03/06/2026
The agency retainer isn’t dying - It’s splitting in two and most owners still haven’t picked a side.
Spent an hour with Connor McAuley last week mapping out where this all goes. We get an odd vantage point at StoreHero as we sit behind a lot of agencies at once, so we see the pattern before most people feel it.
If you’re a generalist charging a mid retainer for decent-but-not-specialist work, that’s the seat disappearing.
Right now they’re all making the same bet on AI then splitting into exactly two camps.
Camp 1: Lower touch, more clients
➡️ Use workflows to hold service quality while one person carries the load that used to take three. More clients, lower retainers, better margin per head.
➡️ The catch nobody mentions: it only works if you go brutally vertical. A workflow built for “ecommerce brands” is useless. A workflow built for subscription skincare doing £2m refined with actual brands is extremely beneficial. You can’t automate what you haven’t narrowed.
Camp 2: Higher value, deeper specialty
➡️ Use workflows to do something the brand can’t get anywhere else and charge more for it, not less.
➡️ For some agencies that’s going all-in on creative. For ours, it’s the commercial lens: stop reporting on spend and ROAS, start owning contribution margin and CAC payback. Profit, not vanity metrics.
Thinking about this from the brand founder’s seat, both offer really good options: a cost advantage or a results advantage. Both can work really well, but the risk is ending up lost in the middle.
