There is a long debate in the industry about whether to sell projects or retainers. Projects pay better in the short term and have a cleaner scope. Retainers pay slower and have a messier scope.
We’ve done both for nine years and the answer is unambiguous: retainers build the practice, projects pay the bills. You need both, but you should never confuse one for the other.
The reason is compounding. Project work shows you a snapshot of what worked once. Retainer work shows you a movie. How the work bends the business over months, what survives the platform changes, what the founder actually does when the ads stop converting.
Lokmanvideo at 40k subscribers in 2017 looked nothing like Lokmanvideo at 2M subscribers in 2026. The work that got him there is a retainer’s worth of reps, not a project’s worth of deliverables.