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I’ve probably wasted somewhere between $300k and $500k on agencies over the years. Maybe more. I stopped counting.

Some of them were genuinely good at what they did. The problem was me. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. After I sold the company, I sat down and tried to figure out where those relationships went sideways, what I could have done differently to get an actual return on what I was spending.

Three things kept coming up. If I’d understood these earlier, I probably would have saved at least half of what I lost.

The Laziness Problem (Which Isn’t Really About Laziness)

Here’s what’s actually happening when you hire an agency. You want maximum output for minimum spend. They want maximum margin for minimum labor. Those two things are in direct conflict, and nobody ever says it out loud.

It’s a tug of war built into the structure of the relationship.

The fix is contracts and accountability. Real ones, with teeth.

When you bring on a media buyer, get specific. How many creatives per week? Is someone on their team looking at contribution margin, not just Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)? Who’s responsible for analyzing results and bringing recommendations? What does the actual deliverable look like, in writing?

Most founders don’t do this. I didn’t for years. We’ll spend weeks dialing in a job description for a new hire, then turn around and hand an agency $10,000 a month based on a friend’s recommendation and a 45-minute intro call. No contract with real teeth. No clear KPIs. No accountability mechanism when things go sideways.

Treat it like hiring an employee. You want a clear job description, clear metrics, and clear expectations about what success looks like — all documented before money changes hands. Then build a process, weekly reports, a shared dashboard, whatever works, to actually hold them to it.

When there’s no accountability structure, agencies fill the vacuum with whatever’s easiest to do and easiest to report. When there is one, you have something to point to. You can say, here’s what we agreed on. Here’s what actually happened. What are we doing about it?

That shift alone would have saved me a lot of money.

The Puzzle Problem

Every specialist you bring into your business sees it through their own lens.

Your media buyer sees the ad account. Your fractional CMO sees marketing strategy. Your CFO sees the numbers. Your ops person sees the processes. Each of them is looking at one piece of the puzzle, optimizing for that piece, and largely blind to how their piece connects to everything else — and nobody’s connecting the dots.

This is one of the structural reasons the agency carousel keeps spinning. You hire a Meta agency, they improve ROAS, but contribution margin keeps sliding because nobody’s looking at how the ad strategy interacts with your fulfillment costs, your SKU mix, your cash position. Or you bring in an ops consultant, they tighten up the backend, but nobody’s thinking about what that does to capital return velocity or how it affects your Allowable Customer Acquisition Cost (ACAC).

Everything in a business interacts. Financial decisions affect marketing decisions. Marketing decisions affect operations. Operations affect cash flow. Cash flow determines what you can afford to spend on acquisition. It’s one connected system, and when you hire a series of specialists who each only see their slice, you end up with a lot of optimized parts and a broken whole.

There’s not a clean tactical fix for this one. The real answer is making sure someone in your business — whether that’s you, an advisor, a mentor, whoever — is looking at everything from a high enough altitude to see how the pieces connect. Someone who can sit above the specialists and ask: given everything that’s happening across this business, what should we actually be doing right now?

I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mentors over the years. Still do. Even though I teach this stuff for a living. Because having someone look at your business from a different vantage point, with fresh eyes and no emotional attachment to the decisions you’ve already made, pays off more than almost anything else you can invest in.

Michael Jordan had a coach who couldn’t beat him one-on-one, and that wasn’t the point. The point was seeing things Jordan couldn’t see from inside the game.

Same thing applies to your business.

The Incentive Problem

This is the one most founders completely miss.

When your agency’s incentives aren’t aligned with yours, you’re not on the same team. Doesn’t matter what the pitch deck said. A media agency paid on percentage of ad spend makes more money when you spend more. Full stop. Whether that spend is generating profit for you is a separate question, and it’s not their question to answer.

Same thing happens with sales teams. Pay someone purely on revenue and they’ll do whatever it takes to close — overpromise, discount aggressively, sell people who aren’t a fit. Align their commission to contribution margin instead, which accounts for refunds, price point, and actual profitability, and suddenly their incentives look a lot more like yours.

The principle is simple: when they win, you win. When you win, they win — from the same result.

This is why I built some of my own services around performance-only models. I only get paid when the client gets a result. I take the risk, I put in the time, and my clients always keep the bigger piece. That structure forces me to be confident I can actually move the needle before I take on an engagement, because if I can’t, I don’t get paid.

Before you sign with any agency, ask yourself: what are they actually incentivized to do? What behavior does their compensation structure reward? And does that behavior produce profit for you, or just activity?

If the answer is activity — clicks, impressions, ad spend managed, reports delivered — you’ve already identified the problem before it costs you anything.

The Through-Line

Agencies aren’t the enemy. Some of them are excellent at what they do. But they’re excellent at their piece of the puzzle, operating under their own incentive structure, with no particular mandate to care about your profit model.

That’s on you to fix.

Get contracts with real specificity, build in accountability, and find someone who can see the whole board before you sign anything. Understand exactly what behavior you’re rewarding with your money.

Do those things and you’ll get more out of every agency you ever hire.

If you want help structuring any of this, or you’re trying to figure out which of the five economic levers is actually limiting your growth right now, the Profit Model Analyzer is a good place to start: tools.scaleadvisors.com/profit-model-analyzer

Zero pressure. If it’s useful, use it.