The Two-Page Client PDF That Saves Us 6 Hours a Month

The Wi-Fi Will Always Break

It is a universal law of consulting: The importance of the meeting is inversely proportional to the reliability of the internet connection.

You are standing there, HDMI cable in hand, sweating slightly. The client is waiting. On the screen, a spinning wheel of death is trying to load your magnificent, interactive, real-time dashboard. It fails. You apologise. You try to tether to your phone. The client checks their watch.

It is dodgy, really. We rely on these heavy, web-based tools to prove our worth, but when the tech fails, we look incompetent. And even when it works, we are asking the client to navigate a maze.

I stopped playing this game years ago. Now, I send a PDF. Two pages. No animation. No drill-downs. Just the truth, frozen in time.

The Drag: The 50-Slide Security Blanket

Why do we produce these massive slide decks? I’ll tell you why. It’s fear.

We are terrified that the client will ask a question we haven’t anticipated. So, we include everything. Demographics? Slide 14. Device breakdown by browser version? Slide 32. A screenshot of a tweet from three weeks ago? Slide 48.

We spend hours formatting these slides. We align boxes. We check font sizes. We are polishing a landfill.

The client does not read it. I promise you, they don’t. They read the Executive Summary, they glance at the first chart, and they close the file. The rest is just noise. It creates cognitive load. It makes us look like we don’t know what is important, so we just handed over the whole haystack and hoped they would find the needle.

Sending a 50-page deck is not “comprehensive.” It is bad manners. It says, “I didn’t have time to synthesise this, so you do it.”

The Answer: The Two-Page Protocol

We implemented a strict rule: The Weekly Report is two pages. Period. If you can’t say it in two pages, you don’t understand it yet.

Here is the structure. It works for almost every industry.

Page 1: The Decision Layer This is the only page the decision-maker needs to look at.

The Headline: One sentence stating the health of the account. (e.g., “Performance is stable, but budget constraints are limiting growth.”)
The Big Numbers: Three to four KPIs. No more. Large font.
The Narrative: A concise paragraph. What happened? Why did it happen? What are we doing next?
The Ask: Do we need approval? Do we need assets? Put it in a red box.

Page 2: The Evidence Layer This is for the skeptics or the tactical leads.

The Trend: A simple line chart showing performance over time (Year-to-Date). Context is king.
The Breakdown: A table showing the top movers (best performing campaigns/products).
The Liability Shield: A brief list of technical changes or optimizations made, just so they know we are working.

[TO EDITOR: Simple wireframe of the two pages side-by-side. Page 1 has a large “Headline” block and 3 “KPI” circles. Page 2 has a large “Line Chart” and a “Table”.]

That is it. Sorted.

The benefits were immediate. Our consultants saved about six hours a week per account because they weren’t wrestling with PowerPoint formatting. The clients loved it because they could read it on their phone in the taxi.

And the best part? When the Wi-Fi sulks during the presentation, I just open the local PDF on my desktop. “Here is the situation,” I say. No spinning wheel. No panic. Just professionalism.

Let’s stop equating volume with value. A short letter is harder to write than a long one, but it gets read.

FAQs

Is two pages really enough to justify our fees?

Fees are justified by results, not the weight of the paper. A heavy report suggests you worked hard; a short report suggests you thought hard.

What if the client asks for more detail?

That is what the Appendix is for. Or a conversation. Never bury the lead in the details.

Doesn't a PDF feel a bit... old fashioned?

It feels reliable. It opens on a phone in a tunnel. 'Interactive' usually just means 'Broken'.