A marketing portfolio career works when retainers carry the rent and project work carries the ambition, and most independents get that ratio backwards. They chase the exciting brief, let the dull monthly contract slide, and then wonder why the invoices feel like a lottery. If you're thinking about going independent as a marketing consultant, build your income around two or three recurring clients first. Treat everything else as a bonus.
That's an unfashionable position. The freelance conversation online is full of people celebrating the big launch, the rebrand, the campaign with a nice case study at the end. Nobody posts a screenshot of a standing order landing on the first of the month. But I spent twelve years inside London consumer PR, and the agencies I saw survive were never the ones with the flashiest pipeline. They were the ones with the most boring revenue. An independent marketing professional is running a small agency of one, and the same rules apply.
Why recurring revenue matters more than the brief you're proud of
Project work pays well per day. It also vanishes. You finish the campaign, send the final report, and the following Monday you're back to selling yourself, which is unpaid work you can't invoice for.
On the agency side, I watched account directors obsess over retention for exactly this reason. Winning a client costs a fortune in pitch time, free thinking and unbilled meetings. Keeping one costs a good monthly report and a phone call that isn't a sales call. Freelancers forget they're subject to the same economics, except it's their own evenings they're burning.
A retainer changes what you can say no to. That's the real value, and it's worth more than the fee. When your fixed costs are covered by two or three clients paying every month, you can turn down the project that pays badly, the founder who wants everything by Friday, the "quick favour" that's really a week of work. Without that cushion you say yes to everything, because you have to. Saying yes to everything is how a flexible career turns into an unpredictable one.
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How to structure the mix
There's no magic ratio, but I'd start from your outgoings. Add up rent or mortgage, tax set aside, pension, insurance, software, the lot. Then ask whether your retainers alone cover that figure in a normal month. If they do, you're stable. If they don't, you're a freelancer who's lucky at the moment, and luck runs out around the same time as the school holidays or a client's budget review.
In practice that tends to look like two or three anchor clients on monthly agreements, a defined number of days each, with scope written down so it can't quietly double. Press office support, content calendars, social management, email programmes, ongoing media relations: the sort of work that has a rhythm. Around those sit one or two projects at a time. A product launch, a website copy overhaul, a media training day.
A few mechanics people skip. Put notice periods in the contract, a month at minimum, so a client can't vanish overnight. Invoice in advance where you can. And if you're operating through a limited company, take proper accounting advice rather than guessing, because IR35 and the way HMRC views your working arrangements can't be improvised. The gov.uk guidance on off-payroll working is dry reading, but a client who treats you like a full-time employee in all but name is a risk to you, not just to them.
The pricing mistake that undermines everything
Most new independents price retainers like salaries divided by days. They take what they earned in-house, work out a day rate, and hand over a number that quietly ignores holiday, sickness, admin, business development and the weeks between contracts. Then they're surprised that a decent-looking rate produces a mediocre year.
Your day rate has to carry the days you don't bill. That's most of the arithmetic. If a third of your working time goes on selling, invoicing and chasing, you're not charging for a five-day week, you're charging for three and a bit. I'd rather see someone quote a slightly uncomfortable figure and negotiate down than quote a comfortable one and resent the work by month four.
People also underprice retainers specifically because they feel like a favour. The client is committing, so you give a discount for loyalty. But the commitment is already the discount: you've removed your own selling time. Charge for the work, not for gratitude.
The strongest objection: retainers are a cage
Here's the fair pushback, and it has teeth. People leave employment to escape the feeling of being owned. Sign three retainers and you've built three small bosses, each with a Monday-morning expectation and a habit of treating "retained" as "available". Project work, the argument goes, is where independence actually lives: you finish, you walk away, you choose the next thing. A retainer-heavy portfolio can feel like a part-time job times three.
I'll concede that, because I've seen it happen. A retainer with vague scope is a trap, and a client who pays monthly often assumes they've bought your attention rather than your hours. If you don't define the deliverables, you'll be answering messages on a Sunday for money that was agreed for twelve days a quarter.
But the cage comes from the contract, not the model. A well-scoped retainer, with named deliverables, set meeting cadence and a clear outer limit on hours, gives you more freedom than a feast-and-famine diary does. Ask anyone who's taken a project they didn't want because the bank balance demanded it. That's the real cage. The retainer, written properly, is the key to it.
Where project work earns its place
None of this means abandoning projects. They're where you stretch, where you test a new sector, where a one-off brief turns into a retainer if you handle it well. A good share of my own ongoing relationships began as a single piece of work that someone didn't want to stop.
Use projects to keep your portfolio honest. If you're only ever doing the same monthly tasks, your skills flatten and your pitch goes stale, and the next client conversation sounds like the last five. A launch campaign or a crisis-prep workshop gives you something fresh to show. If you want to see how others in adjacent fields balance this, the earlier pieces on the messy side of marketing portfolio careers and building creative income that lasts are worth reading alongside this one.
Finding the clients in the first place
Stability isn't only about structure, it's about where the work comes from. Referrals from former colleagues and agency contacts do most of the heavy lifting in my experience, which is why the way you leave a job matters so much. Leave well, keep in touch, and a surprising number of people turn out to have a budget and no one to give it to.
Beyond that, make yourself findable. A short, specific LinkedIn profile that says what you do and for whom beats a vague one every time. Specificity works: "consumer PR and media relations for food and drink brands" gets a call, "marketing consultant" gets scrolled past. And if you'd rather test the market before resigning, browse marketing and PR opportunities to see what employers are asking for, which tells you what clients will pay for as well. On the other side of the table, businesses looking for freelance and interim help can post roles through OHUB's employer tools.
Looking at the next twelve months
If you're planning the leap, don't start by quitting. Start by working out which two clients would sign a monthly agreement tomorrow if you asked, and what you'd need to charge to make that sustainable. If you can't name them, you're not ready, and that's useful information rather than a failure.
If you're already independent and feeling the squeeze, audit your diary this week. How much of your income is recurring? How much of it is something you'd have to re-win in the next quarter? That ratio, more than your day rate or your portfolio site or your follower count, tells you how long you can stay independent.
The freelancers still working happily in five years won't be the ones with the best case studies. They'll be the ones who made peace with the unglamorous contract early. Which kind do you want to be?
