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Venting about start-ups
I love start ups, having worked for several over the years. I keep telling myself “I’ll never work as a PPC consultant for a start up again“ but I keep doing it.
Enter new start up owner,. Doesn’t want to pay me for campaign management so we agree to a monthly retainer where I provide some coaching on how to manage campaigns himself. Sent a bill for this last month. Get response “did we meet last month?“ No, but the amount is still due. It’s a retainer. “That’s not fair, I’m very disappointed, cancel the agreement”.
Not a ton of money, but for the love of God — so frustrating dealing with some of these folks!
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1 Reply
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This seems mostly a client management issue vs. a start-up problem tbh. Yea retainers are great, but every single person is going to be pissed paying for something they didn’t ‘use’ without some kind of reminder. Shit I get mad at bills for things I use daily.
Shoot your client a note half-way through the month saying “hey [x], when do we want to schedule this months call? The retainer will bill on the 11/1 and you’ve got hours committed so let me know what time works best for you”
The first time they don’t use the bank say “hey I’m still billing for last month’s time but I can roll some of that into this month so I’ve got a couple extra hours banked for you. Let me know what I can help with”
I promise you will get significantly better reactions even if you put in the exact same amount of work for the client.
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I’ve been founder of several startups, I’ve worked as a freelancer for startups too, and boy, some founders are fucking retarded. Or pricks. Or both.
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I do enjoy the energy and enthusiasm startups have when they start doing ppc, but there are a lot of loony ones. I had one raise their prices 50% and they were mad at me that conversions went down (hmm I wonder why?).
One startup sat me down and said “listen man, our jobs are on the line if you don’t knock this out of the park.” buddy, my life relies on me and I can’t handle that lol
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Next time I’d just make sure they understand what a retainer is before getting started, like eli5 type of understanding, “You understand that even if we don’t meet in a month, you still pay the retainer because I’ve already turned down other work to be available for you when you need me.”
I personally don’t offer this kind of retainer, I either do fixed price monthly management services or hourly consulting if they’re wanting to be trained on Google Ads.
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