Price retainers against what delivery actually costs you.
Retainers, utilization and the cost of a billable hour. Built for service businesses that sell people.
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An agency on retainer is a recurring revenue business with a sales funnel, which is why it runs on the recurring engine rather than an order-by-order one. A client is an account, the retainer units you sell them are the seats, and the monthly rate per unit is the price. Delivery cost per unit stands in for cost of goods, which is what makes agency gross margin real rather than notional: if a retainer unit sells for less than the loaded cost of the hours it consumes, no amount of new business fixes it.
Healthy agencies run gross margin near 50 to 60 percent after delivery labour, and a blended rate anchored near $100 an hour is where independent operators typically start before they learn to price on value. Client churn is the number that separates agencies that compound from agencies that run to stand still: losing more than about three percent of clients a month means the new business team is refilling the bucket rather than growing it. Account expansion, growing an existing client's retainer, is far cheaper than winning a new logo and the model treats it as a first-class input.
Utilization is the hidden variable in every agency model. Capacity is people, people are hired ahead of the work, and an agency at 60 percent utilization has the same payroll as one at 85 percent and a fraction of the margin. The second driver is retainer mix: project work is lumpy and does not compound, retainers do, and the crossover point where retainer revenue covers fixed payroll is the moment an agency stops being a job and starts being a business.
Everything you need to know about agency financial modeling.
The numbers that matter most for a agency business, calculate any of them free.
Monthly Recurring Revenue is the predictable revenue a business earns every month from act...
Churn rate measures the percentage of customers or revenue lost over a given period. It is...
Customer Lifetime Value is the total revenue (or profit) a business expects to earn from a...
Customer Acquisition Cost is the total cost of acquiring a new paying customer, including ...
Gross Margin is the percentage of revenue remaining after subtracting the direct costs of ...
Net Revenue Retention measures the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing ...
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