Our biggest bottleneck isn't the work, it's waiting for clients to do their part. Anyone else?
Me and my co-founder run a small agency. We work with e-commerce brands - content, ads, websites, the whole brand side of things.
We don't do monthly retainers. We charge based on deliverables. X amount for X pieces of content, X for the website, etc. Felt cleaner than a monthly fee for work that isn't always consistent.
But here's the problem we keep running into. We send a client a script. Two weeks go by. Nothing. They haven't shot the content yet. We're just sitting here with everything ready, edit timeline planned, posting schedule mapped out waiting.
Another client we're doing 16 product designs for. Once those are approved we build the website. Once the website is done we start social. It's one long chain and every link in that chain depends on them moving.
So a job that should take 4-5 weeks is now pushing 2 months. And because we charge per deliverable, the invoice doesn't go out until things are actually done. So our cash flow looks terrible even though technically "we're working." We're not overloaded. We're just... stuck waiting. On them.
Anyone else structure it this way? Did you eventually move to retainers? Or did you fix it with contracts and deadlines? Genuinely asking because we're trying to figure out if this is a pricing model problem or a client management problem.