Why you're getting this: You've interacted with Haven or AdTribe before, and this is my weekly-ish update on what I’m working on to build an agency I actually enjoy running. Zero pressure to stick around, just click unsubscribe if you don't want to get it

Alright, let’s get into it.

Last week before leaving Thailand, I finally made it south to Krabi.

Funny enough, I've been to Thailand more than five times and probably lived there for two years total, but I always went to the same place: Chiang Mai. I know, I'm boring.

This time I forced myself to actually see the beaches. Island hopping, snorkeling, great Thai food, and one of the islands where The Beach with DiCaprio was filmed. Genuinely one of the most beautiful places I've been.

The perfect way to finish my 3-month escape.

P.S. I’m back in Vancouver. If you’re around, let’s grab coffee 🙂

We manage a lot of client relationships across AdTribe and Haven, and I've always had a gut feeling that client communication was eating more time than it should. Especially for our media buyers.

So I pulled 6,159 Slack messages from client channels and ran them through Claude to see where communication was actually breaking down. Here’s what came back:

The number that surprised me most: almost half of all client communication is about creatives.

Not performance. Not strategy. Not results.

Creatives.

"Can we try a different hook?"
"I don't love this image."
"Let's test something new."

And the reason it's all happening in Slack is because there's no proper system for it. No versions, no deadlines, no clear approval loop. Just an endless thread that media buyers have to manage on top of everything else.

Budget questions at 21% were the second biggest category, and honestly those surprised me less. Clients ask about spend because they can't see it in real time. That's almost entirely fixable with a simple automated update.

The one that stood out in a good way: status updates were only 2%. That's because we send proactive weekly recaps. When clients already know what's happening, they stop asking.

So I asked Claude what to do with all of this. Here's what it suggested:

Move creative approvals out of Slack. Use a dedicated tool with versioning, comments, and deadlines. Set a 48-hour turnaround expectation during onboarding. Clients stop pinging when the process is clear.

Automate budget visibility. A simple daily or weekly pacing update sent automatically to each client channel. Most budget questions disappear because the information is already there.

Standardize proactive updates with templates. A weekly recap covering key metrics, what changed, and what's coming next. Clients who get updates on schedule stop asking for them mid-week.

The analysis itself took about an hour. Actually fixing the things it surfaced is going to take a lot longer, but we're working through it.

I'll share what we find.

Talk soon,

Dmitry