Running a Marketing Agency by the Numbers: Retainer Packages, Hours per Client, Contractor Margins, Client Churn & Account Capacity

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn three retainer packages into monthly hours, cost and a price at the target margin, round the price up to a clean figure and look up what each client pays.
• Add up October's timesheet per client, compare actual with planned hours, work out the hourly rate each retainer really earns and flag the clients who are over scope.
• Price paid-media management with a band rate, a minimum fee and a tiered schedule, see why bands create a cliff, and check whether each fee covers the hours behind it.
• Compare in-house and outsourced cost per deliverable including review time, express the outsourced profit as margin and as markup, and choose the cheaper way to produce each piece.
• Calculate the Q3 profit and margin of every client, rank them, and colour the accounts that miss the target margin.
• Measure a year of client losses as a pooled monthly churn rate, turn it into an average client lifetime and lifetime gross profit, and work out how many months it takes to earn back the cost of winning a client.
• Add up the active client hours per account manager, measure utilisation, size the team for the pipeline with a utilisation target and work out how many accounts one person can carry.
• Roll the monthly retainer revenue forward from clients won and lost, find the cash left after payroll and other costs, measure half-year MRR growth and chart won vs lost revenue.