How to Package Ongoing Strategy Support as a Monthly Retainer

Planning projects end. That is their structural problem for an advisory practice: the moment the plan is adopted, the engagement that produced it becomes unnecessary, and the client is left to execute alone — which is the part they are worst at.

A retainer solves both problems, but only if it sells something other than more documents.

What the client is actually buying

Not facilitation. Not another deck. They are buying:

• A rhythm they will not maintain alone. Somebody external who shows up quarterly and asks the uncomfortable question.
• A current picture. Status they can look at in week seven of a quarter without asking three directors.
• Board-ready material produced without a two-day scramble.
• Institutional memory. A dated record of what was decided and why, which survives staff turnover.

A retainer scope that is deliverable

Monthly (2–4 hours) Measure upkeep chased and verified. Overdue actions flagged. One short exception note to the sponsor. No meeting required.

Quarterly (6–10 hours) Pre-read prepared from current data. A 90-minute review the advisor chairs on a fixed agenda, with a decision forced on every at-risk initiative. A written decision record within 24 hours. Board pack produced from the same data.

Annually (included or priced separately) Priority refresh, measure re-baselining, retirement of completed initiatives, next-year initiative costing timed to the client's budget calendar.

That is a defensible 60–100 hours a year — enough to be valuable, small enough to deliver across several clients.

What to exclude explicitly

• Delivery of the initiatives themselves (that is project work, priced separately).
• Data collection the client's own systems should produce.
• Unlimited ad-hoc analysis. Give a small allowance and price beyond it.

Retainers die from scope creep more often than from price. Say in the agreement how extra work is handled: a named hourly or day rate, a written mini-scope before it starts, and a cap per month beyond which it becomes a separate engagement.

Three package examples

Names and contents you can adapt. Each is a different amount of *your* time, not a different amount of software.

Core — visibility and upkeep

• Shared plan maintained in one client workspace.
• Monthly measure verification and overdue-item chase.
• One written monthly progress note to the sponsor.
• One 60-minute quarterly review, advisor-chaired, with a decision record.
• Board-ready pack once a quarter.
• Roughly 4–6 hours a month.

Advisory — Core plus judgement

• Everything in Core.
• A monthly 60-minute call with the sponsor.
• Standing risk register reviewed monthly, with escalations raised in writing.
• Annual priority refresh and measure re-baselining.
• Roughly 8–12 hours a month.

Execution Partner — Advisory plus facilitation

• Everything in Advisory.
• Monthly working session with initiative owners.
• Facilitation of one cross-functional initiative per quarter.
• Onboarding and training for new owners as staff change.
• Roughly 16–24 hours a month.

Delivery of the initiatives themselves stays out of all three. That is project work.

Who does what

You (the advisor)

• Chair the reviews and write the decision record.
• Verify measures and chase what is missing.
• Raise blockers to the sponsor with a specific ask.
• Produce the leadership and board material.

Your client

• Owners update their own actions and measures.
• The sponsor responds to escalations within an agreed window.
• Leadership attends the quarterly review.
• Data the client's own systems produce stays the client's responsibility.

Write both columns into the agreement. Most retainer disappointments are an unwritten expectation on one of these lines.

Estimating your delivery cost

Do this before you set a price:

1. Estimate hours per client per month for the package (use the ranges above as a starting point, then track actuals for two months).
2. Set a cost per hour for whoever delivers each part — your own loaded cost, or an associate's.
3. Multiply, then add the platform cost per client and any other direct costs (travel, printing, a subcontracted analyst).
4. Compare with the fee. If the gap is thin at your *estimated* hours, it will be negative at your actual hours.

An illustrative price build-up

Fictional numbers, shown only to demonstrate the arithmetic. These are not benchmarks, market rates, or a promise of what you can charge.

Assume: Advisory package, 10 delivery hours per client per month, $120 per hour loaded delivery cost, a $3,500 monthly fee, and one other direct cost of $75 a month.

Three things to hold on to. Contribution is not profit: sales time, admin, software other than the platform, overhead and taxes are not in this table. The platform subscription is a practice-level cost spread across all your client workspaces, so it belongs in a practice-level calculation rather than being charged wholly against one client. And a fee is only revenue once a client signs and keeps paying.

The revenue calculator on the homepage does this arithmetic with your own numbers, and leaves costs you have not entered marked as unknown rather than treating them as zero.

Billing shape

Set a monthly fee and bill monthly. Where you quote an annual commitment, be explicit about whether the figure you are showing is a monthly price or an annual price expressed as a monthly equivalent — clients notice, and so do procurement teams. Include the software in your fee or bill it through at cost; do not let a small platform cost add a procurement step to a much larger retainer. More on fee structure in pricing strategy engagements.

A sample monthly service schedule

• Week 1 — Verify measures due; chase missing updates; flag overdue commitments.
• Week 2 — Sponsor call (Advisory and above); escalate anything blocked for two weeks with a specific ask.
• Week 3 — Owner working session (Execution Partner); update the risk register.
• Week 4 — Write and send the monthly progress note; prepare next month's asks. In review months, circulate the pre-read five working days ahead and take a snapshot when the review closes.

The operational requirement

A retainer is only profitable if the between-meeting work is light. That means:

• The client's team updates their own measures and actions; you verify, you do not transcribe.
• Status is visible to you without asking — no email chasing to find out where things stand.
• The board pack and the client-facing summary are generated from the same record you already maintain.
• Each client's data is separated from every other client's, because you are holding several organizations' internal plans and risks at once.

Advisors who run retainers out of spreadsheets end up doing hours of assembly per client per month, which is the margin. Advisors who keep each client in an isolated workspace and let the client update it directly spend that time on the conversation instead. That is the difference between a retainer that scales past four clients and one that does not.

How StrategyHub supports the delivery

• A separate workspace per client, with data isolated per workspace and one login across them.
• Owners and dates on goals, initiatives, actions and measures, plus per-owner work queues.
• Update request links and reminders, so verification is not an email exercise.
• Report books, executive summaries and snapshots, so the board pack and the "what changed" answer come from the records you already keep.
• Prepare Client Review assembles the pre-read for a review — overdue commitments, measures against target, missing updates, open risks and unresolved follow-ups — and records the decisions and follow-up actions afterwards.
• Practice-level pricing: plans are priced per practice with a client-workspace allowance, not per participant seat.

The renewal conversation

Have it 60 days before the term ends, and bring three things:

1. The decision record. Every decision made in the year, dated. Clients forget how much was decided.
2. Measure movement. Where numbers moved, and where they did not, honestly.
3. Next year's priorities, drafted, so renewal is a continuation rather than a re-sell.

Renewals are won on the visibility the client had in month seven, not on the quality of the plan document in month one.

Converting an existing project client

• In the final project session, present the plan *and* the review calendar for the next four quarters.
• Offer the first quarterly review as part of the project close.
• Give them the working plan in a form they can update themselves, with their own team's logins.
• Ask one question: who will chair the quarterly review if we are not here?

Most clients cannot answer that question, and the answer is the retainer.