Standards & Structure
Chris Out
You've been running your agency for a few years now. And you're basically still billing the way you did at the start. An hour here, a project price there, the odd client on retainer. It works, but your margin stays stuck and you don't know whether you're using the right pricing model or just the one you happened to stumble into.
Let me flip it around. The question isn't what your hourly rate should be. The question is whether you should be selling hours at all. Because your pricing model sets your ceiling, not your rate.
As long as you sell hours, you're selling something with a floor and a ceiling. You have this many people, they have this many billable hours, and those hours have a rate. Earning more therefore means working more hours or hiring more people. There's no third way. Your agency literally can't grow bigger than the sum of your time.
And here's the strange part: the better you get, the less you earn. You build something in four hours that used to take two days, and you reward yourself with a lower invoice. Your craft works against your own revenue.
You either sell time, or you sell an outcome. Time has a ceiling. An outcome doesn't.
There are roughly four models, and they don't sit side by side. They sit on top of each other, like a staircase. Each step pulls you a little further away from your own hours.
At the bottom sits the hourly rate. You bill the time you put in. Simple, fair, and for exactly that reason the model that keeps you small. The client buys your hours, not your result, so every conversation is about how long something took instead of what it delivered.
One step up you set a fixed fee per project. You agree an amount up front for a defined piece of work. Now the conversation is no longer about hours, and for the first time you're rewarded for being fast instead of punished. The condition is that you lock the scope down tightly, otherwise you still leak your margin through work that quietly creeps in.
Above that sits the retainer: a fixed amount per month for an ongoing engagement. This is the model that gives your agency calm, because at the start of the month you already know a large part of your revenue. Predictability is the win here. The risk is complacency: a retainer that nobody reviews anymore slowly turns into a client paying far too little for far too much work.
At the top sits value-based pricing: you price on what it delivers for the client, not on what it costs you. You no longer ask a rate, you ask for a share of the value you set in motion. This is the model with the highest margin and at the same time the one that asks the most of you, because you have to be able to name the value and you have to dare to say your number out loud.
That last part, daring to say the number out loud, is its own story. Here it's purely about the model. Which structure traps you, which one sets you free.
Say there are three of you. Everyone delivers roughly 100 billable hours a month, and you charge 90 euro an hour. Then your ceiling is 3 times 100 times 90. 27,000 euro a month. Not because that's where the market sits, but because your hours are gone. More means: someone extra, or running harder.
Now take those same three people, but you sell a defined package for a fixed price. You get better, so you deliver it in less time. On an hourly rate that costs you revenue. On a fixed amount you keep the difference yourself. Every improvement in your process now goes to your margin instead of to the client.
That's the whole point. On hours, the client pays for your time. On a fixed amount or a value price, they pay for the outcome, and you get to become as smart and fast as you like. Revenue is revenue is the biggest lie. What matters is what's left at the bottom line, and your model determines that more than your rate does.
Pull up your client list and write next to each client which model they're on. Hourly, project, retainer or value. Chances are it's a mess that grew historically, client by client, without you ever choosing it.
Then pick one client where you price the next proposal a step higher. Don't overhaul your whole agency, just one proposal. A client you now bill by the hour gets a fixed project price. A project client who keeps coming back monthly gets a retainer proposal. You test the model, not your entire business at once.
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And then the honest question: which model is on your biggest client, and is that the model you chose, or the one you got stuck in?
Roughly four: the hourly rate, a fixed fee per project, a retainer (a fixed amount per month) and value-based pricing (pricing on the value for the client). They sit on top of each other like a staircase. Each step pulls you further from your own hours and lifts your margin.
Not bad, but limiting. As long as you sell hours, your ceiling is the sum of your time, and you get punished the moment you become faster and better. For an agency that wants to grow it's usually the first step to move away from, not the final destination.
A retainer is a fixed amount per month for ongoing work. The win sits in predictability. Value-based pricing ties your price to the value you set in motion for the client, independent of time or package. The win sits in margin. A retainer can be priced value-based, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Start with one client, not your whole agency. Define a bounded piece of work, lock the scope down tightly and put a fixed price on it instead of hours. That way you test the model with limited risk and immediately see what it does to your margin.
Value-based pricing, because you price on what it delivers and not on what it costs you. It also asks the most: you have to be able to name the value and dare to say your number out loud. A tightly priced retainer or project price sits just below it on margin and is often a more realistic first step.
There's no model that's best for everyone, but there is a direction. Away from loose hours, toward a fixed amount or a value price, so your revenue no longer hangs one-to-one on your time. For an agency this size, that's often the most important step to raise your margin and your calm at the same time.
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