Repriced three retainers off deliverable counts, hourly went $77 to $126
Five retainer clients, all residential agents and one small investor shop. Until last spring every one of them was priced on a deliverable count. 16 posts, 4 reels, one email a month, $2,400. Which meant every efficiency I found went straight to the client and none of it came to me, and my team of three was working 31 hours a month per account to hit counts nobody was reading.
I rebuilt three of the five. Same $2,400. New package is one 40 minute recorded strategy call a month, a written content plan against whatever they actually have in the pipeline, and production of whatever that plan calls for, which is usually fewer pieces. Volume dropped roughly a third. Hours per account went from 31 to 19. Effective rate went $77 to $126. Two of the three are on month nine now, one is on month seven.
The part that nearly killed it: the first client I converted, I got greedy about production speed. We ran captions and two email drafts through a model with light editing and shipped them. Week three her assistant emailed asking why everything suddenly sounded like a different person. She was right, it did. I spent about 11 unbilled hours pulling a voice document out of that 40 minute recording, actual phrases she uses, what she refuses to say, how she talks about price reductions. Everything since then gets drafted against that document and read by a human who has met the client. Rewrite cost me the margin gain on that account for two months.
What I'd keep: the recorded monthly call. It's the strategy input, and it's the raw material, and it's the thing that makes the writing sound like them. Cheapest 40 minutes in the business.
The two accounts I didn't convert are still on counts because both clients explicitly want to see 16 things. I've stopped arguing.