| Have you considered a monthly retainer with an hour cap? This prevents you from being treated like a salaried employee, maintains your work life balance, and ensures the client is still providing solid requirements and thinking through their ideas. We have found a lot of great success with this model, and our clients respect it. It ensure we can have multiple clients, without one taking up all of our time, and taking it from others. If we spend under X hours, that's fine. But there's simply a cap. It essentially means that each client gives enough work for us to work for those total number of hours, and we still have MRR regardless. We can help our clients maximize usable time, and it makes our project management valuable to the client as well. To combat long Net Terms, you can kickoff a client with a project, which begins upon receipt of payment, and is continued with the retainer. This initial project should be able to support you until your retainer payments start (180 days in length) but your retainer should start ASAP. It also allows the client to see your value, and you get to feel the client out. |