Two Things You Should Do Before adding Retainers to Your Service Offerings
8 years ago I was pitching my first retainer ever. Since those early days I have seen it ALL when it comes to retainers and have learned a LOT about how to set yourself up for success. Today I want to touch on two things I highly recommend doing before adding retainers to your service offerings – this is my best advice for how to make sure you don't get yourself in a less than ideal/sticky situation.
1. Bandwidth Audit
The first step is understanding your capacity for retainer work. I mean this in two ways:
Emotional Bandwidth
This first step is really just about understanding the reality of where you are at in your business. Do you enjoy onboarding and off-boarding a lot of clients each month? Are you a little addicted to the thrill of the chase and motivated by the number of inquiries landing in your inbox? Then ongoing retainer work might not be the best fit for you, and you wouldn't want retainers to become the bulk of your work. You might aim for 80% one-off project work and 20% retainer work, so that you have a tiny bit of consistent ongoing revenue.
Would you benefit from the super simple cadence of working with retainer clients? Are you trying to figure out how to generate more recurring revenue? Looking for a way to keep working with your design intensive clients after their VIP day? Want to increase revenue without needing a million more leads? Love your existing clients? Then retainers would be a great fit for your business – you might want to aim for 80% retainer contracts and 20% one-off projects to get people in the door… and maybe book them into retainers too after their project wraps up.
Understanding your emotional bandwidth for retainers will help you make strategic choices about how often and who to pitch retainers your retainers to.
Time Bandwidth
What number of hours do you have available to serve clients in a retainer capacity each month? Be honest with yourself. You can get this number by doing one of two things:
Option one is a time tracking audit – tracking exactly how much time you spend doing work each week (this is usually kind of shocking) OR
Option two is by just looking at the amount of time you WANT to spend serving retainer clients in the future. So this can be an educated guesstimate but doesn’t require the same level of involvement as a formal time tracking audit.
After you have that number in hand, here’s a pro tip: Always round down. Life is… wild. If you discover that you have 10 hours per week to serve retainer clients, or 40 hours per month – round that number down to 8. You need to give yourself a little buffer room so you don’t get uncomfortably overbooked. Then, with that number in hand, you know that you can offer up to a total of 32 hours per month in retainer contracts. It could be 8 hours per month for one client and 6 hours/week for another. It just has to make sense and be thoughtful. We are trying to stay one step ahead. Next up, we’re going to:
2. Establish Your Boundaries
New clients or returning only?
Hourly or Deliverable or Intensives?
Days of the week?
Client-owned files?
Payment structure?
Time tracking mechanism?
Communication channel?
Point of contact?
There are SO many ways that you can make retainers work for you by pulling different levers to structure them in a way that suits your business. In Design Retainer Bootcamp we walk through every boundary I recommend having in place so that you can set both yourself and your clients up for success. Want to offer retainers one day per week? It’s possible – I’ve done it. And in fact, I’m doing it with clients RIGHT NOW.
So get out a piece of paper and start jotting down things that are important to you. The key is – you need to be happy and your clients need to be happy. So we need a structure that supports your business and also provides amazing value for your clients. Not even sure where to start? I can help you with that!
Design Retainer Bootcamp isn't like other moms, it's a cool mom! All jokes aside… Really – DRB is not your average course. It is designed to be done (and implemented!) in a DAY. My goal in creating this course was that you could set aside 4-5 hours and watch the entire course and pitch a retainer in the same day. And guess what? That's exactly what my students have been doing! Have any questions about today’s post or DRB? Shoot me an email and I would love to chat!
If you want to learn more about Design Retainer Bootcamp and enroll now – click here. PSST (Use code 25OFF for $25 off any program!)