Client Services Lead

Alpha Key Digital; Cleveland, Northern (OH, KY); Hybrid; USD 75,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work (US)

Flexible hours

Three weeks PTO

Growth opportunities

Autonomy

Job summary

Alpha Key Digital is seeking a Client Services Lead in a remote US-based role with Eastern hours. You will own the client lifecycle from kickoff to renewal, directing a bench of specialists and ensuring results across SEO, paid media, and websites.

You will supervise contractors, manage expectations, and protect profitability while building scalable processes. This role offers growth as the portfolio expands and a chance to shape how the client services function operates.

Qualifications

• Minimum 3 years in a digital marketing agency with client leadership responsibilities.
• Proven ownership of client relationships and outcomes across campaigns.
• Strong written communication with clients and stakeholders.
• Experience managing external contractors and vendors.
• Comfort with WordPress and basic web fundamentals for review and guidance.
• Ability to read analytics and translate data into actionable recommendations.
• Preference for healthcare/aesthetic medicine or professional services clients.

Responsibilities

• Own client relationships and overall account ownership from onboarding to renewal.
• Set strategy for each account and direct a bench of specialists toward goals.
• Review performance data monthly and defend the recommended course of action.
• Review contractor deliverables for quality and relevance to client goals.
• Own monthly reporting and client-facing summaries; protect profitability by managing hours and scope.
• Manage our Asana-based workflow as the source of truth and build repeatable processes.
• Coordinate with the Operations Coordinator on scheduling and admin follow-through.
• Scope work with contractors (SEO, paid media, development, video) and manage growth of the team.
• Lead monthly 1:1s and quarterly check-ins with contractors; ensure teams have context and assets.

Skills

Client leadership

Performance judgment

Contractor management

Process design

WordPress capability

Commercial awareness

Prioritization

Written clarity

Independent judgment

Tools

WordPress

Asana

Google Analytics

Google Search Console

Google Ads

Meta Ads Manager

Ahrefs/Semrush

Claude (AI tools)

Job description

Alpha Key Digital helps aesthetic medicine practices grow digitally with tailored, effective strategies. We’ve spent a decade building online assets for plastic surgery, dermatology, and medical spa practices, along with premium home and professional service businesses across Northeast Ohio and beyond. SEO, paid media, web design, content, and video. We’re not generalists. We’re specialists who understand the nuance of a high-ticket aesthetic consult and a home services estimate, and we can tell you the difference.

We believe in transparency, accountability, and collaboration, and we work closely with our clients at every step. We’re small on purpose, we do good work, and our clients stay with us for years.

We’re hiring our first Client Services Lead: the person who will own how work gets done here. You’ll take full ownership of the client lifecycle from kickoff through renewal: setting the strategy, directing our specialist bench toward client goals, owning whether the marketing actually performs, and being the person clients count on week to week. Our founder stays close to the relationships and new business. You own the machine that delivers.

This is not a coordinator role with a bigger title, and it isn’t pure account management either. You’ll be accountable for results, not just for communication about results. As the portfolio grows, this seat becomes the one that builds a team underneath it, both on the client side and the performance side. If you’ve been running client services inside someone else’s agency and want the authority to actually build the system your way, this is that job.

• Systems instinct – The person who, when something falls through the cracks, builds the process that prevents it next time, instead of just fixing the one thing
• Verifies firsthand – Someone who opens the ads account and the analytics before a client call rather than reading a summary someone else wrote
• Steady under pressure – Genuinely calmer than average when a client is upset, a deadline slipped, or a campaign underperformed
• Follow-through over ideas – More satisfied by a month where everything shipped on time than by a month where you had one brilliant idea
• Direct without damage – Comfortable telling a specialist their work isn’t good enough, and specific enough about why that they can actually fix it
• Holds tension – Able to hold healthy tension with a contractor who wants more hours and a client who wants more results, without needing someone above you to referee it
• Reads people – The kind of person who reads a client’s email and can tell what they’re actually worried about underneath the request
• Self-directed – Someone who’d rather be handed a messy situation and left alone to sort it than be given step-by-step direction
• Accountable to a number – Energized by owning a number and being accountable for it: retention, performance, profitability
• Exacting – Detail-oriented in a way that occasionally annoys people, and you’ve made peace with that
• Range across industries – Able to sit on a call with a plastic surgeon and a roofing contractor in the same afternoon and speak both languages
• Wants ownership – Looking for a place where your judgment matters more than your job description

Key Responsibilities

Client relationships and account ownership

• Serve as the primary point of contact for clients, running check-ins, reporting calls, and strategy updates
• Run onboarding for new clients, from kickoff through first deliverables
• Manage expectations and deliver hard news without losing the relationship
• Identify at-risk accounts early and lead the response before they become save situations
• Know what each client is paying, what that buys in resources, and make the case to the client when the goal requires more than the current scope covers
• Spot expansion opportunities within existing accounts and bring them to the founder

Client performance and results

• Own the marketing outcome across SEO, paid search and paid social, and websites for every account in the portfolio
• Set the strategy for each account against the client’s goals, then direct the specialist bench toward it
• Review performance data on a monthly cycle: know why a number moved, decide what changes, and be able to defend the call
• Review contractor deliverables critically, including SEO plans, ad account structure, site changes, and content
• Own the monthly reporting cycle: performance recaps, lead reporting, and client-facing summaries
• Protect account profitability by managing hours and scope against what the client is paying

Systems and workflow

• Manage our project management system (Asana) as the source of truth for what’s happening and what’s next
• Build and document repeatable delivery processes so quality doesn’t depend on any one person’s memory
• Hold the team to the workflows once they exist, and update them when reality changes
• Coordinate with our Operations Coordinator on scheduling, inboxes, timesheets, and administrative follow-through

Team leadership and development

• Scope work for our contractor bench (SEO, paid media, development, video), review quality, and hold timelines
• Run monthly one-on-ones and quarterly check-ins with contractors
• Make sure the people doing the work have the context, access, assets, and answers they need to execute, and clear the blockers when they don’t
• Recommend adding, replacing, or removing contractors. You’ll have the founder’s backing on those calls, and the final decision stays with the founder
• Build out the team underneath this seat as the portfolio grows
• Report directly to the founder with a standing weekly strategy session
• At least 3 years working inside a digital marketing agency, with 2 or more owning client relationships, delivery, or client services leadership
• Demonstrated ownership of client relationships. You’ve been the person clients call, not the person behind that person
• Real working knowledge of performance marketing: SEO, paid search and paid social, content, and WordPress websites. Enough depth to review specialist work critically, catch what’s wrong, and explain results to a client in their language
• Comfort reading and interpreting Google Analytics, Search Console, and ad platform data, and turning it into a recommendation
• Hands-on comfort with WordPress: you can get into a site, spot what’s wrong, make or direct the fix, and speak credibly to a developer about it. You won’t be doing production development work, but you can’t be dependent on someone else to tell you whether the site is the problem
• Experience managing external contractors, freelancers, or vendors
• Excellent written communication. Most client trust in this business is built over email

Preferred

• Experience leading a team, a department, or a function inside a larger organization: you’ve grown a small team into a bigger one or built out a segment of a company from the inside
• Experience with healthcare, aesthetic medicine, or professional services clients
• Background at a small agency (under 15 people) where you wore several hats
• Northeast Ohio based, or a genuine connection to the market

Tools you’d be working in

You don’t need every one of these on day one, but you should recognize most of them and be genuinely fluent in a few: WordPress, Asana, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, an SEO platform such as Ahrefs or Semrush, and AI tools like Claude for reporting and analysis. If your website experience is entirely on a different platform, be upfront about it. WordPress is where most of our client work lives.

Key Skills & Abilities

• Client leadership: running a room, managing expectations, delivering hard news without losing the relationship
• Performance judgment: enough depth across SEO, paid, and web to make calls about what to do next and defend them
• Contractor management: scoping, quality review, and accountability without micromanagement
• Process design: turning ad hoc work into documented, repeatable systems
• WordPress capability: confident inside a site, including pages, plugins, and basic troubleshooting, plus knowing when to escape
• Commercial awareness: understanding the relationship between what a client pays, what we spend, and whether the account works
• Prioritization: deciding what matters this week across the portfolio and being right most of the time
• Written clarity: reports, recaps, and emails that clients actually read and understand
• Independent judgment: making the call when the founder isn’t available, and being comfortable owning it

What We Offer

• Compensation: $75,000 to $95,000 base, depending on experience, with a performance bonus tied to client retention and portfolio growth
• Schedule: full-time, with flexible hours. We care when the work ships, not when you’re at a desk
• Location: Remote, US based, Eastern hours. Regular time with the founder, otherwise work where you work best
• Time off: three weeks PTO plus holidays, and we mean it. This is a company that’s learning to run without any one person being indispensable
• Growth: this is the first senior hire on the client services side. The person who builds this function well will be the one building the team that comes after it, on both the account side and the specialist side
• Autonomy: you will not be managed closely. You’ll be given the portfolio, the contractor bench, the tools, and the outcomes we’re accountable for

Alpha Key Digital is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate every applicant on skills, experience, and fit for the work.