When to fire your agency, and when the problem is you
Agency changes are expensive, disruptive and frequently solve nothing, because half the time the dysfunction was not on the agency side.
Switch when the agency stops arguing with you, when the senior people who pitched have vanished, or when reporting has become advocacy. Do not switch when the brief keeps changing, approvals are impossible or the budget cannot support the ask, because those problems will follow you.
Before changing, work out which kind of failure you have. The symptoms look identical from the inside and the remedies are opposites.
Signals that it is the agency
- They have stopped arguing with you. The most reliable indicator. An agency that agrees with everything has decided the relationship is about retention rather than results.
- The senior people have disappeared. Pitched by directors, serviced by juniors, which is normal in moderation and fatal past a point.
- Reporting is advocacy. Every month a win, no month a failure, no test that did not work.
- Repeated avoidable errors, particularly in tracking, billing or compliance.
- No point of view. They execute what you ask and nothing more, which means you are paying agency rates for a production service.
Signals that it is you
- The brief has changed three times this quarter.
- Work dies in approvals, or a senior objection arrives at the final stage every time.
- The budget cannot support the outcome being demanded, and everyone is pretending otherwise.
- Nobody internally owns the relationship, so the agency is managed by whoever is least busy.
- The agency has told you the constraint is elsewhere and nobody acted on it.
Changing agencies will not fix any of those. It will reset six months of context and reproduce the same outcome with new names.
The conversation to have first
A direct one, with the senior person, about what is not working, with specifics and a date to review it. Agencies can almost always fix a stated problem. They cannot fix dissatisfaction nobody has named.
Running the transition
If you do switch: get the handover in writing, keep account ownership and historical data, overlap by a fortnight where possible, and give the incoming team a baseline rather than a grievance. Then run the first ninety days properly: see the first ninety days with a new agency.
Questions we get asked
What is the clearest sign to change agency?
They have stopped disagreeing with you. An agency protecting the relationship rather than the results has stopped being useful.
What should we check before switching agencies?
Whether the brief keeps changing, whether approvals kill the work, and whether the budget supports the ask. Those problems move with you.
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