Your agency didn't cause that growth. Your business did.
Yet every month they take credit. Pointing at graphs that went up, spinning narratives, claiming wins that weren't theirs. The levers that drive growth? Untouched.
I've watched this play out dozens of times. A founder comes to me frustrated, bleeding cash, wondering why their $15K or $20K per month agency retainer isn't moving the needle. When I dig in, the pattern is always the same: the agency is running a handful of campaigns, adjusting bids, swapping creative every few weeks, and calling it strategy.
That's not strategy. That's babysitting.
And in 2024, the babysitter isn't even necessary. The algorithm does the work now.
The Shift Nobody Told You About
Something fundamental changed in paid acquisition over the last three years, and most founders missed it. This is one of the three shifts that broke traditional growth—and it's reshaping how growth actually happens.
Meta's algorithm got good. Really good. Advantage+ campaigns, smart bidding, simplified account structures. The platform now does the optimization work that junior media buyers used to do manually. It processes more data points in an hour than a human could analyze in a month. It tests creative combinations at scale. It finds audiences you'd never think to target.
The role of the media buyer has been commoditized by the software itself.
This isn't speculation. It's observable in every ad account I audit. The campaigns performing best are often the ones with the least human intervention. Broad targeting. Automated placements. Creative diversity. Let the machine learn.
So when an agency pitches you on their "team of experienced media buyers," ask yourself: what exactly are they buying? The platform handles bid optimization. The platform handles audience expansion. The platform handles placement selection.
You're paying premium rates for someone to watch an algorithm work.
The $18K Wake-Up Call
A founder came to me six months into an agency relationship. He was paying $18,000 per month. The agency had set up three Advantage+ campaigns. Performance had been flat the entire time.
When I asked what the agency had done to improve results, he showed me the monthly reports. Lots of graphs. Lots of commentary about "testing" and "optimization." But when I looked at the actual account, the structure hadn't changed in four months. The creative was stale. The landing pages were untouched. The email sequences were nonexistent.
The agency was taking credit for baseline performance. The business was doing the heavy lifting through product quality, brand recognition, and organic word of mouth. The paid ads were just capturing demand that already existed. This is the real economics of marketing agencies—they draft on momentum they didn't create.
This is more common than you think. Agencies are incentivized to maintain, not improve. A stable account is an easy account. As long as results don't crater, they keep the retainer. There's no urgency to push harder, test faster, or expand into new channels.
They're not growth partners. They're maintenance contractors.
Why Your Agency Can't Actually Drive Growth
Here's the uncomfortable truth: if your agency only controls your ad account, they can't be accountable for growth.
Growth doesn't happen in a silo. It happens across the entire customer journey. Someone sees an ad, clicks to a landing page, evaluates your offer, maybe signs up for email, gets nurtured over time, eventually converts, and then either sticks around or churns. Every step in that sequence affects the economics.
Your agency touches one step. Maybe two if they're doing creative.
But what about the landing page? If conversion rate is 2% instead of 4%, you just doubled your customer acquisition cost. What about the email sequence? If you're not capturing and nurturing the 95% of visitors who don't convert immediately, you're leaving money everywhere. What about retention? Acquiring customers who churn in 30 days is just expensive churn.
When your agency controls ads but you own landing pages, email lives with another vendor, and creative is outsourced somewhere else, nobody owns the outcome. Everyone owns a piece. And when results lag, everyone points fingers.
"The ads are performing great, it's the landing page."
"The landing page is fine, it's the offer."
"The offer converts, but email isn't nurturing properly."
This is why most agency relationships feel like spinning wheels. The agency optimizes their slice while the funnel leaks everywhere else. Understanding what a growth marketer actually does reveals why fragmented ownership fails—real growth requires owning the entire system.
The Questions That Expose Pretenders
If you're evaluating whether to keep your agency or find a new partner, here are the questions that separate operators from account managers.
"What did you do this week?"
A real growth partner should have a concrete answer. We launched four new creative concepts. We ran a landing page test that increased conversion by 12%. We identified a new audience segment that's outperforming our core demo. We fixed an email deliverability issue that was killing open rates.
If the answer is "we monitored performance and made some bid adjustments," that's not work. That's attendance.
"How many creatives have you launched this month?"
Creative velocity is the game now. Meta's algorithm needs volume to learn. If your agency is launching two or three new ads per week, they're not feeding the machine enough data. A serious paid acquisition operation should be testing 20, 30, 50+ creative variations monthly across different formats, hooks, angles, and audiences.
The agency that talks about "optimizing" the same five ads for three months straight is telling you they don't understand how the platforms work in 2024.
"Are we split testing landing pages?"
If the answer is no, you're leaving conversion rate on the table. And conversion rate is the most leveraged improvement you can make in paid acquisition. A 1% improvement in landing page conversion has the same impact as a 1% improvement in ad CTR, but it compounds across every traffic source, not just paid.
Agencies that don't touch landing pages aren't growth partners. They're traffic vendors.
"What's our email capture and nurture strategy?"
Most visitors won't convert on the first touch. That's just how B2B and high-consideration B2C works. If your agency isn't thinking about how to capture those visitors and bring them back, they're optimizing for one-shot conversions in a multi-touch world.
A growth partner thinks about the whole journey. An agency thinks about the ad click.
The Full-Funnel Imperative
The only way an outside partner actually drives growth is by owning the entire funnel strategy. Research. Messaging. Creative direction. Media buying. Landing page optimization frameworks. Email strategy. Every piece connected by someone who sees the whole picture.
This isn't about scope creep or upselling. It's about physics.
If I can only pull one lever, I can only create incremental improvement. If I can pull every lever, I can create compounding improvement. Better messaging informs better creative. Better creative drives cheaper traffic. Cheaper traffic to a higher-converting landing page drives lower CAC. Lower CAC with strong retention drives higher LTV. Higher LTV allows more aggressive acquisition.
Every piece connects. Optimizing one piece in isolation is like tuning one cylinder in an engine. You might make that cylinder more efficient, but the car doesn't go faster.
This is why the agency model struggles to deliver transformational results. Agencies are structured around deliverables, not outcomes. They sell media buying. They sell creative. They sell landing pages. Each service is a separate line item with a separate team.
But growth isn't a bundle of deliverables. Growth is a system. And systems require integrated ownership. This is exactly how we run growth for 8 clients at once—by treating each engagement as a unified system, not a collection of services.
What You Actually Need at $100K+ Monthly Spend
If you're spending six figures per month on paid acquisition, you have two viable paths forward.
Path One: Full-Time Growth Professional
Hire someone who's operated a full growth funnel before. Not a media buyer. Not a creative strategist. Someone who's owned P&L responsibility for a growth function. Someone who understands how all the pieces connect.
This person should have experience across paid acquisition, landing page optimization, email marketing, and analytics. They should be able to build a team underneath them as you scale. They should have enough technical chops to implement tests without waiting on engineering.
The challenge with this path is finding the right person. True full-funnel operators are rare and expensive. You're probably looking at $200K+ total comp for someone senior enough to own the function. And you're competing with well-funded startups and established companies for that talent.
Path Two: Full-Service Growth Partner
Find an outside partner who operates like an extension of your team, not a vendor. Someone who takes ownership of the entire funnel. Someone who's compensated on outcomes, not just activity.
The key differentiator here is skin in the game. An agency charging a flat retainer has no incentive to push harder once results are "good enough." A partner with performance-based compensation is aligned with your growth.
This doesn't mean pure revenue share, which can create its own misalignments. It means structured agreements where the partner benefits from outperformance. They make more money when you make more money. They feel the pain when results decline.
Whatever path you choose, the critical requirement is the same: unified ownership of the growth function. Someone has to own the system, not just the pieces.
The Founder's Blindspot
If you've never operated a full growth funnel yourself, you don't know what good looks like.
This isn't an insult. It's just reality. Founders have a hundred things competing for their attention. Most come from product, engineering, sales, or domain expertise backgrounds. Growth marketing wasn't their lane.
So when an agency shows up with a polished deck, confident account managers, and a roster of logos, it's hard to evaluate whether they actually know what they're doing. The jargon sounds right. The process seems professional. The reports look thorough.
But none of that means they can drive results.
The agencies that are best at sales often aren't the ones that are best at delivery. Building a services sales machine is a completely different skill than building a growth engine. Some of the most effective growth operators I know are terrible at business development because they're too focused on the work to package it prettily.
This asymmetry is why founders keep getting burned. The signal of quality (slick presentations, big client lists, smooth account management) has almost no correlation with the substance of quality (strategic insight, creative velocity, full-funnel thinking, relentless testing).
The only way to evaluate is to ask hard questions and know what good answers sound like. Which brings us back to those questions from earlier. Ask what they did this week. Ask about creative volume. Ask about landing page testing. Ask about email strategy.
The pretenders will deflect or generalize. The operators will get specific. Understanding what separates a real growth marketer from pretenders will help you spot the difference.
When to Fire Your Agency
If any of these sound familiar, it's time to move on.
Your monthly calls feel like performance theater. The agency presents numbers, tells a story about what happened, and promises optimizations next month. But nothing fundamentally changes. The same structure, the same creative approach, the same results.
You can't get a straight answer about what they actually did. When you ask for specifics, you get jargon and generalities. "We're testing new audiences." "We're optimizing toward stronger signals." "We're refining the creative strategy." These phrases sound good but mean nothing.
Creative velocity is low. If you're seeing fewer than 20 new ad variations per month, they're not working hard enough. The platforms reward volume. The algorithm needs data. Slow creative testing is just slow losing.
They don't touch anything outside the ad platform. If your agency has never suggested a landing page test, never audited your email sequences, never questioned your offer structure, they're not thinking about growth. They're thinking about media buying.
Performance is flat despite "optimization." This is the clearest signal. If an agency has been "optimizing" for six months and results haven't improved, they either lack the skill to move the needle or lack the incentive to try. Either way, you're wasting money.
The Path Forward
Growth is about more than media buying and ads.
It's about understanding your customer deeply enough to craft messaging that resonates. It's about testing landing pages until you find the framing that converts. It's about building email sequences that nurture cold traffic into warm buyers. It's about analyzing retention to understand which acquisition channels drive valuable customers versus ones who churn.
An agency that only touches your ad account is playing with 20% of the system. They can't create transformational results because they don't control the other 80%.
If you're spending real money on growth, you need someone who owns the whole machine. A full-time hire who's operated at this level before. Or a partner who takes true ownership, operates across the entire funnel, and has compensation aligned with your outcomes.
The approach matters too. The best growth partners combine human expertise with AI-powered systems—using technology to move faster while retaining the strategic judgment that algorithms can't replicate.
If they don't own the funnel, they don't own your growth. Find someone who does.
Ready to Stop Wasting Money on Maintenance?
Your agency is babysitting an algorithm. You're paying premium rates for performance theater. And meanwhile, the levers that actually drive growth sit untouched.
Apply to work with us and work with a growth partner who owns your entire funnel—from first click to retained customer. No more finger-pointing. No more optimization theater. Just systematic growth with aligned incentives.
Robbie Jack•Jan 03, 2026•12 min read
