[00:00:00] Before we get started, I want to ask you, how did you stumble upon this podcast? A tweet, a friendly recommendation, an Instagram story. This podcast relies solely on word of mouth. I don't rely on ads or sponsorships. I'm here to help people. This episode, the show, it doesn't make any money. I'd be grateful if you could just share it with another creative person, you know, or a view, an Instagram or Twitter post, or a casual mention would go a really long way.
It would be a game changer for another entrepreneur. Thank you. Now let's get started. If you're tired of having low budget after low budget project, this episode is for you. Have you ever felt that going through the effort of finding clients is too much work? What if we can 10 x the revenue you get from each client?
By the end of this episode, you'll be to convince clients to go from a low budget, one-time project to a high ticket long-term retainer. Today I'm gonna share with you five specific things you can do right now. That will allow you to start landing high ticket projects. Let's get into it. Welcome to the [00:01:00] Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to six figures.
Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. If this is your first time here, my name is Chris Pieta. I run an education company, creative Biz Launch, that teaches crib entrepreneurs how to build and scale their businesses, and I also run my product photography company, Pieta Productions in the background.
This podcast episode is all about increasing the revenue per project by using retainers. We all know how frustrating it can be when we've cold emailed hundreds of clients, gotten dozens of phone calls from them, sent handfuls of proposals and enclosed deals only for that deal to be a tiny project.
We've spent all this time trying to land these clients, but a thousand bucks. Doesn't really seem to be that great. What if I told you there's an easy and realistic way to take that thousand dollars project and transform it into a $10,000 plus? We're talking retainers. Well, our retainers. Well, by the end of this episode, this will be your favorite [00:02:00] word.
I'm sure you've heard retainer used in your favorite lawyer shows. Typically a lawyer charges their client a retainer so that they can retain their services whenever you need them. We're using a very similar idea here. A retainer is an extended contract for multiple months that your client agrees to work with you for.
Let me show you an example. Typically, your base package is a thousand bucks for 10 photos. Maybe yours is different, but for the sake of this example, let's go with that $1,000. 10 photos. A simple retainer model here can be 10 photos a month for 12 months for 10 grand. Now the math majors listening will tell me 12 times a thousand equals 12,000, not 10,000, but let's not worry about the price for now.
There's a reason why we're charging 10,000, not 12,000 here. The important thing to note is that you're offering a set service on a reoccurring basis. For a specific timeline, these are the three components you need to establish with your client, what you're offering, how often you're offering it, and for how long.[00:03:00]
In our example, we're offering 10 photos every month for 12 months. Easy peasy. Now, if you don't have any packages yet, I highly recommend you check out my YouTube channel, or I have a bunch of videos that talk about building your first packages. This is the best way to up. Your rate that you charge clients.
As a quick recap, you always wanna be offering packages to your clients rather than individual deliverables. You should have a few packages that you can offer at various price points. For me, my cheapest package is about $2,000. This package includes photos, videos, and it has. A bunch of free bonuses for my clients.
I include things like fast turnaround times, online tracking, project success, mood board, all these great bonuses. And this package is designed in a way that presents a core offer, the photos and videos, and then it has bonuses to convince them to buy with me. But if you want the full explanation of this, either check on my YouTube channel.
Or enroll and create a BIS launch where we walk you through the stuff in a dedicated module. Once you have a core offer, you can easily apply to [00:04:00] retainers. All you need to do is just say, you'll give the client the deliverables from your package every month for a year. You've got your offer and you've just extended it here.
Now, I know what some of you're probably thinking at this point. Why would a client commit to 12 months of working with you for the same price as 12 individual packages? Well, normally they wouldn't. But it's up to you to incentivize them to do this. How do we do that? The easiest way to incentivize them is to just offer them a discount.
You tell them that you'll work with them for 12 months, for a 20% off discount. Your neural MERL rate. That's enticing for the client. They get your typical services for 20% off, and while you're going to be making less money here, You've got a client locked in for many, many months, you've got secure income, and that's huge.
As a creative, as a freelancer, the client acquisition process is the same whether it's for one project or for a retainer. So why not push for the retainer for the same amount of upfront work you'll be making way more money. Another huge per of retainers is guaranteed income for that. Period of time.[00:05:00]
Once we know when our next paycheck is coming in, that gives us more certainty in our business and allows us to focus more on the business, build that business up, and get more and more clients when clients agree to retainer. Payment structure is usually monthly, so that means you have a paycheck coming in every single month from your client, and that gives you security.
And while you're giving the client a discount here, which means less money for you, you get that added security, which is a great trade off if you ask me. Now. If you don't have a single client yet, then check out my free workshop on my website. Create a bis launch.com. It's a 60 minute workshop. It's got over 1900 students inside of it already.
Check it out in the description and finally land your first client. So we have retainers, but what are the dangers of retainers? There are very real dangers to this retainer model, but the good news is that you can avoid them relatively easily. When I was starting out, I was eager to take on any client that would want to retainer.
The dollar amount was just too tempting to turn down, [00:06:00] but eventually this backfired almost. All my clients are awesome, but occasionally you get some bad ones. This is just true because of the L law of large numbers. I ended up with a client that was a pain to work with, and I was stuck with them because I had a retainer agreement with them.
I was stuck with them for the entire duration of the contract. Luckily, it was just a three month contract, so I learned from this quickly, this could have been a lot worse after that three months was up, I just raised my rates and they didn't renew. Easy peasy. We all know how some clients are. They want to micromanage every part of the project.
They're bad about paying on time. They try and change the scope of the things they paid for, and they try and overwork you, or they're just flat out rude, whatever the situation is. You'll come across these clients over and over the course of your career, and the problem with retainers is that if you have a bad client for this entire retainer, you're stuck with them.
The easiest way to avoid this is to never do retainers as the first project with the client. I always like to do a [00:07:00] one-time project. With a client to see how they are to work with, if we're gonna be working for a long time, then you want to make sure they're a good client. And this goes both ways. You're testing them, they're testing you.
So clients also usually don't wanna do a retainer right off the bat because they wanna see how you are to work with, they wanna see what kind of photographer or videographer you are. They wanna make sure that you're professional, timely, and that you can deliver the results. That you promise. It goes both ways here and that's a good thing.
However, I know how tempting it might be to sign on a client with you seeing that five figure deal in the works, that's a lot of money. You can try and scope out what type of client they're gonna be by asking a few questions and hopping on an onboarding call prior to them actually signing the contract.
A question I love to ask clients is, What made you stop working with your previous photographer? Depending on how they answer this, you can get a pretty good idea of what kind of client they're gonna be. If they say they've worked with five photographers in the past and none of them were any good.
That's most likely not the photographer's fault. [00:08:00] There's probably some issue with the client. If you can't get along with everyone you meet, it's probably your fault, not theirs. If the client answers this question with, well, our styles didn't match up exactly, and we want something more specific like an action photographer.
That we see in your portfolio. Well then this type of client sounds fine. Just be sure to ask a lot of follow up questions and listen to how your potential client talks about the previous people they've worked with. You can learn a lot from them by just asking questions. You can also ask something like, What are the mistakes previous photographers made when working with you?
This is another great question to gauge how they will be as a client. And if you're not seeing any red flags and you really wanna get started on a retainer as your first project with a client, then go for it. But just be aware of the risks involved here. Okay, so we know what retainers are. We know the dangers of them.
How do we actually implement them into our own creative business? Step one, we already covered. We have our core offer that we extend for many months as a retainer. We know what we are offering, and we know we're doing it on a [00:09:00] reoccurring basis. And for a set duration, reoccurring here usually means monthly, but I have clients that have opted for a quarterly as well.
In this situation. They'll get a set of photos once a quarter for a year. I try and get clients on a monthly schedule, but quarterly also works if the client insists. I always try and be flexible with retainers
in terms of duration of the retainer. I've been talking about 12 month retainer here, but you can offer as many months as you want. My shortest retainers have been three months. My longest have been 12. I think it's good to have some flexibility here. But I also think that you should have a minimum like three months.
And honestly, going past 12 months is tough because you probably wanna raise your rates after the retainer is up. Raising rates once a year is very normal, so locking yourself into more than 12 months can be hard. For this, we were talking about discounts earlier. The way I offer my discounts is a direct correlation with how long the retainer is for.
The longer the retainer, the bigger the discount. For a three month retainer, I might only do 10% off [00:10:00] the total package, but for a 12 month retainer, we can bring that number up to 20%. At that stage, you're gonna be doing a bit of negotiating to try and get the best price for you. The client's also gonna negotiate here.
So try and do your best here.
Previously, we talked about our basic package of 10 photos a month for a thousand bucks. What if we do a 12 month retainer at 20% discount? That gives us a grand total of $9,600. Not bad. In terms of payment terms, I always have a monthly amount due at the start of each month, and this example, the client would owe 800 at the beginning of every single month.
That's wrong. This is really important in a retainer agreement. I always have a client pay the full amount for the assets before they get them, since I gonna be doing a discount already. All of my clients have been fine with these terms. This also protects you. If they don't pay you, don't shoot. If you haven't received a payment yet, you can always say, Hey, we're still waiting on the payment for this month before we can start photographing.
Can you get this paid today? When asking for a payment, always be [00:11:00] specific when you want to get paid. Now, probably the hardest for our retainers is pitching them. The way you present these and how you present them to a client is really important. My client acquisition process is mainly cold email, and the cold emails I send have no mention of a retainer.
After the cold email, I hop on a sales call with clients and most of the call is me asking them questions and learning how I can best help their business. If you need help with discovery call scripts, I have a whole pack on my website. Just go to the store and download those. They're a game changer for closing more client deals and closing retainers like this
at the end of discovery calls. I'll usually talk about my package options and sometimes casually mention that we have clients on retainer if it makes sense in the conversation. When I mention the retainer, I also say that they can get a 20% discount on those packages. At this point, the client will either express interest in a normal package or a retainer, and you can take it from there.
Almost always, they just want a typical package to start. No problem. This is great for you because you get to test this client out and see how it is [00:12:00] working with them.
After that project, you deliver your final assets and then you can plug your retainer here. After that project's complete, I usually send an email to case study or something else of a previous retainer client. If I can show them social proof and actual numbers of how a retainer helped another client of mine that's gonna help me land this new client.
If my case study shows how we were able to improve sales or marketing, or revamp their social media or website, then this helps. Me so much when I'm trying to land this new client for that retainer. I also mentioned that there's a discount included in all of this, and I asked the client if they're interested in learning more.
From here, you can talk about your specific retainer you had in mind and say you can customize it to fit their needs. And there we go. Retainers are the best way to increase the amount money you can make per project. My name is Chris Pieta. This is the Creative BIS Launch Podcast, and I'll see you next time.
