Loading…
26
Rant: Retainer clients get better work from me than one-off projects, every time
I did a comparison last quarter with my little shop in Cleveland. Took on three one-off website projects and kept two retainer clients going. The one-offs got maybe 4 rounds of revisions each, lots of back and forth, and I still felt like I was guessing what they wanted. The retainers, we hit a rhythm after week two, they saw me as part of their team, so feedback got sharper and I could push back when they asked for dumb stuff. One retainer client even doubled their monthly spend after 60 days because we finally aligned on goals. Has anyone else noticed this pattern, or do you actually make decent margins on single projects compared to monthly retainers?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
avery3664d ago
Does it count as a hot take if I basically ran the same experiment by accident and got the same result? I had one retainer client where we spent the first month just figuring out their voice, and by month three I was writing stuff they barely touched, like 1 round of edits instead of 6. Meanwhile a one-off logo gig took 11 emails to settle on a font. My partner jokes that my best work only shows up once the invoice has shown up twice.
6