Value-based retainers: Why we stopped selling time

The retainer model has been a staple of agency-client relationships for decades, & for a long time, that made sense. But client expectations have shifted. The way agencies charge for their work needs to shift with them.

At Next Chapter & Show + Tell, we've made the move away from traditional time-based retainers towards a value-based model, built around outcomes, clear ownership, & genuine trust. Here's what that's looked like in practice.

The problem with selling time

It's a pattern most people in agency life will recognise. A conversation that should be about growth & strategy drifts into a discussion about hours. Is there capacity for this next month? Can we find half an hour in the retainer? How do we log this?

It's nobody's fault, it's just what the model incentivises. Agencies end up managing spreadsheets when they should be managing strategy, & a relationship that should feel like a partnership starts to feel transactional. By the end of the month, the honest answer to a client's request is often: "we've run out of hours."

That's not a great place to be for anyone.

What "value-based" actually means

Switching to a value-based model requires genuinely rethinking what an agency is there to do.

Instead of delivering a fixed set of outputs each month, the focus shifts to achieving client's actual business goals. If the goal is growth by a certain percentage, our job is to build & execute the strategy that gets them there. The deliverables follow from the strategy & are not the point in themselves.

In practice, this means taking clear ownership of specific areas, like AI SEO, inbound marketing, or HubSpot, & committing to making meaningful progress over time. Clients get a proactive team that's constantly thinking about their business, not a reactive one waiting to be briefed & logging the hours.

Accountability gets clearer

One of the questions we hear most often is: if you're not tracking hours, how does the client know what they're getting?

The answer is ownership. In a well-structured value-based retainer, it's clear who owns what. We take accountability for the areas in our remit & are measured on performance within them. The client holds accountability for their side. That division actually makes things cleaner as there's less ambiguity, not more.

Regular check-ins & quarterly reviews make sure clients always have visibility. They know what's been done, what's coming next, & how the strategy is tracking against their goals. In our experience, transparency improves with this model, not the other way around.

The one thing that makes it work

If we had to name one thing that determines whether a value-based retainer succeeds, it's trust, & it has to run both ways.

Clients needs to trust that their agency will deliver on what they say they will, without needing to scrutinise every hour to verify it. And the agency needs to trust that the client will engage, take ownership of their responsibilities, a& show up as a genuine partner.

When that trust is there, the model works. The relationship starts to feel less like a supplier arrangement & more like a shared investment in the same outcome.

For anyone considering making this switch, agency or client, that's the first question worth asking. If the trust is there, the rest follows.

Want to hear more about how we made the transition? Watch Daniel Swepson and Charlie Hartley discuss the shift to value-based retainers in our latest video interview.