How I Closed My First Long-Term Recurring Contract, and How You Can Too

I’ve spent the last decade building my consulting firm, growing it steadily into a seven-figure operation. We serve a challenging market, partnering with nonprofits, foundations, and governments to eliminate generational poverty and uplift Black, brown, and low-income communities across the United States. While the work has always been meaningful, profitable even, it has also come with its fair share of stress.

Imagine playing Tetris: as the blocks (projects) come down randomly, each with a different shape and size. You do your best to fit them together. Yet, no matter how skilled you get, gaps remain. That’s how I’d describe managing our project load over the years. This has especially been true in Quarter 3, when work slows as social sector leaders take summer vacations, and team members are out of the office. The Q3 lull put pressure on profitability, strained our cash flow, and left our team underutilized. Meanwhile, I as the founder, wrestled with the stress of securing Q4 work to keep everything afloat.

After many years of playing this game, I knew something had to change. The solution? Recurring, long-term contracts. 

But, beyond addressing gaps in our project load, why is it so hard to build a stable business using short term projects? 

As in Tetris, doing things just right makes the blocks (projects) disappear. When you deliver on your services, clients go away happy and ready to take the next step in their journey. But in business, completed projects that simply “disappear” without leading to another engagement leave a foundation full of gaps that have to be filled by other work. That means we have to get the timing of new projects just right to avoid operating from a deficit. While short-term projects can be valuable, their temporary nature makes it challenging to build a lasting structure for growth. 

At DC Design, we experienced these realities firsthand. Making this more challenging is the fact that sales cycles in the social sector are long, often requiring input from multiple decision makers before a deal is finalized. These truths, combined with our biggest expenses occurring upfront as we get to know our client’s work and stakeholders, meant that it was in our best interest to increase our customer’s lifetime value while reducing the time spent selling individual contracts.

Here’s how I made the shift to recurring contracts – and how you can, too.

Steps to Build Long-Term Client Relationships

Step 1: Open Yourself Up to Change

Professional services often revolve around our own biases about what we do (and don’t) want to offer. For years, I avoided internal operations work, focusing solely on high impact external programming to improve early childhood education, reduce mass incarceration, build Black wealth and more. All of this work is deeply meaningful to me. But the truth is, while our clients want these same outcomes, there are other pressing needs that are dominating their attention. Focusing solely on the external impacts we want to create has given us fewer occasions for our clients to work with us.

The first step in my journey to closing my first long term, recurring contract was realizing I needed to open myself up to a change in services. By opening myself up to these new possibilities, I started to ask different questions.

Step 2: Identify Limitations and Opportunities within Your Current Offerings

To make the shift to long-term client relationships, it’s essential to take a hard look at where your services may be falling short for both your clients and your own business. Start by asking: Which of your services aren’t fully meeting client needs or supporting sustainable growth?

For DC Design, our primary services include community-centered research, strategic planning, program design, and impact evaluation. While these services achieved measurable impacts like reducing homelessness and infant mortality, their short-term nature limited our ability to provide ongoing support, leaving gaps in both client outcomes and our business model.

We found specific areas where these limitations presented an opportunity to develop recurring services that would benefit both us and our clients:

• For DC Design: Short-term projects demanded extensive onboarding, created revenue instability, and often resulted in scattered impact without long-term follow-through. By developing an ongoing service model, we theorized we could stabilize cash flow, reduce upfront costs per project, and ensure our work had lasting impact.
• For Clients: Strategic planning, for instance, often ended after the plan was developed, with clients lacking the capacity to implement it. This left executive leaders overloaded and strategic plans underutilized. Providing consistent, long-term support would allow clients to integrate these strategies effectively, creating a higher return on investment and reducing the burden on leadership.

After identifying these gaps, I began exploring how to build a 5-year lifecycle of services that could continuously support our clients’ evolving needs. With regular engagement, we could deliver more value by co-designing solutions, implementing them alongside client teams, and measuring long-term outcomes.

This process of assessing where our services fell short hinted at the path forward – one where we could build a sustainable, impactful model that supported our clients’ success while strengthening our business.

Step 3: Engage Your Existing Clients

One of the most powerful moves I made was to have open conversations with both our clients and our team about the shift toward long-term partnerships. I began by discussing our vision for recurring engagements with existing clients, sharing how our current project-based model impacted their outcomes as well as our firm’s operations. I shared my thoughts on how it could help them achieve their goals more sustainably, and invited their feedback on what an ongoing support model could look like for them. 

This client feedback was so important as it negated some of my theories, and validated others. In particular, clients shared more about the challenges faced by executive directors, who were often overwhelmed by the demands of implementation. Clients also highlighted specific issues where they felt ongoing support could make a real difference. They highlighted specific areas where ongoing support could make a real difference, such as enabling their teams to work more autonomously, translating strategic plans into annual goals, setting up impact evaluation processes, and continuing the external program design work we love to do.

Just as critical was engaging my team in this vision. I had candid conversations about why this change mattered for our firm’s stability and how it could create more consistent work. I shared how this model could lead to future salary increases and let us focus on creating long-term impact in specific communities. These discussions energized the team and brought them on board with the shift. Through these conversations, I recruited their help in framing up what our new service offering would look like. 

Step 4: Define and Implement the Win-Win

With feedback from our clients and buy-in from the team, we developed and implemented the foundational structure for our recurring services to ensure it was both effective and sustainable:

• Long-Term Implementation Framework: We established frameworks for ongoing strategic plan implementation, defining structured touchpoints, sequencing activities, and building workflows that support clients beyond the typical 6–9-month project.
• Deliverables-Based, Not Hourly: We framed our services around deliverables rather than a ticking clock, providing clients with clear value while internally managing team capacity.
• Affordable, Predictable Pricing: We set the monthly fee as a significant discount from what clients would pay for frequent one-off projects or hiring people in-house to do the same work. This pricing model increased overall lifetime value without overburdening client budgets, allowing them to see clear long-term financial and operational benefits.
• Lean, Strategic Staffing: We tested multiple staffing structures and calculated time contributions to deliver high value efficiently, ensuring we could exceed client expectations while staying lean.
• Multi-Year Contract Terms with Flexibility: We aimed for multi-year commitments to foster stability, but we also wanted to give clients confidence in the partnership. We structured contract terms to allow clients to end the agreement if they were dissatisfied, ensuring that our commitment to value and outcomes remained at the forefront.
• Success Metrics and Regular Check-Ins: To keep the partnership focused on measurable outcomes, we set clear metrics to track progress and scheduled formal check-ins every 6–12 months to reassess priorities.
• Proactive Communication with Key Decision-Makers: We maintained regular contact with key decision-makers to address any concerns promptly, ensuring alignment and allowing us to refine the model as needed.

This structured, adaptable model balanced client needs with our goals for sustainable growth, creating a long-term partnership that drives consistent results and supports DC Design’s vision for impactful, ongoing work.

This model became our answer to Tetris. Instead of piecing together projects, we built a framework that allows for ongoing, transformative work, packaged as a predictable monthly retainer. Going forward, every six to nine months, we will sit down with clients to review priorities and allocate resources for the months ahead – ensuring that strategic plans lead to real, lasting impact.

Embrace Growth by Embracing Change

Sometimes, we can get stuck on what was, assuming that what got us here will carry us forward. But growth demands openness to change—rethinking what truly serves our clients and aligns with our mission. For DC Design, shifting to a long-term partnership model is already stabilizing our once-choppy financials, allowing us to focus deeply on the work that matters. Our first client now has a committed partner to help bring their strategic vision to life, build team capacity, and create lasting impact in their community. Imagine what a model like this could do for you and the people you serve.

If you know a nonprofit leader working to address poverty, consider connecting them with DC Design. We help nonprofits conduct community research, develop and implement strategic plans, design new programs, and evaluate impact. We believe in an America where all communities are fortified, self-determinant, and prosperous, and we won’t stop until that vision becomes reality.