To build a profitable freelance business upselling and bundling your services is essential. In order to escape the hamster wheel and start getting paid for your value instead of how much time you put in you need to master this art.

In this cheat sheet you will learn what a monthly retainer is, how to move from hourly to monthly billing, how to bundle your services, and best practices for charging clients.

 What is a Monthly Retainer?

A monthly retainer is a fee paid by a client to a freelancer for next month’s work. This assures that the services they are purchasing will be delivered throughout the entire month.  Monthly retainers are associated with long-term projects and help both the client and the freelancer have predictable expectations.

• For example, a client can pay you a monthly retainer fee of $750 per month to manage all of their social media accounts and post daily.
• Another example is a client can pay you a monthly retainer fee of $1,500 to manage their Facebook Ads and provide weekly reports

As you can see, retainer fees are for ongoing types of services you can provide on a monthly basis.

 Moving From Hourly to Monthly Billing

Moving from an hourly billing model to a monthly billing model can seem like a challenge at first. But in reality, it benefits both you and the client to establish a monthly retainer that is fair for the value you are providing. There is an ongoing ‘Hourly rate vs. flat rate dilemma’ that states the pros and cons of each method.

However, I am here to tell you that you should be basing the majority of your business on recurring monthly revenue and not hourly clients. You have to shift your perspective away from the 9-5 mentality that makes you feel you are only worth a certain amount of money per hour.

 Dealing With Client Objections

When you go to either upsell your current clients onto a monthly retainer OR you pitch one to a new client, you will likely have to handle a few customer complaints / objections. It’s important to remain calm and describe to the client these 2 big points:

• Hourly work incentives slow work. Don’t you want me to be able to provide my best value service at the quickest speed possible?
• Describe that your client hired you for the results you bring, not to pay you by the hour. If they want to find someone cheaper that delivers less results that will always be an option.

 How To Bundle Your Freelance Skills Together?

Now that you understand what a monthly retainer is and how to transition from hourly to monthly billing, it’s important to understand how to bundle your skills together to offer a monthly service. Even one-time projects have opportunities to turn into a long-term client if you know how to bundle and sell your skills effectively.

The first step is to ask yourself: “How can I charge monthly and provide an ongoing service within my skill set?”

• For example, if you are a web designer, you can offer ongoing email support and unlimited website updates for your client. You can even offer web hosting, email hosting, and much more once you begin to investigate it.
• For example, if you are a copywriter, you can offer to write weekly blogs and provide analytics reports on how they improve rankings and website traffic.
• For example, if you’re a content marketer, you can offer weekly email campaigns and social media management to build engagement & generate sales.

As you can see, there is always a way to turn your skill into a monthly service that you can repeat and charge a monthly retainer for.

The second step is to now begin bundling all of your skills and associated services into multiple different tiers so clients can choose which one is best for them. The goal here is to show how much value the client will receive is directly related to how much they are paying. This is how you escape the time trap and can scale a profitable freelance business.

Let’s take our Content Marketing example from above. Your skill bundles could include:

 Bundle 1

• 1 email campaign per week
• 5 Facebook posts per week

 Bundle 2

• 1 email campaign per week
• 5 Facebook posts per week
• 5 Instagram posts per week
• 1 SEO written blog per week

 Bundle 3

• 2 email campaign per week
• 10 Facebook posts per week
• 10 Instagram posts per week
• 2 SEO written blogs per week
• Monthly analytics reporting

As you can see, each Bundle Tier builds off each other.

By laying out your different skill bundles like this you can easily show the client different options based on how much value they want to receive. I encourage you to build out 3 skill bundles that you can begin offering clients right away.

Make sure to only include skills and services that you will actually be able to deliver results for.

 How Much To Charge For Your Bundle?

This is the exciting part. Making money! This is how you upsell your clients on the VALUE you offer. Once you begin to see why charging a monthly retainer helps you so much you will never go back.

First, let’s start by remembering each tier builds off of each other. So just like you laid out each skill you can provide and bundled them together, next begin putting prices next to each of them and adding the totals up.

 

Bundle 1 – $600 / month

• 1 email campaign per week – $400
• 5 Facebook posts per week – $200
• Bundle 2 – $1,200 / month
• 1 email campaign per week – $400
• 5 Facebook posts per week – $200
• 5 Instagram posts per week – $200
• 1 SEO written blog per week – $400

 Bundle 3 – $2,400 / month

• 2 email campaign per week – $800
• 10 Facebook posts per week – $400
• 10 Instagram posts per week – $400
• 2 SEO written blogs per week – $800
• Monthly analytics reporting – Included

Now that you have established your skill bundles, you are putting yourself at a big advantage. For the client, they have 3 different options to choose from based on how much value they want to get and how much they can afford to pay. On your end, this is where it gets exciting.

Let’s say that Bundle 1 takes you about 12 hours to complete. That means you will make $50 / hour! ($600 / 12 hours = $50/hour rate). However, if you went straight to the client and asked for $50 / hour you may not be able to show them the value you are worth.

By taking the focus off your hourly rate and onto what the monthly value is that you are offering, it shows the client exactly what they can expect to receive, which is what they like. But wait, it gets better! As you move onto Tier 2, let’s say your current email campaigns and Facebook posts actually help you do the additional Instagram and blog services quicker.

For example, let’s say Bundle 2 takes you about 20 hours to complete, now you are at $60 / hour! ($1,200 / 20 hours = $60/hour rate) Not only did you just double your monthly retainer by going from Bundle 1 to Bundle 2, but you also got a $10/hour rate increase as well.

If you were to just go to the client and ask for a $10/hour rate increase it would be incredibly difficult. But when you are bundling your services and offering your value instead of your time, you have the ability to scale much faster and easier. Both with your current clients and with new ones. Now for the final bundle, Bundle 3. Let’s say this one takes you 30 hours per week. That means you will now be getting paid $80 / hour! ($2,400 / 30 hours = $80/hour rate). That means you just DOUBLED your revenue with a 50% increase in time spent.

Conclusion

The power of monthly retainers helps freelancers all around the world build profitable businesses.