# Systems and Partner Retainers | The Coastal Collaborative

Source: https://www.thecoastalcollab.com/retainers

Ongoing, not a project

## The boring parts, handled every month.

Two retainers, named deliverables, flat price. Nobody buys hours, so I stopped selling them.

[Talk it through](https://www.thecoastalcollab.com/book)

What you can put on retainer

### One is for the list you keep not getting to. The other is for when I am the ops department.

Both are a flat price for a named list of things that happen every month. No hour cap, no timesheet, no awkward email about scope. If you outgrow the smaller one we move you, and if the bigger one is more than you need I will say so.

Flat rate, no timesheets

#### Systems Retainer

$1,500per month

For the owner who keeps saying "I really need to fix that" about the same four things, every month, for a year.

- One build a month, tested and live in your business, sized to a single workflow connected end to end: an intake flow, a follow-up sequence, one sales pipeline, or a handoff between two tools
- A 30-minute call every week, or whatever cadence we agree on once Slack or email is doing the job
- Written documentation for everything I build, so your team can run it without me
- Questions answered within one business day
- Fixes to anything I built, always included

Month to month. This is the one most people mean when they ask about a retainer.

Flat rate, capped at three accounts

#### Partner Retainer

$2,500per month

For the businesses where I am effectively the operations department, and everybody involved already knows it.

- Everything in the Systems Retainer
- Up to two builds live a month, or one larger workflow that spans several tools
- A seat in your Slack and same-day response
- Up to an hour a week on calls, as needed
- A quarterly systems review: what is running, what is duct-taped, what goes next

Three months to start, then month to month. Three seats, and when they are full they are full. I would rather tell you that now than take your money and get thin.

Let me be specific

### What a retainer here is not .

I have been on the other side of four of these and every one of them went sideways in one of the ways below. So here is what you are not signing up for:

A block of hours you buy and then feel guilty about not using

A monthly report that tells you what I did instead of showing you what changed

An open-ended thing with no scope where the invoice creeps every quarter

A junior nobody you have never met doing the work in your account

If you want to see what I am like to work with before any of this, the [Operations Audit](https://www.thecoastalcollab.com/operations-audit) is $597, you keep the fix list either way, and it credits toward your first month if you come back inside 60 days.

The questions people actually ask

### Before you book anything.

#### Why is there no hour count?

#### Is there a contract?

#### How is this different from paying you hourly?

#### What counts as one build?

#### Who actually does the work?

#### Can I start smaller and move up?

#### What if my month is quiet?

### Tell me what keeps not getting done.

Thirty minutes, no deck, and I will tell you honestly whether a retainer is the right shape for you or whether you would be better off with one scoped project and your money back in your pocket.

[Book a call](https://www.thecoastalcollab.com/book)

The 5-Minute Ops QuizFree Quiz