When I look at the duration of my client relationships, some extend over long periods. Yet that figure does not tell us how much work was done each month.
The start of an engagement is often intense. You need to understand the business, build an initial solution and have it tested. Once the system is in place, support can become more occasional.
A succession of needs
A rule changes, a new workflow appears, an interface needs adapting. In my experience, long collaborations are often a succession of small Airtable or Make engagements.
The length of the relationship and the workload must therefore be distinguished. A long-running collaboration does not mean continuous development work.
Define each next step
To understand what remains to be done, I prefer to return to the concrete need: which problem must we solve now, who is affected and how will we check that the solution works?
Breaking work down this way also makes it possible to hand routine changes over to an internal champion and reserve outside support for issues that need it.
Adapted from my LinkedIn post “How long does an Airtable engagement last?”, dated 29 June 2026.