Client content, approval, and handoff portal for agencies

We deal with this constantly. Small studio, similar setup to yours, project-based billing where everything is sequential and the client controls the timeline. Two things helped. First, we restructured contracts to bill in phases with deadlines on the client side, not just ours. If they don't provide feedback within 10 business days, the next invoice goes out anyway. That alone fixed the cash flow problem. Second was the follow-up problem. We used to manually track who owed us what in a spreadsheet and half the time we'd forget to ping someone until it was awkward. Started using Duet Mail which tracks open email threads that need responses and reminds you before things go stale. Sounds small but when you have 8-10 active clients it's the difference between a project taking 5 weeks and 10. The pricing model isn't the problem honestly. We still charge per deliverable. The problem is not having consequences for client delays and not following up consistently enough.

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. Read more