Beyond The Retainer
A free weekly newsletter for freelancers and agency owners.
What If You Got Paid a Cut of the Revenue You Generate — Not Just a Monthly Fee?
When you start freelancing, there's a good chance nobody explains to you that there's more than one way to get paid.
You learn to find clients, agree on a monthly fee, deliver the work, and send the invoice.
Rinse and repeat.
It's a perfectly reasonable way to build a 'business' — and for a long time, it works.
But at some point, something starts to feel off...
... Maybe it's watching a client have their best quarter ever while your invoice stays exactly the same.
... Maybe it's realising that no matter how good you get, the monthly fee has a ceiling you can't break through.
... Maybe it's the nagging feeling that you're closer to an employee than a partner — even though going freelance was supposed to feel like the opposite.
There's nothing wrong with retainers. They provide stability and predictability, and those things matter.
But retainers are not the only option...
Businesses spend years building audiences they never fully use.
For example:
Email lists with subscribers that don't get emailed very often.
Communities with engaged members and nothing being offered to them.
YouTube channels with real subscribers and no products behind them.
CRM and databases of current and previous customers.
These are what we call backend assets. They already exist, the audience is already warm, and the trust is already built.
A backend performance deal is an arrangement where you help a business unlock the revenue sitting in those existing assets — and get paid a percentage of what you generate. You're not building traffic from scratch. You're not running ads or waiting months for SEO to kick in. You're working with assets that already exist.
Real Case Studies
One practitioner in my network recently ran five simple emails to a partner's existing buyer list — no ads, no webinar, no sales calls. In 18 days they generated over $521,000 in revenue, split with the partner. The list already existed. The audience already trusted the partner. Nobody built anything from scratch.
Another ran a simple campaign inside a partner's community of just 53 people. No ads, no funnel, no sales page — just a handful of posts and a Google Doc. $76,920 in 28 days.
That's the model this newsletter explores.
What This Newsletter Is For
If you read this newsletter, you'll come away with a different view of what freelancing can look like. More control over your income. Better relationships with clients. And real deals under your belt — once you act on it — that prove this model works.
No income replacement promises. No "quit your retainers immediately" instructions. Just an honest, weekly account of what backend performance deals look like and how they work.
Each Weekly Issue Includes
- Real deal structures — how backend performance partnerships are negotiated, built and tracked
- Asset spotting — how to identify email lists, communities, and social audiences businesses have built but aren't using
- The Quiet Little Launch — how to help creators gauge genuine interest in a new product before they build anything
- Honest case studies — what worked, what didn't, and why
- The transition conversation — how to move from retainers to performance deals without betting your entire business on the shift
- Deal mechanics — pitch structures, contract approaches, and how to track and protect yourself properly
About Me
My name is Julian England. I've been freelancing since 2008 — starting as a web designer, moving into SEO, and spending the last several years managing Google Ads campaigns for small businesses across the UK.
I'm in the middle of the same transition many of you are considering. I don't have it all figured out — and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What I do have is access to a private community of practitioners already running backend performance deals successfully across the UK, USA, Australia and beyond. Their real deal structures, their case studies, and the lessons they've learned the hard way. That's what I'll be sharing here — alongside my own attempts to build this myself.
You won't be figuring this out alone. Neither will I.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is a backend performance deal? It's a partnership built around assets a business already owns — their email list, their community, their social following. Instead of building new traffic from scratch, you work with warm audiences that already trust your client. You generate revenue from those existing assets and get paid a percentage of what you produce together.
Is this free? Yes, completely free. One weekly newsletter.
How often will I hear from you? Every week, same day, same format. If that changes, I'll tell you why.
Do I need to quit my retainer clients to make this work? No — the whole point is to be building something alongside what you already have, not instead of it.