Context
This was one of the agency’s longest-running revenue accounts: an ongoing production retainer for a US-based enterprise customer experience management company, running 1.5+ years. The client sent design tickets on a rolling basis through Wrike. No fixed scope, no fixed monthly volume. Just tracked hours, billed against a rate that only held up if the hours stayed honest and the process stayed tight.
The stakes
Two structural risks came with a model like this, and neither shows up until it’s already cost you something.
First: a junior designer working alone can spend 10 hours on a task that realistically takes 6 or 7. Billed straight through, that either erodes the client’s trust in the invoice or eats the agency’s margin, depending which way you resolve it.
Second: the client was US-based and reviewed work in the evening. Any deadline written into a Wrike ticket was the finish line for the whole cycle, feedback included. The design work itself had to be done well before that.
What I did
Made time logging a judgment call. If a simple task ran long because of designer inexperience rather than actual complexity, I adjusted the logged hours down to match realistic scope. Overbilling a task-based enterprise client erodes trust faster than it protects short-term revenue, and this was a relationship built for the long run.
Reverse-engineered the internal deadline. A client deadline of the 25th was treated as the final approved delivery. A first draft had to land well before that. The team backed into an internal completion date, usually the 22nd or 23rd, leaving the remaining days for the client to review, send feedback, and see it applied before the real deadline hit. The buffer was the review cycle itself.
Logged the hours nobody else was tracking. Designer time was never the full cost of a task. Art director review and revision passes added real hours, and if that time went unlogged, the numbers stopped reflecting what the work actually cost.
Outcome
- Stayed stable and profitable for 1.5+ years with no margin or trust escalation
- Survived a full client rebrand mid-engagement by aligning the team on new standards in one structured call, instead of absorbing it as an ad hoc scramble
- Client kept the freedom of an open-scope queue without handing the agency an open-ended cost problem
What I’d do differently
I’d have written the internal-deadline buffer down as a rule from day one, instead of leaving it as something the team had to relearn on every new ticket. An unwritten process only works as long as the person enforcing it is in the room.