgettable. And forgettable doesn't get referred.

The National Retail Federation expects holiday sales to grow 4.2 percent this year and top a trillion dollars for November and December. People are going to spend.

But they're spending nervous. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index bounced up in October, and in the same breath consumers kept writing in about frustration with rising costs. Translation for you: money is moving, but every dollar is getting a second look.

When people are watching every dollar, the providers who get kept are the ones people remember. The ones who get cut are the ones who were "fine."

And here's the timing piece. The next eight weeks are full of natural moments you can use. Year end. Thanksgiving. The holidays. The last check in of the year. The first project of next year. If you don't design those moments, your clients will still have them. They'll just have them with someone else's holiday card in their hand.

So let's build them. Seven steps.

Before you add anything, figure out what your clients actually go through.

Grab a sheet of paper and write down every step a client takes with you, from the first time they hear your name to the moment the work wraps up or renews. For most service businesses it looks something like this.

First contact. The sales call. Saying yes. The first day. The first week. The first result. The middle stretch where everything is just work. Problems. The end of a project or a contract. The renewal or the goodbye.

Now go through that list and score each step honestly. Plus two if a client would tell a friend about it. Zero if it's fine. Minus two if it's a pain.

I'll warn you. Most owners who do this find a long line of zeros with a couple of minus twos sprinkled in. Almost nobody finds a plus two they built on purpose.

That's normal. It's also the whole opportunity.

The Heaths make a point that's easy to skip because it's boring. Before you go building magical moments, fix the stuff that hurts.

A surprise gift doesn't cover up an invoice that's confusing, a login that never works, or a project that goes silent for three weeks. Those are pits. And pits are peaks too, just the wrong kind. Remember the peak end rule. The most intense moment counts most, and a really bad moment is intense.

Look at your minus twos. Pick the worst one. Fix it this month.

Common pits I see over and over in small businesses:

The silent middle. The client signs, gets onboarded, then hears nothing until something's due. They start wondering if anything is happening.

The confusing bill. Line items nobody understands, or a charge that shows up without warning.

The handoff drop. The person they bought from disappears and someone new shows up who doesn't know their story.

The ghost ending. The project just stops. No wrap up, no summary, no thank you.

That last one is the most expensive, because it's the end. And the end is half of the memory.

The Heaths tell a story about John Deere that I think about a lot. For years, a new employee's first day there was like most companies. Show up, nobody's ready, sit in an empty cube, fill out paperwork. So the company redesigned it. A welcome message from a buddy before day one. Their name on a sign when they walk in. A desk that's actually set up. A gift tied to the company's history. And a meeting with someone senior who tells them why their work matters.

Same company. Same job. Totally different first memory.

Your clients have a first day too. It's usually the day after they pay you. And for most businesses, that day is an automated receipt and a calendar link.

Here's a simple first day build you can install this week:

Within one hour of payment, a personal video or voice message from you. Sixty seconds. Their name. What happens next. Why you're glad they're here.

Within one day, a short welcome doc that answers the questions they're too polite to ask. Who do I contact, how fast do you respond, what happens in week one, what does success look like in ninety days.

Within one week, something small that shows up in their actual life. A book you love, a note card, something that fits what they're working on. Not swag with your logo on it. Something they'd actually keep.

If you run your onboarding through Go High Level, the welcome doc and reminders can fire automatically the minute they sign. The video and the gift stay human. That part's the point.

The Heaths break great moments into four ingredients. Elevation, insight, pride and connection. Pride is the one service businesses ignore the most, and it might be the easiest to create.

People feel pride when they hit a milestone. The problem is that most client work doesn't have milestones. It has one big finish line that's months away. So the middle feels like a long walk in fog.

The fix is what the Heaths call multiplying milestones. Take the big goal and cut it into smaller wins you can actually point at.

If you do marketing, the first win might be the first lead from a new campaign. If you're a coach, it might be the first week your client keeps the habit. If you build websites, it might be the first page they can actually show their spouse. Pick something real that can happen in the first thirty days.

Then celebrate it. Out loud. On purpose.

A short message works. "Hey, I want to point something out. Three weeks ago you didn't have a single booked call from this page. Today you had four. That's real. Nice work." Screenshot the number. Send it.

It costs you two minutes. And it gives your client something they'll repeat to someone else, which is the only kind of marketing that actually compounds.

Every business screws up. The question is what the screw up becomes in the client's memory.

Handled badly, a mistake is the most intense moment of the relationship, and it lands right in the "never again" pile. Handled well, it can become the best story they tell about you.

Here's a recovery playbook that works:

Own it fast. Same day if you can. Don't wait until you have a perfect explanation.

Say what happened in plain language. No corporate fog. "We missed the deadline on your launch emails. That's on us."

Fix it, and tell them exactly when it'll be fixed.

Then do one thing they didn't ask for. Extra time, an extra deliverable, a personal call. Something that says this mattered to us.

The Magic Castle Hotel in Los Angeles is a favorite example in the book. It's not a fancy hotel. But by the pool there's a red phone on the wall. Pick it up, and someone answers "Popsicle Hotline." A few minutes later a staff member in white gloves brings popsicles out on a silver tray, free. Nobody's going to remember the room. Everybody remembers the red phone.

You probably don't need a popsicle hotline. But you can have a "we messed up" moment that's so good people talk about it.

This one is right in front of you, and most people waste it on a generic holiday card.

Sometime between now and the middle of December, send every active client a short personal recap of the year you had together. Not a newsletter. Not a template with their name swapped in. A real note.

Three parts:

Where they started. Remind them what things looked like when you first met.

What changed. Two or three specific wins, with numbers if you have them.

What you're excited about next year. One sentence that points forward.

This hits pride, because you're showing them how far they came. And it hits connection, because it proves you were paying attention the whole time.

If you record your client calls with Fathom, go back through the summaries and pull the wins out. You'll be shocked how many good moments you forgot about. Your clients forgot them too. That's why you're reminding them.

Handwritten is better if you can swing it. A typed letter in the mail is great. A thoughtful email is fine. A text that says "happy holidays from the team" is not a moment. It's noise.

Back to the cold water. The ending changes the memory of everything before it.

So decide how your engagements end, before they end.

When a project wraps, do a short closing call. Walk through where they started and where they landed. Give them a one page summary they can share with their boss or their spouse. Ask what they'd want if you worked together again. And then thank them in a way that sounds like a person, not a form.

When a client leaves you, which will happen, end it well anyway. Make the handoff easy. Send their files. Wish them well and mean it. People remember the providers who were classy on the way out, and a surprising number of them come back.

And if you want this whole system to run without living in your head, set up a simple automation in Make.com that pings you on the moments that matter. Ninety days in. Project wrap. Contract anniversary. Two weeks before renewal. The automation doesn't create the moment. It just makes sure you don't miss it.

Most owners already know clients should have a great experience. That's not new.

The reason they don't build it is that moments feel soft. They don't show up on a dashboard. You can't measure a handwritten note the way you can measure a click through rate. So the moments get pushed to "when things slow down," and things never slow down.

When I was rebuilding, everything felt like it had to produce a number right now or it wasn't worth doing. But some of my longest client relationships started with a moment I didn't plan. A thank you call I made because I felt like it. A recap I wrote because I was proud of what we'd done. I didn't do those things for a return. They came back anyway.

The difference now is I'd rather not leave it to how I feel on a random Tuesday. I'd rather build it in.

Trying to wow everyone at once. Pick one moment and do it well before you build the next one.

Making it about your brand. A logo coffee mug is not a moment. A gift that fits their life is.

Skipping the pits. If the basics are broken, the peaks feel fake.

Automating the human part. Automate the reminders. Keep the voice, the note and the call yours.

Forgetting the end. If you only fix one thing this quarter, fix how things end.

I built out everything from today's letter so you can install it this week instead of rebuilding it from an email.

It's called The Peak Moments Kit. Inside you'll find the client journey map with the plus two, zero, minus two scoring built in, a pit finder checklist, a first day build with welcome video and voice note scripts, a welcome doc template, a gift idea list that isn't swag, a milestone multiplier worksheet with first win message templates, a mistake recovery playbook with word for word scripts, the year end recap letter template, a project wrap call agenda and one page summary, a graceful goodbye script for clients who leave, an automation trigger list for your CRM, and a fourteen day rollout plan to get your first moments live before Thanksgiving.

Free. Nothing to opt into. Duplicate the page into your own Notion and start tomorrow.

Get The Peak Moments Kit here

And if you map every step your clients take and realize the problem isn't the moments, it's that there's no real system under the business at all, that's a bigger conversation. It's exactly the kind of thing we build at Pinnacle Masters. Hit reply and tell me which step scored the lowest.

Don't build the whole kit this week. Two things.

Map your client journey and score every step. Plus two, zero, minus two. Fifteen minutes.

Then pick your three best clients and send each of them a short note this week pointing out one specific win from this year. Not a pitch. Just the win.

Watch what comes back.

A year from now, your clients won't remember most of what you did for them this fall. Give them two or three things worth remembering.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman

Tools I use and trust. If you sign up through these links I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I actually use.

Go High Level, forms, CRM and follow up in one place

Fathom.video, AI meeting notes that actually capture what matters

Make.com, automate your workflows without writing code

Beehiiv, where serious newsletter operators publish