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retainer-economics-calculator

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Compute per-client and agency-wide retainer profitability for a team-based agency - loaded delivery cost including account management time, gross margin per client, team utilization, and the fire-or-fix and sales-stop verdicts - with a runnable Node calculator. Use when an agency owner asks "which of my clients are actually profitable", "what's my real margin per retainer", "are we over capacity", "should we fire this client", or "can we take on another account". Do NOT use for pricing a solo freelancer's own retainer rate - use retainer-pricing-calculator instead.

skills/retainer-economics-calculator/SKILL.md

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# Retainer Economics Calculator

An agency can grow revenue every quarter and still starve, because two or three retainers quietly consume more delivery cost than they pay. The mistake this skill prevents is invisible unprofitability: treating account management time as free overhead, never loading labor cost, and only discovering the losing clients when the agency-wide margin collapses. Install this skill before the rest of the agency pack - it defines the margin thresholds that agency-positioning, agency-qbr-upsell, and client-churn-save all cite.

Work the example agency throughout: Northbeam Digital, an 8-person marketing agency with 11 retainer clients averaging $6,500/month ($71.5k MRR) and a 62 percent gross margin target.

## Operating procedure

Follow in order. Cost loading comes before any margin math, because margin computed on unloaded cost is fiction.

### Step 1: Build loaded hourly cost per role

For each delivery role: loaded hourly cost = annual salary x 1.35 (payroll taxes plus benefits) / 1,800 deliverable hours per year. Use 1,800, not 2,080 - nobody delivers 40 billable-equivalent hours a week.
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