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This firm stopped bleeding money when clients stalled. A single change to how contracts are written turned erratic project margins into consistently high ones.
The problem is one every project shop knows. You are hired to deliver a thing. The client is slow to give feedback, slow to approve, slow to do their half. The deadline slips, the work drags, and on a deliverable-based contract you carry the cost while you wait to get paid.
A member solved it with a move borrowed from a peer in the room. The peer had written into his contracts that he reserves people and time for a set period, and the client agrees to pay for that period whether or not they hit their own deadlines. This firm adapted the idea: move to a retainer, and add an ongoing project-management fee that keeps running when the client is the one causing the delay.
“We have this project management. You didn’t finish the thing? We’re going to keep charging you $5,000 a month until we’re done. And our margins are incredibly consistent and incredibly high because of that.”
The objection everyone expects, that clients will refuse, mostly evaporates. As the founder put it, nobody signs a contract admitting they plan to miss their own deadline, so everybody signs. And once it is signed, the delay becomes the client’s cost, not the firm’s.
Why it matters to you
Erratic margins usually get blamed on pricing or delivery. Often the real leak is scope and schedule slippage that the client causes and you quietly absorb. Moving from deliverable-based fees to a retainer with a standing project-management fee reprices that risk onto the party creating it. The result is not just higher margins, it is predictable ones, and predictable margin is what lets you plan, reinvest, and eventually sell. It also takes the founder out of the miserable job of chasing stalled projects, because the meter simply keeps running.
Your one thing
Look at your last three projects that ran over. Who caused the delay, and who paid for it? If the answer is “the client caused it and we ate it,” then your contract, not your team, is the thing to fix this week.
Collective 54 is where boutique service firm founders go to make more money, scale with less friction, and build a firm worth buying.
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