Why I won't sell project work

A decade of running marketing accounts taught me that the engagements that went poorly didn’t go poorly because the ads were worse. They went poorly because the business model was structurally broken before the contract was even signed. Project work is the single most common version of that structural problem in agency land. Boydston Marketing is built specifically to avoid it.

When I say “project work,” I mean fixed-fee engagements with deliverables that look defined on paper but turn into open-ended scope in practice. Build me a lander. Run me a campaign. Set up my tracking. Each one of those sounds simple. Each one of those, in practice, contains five hidden specifications the client hasn’t articulated and the agency hasn’t asked about. By month two, somebody is paying for the gap — usually the agency, often the client, sometimes both.

The structural problem

Fixed-fee project work has a built-in incentive misalignment. The agency makes more money the less time the project takes. The client values more of whatever they think they’re getting. These two pressures collide somewhere around week four, usually when the client says “while you’re at it, can you also…” and the agency has to decide between eating the cost or having an awkward conversation about scope.

Nobody is dishonest in this story. Both sides are doing what their incentive structure tells them to do. The structure is the problem.

What a productized retainer actually fixes

The simplest way to describe what a productized retainer does is: it prices the scope creep into the relationship from day one. The contract says: here is what’s included monthly. Here is what isn’t. Here is how often we revise. Here is the response SLA. Here is the cadence of reports and calls.

When the client says “while you’re at it,” the answer is one of three things:

1. Yes, that’s in scope. (No friction. Do the work.)
2. That’s outside scope. We can do it next month in the revision cycle, or we can quote it as an add-on. (Friction is small because it was anticipated in the contract.)
3. That’s not a Boydston service. Here’s an agency I’d point you to. (No false promises, no half-built deliverables.)

What clients lose, and why they shouldn’t mind

A productized retainer takes away the illusion of unlimited custom work. Some clients miss it. That feeling of “the agency will do whatever I need” is comforting in the moment and structurally toxic to both sides over twelve months.

What clients gain is harder to feel on day one but obvious by month three: the work actually ships. The lander gets built when promised. The reports arrive when promised. The optimization passes happen on the schedule they were sold. Nothing exotic, but nothing surprising, and nothing slipping.

For most established medical practices, nothing slipping is worth more than anything is possible. The practice already has enough variability in patient demand, staffing, and quarterly economics. The last thing it needs is a marketing relationship that adds more.

How this shows up in Boydston engagements

Concretely: every Boydston engagement has a contract you can read in five minutes. The contract names what’s in scope, what’s out of scope, how many revisions are included per month, the response time, the cadence of reports, and the quarterly business review.

If a client wants something outside that, we have a real conversation. Sometimes it’s a small add-on. Sometimes it’s a “we don’t do that, here’s who does.” Sometimes it’s “you might be ready to move from Lead Engine Standard to Pro.” Three honest answers. Zero half-built sneakthroughs.

If that sounds like a tighter relationship than what you’ve had with marketing agencies before, that’s the intended outcome. It’s also why every “you’re not the buyer” sentence on this site is a deal I’ve actually turned down. The deals I run are the ones I can run cleanly.