--- title: "Retainers were priced below delivery cost, $54k recovered" description: "Blended rates hid unprofitable accounts inside a healthy looking book. Marketing & margin audit: $54k/yr in margin identified, evidenced in 7 days." url: https://marginfix.ai/cases/retainers-were-priced-below-delivery-cost/ lastmod: 2026-10-24 --- Retainers were priced below delivery cost. [Request an audit →](/book/) Services · Agency # Retainers were priced below delivery cost. This marketing & margin audit surfaced **$54k in annual margin** in a Services business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 7 days. $1–3M annual revenue Agency Focus: Retainer pricing +$54k margin recovered / yr +9pts account margin 7 days to findings Retainers priced below their delivery cost Before audit 6 of 34 → After fix 0 of 34 ## The business A marketing agency ran a book of client retainers that looked healthy on blended margin, and relied on that blended figure to reassure itself the business was comfortably profitable. Because the overall number looked fine, the profitability of individual accounts was rarely examined, and the assumption held that a healthy average meant a healthy book across the board. ## What triggered the audit Cash was persistently tighter than a healthy blended margin should allow, the same contradiction the agency routinely diagnosed for its own clients. Taking its own medicine, the audit broke the reassuring blend apart account by account, on the principle that a comfortable average is exactly where unprofitable work hides. ## What the audit found The blended margin was concealing a spread the agency hadn’t seen. Broken down account by account, several retainers were priced below their true delivery cost, accounts where the hours actually spent servicing the client exceeded what the retainer brought in, and these were being quietly funded by the genuinely profitable accounts sitting alongside them in the blend. Because leadership only ever looked at the aggregate, the loss making clients were invisible: the healthy average implied every account was fine, when in fact a subset was steadily draining the margin the rest generated. The unprofitable work buried inside the book came to roughly $54k a year, hidden by the same blended rate thinking the agency warned its own clients against. ◉ How we produced this finding To surface the retainer pricing finding, MarginFix reconstructed the true cost of each unit and order, loading in every fee, return and hidden charge the services headline numbers ignored. The resulting contribution margin read was checked against the client’s own cost data and approved by a named senior auditor. Data sources: Cost of goods, retainer pricing inputs, fulfillment, fees, returns and discounts, reconciled per unit and per order, so the true contribution margin behind every single sale is visible rather than assumed. Key frameworks: A full contribution margin and cost to serve rebuild, full cost ROAS and margin based ROI analysis, framed by the Enterprise Marketing ROI Framework that treats spend as a capital allocation decision. Human validation gate: Every number is rebuilt on your own cost data and signed off by a named senior auditor before it ships. No figure leaves the building without a human standing behind it. Verified against Time tracking / utilization Price / margin change log Project P&L CRM pipeline Invoiced revenue The margin recovered / yr was measured like for like over a matched period, reconciled to the billed and delivered project P&L, and signed off by a named senior auditor before publication. Client identity redacted to protect their commercial position. WORKING PAPER ████████ Agency Representative Redacted Retainer Account margin Enterprise retainer A +21% Mid tier retainer B +14% Legacy retainer C −6% margin recovered / yr +$53,710 Recurring, recovered every year the fix holds, not a one off. Working paper: retainers priced below their delivery cost traced line by line and reconciled to the billed and delivered project P&L over a matched period. Line items representative and redacted; the recovered figure is the reconciled audit finding. ## What we changed ✓ Repriced or exited every account sitting below its true delivery cost, ending the cross subsidy in which the profitable clients had quietly been funding the loss making ones inside the book. ✓ Introduced per account margin tracking with a clear owner, so no individual retainer can ever again disappear into a comfortable blended average and hide a loss. ✓ Set a minimum margin gate for all new business, preventing structurally underpriced accounts from entering the book in the first place. ✓ Gave each account lead full visibility of their own account economics, so scoping and delivery decisions are finally made with real profitability in view. ## The result The outcomes were measured for three months after a 90 day implementation period. $54k a year recovered by fixing accounts the profitable ones were quietly funding, an annual figure equal to 9× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. For any agency or services leader, the mirror is uncomfortable: a healthy blended margin implied every account was fine, while several ran below delivery cost. If you manage to a blended number, loss making clients hide inside the average with no one accountable. It takes per account economics to surface them, the very analysis you’d run for a client but rarely for yourself. A fixed fee audit delivers it in days, so you price new work with eyes open. From kickoff to signed off findings: 7 days. ![Portrait photograph of Leslie Martin](/assets/team/leslie-martin.jpg) Reviewed & signed off by: Leslie Martin Senior Auditor · MarginFix · 10+ years of auditing experience ✓ Anonymized to protect the client · senior reviewed findings · Audit completed between 2024 and 2026, contracted through Cristian Bragau's practice before the MarginFix name existed · Published in the MarginFix library July 21, 2026 · Last reviewed October 24, 2026 ## What the client said SERVICES $54k a year found in 7 days Retainers priced below their delivery cost: **6 of 34 → 0 of 34** “Our blended margin said every account was fine. Leslie broke it apart account by account: six of thirty four retainers were priced below delivery cost, funded by the profitable ones. We repriced or exited them, our own advice.” **Managing Director · Services · Agency** Written approval Under NDA 7 days to findings ![Portrait photograph of Leslie Martin](/assets/team/leslie-martin.jpg) **Leslie Martin** Senior Auditor · signed this audit off [Request an audit →](/book/) [Prefer to talk it through first? Talk to an auditor →](/book/call/) ## More Services findings [Fixed fee packages were scoped below the hours they consumed, +$52k/yr](/cases/fixed-fee-packages-were-scoped-below-the-hours-they-consumed/) [Job board spend was spread evenly regardless of fill rate, +$39k/yr](/cases/job-board-spend-was-spread-evenly-regardless-of-fill-rate/) [Travel and onboarding time was going unbilled, +$47k/yr](/cases/travel-and-onboarding-time-was-going-unbilled/) [Quoting ignored callback and warranty cost, +$44k/yr](/cases/quoting-ignored-callback-and-warranty-cost/) [Lead spend ignored close rate by source, +$47k/yr](/cases/lead-spend-ignored-close-rate-by-source/) [Intake was dropping a third of qualified calls, +$62k/yr](/cases/intake-was-dropping-a-third-of-qualified-calls/) [The benchmark: what audits recover across 74 cases →](/benchmark/) [All case studies](/case-studies/) [Model a Services budget in the wasted ad spend calculator →](/estimator/services/)