Sold a $1,900 a month media retainer and lost $3,100 over the term

The turnaround clause is doing more damage than the rate. $75 per late delivery with no volume ceiling on the obligation is a penalty you wrote against yourself, and it gets worse exactly when you're busiest, which is the definition of a badly drafted term. The fix isn't a cap on shoots. It's tying the 24 hour promise to a stated weekly throughput, so shoots seven through twelve in a week carry 48 hours and anything past that is scheduled by agreement. That way volume never converts into penalty.

I'd also look at whether the additional shoot rate was even the right structure. A brokerage that sends you 24 shoots is buying capacity, and capacity gets sold as a block with a floor, not as an unlimited per unit rate. Any agreement like this should get read by an attorney in your state before you sign the second one.

I've been stuck in analysis for months so let me actually build the number. At six shoots the contract yields $1,900 against $708, so $1,192 of gross. Every shoot from seven to fourteen adds $140 against $118, so $22 each, which is $176 across eight shoots. Then everything past fourteen adds $140 against roughly $200 with the subcontract and your edit time, so negative $60 each. In the 24 shoot month that's ten shoots at negative $60, so negative $600, which wipes the entire gross on the included six.

So the crossover is somewhere around shoot 17 or 18 and the whole account goes underwater. Does that match what you saw month to month, or was it worse because of the deductions landing in the same months as the volume?

Before I'd sign anything like this I'd want to know how the brokerage behaved for the nine months before you showed up. Were they buying media at all, and from how many people? Because 14 agents going from whatever they did before to sending you the entire pipeline in five months is a behavior change, and behavior changes usually mean the old provider was more expensive or slower and they'd been rationing. If you'd known they were rationing you'd have known the volume was coming.

In my market a 14 agent shop wouldn't generate 24 listings in a month if you gave them a year, so the failure mode here is almost the opposite of my problem. Still, the pricing lesson holds in reverse. If I ever sold a retainer out here the risk is them using two of the six and deciding it's expensive.

Anchor is asking the right thing and I'd push further. The number I'd want is not their history, it's their listing count capacity. 14 agents, if they average say 1.5 listings a month each in a decent market, that's 21 a month at the top and your six included shoots was never going to be the ceiling for anyone paying $1,900 for it. The brokerage did the obvious thing and used what they paid for and then some.

The thing I keep noticing in these threads is that people set the included quantity by what they hope the client uses rather than by what the client can physically generate. thatch, if you'd multiplied 14 agents by their actual listing rate before you named six, would you have named six?

The paperwork is where this comes down for me. Two things in what you described that I'd want to see the exact wording on. First, whether the $75 deduction applied per shoot or per delivery batch, because on a nineteen shoot month those are wildly different numbers and you may have been under-deducted rather than over. Second, whether the additional shoot rate was stated as fixed for the term or subject to adjustment on notice. Most service agreements I've read have some adjustment mechanism and providers forget it's there.

Also, nine months on a term you're describing as over. Did it have an out or did you serve it to the end? If there was a thirty day termination for convenience clause on your side, the $3,100 was optional after about month five, and that's the more expensive mistake than the $140 rate.

Mostly out of my depth here but fathom's last point is the one I understood immediately. You knew by month five it was losing money and you kept going for four more. What made you stay?

vellum asked the thing I was circling. My guess is the answer is that a $1,900 line looks like a business and losing it looks like going backwards, even when the line is negative. I've watched people in other industries do exactly that with their biggest account.

Every trade has this contract. Unlimited callouts, fixed monthly, and the guy who signs it works Saturdays for a year. The subcontract number is where it turned for you, because $165 out against $140 in is a loss you can see from across the room, and you paid it eight times in one month. The move at that point is to tell the client you've hit capacity and shoots past a certain count go out at a scheduled rate, and if they walk, they walk. You were already paying for the privilege of keeping them.

Management side of the house, same structure, different service. I signed a maintenance coordination arrangement with a small owner group that included unlimited work order intake at a flat fee and the intake volume tripled in four months once they trusted us with it. The thing I learned is that a client's usage rises to fill whatever you include, and it happens fast when the service is good.

What I did on renewal was keep the flat fee and put a monthly unit count on the included work, with everything beyond it priced at a rate that assumed I was hiring help. Lost one of the four owners over it and the remaining three are worth more than all four were. thatch, your tiered rate idea is the same fix. I'd add that you should say the tier out loud in the sales conversation rather than burying it, because the client who objects to the tier is telling you they intend to be the 24 shoot month.