Nine things an agency does that should end the conversation
We are an agency writing about agency red flags, which is self-serving. Read it that way and it is still useful.
· 6 min read · How we work
Most of these are not dishonesty. They are structural incentives that produce bad outcomes even when everyone involved means well. That is what makes them worth spotting early.
The list
- They price as a percentage of ad spend. Their income rises when they spend more of your money.
- They want to hold the ad accounts. There is no client-side benefit to this arrangement.
- They guarantee rankings or a specific number of links. Neither is within anyone control, so a guarantee means something is being bought.
- The people in the pitch are not the people on the work. Ask who will be in the weekly call, by name.
- They will not name a failure condition. If nothing counts as failure, nothing counts as success either.
- The contract is twelve months with no break clause. Length is a substitute for confidence.
- Reporting is a monthly deck rather than access to the underlying data. Decks are edited; dashboards are not.
- They cannot explain what they would stop doing. Every good plan includes subtraction.
- They agree with everything you say in the first meeting. You are paying for judgement, and judgement occasionally disagrees.
What to ask instead
Ask for a client they lost and why. Ask what they got wrong on their last engagement and what changed as a result. Ask what they would do in month one if the budget were half what you said. The quality of those three answers will tell you more than any case study deck.
An agency that has never lost a client has either not been running long or is not telling you the truth.
And apply the same test to us. We have lost clients — one because we were too slow to staff the account properly, one because we recommended cutting spend and the founder wanted growth at any cost. Both were the right outcome for them and an uncomfortable quarter for us.
