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Retainer invoice example for Administration

okay so we cut and I already have the answer in my head alright guys the second question is you know Sean you're talking about scaling and it's twofold you have to increase your rates on the one hand but then on the other hand you have to have predictable monthly income and you're talking about retainers the question then came you know what is a retainer what's included in a monthly retainer now is probably a million different ways you could package up a retainer agreement I'm just gonna let you know the way we typically do it at Butler so for us when we first started we were a creative studio so we didn't have marketing as a service we were doing websites and graphic design those were the two primary services and so the the route we chose to do was to add marketing as a third type of service and that's what we would package up to be able to produce that recurring predictable income and so what a marketing retainer for Butler looks like is client pays us a specific amount for a chunk of time and so our current standard hourly rate is $150 an hour and it that so if somebody comes to us for a you know to maybe update a website or to add some you know verbage to a brochure or to do any kind of random medial service task or hourly rate is typically $150 an hour so this isn't when we're doing projects it's basically when we're just doing service so our it's $150 an hour so for our retainer clients what we do is we reduce our hourly rate to $100 an hour if they commit to buying blocks of time and so let's just say we have a 20 hour minimum so at the minimum it's 2,000 a month and they buy up to 20 hours and you know a lot of people ask the very first question is you know what if you don't use all 20 hours and is it roll over hours do you save those up and the answer is no we don't have rollover hours because think about if we spend fifteen hours and so there's five hours left in the month do we roll that over to where the next month I get 25 or we we reduce it know that that's not predictable it's not sustainable and the client is still saving money because we remember we're reducing our hourly rate to $100 an hour if we spent 15 hours they would have spent twenty two hundred fifty dollars so they're saving two hundred and five fifty dollars by having a retainer even though we spent less time and so the answer is no we don't have rollover hours so what if you you spend ten hours well that's that's a mistake on urine so what you're gonna have to do is predict how many hours are you gonna reasonably spend for a client in a particular month so you you should during the strategy phase this is well you know after you've conducted a level of discovery you know about how many hours of work you're going to be able to do on a consistent basis for that client you have to estimate that and then the goal is to try to fill that up then the next question is okay well what if you go over hours what have you been over like twenty five hours or maybe we're on a 50 hour retainer and we spend sixty so the way we structure that agreement is to where if you know we're not we're gonna spend up to fifty hours of work of services but if we go over that it's only because you have requested it or you have approved us to go over and then it goes back up to the standard hourly rate of 150 there's two reasons why we do that we want to stay we kind of allocate our time to be filled up with that month with about that many hours for that particular client and so if we have to do more hours because the client is requesting more things it throws off our process and so we're trying to keep them at the amount of hours that they that we agree to the second reason is because if it's a consistent thing to where we're constantly going over hours then it's incentive for the client to increase their retainer so if they're every month for the last five months you've been going you know we've been doing five extra hours at your request because we add all these other projects I suggest we up our retainer to sixty hours to give you a little bit of buffer it's gonna save you some money and we get to do a lot more creative things and so it allows you the opportunity to increase your monthly predictable income and so there's two reasons why you want to do that and then the third question is okay well what's all included in the return so we answered you know what if you go what if you use less what if you go over well what is all included you're saying you're spending 50 hours 50 hours spent doing what and that is going to change from agency to agency from Studio to studio so what what looks like a retainer for me isn't necessarily going to look the same for you and so for us at Butler we have a full-service marketing team so I have we have graphic design in-house content writing digital marketing videography photography web development so we're able to do basically anything under those services for our clients and and each client has a custom set of services and a work that we're doing for them so and I'll save kind of the specifics of that for the next video [Music]