 Hi, this is Robert Gephardt and today I wanted to talk to you about payment, more specifically about a specific type of payment, my favorite type of payment. Now chances are you've thought about payment at least a bit. I mean chances are you're in this business because you want to get paid, so you thought about how often you want to get paid, how much you want to get paid, if you want to get paid by cash, by check, by PayPal, if you want to get paid every month, every week, if you want to get paid by invoice or this, that and the other, if you want to get paid in this currency or that currency, I don't know. However, a lot of you might not have thought of getting paid by retainer. Getting paid by retainer is one of my favorite ways of getting paid and actually I think pretty much everyone should shoot for getting paid by retainer whenever possible. So well first of all, what is getting paid by retainer? Getting paid by retainer is, in essence, is selling your future availability at a discount. What does that mean? That means, well here's how it works. Basically you're receiving stuff to be translated. You receive a document, you translate it and you send it back and then you invoice them. And then they say, hey, we have something else to be translated. Can you work on it? Yeah, sure, I'm available. Okay, you work on it. And maybe you negotiate the price every time. Maybe you don't. It doesn't matter. They send you stuff, you work on it and then you invoice them. Maybe you even invoice them at the end of every month or every week or something like that. That's fine. What you might notice after a while is that they always have the same types of translations. Maybe they have something like, maybe they have a monthly report that always needs to be translated. And after a couple months you realize that it's always more or less the same report just updated month by month. So what you can do, what you can say is you can offer to work on retainer. You can say, look, I've noticed that you have these every month. So why don't we do this? Why don't we say that for the next year or six months or whatever, I will be working on these in exchange. You can pay me either ahead of time or six months ahead of time or just by month. But what you can, but you lock them down into those six months or a year. So you can say, look, I charge this much per report that I've been translating. It comes out to say, I don't know, 1,000. I will do this for 900 or 850 or whatever, some sort of discount, as long as we lock it in for the next six months or a year. There are a couple of things here. First of all, the client will definitely like it because they can get it at a discount and they can say, oh, well, yeah, we do need a year of monthly reports translated and you're offering it to us at a discount. That's awesome. Secondly, it's actually good for you because it allows you to do a couple of things. It allows you to plan ahead. So you know you can work on this and you can plan accordingly. It also means guaranteed income. It means for these six months, one year, whatever it is, you're guaranteed to be receiving X amount per month, which is very good when you're working in freelance. You know, no month is guaranteed and so it's very good to have something steady. And third of all, it also means that you have to sell less because you have to target fewer clients. When you don't know what's going to happen month to month, you're always selling. You're always trying to get new clients. But when you have guaranteed income, all of a sudden you don't need to be targeting that many new clients or you need to be doing that much selling because you have this guaranteed work. Now, I should specify here because you don't necessarily have to discount, to offer discount. Usually you want to because that's what gets the client interested in this retainer fee. You could also just say that you'll do it at the same price, but you're guaranteed to be there all the time. If you operate in a language that is a bit rare and so they need to make sure you're available ahead of time, then you could probably try this angle. But if you're in a language combination that's not so rare, then you want to offer the discount. It's probably better. And you know, just to make sure you lock them in because otherwise they don't really see any benefit. In fact, it locks them into a yearly contract and they're like, well, you know, we don't want to be locked in just in case we find something else or we don't need them anymore, et cetera, et cetera. So back to the issue at hand. There also, well, there could be another issue as well that comes up later because the client could say, look, well, it seems like we're paying you $8.50 for all these things. It comes out to say $8.50 per monthly report. Why don't we just pay you $8.50 monthly report? And before they were paying you $1,000 and now they're paying, and now they say, well, it seems like if we divide it up, we're paying you $8.50. So why don't we just pay you again per report $8.50? Suddenly you're working for a lot less. So that's where you kind of need to stand your ground. And you need to say, oh, no, no, I'm giving you this discount because it's a long-term discount and, you know, and that's why you get it. Usually they understand right away. And so, and they'll only bring it up if like some new manager comes or someone new looks at it and starts wondering why. But once they realize the benefits, then they should be okay with it. Because once again, they know you're available. Then they know they're getting a discount. They also get reliability and consistency. They know that you're going to translate it every time. And so they know that you'll get, they'll get a reliable person to work on it. They'll always get the same person to work on it. And so from one month to the next, it will always be the same. There are also some other things that you can take into account because now that you're working on the same monthly report every month, then you can automatically try to improve it. Maybe this monthly report always has the same template. And so you can prepare a template ahead of time so that it's ready for every month ahead of time when you're working on it. And so this automatically means less work for you and it means a more consistent job for the client. Because you just have that template. You just need to plug in everything that needs to be translated and you send it off every month. And so it benefits both of you. It also means that over time you can try to add something to your offer as well. And you know, try to maybe differentiate your offer. So say you're doing this and you've been doing it for six months, say you're even on retainer and you've been doing this on retainer for six months. And it's time to renegotiate or else you're just talking to the client. So you can say, look, we can continue the way we're doing and I can keep working on just the translation for six months if that works for you, that's great. But I can offer something else. And you know, a good way to do this is to offer different tiers like A, B, C or one, two, three, right? So you can say tier two would be that I can do the translation of this report. Plus I noticed that you put the report on your PowerPoint presentation every month, to show to your bosses or something. I can automatically insert it into PowerPoint. And so right away you have all the new data and all the new language or whatever it is for every month in PowerPoint. That's my tier two, something like that. And tier three could be maybe since they're dealing in different languages or dealing with different countries. So if this is a monthly report, maybe you have foreign exchange issues or you have different, you know, currencies and different exchanges that need to be dealt with. So you can say, my tier three is that I send you alerts anytime there is a difference in foreign exchange of more than 10% or something along those lines. And so if you offer these different tiers, they can decide which one they want. My pro tip here would be to offer your tier three to offer something, yeah, quite a bit of work but also quite a bit more money with the idea that they probably won't go for that, but it will make them more likely to go for tier two, if that makes sense. If you anchor the tier three at a price that's very high and tier one is the price you've been doing so far and you know, tier two can be somewhere in the middle, the higher you rank tier three, the more likely they are to go for tier two. Obviously you can't do it way up in the stratosphere, but anyway, obviously you need to take into account and use your own judgment and see also with the client and what type of client they are and how they feel. But if you offer these tiers, at least it gives the client a choice and the client can decide, oh no, we just want to continue what we're doing or maybe, hey, we would appreciate this extra thing you can do. And you're able to do this because it is a repeat job and you're on retainer and so you can notice what needs to be done and put yourself in the shoes of the client and try to make something better for them. And that's the way to do it, is to put yourself in the shoes of the client and realize, oh wait, as a client, this is what they're using my monthly report for or my monthly translation, whatever it might be. It doesn't have to be monthly, it could be weekly, it could be quarterly, it could be annual, whatever it is, but try to put yourself in their shoes and see what they can use and then you can improve on your offer that way and offer them something better. So, I mean, that's basically it. That's what a retainer fee is and that's why I like it. It means guaranteed work and it means that you have guaranteed income in the future and if you can get three or four clients with guaranteed work and income for the future, you're in a pretty nice spot, obviously depending how much they pay you, but at least it's guaranteed and it makes you not have to run every month to try to find new clients because let's face it, even if you have the same clients, but every month it's a different stuff that they're sending you, nothing's guaranteed. Maybe you've been working with them for three, four years and it happens all the time, you're working with someone for three, four years but then all of a sudden from one week to the next, they found a new translator that they like a lot or maybe they just don't need translations or whatever it is and then that's it, you don't have any more work. But at least if you have this six month or whatever contract, then you have some leeway. Then they'll tell you, they're like, look, by the way, we're not gonna need any more of these translations by the end of the year. I mean, it sucks, but at least you get some advanced notice and so then you can plan accordingly. So that's why I like the retainer fee. I think it's something you should bring up with clients. I think the best time to bring it up is when you've been working with your clients for a bit and maybe when you have a job and as soon as you finish the translation, you can say, look, I've noticed that you often have these types of translations and you have them regularly. Why don't we try this? Why don't we try that? You can also try it, by the way, after you've had your first translation. If this is just a new client, you can try, I mean, obviously, once again, and it's very hard to pinpoint an exact example because working with different types of languages and different fields, all types of stuff can happen. But let's say it's a financial report that you're working on and that means that you can say, look, I noticed it's a monthly financial report. If you're getting these every month, I'm available to work on them every month if you're happy with my translation, obviously, and we could set up some deal to do something on retainer. So anyway, I hope you do explore working on retainer and because I do think it's very beneficial and in the long term, it's good for you and it's good for the client, and so it's a win-win and I don't see why not to use it. So feel free to let me know if this works for you or if you have other advice in working for retainer or maybe if you have a reason you don't like working on retainer, feel free to let me know. If you found this useful, please leave a thumbs up because that always helps. And if you want more advice for freelancers, freelance translators and feel free to subscribe and you'll get more videos just like this. I'll see you next time, thanks.