Agency transparency / client governance

I wanna talk about how to know if your marketing agency is ripping you off. Whenever I talk to a business owner that's paying a marketing agency, I always ask, what is the agency doing for you?

And the most common response I get is, I don't know. This is incredibly common, and it's the first sign that your agency is probably ripping you off.

Let me give you another one. Today I was talking with a business owner I've known for over a decade.

He owns several businesses, and he's hiring a different agency for two of them. He was told me today that he has weekly calls with both of them.

And with one agency, everything they say makes perfect sense to him. But with the other agency, he always feels like he can't follow what they're saying.

And when he asks clarifying questions, they're not able to explain it in a way that he understands. Maybe they're just bad communicators.

But what happens a lot with agencies is they know they're doing bad work, or they don't know why they can't get results, and so they talk in circles...

does less and less work for them. This is why I decided to bring all of our clients directly into our task management system.

Not only can they see every task we're working on and all of our internal communications, they can also join in on those conversations. So I'm not saying you should fire your agency, but if you're not crystal clear on what they're doing and why they're doing it, you should definitely have a talk.