A guide
Most of what goes wrong in an agency relationship is decided before the contract is signed. This is what to look for, what to ask, and what it should cost.
We are a marketing company. You should read this knowing that. We wrote it because we spend a lot of time undoing work done by the last agency, and because the founders who end up happiest with us are the ones who arrived asking hard questions. If this page helps you hire someone else, or helps you decide not to hire anyone right now, it did its job.
First
More demand does not always help. Sometimes it actively hurts. Before you evaluate a single agency, check three things about your own business.
01
Can you deliver more work today?
If your team is at capacity, lead times are stretched, or quality slips when volume rises, more inquiries will make your business worse rather than better. Fix capacity first.
02
Does someone own this internally?
Not someone who attends the calls. Someone who can make a decision, approve work and be reached in a day. Relationships fail more often from a missing internal owner than from a bad agency.
03
Are you at a size where fees make sense?
Below roughly $2M in revenue, a competent freelancer or a part-time hire will usually get you further, because the fees consume the budget that should be going to the work. That is arithmetic, not a judgment about your business. It also has an expiry date, which is covered below.
If you are under $2M in revenue
Here is what usually works better at that stage. Get your Google Business Profile complete and collecting reviews. Make sure inquiries get a response the same day. Put whatever budget you have into one channel rather than three.
A good freelancer or a part-time hire will take you a long way on that. They are cheaper, they are closer to your business, and at your size the work is narrow enough for one person to hold.
A freelancer is one person with one skill set. That stops being enough at a fairly specific point, and it is worth knowing the signs before you lose a year to them:
The work needs three specialties at once
They are at capacity and you are not
Nobody is looking at the whole picture
The bus problem is real
If two or three of those are true, you have outgrown the arrangement, and that is the point at which agency fees start buying something a cheaper option cannot.
The one standard that matters most
If an agency arrives with a proposal for search advertising, a content package or a website rebuild before they have examined your business, they are not diagnosing. They are selling what they sell. The recommendation was decided before the conversation started.
It is worth understanding why this is so common. Agencies are usually organized around a service. A search agency finds search problems. A content studio finds content problems. Not out of dishonesty, but because that is the lens they own.
The cost lands on you. A business whose real constraint is that inquiries wait two days for a response can spend eighteen months and a great deal of money buying more inquiries. The advertising works. The business does not improve. Everyone is frustrated and nobody is lying.
The third is the one that separates people. An honest answer includes a real example.
Red flags
The obvious ones. You are getting these emails already.
Not possible through legitimate means. Google removes reviews that violate its policies and nothing else. Anyone promising removal is either doing nothing or attempting something that puts your profile at risk.
Usually an automated scan wrapped in urgent language. A real audit requires access you have not granted.
Nobody controls what Google shows. A guarantee means either meaningless terms in the fine print or a promise to rank for phrases nobody searches.
Achievable, and that is the problem. Lead volume is easy to hit with low-quality traffic. A guarantee on volume with nothing about quality is a guarantee to waste your money efficiently.
Red flags, continued
The less obvious ones. Nothing here is a scam. These are ordinary arrangements that quietly cost you a year.
Watch this one hardest. If the agency creates your ad account, Business Profile or website under their own ownership, leaving means starting over: history gone, learning gone, reviews potentially gone. Ask who owns each asset and get it in writing.
Posts published, keywords tracked, hours worked. All real work, none of it an answer to whether the business grew. Ask what the report will show you about revenue.
Plenty of agencies sell the work and then buy it from someone else. You are paying a markup for a contractor you cannot name, in a timezone you were not told about, who has no relationship with your business. Ask whether the people doing the work are employees.
Some commitment is reasonable, since real work takes time to compound. Twelve months with no performance condition and no way out is not about the work.
Ask it plainly. A good answer includes specifics about when they would tell you and what they would change.
What it should cost
A page about how to hire that will not discuss money fails its own test. So here it is.
Frame it as a share of revenue. Businesses in growth mode typically invest five to ten percent of revenue in marketing, covering both fees and media. Below that, progress is slow. Above it, you are usually funding it from somewhere it will hurt. That range is the first thing to measure any proposal against.
Understand what you are paying for. Fees buy strategy, execution and management. Media is what reaches customers. An agency taking most of a small budget in fees has left nothing to work with. Ask for the split explicitly.
$3,500 to $5,000 per month
One clear problem, one lever. A business that knows what is wrong and needs it done well.
$5,000 to $10,000 per month
Groundwork is required before the main work can perform, or two connected problems.
$10,000 and up per month
Several parts of the business need to move together, in sequence, with strategy holding it.
Which one you need is determined by the shape of the problem, not the size of your company. A large business with one clean constraint belongs in the first row. A smaller business needing foundation work belongs in the second.
Be careful with any agency that scopes you by your budget rather than your situation. If they learn what you can spend and the recommendation arrives at exactly that number, you have learned something about how they work.
Standards worth demanding
01
You should not have to request a status update. You should be able to look at what is in progress, what is waiting on you, what shipped, and what you are being billed, whenever you want.
How to check
Ask to see the client view. Not a sample report. The actual place a client logs in.
How we do it
We do this with TrolleyOS, our own platform, with the client view coming soon. We have committed real resources to it so we do not fall into this same trap.
02
Not clicks. Not leads. Which specific marketing produced which specific closed business, as far as the data allows.
How to check
Ask how a phone call from a paid ad gets connected to a closed deal in their reporting. A vague answer means it does not happen.
How we do it
We connect the advertising platforms, our lead quality system and the CRM into one pipeline view. Being straight about the limits: this depends partly on you. If deals close in conversations that never get recorded, no system recovers that. We will tell you where the loop closes cleanly and where it does not, rather than presenting an estimate as a measurement.
03
Lead volume is not the goal. An agency reporting volume without quality is reporting on something that does not matter.
How to check
Ask what percentage of the leads they generated last quarter were real prospects, and how they know.
How we do it
We built TrolleyShield, which screens inbound calls and form fills for whether they are genuine prospects. It runs on the accounts we manage, so we can tell the difference between a campaign that is not working and one producing volume that is not real.
04
Every account, profile, domain and property in your name. Access granted to the agency, revocable by you.
How to check
Ask who owns each one. Ask what happens to it if you leave.
How we do it
You own all of it. We request access and you can remove it. If you leave, you leave with your history intact. We would rather earn the next month than hold your accounts hostage.
05
A lot of agencies resell. You sign with one company and the work is done by a contractor or a white-label shop you never hear about, at a markup, with nobody who knows your business. Whether they sit in your meetings matters far less than whether they exist.
How to check
Ask whether the people doing the work are employees. Ask their names. Ask what is subcontracted and to whom.
How we do it
Everyone who touches your account is on our payroll, and we will tell you who they are. We do not white-label. Our specialists spend their time on the work rather than on status calls, which is how the work stays good, and you always have a named person who owns the outcome and can put you in front of whoever built the thing. When a project needs a skill we do not keep in house, we bring in someone from a network we have vetted and worked with before, and we tell you who and why.
How our process works
Four steps, in this order, always.
01
You get in touch
We ask a few qualifying questions up front. If we are not the right fit, we say so before spending an hour of your time.
02
A strategy call
Thirty minutes. We start with what you are trying to accomplish and when, before we show you anything. Then we walk through a free external review of your marketing. It will tell you useful things and leave real questions open, because there is only so much visible from the outside.
03
The Growth Diagnostic
$1,500, credited fully toward setup fees if you go forward. You connect your advertising and analytics accounts, which we do together on the call rather than setting as homework. Our specialists review. Then we identify the constraint and tell you what reaching your goal actually requires.
04
A decision
We present what we found and what we recommend. That might be a package of work, a sequenced plan if what you need costs more than you can fund now, or nothing at all, because the constraint is operational and buying more demand would make things worse.
We show the math behind whatever we recommend, including the assumptions it depends on, so you can judge it rather than trust it.
What we will not do: promise a result. We will tell you what the investment needs to be and what has to hold true for it to work. Anyone promising you an outcome is guessing with more confidence than the situation allows.
Questions we find hard
These are ones we have to work at.
Take this page to whoever you are considering, including us, and ask the questions in it. The answers will tell you more than any proposal.
