The client asks the question and you feel yourself shrink.
"So what would your fee be?"
And before they've even finished the sentence, you've already started discounting in your head. You quote a percentage. You watch their face. You add, too quickly, "but there's room to move on that." You've dropped the number before they pushed on it. You've negotiated against yourself, in front of the buyer, in real time.
You've done this for years. You price contingency because contingency is all you've ever priced, and contingency pricing has one logic: be cheap enough to stay on the panel. A percentage of salary, shaved down at renewal, discounted again when volume is promised and never delivered.
Here's the thing you already half-know. Retained pricing does not work like that, and trying to price a retainer with a contingency brain is why most owners underprice retained work so badly they make less on a retainer than they would have on a contingency punt.
Of the hundreds of search firm owners I've sat with, the ones who struggle with retained pricing nearly always make the same mistake. They price the effort. They think about the hours, the sourcing, the admin, and they try to put a number on their time. That is exactly backwards.
Where you want to be
You want to walk into a fee conversation and state a number calmly, once, with no flinch and no "but." You want the price to feel obvious to the client, because the value is obvious. You want to be paid for the outcome you create, not the hours you burn creating it.
Twelve months ago I was on a call with an owner who had never charged more than 20% contingency. We rebuilt how she thought about price, not the number, the logic underneath it. Her next retained engagement was three times the fee she would have quoted, and the client signed without a flinch. The work was identical. The frame was completely different.
Price the value, not the hours
A retained search is not the sale of your time. It is the sale of a result: the right person, in a critical seat, who would not have been found any other way.
So start with what that result is worth. A senior hire who performs creates value measured in the millions over their tenure. A senior hire who fails costs the business a year of lost progress, the salary paid, the rehire, and the opportunity that walked out the door. You are not pricing against the salary. You are pricing against the cost of getting it wrong.
When you anchor on what the placement is worth over twenty-four months, a fee that felt aggressive as a percentage of salary suddenly looks like a rounding error against the value at stake. That is the mental shift. The number stops being "my cut" and starts being "the price of certainty."
Make exclusivity the reason
The retainer buys the client something contingency never can: your full, undivided focus on their search and no one else's competing for the same role.
That is worth paying for, and you should say so. When you take a search on retainer, you are not running it alongside six other briefs in the same week, hoping one lands. You are dedicated. You map the whole market. You approach the people who are not looking and would never answer a generic message. That depth is the product. Charge for it.
The pattern I see again and again inside Boardroom is that the moment owners can articulate exactly what the retainer buys, the price stops being a fight. The client is no longer comparing your percentage to another agency's percentage. They are buying a different thing entirely.
Anchor high and stop talking
The single most expensive habit you have is filling the silence after you state your fee.
You say the number, the client pauses to think, and you panic and start justifying, or worse, discounting. Stop. State the fee. Then say nothing. Let them sit with it. The first person to speak after the number loses, and it does not have to be you.
This is not a trick. It is what confidence in your own value sounds like. The owners who hold the silence are the owners who believe the number. And clients can feel the difference between a price you believe and a price you are hoping they accept.
The number is downstream of the belief
Here is the part owners resist hardest. The fee you can hold in the room is capped by the fee you privately believe you are worth, and no pricing formula raises that ceiling for you. I have watched owners learn a perfect value-based method and still quote low, because underneath the method they did not yet believe the number.
Of the hundreds of search firm owners I've sat with, the ones who reprice successfully do the inner work and the outer work together. They rehearse the new number until it stops feeling like a lie. They stop reading the client's face for permission. They notice the old discounting reflex firing and they sit on their hands. The belief and the behaviour move as one, and the price follows.
This is why pricing comes up so early inside Boardroom. Not because the maths is hard, but because the maths is easy and the self-permission is not. When an owner finally prices from the value they create rather than the hours they spend, the same search that used to invoice at a nervous percentage invoices at a confident multiple, and the client respects them more for it, not less.
Where to start
You're here: quoting a percentage, discounting before you're asked, pricing your hours.
You want to be here: stating a fixed engagement fee, anchored on the value of the outcome, held calmly in the room.
Here's how. Take your next retained opportunity and do not quote a percentage. Work out what the hire is worth to the business over two years. Set a fixed fee that reflects the value and the exclusivity, not the salary band. Write it down before the call so you are not inventing it live. Then say it once and stop.
You will feel the discomfort the first few times. Good. That discomfort is the gap between how you have been paid and how you should be paid, and the only way to close it is to keep stating the higher number until it stops feeling high.
The number on the invoice is the easy part. The work is changing what you believe you are worth. If you want help making that shift, the people who do it fastest do it inside Boardroom, and you can apply to talk it through.