I Turned Upwork's MCP Into a Free Retention Board (FREE DOWNLOAD)

You're losing clients on Upwork, and yes, it's your fault. Nobody tells you that they're leaving, they just reply slower, then quieter, then never. That sounds familiar, right? Mine did it 5 times on almost the exact same day, day 90. I never saw the pattern until a tool drew it out for me, because that difficult client, half of the time you were the one that's sabotaging it. So I built the fix free of charge for you on Upwork's own MCP, a board that runs your retention on autopilot. And retention is the one thing that scales when Without you winning a single new project, one paste and it's free. At the end, this document that makes them stay. Now watch this. So how do you see the sabotage before it costs you a client? This is Claude empty project. There's nothing installed in here, and this is exactly where a beginner starts. If you've never created a project before, just head to projects in the menu on the left, create a project, and you'll land here. This video is for beginners. If you've never touched an MCP, if you don't even know what it means. None of it matters. Stay with me. The tool that handles that part for you inside of here is about to rear its head. Quick context whilst I'm inside of here. I'm top 1% on Upwork, expert vetted, over half a million earned, and I run companies outside of this arena with real boardrooms. Today you're gonna get one of those for free. And the download— this is solved before you ask because it's created into 5 files. I understand there was questions previously. 1 to 5, they're numbered. 5. File 2 is called Paste This Into Claude. That's exactly what you need. This is the whole install. Command+A, paste this in. That's the whole install. Look at its very first question. This is around the Upwork MCP. Upwork is connected because I already have mine connected. However, it will take you down a completely different line of questioning inside of here that explains the full implementation of the Upwork MCP. I also have another video that goes through the installation. It's extremely simple. Get the URL, connect it. Login. It's as simple as that. But if you don't have it, it will stop right there and force you to install it. You have everything you need in this brief. It gives you the Upwork official link and the exact steps. It's Upwork's own tool. 2 minutes, one time, and then it waits for you forever. Nobody gets left behind at the install. Not this time. Mine's connected, so it moves straight on. Now the most important thing here is that it makes one call, and notice that it literally states it every time it touches Upwork. You have to approve these changes as it goes. Then it reads my profile back to me, my rate, my wins. My actual 5-star reviews literally quoted to me. CEO, first, the $47 an hour rate on a profile that claims $130 million managed is a mismatch. A client notices. It's giving me feedback on profile optimization on Upwork. This is critical. So it pulls all my reviews, it knows exactly who I am, and it starts to mold me into what it needs to be. Hold that thought because the reviews that are in here are part of the secret at the end. Now this is going to interview me. You can see here, is it— does it one question at a time? And here's where the veteran thinking starts. It starts showing through. Beginner simple questions. It asks how clients pay me, you know, anything on the profile that's wrong or out of date. Because here's the first value most freelancers get wrong. A signed contract counts from the day that it's signed. Upwork can't see your deal terms, so a lazy tool gives your new clients a $0 amount, and suddenly you think that you're broke and you can't bid up connects anymore. You're padding bidding even on jobs that you don't need. This asks like a real CFO would and counts your signed money as signed money. So let me paste some of these answers in as we go because I have them ready for you so we don't have to wait. The second question about what clients pay me: fixed price monthly retainers always, you know, even when the job's quoted hourly. This is something you don't want to get tripped up on. I'm a massive advocate of fixed price retainers. You have to be quoting fixed price retainers in order for you to have an established ground of not being pushed down in terms of hourly work. It asks for your promise window. How quickly do you communicate with clients? If there are issues here or it thinks you're taking too long, it will pull you up on it. It's asking about connects, and watch how it reframes them. You know, when it comes down to this, connects aren't a tax. We know that they're a marketing budget. They're 15 cents each, and it's the cheapest marketing budget that you could physically possibly get. Trust me, I've spent millions advertising AdTrain, my PPC company, and for $45 for an application for a job that spends $200 grand a month, it is nothing to me. That job pays thousands a month. To give the CFO context, this is asking about what clients judge me on. If you're a web developer, if you are an AI automation specialist, it might be hours saved and efficiency. For me, it's direct return on ad spend. That's all that a client wants to get through. Now we're getting towards the end of this. Now it then asks for the day and time of your weekly meeting. This happens whether you're there or not, but I want mine at Sunday at 8, but I advised it Monday 7 AM UK time. You can update this with answering your question in your time zone. Then it asked me anything that I refuse to work on— hard skips, niches, project types. For me, this is all suspension-based— GMC suspension, account suspension. For you, it'll be something else, and that's why we're going through this process. In my previous MCP video, I heard a lot of comments around wanting to stay granular, so I'm going to take you through every single step of this now. So yeah, boring questions but honest answers, and that's the difference between a template and your business. Now it earns its seat. This is where it gets interesting. It announces a budget. 8 calls to Upwork's system once ever, and it paces them out so that you don't hit a rate limit. 8 to 10 seconds apart, each one counted on screen. Why am I so careful? Well, Upwork doesn't publish its rate limits. I hit them building my first system. The discipline is welded into this one. It reads 2 years of your closed contracts, 2 years of your money, your proposal history. If Upwork ever throttles it, it stops and works with what it has. It never dodges a limit. That's why you'll still have an account next year. And then it hands you the number I opened this video with. So it's gone through and it's now pulled all of the information that you need that a CFO would pull about your business. Now some of this is going to be blurred because obviously I don't want to give client names away, but all the amounts— you can see that the clients are listed. It shows you the day that they're on and how much is funded. It scores them out of 12 and gives you a color that allows you to be able to manage milestones, understand what clients need, and be able to provide them with information at this set time, which is the next step, and I'm going to show you in a moment. The key to this is actually in the board pack. So it provides you with a board pack that tells you what your monthly recurring revenue is, the stated amounts, things that might be causing issues. It tells you your concentration, which means how many of your projects put you severely at risk. My color there is amber because I have a big client on Upwork that could sabotage it. Now naturally, I have multiple different streams of inquiries and revenue. So this is not as big of a concern to me as it may be to you, but I should still monitor it closely. And that is the single biggest way to stop yourself being in a position where 2 or 3 clients dominate your income. If they go, you're exposed, and a good CFO would tell you about that. And that's exactly what it's done here. Connects balance, unread client messages. It then goes around client health, what is actually on a milestone this month in USD. Really key is this cliff document and/or graph. Now this is so important to anybody who's trying to retain clients because I never knew that this was my issue, and I've recently realized that that's the case, and that's why I've created this video. My problem is this: I win clients, and roughly the same amount of clients that stay for 2+ years stay for under 100 days. That is a massive problem and leakage, and if I can improve that by 25%, it means that a significant portion of my clients stay for a prolonged period of time that heads into years, not months, and allows me to extract LTV Which you'll see more about in my video on what I— how I performed in the, uh, application run that I did that week. But when it comes down to what is happening now and what happens next, this graph tells you everything you need to know. My cliff is after 71 to 98 days. What does that mean? If I survive day 98, the average outcome is a 14 to 18 month client worth 5 to 20x of the ones that die on the cliff. The next 30 days of the 4 new wins decide which side they land on. And the thing with that is this: if I'm in a position where the client is unhappy because maybe I've not managed expectations, maybe I've not sent them the correct welcome information, maybe I'm not reporting on their competitor analysis, and they start to waver in their understanding around what the project is and think that the grass is greener— and that is almost always the case— whose fault is that? That's not the client, because I deliver results for all of my clients. The problem is if they don't feel loved and they think that they can get more, then they will go. And that's the nature of Upwork. So here, you know, contract data said Client A was part of the cliff— was past the cliff and thriving. The message room says the relationship ended on day 42 over a lead quality complaint. And the client who needs you the most, W1— I've changed the names— sent the cause of her own crisis 2 days ago. The Google tags came off of her checkout page on the 1st of September, right before her brand campaign collapsed completely. So it's given me the correct people to actually go and respond to in the right order with a color-schemed graph that actually provides you with actionable items showing you what clients are waiting on, how many hours they've been waiting, and what their importance is, plus provides you with the drafts and things to do today in order. This is a game changer for freelancers because this is what agencies do and corporate businesses do. And if you want to know the difference between you and a major corporate that does exactly what you do, it's about 500 team members And extensive retention processes. That's the difference. I've worked both sides of the coin. You can clearly see that over time this has proven to be a problem for even me, and that is something I need to address internally. If you can't admit that you have that problem, it's going to harm you to the tune of, you know, 45%, 48% of your clients going inside of a 90-day window with the rest going on to be with you for years. The ones who— that maybe they push the envelope and get a better quality of service. I'll fix that in a moment. It pulls you up on things that you've missed and it ultimately takes us through the process of being able to retain clients and spot problems before they exist. So I'm going to head back into Claude now. And it was— there was one specific client that it mentioned. So what's the CFO going to do from here? We're in a position— you've watched me install it, how easy that was, you know, going backwards and forwards. But now how do we actually make it give us things that are going to improve our retention directly using the MCP? So what you need to do here— I've created my process based off of my timeline. Your timeline might be different. I should hope— I'd like to think that there'd be people out there that had retention that was higher from the Upwork platform than me. And the smaller clients are the ones for me that tend to leave. So I need this automated process in order for me to be able to actually keep clients of varying sizes. The large ones, they stay. The smaller ones, they tend to dip because the attention in terms of the time frames and what they actually have available to them, given the low data, means that you can't move needles like you can for larger businesses in my field. If you're the same, you might have a similar window to me. If you're not, then you'll have to tailor these times to exactly what you need to keep them. You want to retain them based off of your data, not mine. However, the whole tool does it for you, as you've just seen. These are examples. So I built out a welcome pack. When you sign a client, I've gone through numerous times about the individual stuff around clients that have scope creep, clients that don't onboard and then have buyer's remorse. You know, they're in a position where they've gone ahead with somebody. They don't know whether that's the case. So inside of here, this is the welcome of information. It pulls all of the reviews off of the profile, what other people say. It pulls these bits of information from clients' accounts on the profile, the revenue that's generated, you know, what people have said— 12.5x return on ad spend over 90 days. It tells them what to expect in their first 14 days, so it'll go through exactly what's happening, when the rebuilds begin, you know, first quick wins, all of these things. And then what to expect from the results weeks 1 to 4, 5 to 8, weeks 9 to 12, you are expectation managing without the client even knowing. They just think that you're onboarding them at this time. That is critical for an onboarding process. But how does that then retain them? You're off to the races. You've had a good start because the client doesn't receive that sort of thing, generally speaking. But now you're in a position where you hit the 30-day mark, which is basically the key anchor, because when they cancel isn't when they started thinking about it, it's when they actually pulled the trigger. So in the day 30 review, we get what we actually delivered. This is all mock data, but conversion tracking rebuilt, search terms cleaned, campaigns restructured, It shows them what the campaigns produce before days 1 to 30, the changes, honestly open and transparent. And we'll give them— if performance is down, it will explain why based off of your inputs and the way that you go backwards and forwards with it. It is AI, so you do need to read these. You cannot just fire them off on an automatic basis, especially to the Upwork platform. My advice is that you download them and create a 2 to 5 minute Loom and just go through them. The amount the retention increase from that, which is what I do for a lot of the big clients, that is something that I can see clearly in my work funnel that doesn't exist for smaller businesses. Then it says, what do I need from you? And that is critical because it keeps them in the loop working on the project, and they feel like they've got their hands or their finger on the pulse. And after that, we have a 90-day review example, which is even more detailed. This can pull— for me, it pulls Facebook. It tells them the report. It goes through individual things that I've done, their competitors, what to expect in the quarter ahead, and what I need from them. But I also send a document that analyzes their competition and goes through that, which is inside of the CFO for you to use. So you've seen the retention element. You've seen the CFO go through and produce some documents that give us a real understanding around what we need to do to retain clients. And the thing is, is that you can tailor this to your individual business. You can connect— once you have the project open, you can connect so many different connectors in here. Slack, Gmail, you can pull the Upwork conversations on a weekly basis. So the way my real project looks is that it has all of this in it. This is all I use. But what I also have is I have Slack connected with the Slack channels where I communicate with them. I have emails connected so it can pick up any emails that I've sent backwards and forwards. I also pull live account data so it understands the real data without having to go and dig. Why is that important? Well, that's important for us because if we're communicating with clients, Claude can understand— slash, your CFO can understand exactly where that client is, issues that it may have brought up about relationship management or canceling calls, and themes that it spots. All of those things give you the output that is required in order for you to be able to actually retain them based off of their specific issues. Some clients don't want to talk, but they're very Slack heavy. Some clients want to speak every week. Some clients start canceling those weekly meetings, and it's indicative of a cancellation. All of this is picked up by your CFO. I strongly advise you to use this as a baseline. This will help you with your retention. It will help you with how much you should spend on connects to stay profitable. It will help you grow your business. And not only that, you're in a position where I've documented— I think there's like 30 questions in here, 25 questions with examples So a real conversation, live data, so I don't have to go through it with you. So where's my revenue going? Up if you land the cohort. Contracted run rate on this channel is X amount per month, X amount in established money and new retainers that have been signed. That gap is the whole story. If the 4 new clients cross my cliff, this is the channel's best quarter. But if they die at it, you're back to X clients carrying X percent of the weight. Which client is my cancellation risk? It'll tell you which client is where the concentration is a problem. What happens if I lose my biggest client tomorrow? When can I afford my first hire? All of these questions are just examples for you to ask your CFO and ask your retention manager. I've built a full C-suite of executives for you to help you run your freelancing business, because guess what? Even though it's a freelancing business, you could look at that and think that you could do it all manually. This will change your life in terms of how you handle clients, and clients will respect you for it. There is no limit to how far you can go with this. Spend 10 minutes conversationally speaking backwards and forwards with your CFO and retention manager in here and watch what happens. You will then have an output that is tailored to you that you can change color schemes on graphs. You can give it your, you know, your brand colors, brand tone of voice. You could do anything that you physically want to. I'm going to continue to produce these MCP videos because I think they're extremely valuable for people. And I think that this is how you're going to be able to leg up. I don't plan on growing my own business and getting retention nailed in for my company without sharing it with you guys. If that sounds like you, like, subscribe, drop me a comment below, and ultimately keep your eye out for these videos because eventually we're going to have a full suite of business managers or opportunities for reporting and retention that just aren't physically possible without an MCP pulling all of that data and then being able to optimize towards it to treat your clients with the 5-star service they get from agencies in terms of communication and reporting. Without the, you know, 5-figure or, you know, 6-figure bill depending on how big they are, 6-figure bill that they receive and the long-term contracts that lock them in. This is how we're going to nail it. I'm going to take you on a freelancing journey. Hit the subscribe button. I'll catch you in the next one.