Thank you very much. And sound pulling in 5k MR. Nice. I have two separate questions. Number one, I want to grow my MR, but I'm noticing a lot of business I'm offering to will gladly pay for the build, but when it comes to the monthly fee, they clam up. How can I reframe this to set myself up for more of a passive route to massive MR?
When a business likes the build but balks at a recurring fee, I reframe the conversation by offering a ladder of options. First, I sell a fixed‑price project (typically $1‑2k) that delivers a system I claim can add $10k of monthly value. If they accept, I then pitch a monthly retainer (e.g., $5k/month) based on the roadmap of additional improvements I uncovered while building the system—this can represent tens of thousands in lifetime value. If they decline the retainer, I fall back to a fixed‑price version of the same scope (around $3.5k) or a low‑cost maintenance retainer (about $250/month for Slack access). Should none of those work, I downsell them to my agency school—a low‑cost or free educational resource—where I can periodically re‑engage and upsell them later to any of the higher tiers. This creates a self‑reinforcing ecosystem: customers can start low and move up, or start high and later add services, mirroring the way high‑performing service businesses operate today.
I build new systems rather than just maintain one, because you’d quickly run out of high‑ROI systems to apply to their business. The ROI from something like Lead‑en automation can be massive, which justifies the recurring payment, but if the retainer were only for maintenance of a single system you’d worry about endless revisions. I don’t think it’s wrong to charge a retainer even when the ongoing work is near zero, because the systems I build produce value independently—you don’t have to constantly watch over them. It’s like hiring an emergency plumber who charges $500 for a 30‑second fix; the fee reflects the expertise built over years, not just the time spent on the job. So the ongoing work doesn’t have to be zero for you to get paid, but you must continuously provide value—perhaps through a system that runs cold email autonomously, for example. What I provide on a monthly retainer includes: unlimited maintenance on all systems we’ve built together; a 15‑minute availability window each day (12 p.m. to 2 p.m. PT) where you can ask me any question and I’ll reply within about 15 minutes; a weekly strategy call (30‑45 minutes) where I slot into your business and tell you exactly what you need to do to make more money, essentially building a roadmap for the coming week; I also often create a big monthly roadmap at the start of the month or include a proposal with a list of 50 things I want to do when we begin working together, which I follow unless I provide a separate monthly roadmap; unlimited new project requests—you can make as many requests as you want and I’ll add them to my queue, though realistically I usually complete about one new project per week because I have templates and blueprints for most things, so I’m not spending eight hours a day fulfilling a $7,000‑a‑month client; there’s a lot of perceived value in this, comparable to what clients would pay for a standalone maintenance package, Q&A and training for the team, a weekly strategy call, or consultation at my hourly rate (around $800). Instead of building every project myself, I increasingly describe exactly what the system should look like or provide SOPs for your team to build it with their own tools, so I’m not a single point of failure and your team develops the skills to build these automations as well.
Retainers replace unpredictable hourly billing with a recurring, prepaid service model. For example, if you previously billed 20 hours at $50/hour ($1,000), a retainer might lock in those 20 hours at a discounted rate of $45/hour ($900) paid upfront. This gives you guaranteed income and lets you schedule work knowing exactly how many hours each client will need each month, eliminating the feast‑or‑famine swings of hourly work. The real power of a retainer lies in what you bundle with the core service. Instead of selling just the automation build, you add items that make the offer a no‑brainer for the client: a regular strategy call (e.g., a 45‑minute weekly meeting); unlimited maintenance: you fix any API glitches, server outages, or platform issues at no extra charge; an availability guarantee, such as promising to respond on Slack within 15 minutes between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. Monday‑through‑Friday; emergency Q&A or training sessions where the client can ask “How do I update this?” and get immediate help; and access to any resources or tools you’ve built for them. These extras increase the client’s perceived value and satisfaction, improve retention, and generate referrals, while they don’t scale linearly with your time — so you can serve more clients without a proportional increase in workload. From a utilization standpoint, clients often use fewer hours than they pay for (e.g., 18 of the 20 contracted hours). You still receive the full retainer payment, meaning your effective hourly rate remains at your baseline ($50/hour) while you enjoy predictable income. Over a six‑month period, a $1,000‑per‑month retainer yields $6,000 lifetime value; after subtracting acquisition costs (say $150 per client), your net profit jumps from $850 on a one‑time $1,000 deal to $5,850 — a margin increase from roughly 85 % to 97.5 %. Working with repeat clients also lets you understand their business deeper, deliver more nuanced solutions, and earn more referrals. Finally, because you’re building automation systems, the value you deliver isn’t tied to your personal time: a system like my cold‑email setup that generated 23 leads last month continues to produce results even when I’m not actively working on it, adding another layer of leverage to the retainer model.
Sure thing, Otis. The nuanced answer is you should do both: charge an introductory (setup/implementation) fee and a recurring retainer/service fee. The introductory offer is a one‑time, fast‑win product with high conversion; it lets prospects quickly see value and justifies the ROI. Once they’ve experienced that win, you pitch the retainer—a slower, monthly recurring service with lower conversion if sold alone. By leading with the intro offer you maximize front‑end conversion, deliver a quick win, then upsell the retainer with a much higher close rate. Think of your funnel: lead generators → sales event → intro offer → recurring service. For example, with a 25% lead‑to‑intro offer conversion and a 30% intro‑offer‑to‑retainer conversion, you end up converting about 7.5% of leads into retainer clients, while still capturing the upfront fee. Using sample numbers—a $2k intro offer that yields a $6k–$88k return, and a $5k/mo retainer over six months ($30k LTV)—you can make far more money than selling either piece alone. In short, the intro offer gets the foot in the door; the retainer maximizes lifetime value.
Yeah, this is bang on — this is exactly what you want to do. You basically increase your prices until you get so much resistance that it doesn't make sense to increase them anymore. Here's a concept I think is really important: the optimal conversion rate is not 100%. If you put an offer in front of 100 people and all 100 say yes, odds are you could be making way more money by taking a few hits on the front end — because how much you actually make is conversion rate times price. If your fee is $1/month and 100% convert, you make $100 servicing 100 clients. If your fee is $25,000 and only 1 in 100 converts, you make $25,000 for 1/100th the work — 250x the money for 1/100th the work. This is an optimization problem: as price rises from low to high, conversion rate falls, but not proportionally at first — there's a hypothetical maximum where price times conversion rate is far higher than at a low price, even though conversion rate has dropped. So keep pushing your price up as long as your services stay solid; you'll make more money per unit of work. Alex Hormozi's rule of thumb is that the ideal conversion rate on a high-ticket service (and a $3K/month retainer with a ~5-month average return, i.e. $15K, counts as high-ticket) is around 30-40%. So if your current conversion rate is more like 50-60%, you'd actually make more money pushing pricing up until it drops to that 30-40% range — supply and demand: as price goes up, the number of people willing to say yes goes down.