The strategy case is made in the post-close follow-up article: referrals peak in the months after funding, renewals are won years before maturity, and silence is the most expensive default in a broker's business. This guide is the artifact itself — the full calendar, touch by touch, with draft copy you can adapt.
Two rules before you copy it. Every touch must be useful or personal — the moment a message exists only to “stay top of mind,” it costs more trust than it buys. And the delivery splits by lane: automation sends the written touches; you make the two calls. Set up once, runs for every client, forever.
Touch 1. Day 0: the funding-day call and close-out note
The call is yours, always — congratulations, in your voice, on the day the referral engine is born. Same day, the automated close-out note follows with the practical wrap-up: first payment date and amount, how their payments work, property tax and insurance reminders, who to contact for what, and one warm line: “we're your mortgage people from here on — any question, any time, no such thing as too small.”
Draft close-out skeleton: “Congratulations again, [name] — officially done! Quick practical notes: first payment [date, amount], [lender] will send [what to expect]. Keep this email — it has everything. And truly: any question this year, just reply.”
Touches 2–3. Day 30 and day 90: the settle-in check and first value touch
Day 30 (automated, reply-monitored): “A month in! Did the first payment come through as expected? Anything about the statement or setup that looks odd, send it over — two-minute fixes now beat surprises later.” It catches small problems early and lands squarely in the referral-energy window — replies here get a human response fast.
Day 90 (automated): the first pure-value touch — pick one: what current rate movement means (or doesn't) for their situation, a plain-language explainer of their prepayment privileges, or a seasonal home-cost note. The template: one useful idea, three sentences, no ask. This touch trains the most valuable expectation in the calendar: messages from your broker are worth opening.
Touches 4–6. Months 5, 7, and 10: the value rhythm
- →Month 5 — the rate translator: whatever the Bank of Canada has been doing, translated to their mortgage type in two sentences — fixed-rate clients mostly need “this doesn't change your payment; here's what it means for your renewal eventually.”
- →Month 7 — the equity/options note: a light educational piece on what homeowners can do mid-term — prepayments, renovations financing basics, porting if they move — framed as “filing this away for whenever it's relevant.”
- →Month 10 — the season/holiday touch: the one purely personal message of the cycle — brief, warm, no mortgage content at all. Calendar it to the season, not the transaction.
Three touches, five months — enough presence to stay their broker, spaced enough to stay welcome. Every message ends the same way: an open door (“question about anything mortgage-adjacent? just reply”), because replies are where files and referrals actually surface — and every reply gets a human.
Touch 7. Month 12: the anniversary review (the second call)
The automated invite, the human call. The invite: “It's been a year! I do a quick annual check-in with every client — fifteen minutes: how the mortgage's fitting, anything that's changed, and whether anything's worth adjusting. Grab a time here.” The call itself is a genuine review — life changes, prepayment room, early renewal thinking if their term is short — and it's where next business surfaces naturally: the renovation plan, the investment property idea, the spouse's friend who's renewing.
This is also the calendar's prime referral moment: value freshly delivered, relationship warm by design — the anniversary version of the ask from The Referral Ask belongs in the closing minutes of this call.
Touches 8–9. The renewal runway: where this calendar hands off
For clients on longer terms, the value rhythm simply repeats annually — touches 4 through 7 cycle each year with fresh content. The handoff comes at maturity minus ~12 months, when the renewal sequence takes over: the year-out review invite (touch 8), then the education cadence and month-six strategy call (touch 9 and onward) detailed in the Renewal Wave Deep-Dive.
Seen whole, the system is one continuous relationship: funding day → twelve months of presence → annual rhythm → renewal runway → a new funding day. No client ever exits into silence — which is precisely the failure mode this calendar exists to make impossible.
Wiring it up: one afternoon, then forever
Implementation is one afternoon: adapt the nine drafts to your voice, load them into your CRM as a sequence triggered off each file's funding date, set the two human-call tasks (day 0 and month 12) to assign to you, and route every client reply to a monitored inbox with a same-day human answer — per CASL, keep consent records and unsubscribe options on the electronic touches. From then on, every funded file enrols itself.
The maintenance load is quarterly: refresh the rate-translator and value-touch content so nothing goes stale. If even that's more marketing operations than you want to own, this calendar — written, wired, and maintained — is part of what Treadstone installs for broker clients.