Retainer clients
Out of context: Reply #6
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- tOki0
Well transferring hours back and forth is doable - but you have to manage it tightly, essentially to make sure you don't do more work than you're paid for. At the end of the day you are there to help their business in the way you've been engaged to, but your own interests come first. Truthfully I hate them as an Art Director for all the cons I mentioned, and suits love them for the pros that I mentioned.(see point 2 = covering our asses on original deliverables)
In my experience when you eat up 3 months of retainer in advance, even with due warning beforehand - most clients will not be happy to hear this. We have written scope documents which require a sign off to use retained hours, so its like a kitty of cash/hours that can be accessed. The problem is that most like to think that they can get everything they want every month. This becomes particularly true in a marketing/advertising situation, if you've used up all the hours for the next 2 months but there is another campaign to do - you take the hit or the client does. Depending on your relationship, this can be very difficult, and account service will often want to take the loss to ensure the client stays happy. They NEED the work done, but might not want to pay for it. You have to then be able to prove or convince that you've provided value equal to the advance deficit of hours. Take into potential politics when there are multiple agencies involved who rely on each other and you have a true business clusterfuck.
As noted above by d_rek, retainers are bad news for mid to large size projects. Ideally you build the platform , in as much entirety as you can, then go into a retained situation to maintain, optimise & improve incrementally as you go. Large features should be treated as individual projects (billed and scoped separately) rather than trying to split the hours or cost across a series of months.
That said, if you are doing continuous series of small projects such as adding some products or creating banner campaigns on a regular basis where the scope never really changes, there is definitely a place for retainer agreements.