Eric Deeran explains why creative agencies get stuck in feast-or-famine cycles with project work, and how switching to retainers fixes it. He outlines three steps: create a repeatable offer, define monthly deliverables, and price around client outcomes like leads or sales. Retainers turn unpredictable revenue into stable, compounding growth.
If you're a video or creative agency owner, this is why your revenue feels like a roller coaster every single month. You've probably experienced the up, down, up, down, up, down revenue roller coaster that is the agency model. Some months you're making $20K, some months you're making $0K, some months you're making $15K, some months you're making $10K, and so on and so forth. This leads to that feast or famine that most agency owners, freelancers, and video agencies experience every single year. And the root cause of this is actually a structural problem and not you as the agency owner. But the unfortunate truth is that most agency owners are just one slow month away from from full panic mode. Now, like we said, it's not your skill, it's actually your structure. And fortunately, the fix does exist, but it's simply just a model switch, not a talent upgrade. And any creative service that repeats can use this. Now, here's the fix. It's very simple. Most agencies operate off of a project model when they need to switch to a retainer model. Obviously, we talked about the project model where it's up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, and it's that inconsistency that most agency owners face every single month. Whereas with the retainer model, your revenue actually compounds on top of each other, meaning that each client adds to your existing base of monthly which in turn gives you stability because it's more of a stair-step approach and not an up, down, up, down, up, down approach where it's feast or famine. And it's really not as difficult as you think to switch to a retainer-based model. Now, in both of those examples, those are the same 5 clients, but you had completely different results in compounding revenue. And this is why the retainer model just works. And if you're struggling thinking, how do I actually switch to the retainer model? There's 3 main things that you need to switch. Number 1, you need a productized offer, meaning that you need an offer that is repeatable, that you can train staff on, that you can train your team on, that is very easy very easy to repeat and productize, and it becomes pretty much a product, which is hence the name productized offer. It becomes a product that you can sell, or it's a service, but it really operates like a product to where when you sell it, it's the same delivery mechanism every single time. This makes it extremely easy to scale and stack on top of each other. Number 2, you need clear monthly deliverables, meaning that the client needs to know exactly what they're getting every single month, whether it's a certain amount of ads, a certain amount of video content, a certain amount of social content. That's going to help them understand what they're paying for every single month instead of doing the one-off projects. And number 3, you need pricing anchored in outcomes, meaning that we need to anchor our pricing around outcomes that the client actually wants, meaning leads, calls, sales, actually getting some sort of tangible business result from the content, therefore continuing to pay us on monthly retainer. And when you can nail these 3 things, you can successfully switch to a retainer model. Now, if you want our help doing this, I put together a short video on the next page that breaks down this entire process way more in depth than just this short ad here. You can also click below on that page and apply to work with us to see if it's a possible fit. And this works for any sort of video, creative, or just any agency you can see that sells anything on a monthly basis or wants to sell something on a monthly basis. So hopefully this is helpful, and hopefully you got some value out of this video.
