🏷️ Category: Offers & Services
There’s a particular feeling most freelancers know.
You finish a decent-sized project, the final invoice gets paid, and for a moment there’s that lovely sense of having cleared the decks. Then you look at what’s booked for next month and realise there isn’t actually much there.
That’s when otherwise ordinary enquiries can suddenly become very interesting. The slightly awkward project. The vague brief. The client where something in the back of your head is already whispering, you’re probably going to regret this one. When next month starts at zero, turning work down feels very different.
I’ve been there plenty of times over the years. And I think it’s one of the reasons hourly work is so attractive when you’re freelancing. It makes perfect sense. Someone needs something done, you do the work, track the time and send them an invoice. There’s no complicated pricing model and no need to predict exactly what might happen three months from now.
Lovely.
Except there’s a catch.
The Common Freelancer Challenge
There’s nothing inherently wrong with charging hourly. I still track my time closely, and there are situations where billing for time is absolutely the right approach.
The problem is when most or all of your income relies on continually doing the next piece of work. The project finishes, so the revenue finishes. The support request gets resolved, so that revenue finishes too. Take a week off, and there’s a good chance your income takes the week off with you.
It means each month can become a miniature sales cycle. You’re looking at the pipeline, wondering whether you should chase that proposal, trying to work out where the next project is coming from and perhaps saying yes to work that you’d be much more selective about if things felt a little more secure.
That’s the part of feast and famine we don’t always talk about. It isn’t just what happens to your bank balance. It changes the decisions you make.
When you really need the next project, it’s difficult to objectively ask whether you actually want it.
A Better Way to Frame It
This is usually where freelance advice tells you to stop charging hourly and start selling retainers.
I don’t think it’s quite that simple.
A badly designed retainer can be worse than hourly work. Promise a client unlimited access to you for a fixed monthly fee, and you haven’t created freedom. You’ve basically invented hourly freelancing with significantly worse maths.
For me, the more useful goal is much simpler: stop making every month begin at zero.
Recurring revenue gives you predictability. And predictability gives you options.
If you already know that part of next month’s income is committed, the next enquiry doesn’t carry quite as much weight. You can look at it properly rather than immediately wondering whether you can afford to turn it down.
The question changes from “Can I afford to say no to this?” to “Is this actually the right project for me?”
That, to me, is where retainers and recurring work begin to create freedom. Not because the income is passive. It certainly isn’t. You’re still delivering something valuable in return. But having a predictable foundation gives you more control over what you build around it.
Try This With Your Own Offer
I wouldn’t start by disappearing for an afternoon and emerging with Bronze, Silver and Gold retainer packages.
Instead, look at what your existing clients repeatedly need from you.
It might be WordPress support and maintenance, ongoing improvements, performance work, content changes, reporting, optimisation or simply access to your advice when they need to make a website decision. Somewhere in the work you’re already doing, there may be recurring problems that clients currently bring to you as individual jobs.
The opportunity is to ask whether you could take ongoing responsibility for one of those problems instead.
That distinction matters because your clients don’t particularly care that you’d like more predictable revenue. They do care about having someone they trust taking responsibility for something they don’t want to worry about.
I wrote about a similar shift recently in Maintenance Plans Are Dead. Or Are They?.
The central idea there is that ongoing website services become much easier to understand when we stop selling a shopping list of technical tasks and start talking about the responsibility we’re actually taking off the client’s shoulders.
A Quick Reflection
Here’s something worth thinking about for a moment.
If you stopped working today, how much of next month’s income would already be committed?
You don’t need to calculate the exact percentage. Just consider whether the answer is most of it, some of it, or almost none of it.
There isn’t necessarily a wrong answer. But if it’s close to none, it might explain why the next enquiry sometimes feels more important than it really should.
Your Thoughts
I’m curious where freelancers reading this sit.
Hit reply with just one word: Most, Some or None.
You don’t need to explain or justify it. I’d simply like to get a feel for how much predictable income people have built into their freelance businesses.
Until next time,
Wil.