retainers

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Hey Burnt Out Freelancers, it’s time to talk pricing strategies!

In this episode, we get real about the confusion around hourly rates vs monthly retainers vs service packages.

As newbie freelancers, they had no clue how to determine their rates. Tracking hours and constantly billing hourly clients was a pain. There had to be a better way...

Turns out, transitioning to defined service packages and retainers is the secret to predictable income and scaling your rates.

TL;DR:
☕ Why hourly billing is great for starting out but has major downsides long-term
☕ How packages create reliable monthly revenue streams from bundled services
☕ When retainers make the most sense for less routine project work
☕ Strategies for calculating your rates based on expenses, profit goals, and experience
☕ Tips for gradually increasing rates by bracketing new clients at higher prices
☕ The importance of knowing your worth and resisting discounting just to win clients

If you’re struggling to determine the best pricing model for your freelance business, this episode is a must-listen! Follow along for laugh-out-loud real talk on finding an approach that maximizes your income and sanity.

You’ve got this! Now push play + let’s talk money 💰

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An hour worked should be an hour paid. Yet so many small business owners, solopreneurs, and freelancers feel like they need to give entirely too much away. In this episode, I discuss my client "Jeff" and his desire to work with better prospects and improve the cash flow in his business.

Key topics:

✔️ If someone says all the right things during the intake call and then turns into a bugaboo, stalker, weirdo, etc., what do you do?
✔️ Working for free or putting everything on the line in a contingency-based business model will break you. You're not gonna have solid, dependable cash flow if you keep operating that way. 
✔️ Don't get happy ears on a sales call. Detach yourself from the outcome and develop safeguards that rule more people out than in. Not everyone on the planet is an ideal client for your business and that's OK.
✔️ Your rules of engagement are utterly meaningless if you do not require compliance to them. You may as well save your breath if you let people treat you like a doormat. 

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Monthly client meetings––they’re a requirement of service retainers.

Or, are they?

There's an expectation that if you're working with clients on retainer, in an ongoing, recurring way, that you have to have meetings––ya know, just to touch base.

Conventional wisdom says that meetings should be included in the service because they seem to deliver inherent value.

But meetings are a huge limitation when it comes to scaling a service business.

There's only so much of you to go around. Is spending time in meetings really the best way to delivering great value and grow a business?

Today, I got Parker Stevenson to weigh in. Parker is co-owner of Evolved Finance, a bookkeeping company that specializes in online businesses.

By its very nature, the business of bookkeeping is doing pretty much the same thing month after month–making it a business that is ripe for scaling, if you approach scaling the way Evolved Finance has. 

One of the ways that Parker and his partner, Corey Whitaker, take advantage of this opportunity to scale is by bucking convention and delivering their monthly bookkeeping service without having regularly scheduled calls.

In this episode:

• How Parker’s project to change the client-meeting paradigm has evolved over that last year
• Why niching down made it easier to build out operational practices 
• How he shifted from using recorded Loom videos with his clients to experimenting with a training resource library and group office hours
• How getting to know his clients and their needs has been a better way to deliver value than getting mired in weeks of calls
• The challenges Parker and his partner have run into transitioning from typical client meetings to group calls
• What kind of impact this move away from regular client calls has had on the business’s operational capacity
• How quitting client meetings have impacted Parker personally

Links:

Website: evolvedfinance.com

Facebook handle: facebook.com/evolvedfinance

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/evolvedfinance/

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