Why great agencies can still suck
How to work with agencies effectively.
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door”, a weekly publication with stories and tidbits of my human journey bootstrapping eWebinar to $5m ARR. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs on what it’s like to build a company without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.
I’ve been vocal about how I’ve failed to work with agencies over the last 15 years. Great agencies. Best-in-class agencies. Agencies that worked wonders for everyone else but somehow not for me.
Only recently did I figure out why.
Most founders, myself included, see agencies as the solution to a problem they don’t know how to solve. Outside experts who will figure it out for you. That’s only half true.
Agencies don’t work with you full-time. They’re not thinking about your business 24/7 like a team member would. They can only solve the parts of the problem you’re able to see and articulate to them.
💡 Here’s the thing: an agency can only do what you’re able to tell them to do.
When you hire one to do something you have no idea how to do yourself, you don’t even know how to interview for the right fit. You can’t validate someone’s skills if you don’t know what questions to ask.
Let me give you three examples of how we got this wrong.
Six months after launching eWebinar, we hired a sales and marketing agency to rewrite our website and messaging, then sell the product for us with guaranteed revenue in 12 months. The messaging work was great. But the selling? Obstacle after obstacle. The engagement fell apart because we were too early. We hadn’t figured out how to sell our own product yet, so how could an outside team create a repeatable pitch for us? You can’t outsource selling until you’ve figured out how to sell it yourself.
Three years ago, we hired Fletch to rewrite our homepage. They’re the absolute best in the industry at what they do. They told us upfront: no customer research, we’ll take everything you give us as truth. Completely fair. They did a great job for that point in time. But six months ago, I realized our entire approach to selling was wrong. We assumed we were selling to people who already knew they had the pain (a red ocean audience) when our biggest opportunity was people who don’t know they have the pain at all (a blue ocean audience). Now we’re rewriting everything Fletch wrote. Not because they failed. Because our input was wrong. (See: The strategy that got us to profitability and kept us small)
Same story with Grow & Convert, who I think is regarded as one of the best SEO agencies out there. We worked with them for a year with no increase in traffic. They wrote content based on what we told them we were selling, competing for existing keywords with barely any volume. What we actually needed was jobs-to-be-done content that goes beyond what’s already out there. That wasn’t their strategy to figure out. It was ours.
Looking back, it’s easy to point at an agency and say you didn’t get us the results we wanted! But in all three cases, it wasn’t that they were bad at their jobs. It was garbage in, garbage out. Our knowledge was limited, so their output was limited to what we gave them.
That’s one of the hardest things about a startup. Nothing is set in stone. What worked three months ago doesn’t work anymore. Experimentation is expensive, which means it rarely makes sense to hire an expensive agency to experiment for you. It makes sense to hire one to scale what you’ve already figured out.
What I’m doing differently now is getting personally involved by educating myself on the thing I’m hiring for.
We engaged T360 to grow our footprint in the real estate industry, their specialty. I’ve personally reached out to our top real estate customers, dug into every account, and I get on calls with them every two weeks. I make sure they have what they need to do their job. I’m treating this as a partnership, not a project I hand off and wait for revenue.
We’re now working with Breaking B2B on SEO. I’m getting involved by learning keyword research, reading and editing every article, asking why they chose certain topics, and making sure they know exactly who we’re trying to reach and what not to do.
I spent so many years frustrated at hiring great agencies that worked for everyone but me…
Learn from my mistakes. Don’t hire someone to do a task you have zero idea how to do yourself. Get a basic understanding first, so you can hire the best people and know how to direct them.
When something’s not working, sure, re-evaluate the agency. But also re-evaluate yourself, and whether there’s something else you need to feed into the machine.
An agency’s output will only ever be as good as your input.
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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Very well written Melissa. You have a gift for persuasive writing. I remember making all those 3 mistakes in my last company :-)