Flat retainers create flat effort.
I've been on both sides of the marketing services equation. As a founder who hired agencies. As an operator who built and sold a SaaS company. As someone who now runs a growth firm. The pattern never changes: when your marketing partner gets paid the same whether you grow 10% or 100%, urgency dies.
Not because they're bad people. Because nothing rewards urgency.
Most marketing relationships are structured this way. And it explains why founders who think in first principles are abandoning retainers for performance-based partnerships.
The Retainer Model Is Broken by Design
You sign a contract for $15K a month. The agency assigns your account to a team juggling eight other clients. They build a workflow: weekly status calls, monthly reports, quarterly strategy reviews.
The machine runs. Deliverables ship. Everyone stays busy.
Now ask yourself: what happens to that team's motivation when your CAC spikes 40% in a week?
Nothing. They still get paid. The account manager still has seven other clients demanding attention. Your emergency is their Tuesday.
Agencies coast through entire quarters delivering templated work. Same deck with new dates. They hit their hours. You missed your targets. Everyone gets paid.
That's not partnership. That's payroll.
The Incentive Problem Nobody Talks About
Charlie Munger put it simply: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome."
In traditional agency relationships, incentives misalign from day one. The agency wants to retain the account. You want to grow the business. These sound similar. They're not.
Retaining an account means keeping you satisfied enough not to leave. It means managing expectations. It means having reasonable explanations for lagging results. It means pointing to activity metrics when outcome metrics disappoint.
Growing a business means taking risks. Testing aggressively. Killing sacred cows. Having uncomfortable conversations about what's broken. Choosing results over comfort.
When your partner's paycheck arrives regardless of performance, they optimize for smooth relationships over hard outcomes. Problems get softened in reports. Bad news gets delayed. Underperformance gets rationalized.
None of this is malicious. Just human nature responding to structural incentives.
What Changes When Compensation Follows Performance
Performance-based partnerships flip the equation. Your partner wins when you win. Their best month is your best month. Growth becomes a shared project, not a deliverable.
The calls get sharper. When your partner's income depends on your CAC, they stop asking what you want to do and start telling you what needs to happen. Service provider becomes invested collaborator.
Problems surface faster. In a retainer model, hiding bad news protects the relationship. In a performance model, hiding bad news costs money. Everyone confronts reality quickly because delay is expensive.
The creative gets bolder. When safe work and risky work pay the same, safe wins. When risky work that performs pays more, agencies actually swing for the fences. This is why creative velocity matters so much in modern growth.
Strategy becomes real. Retainer agencies produce strategy decks. Performance partners produce bets they stake income on. There's a difference between "we recommend this approach" and "we're tying our compensation to it."
Alignment isn't aspirational. It's structural.
How We Built GrowthMarketer Around This Principle
When I started GrowthMarketer after selling TrueCoach, I had one question: what would a marketing partner look like if it were designed by a founder for founders?
The answer was obvious. It would share the risk.
We charge a base that covers costs. Nothing more. The real upside comes from performance. When we hit growth targets, we participate in the outcome. When we miss, we eat the downside alongside you.
This changes how we operate at every level.
We turn down clients we can't help. In a retainer model, revenue is revenue. In a performance model, bad-fit clients cost us money. If we don't believe we can move the needle, we pass. It's why we only take 8 clients at a time.
We ignore activity metrics. Impressions, clicks, engagement rates. Fine diagnostic tools. But we get paid on outcomes, so that's what we focus on and report on.
We skip the permission dance. When we see an opportunity or a problem, we act. The traditional agency cycle of proposals and approvals disappears when everyone's incentive is simply to make the number go up.
We surface problems immediately. Not because we're virtuous. Because hiding them is expensive.
The Founders Who Get This
Not every company fits this model. Some need basic execution capacity. Some have leadership that prefers control over outcomes. Some are too early to have clear success metrics.
But founders who think in systems recognize the logic instantly.
They understand that incentives shape behavior more reliably than intentions. They know alignment beats oversight. They'd rather pay more for results than less for activity.
They've usually been burned. They signed with an agency that promised senior attention and delivered junior execution. They sat through status calls reporting on deliverables while revenue flatlined. They wondered why their "partner" seemed so calm about the numbers.
Performance-based partnerships answer that question. The partner was calm because the partner wasn't exposed.
If this sounds familiar, it might be time to fire your marketing agency.
Finding the Right Performance Partner
If this model resonates, here's how to evaluate potential partners.
Ask how they get paid. Specifically. If someone claims "performance-based" but can't explain the exact mechanism, they're using it as marketing language. Real performance models have clear metrics, clear targets, and clear compensation tied to both.
Ask what happens when they miss. A true performance partner feels pain when results disappoint. If missing targets carries no financial consequence, the alignment is theater.
Ask about client selection. Partners with real exposure are picky. They have to be. If someone takes any account that can pay, they're not actually bearing performance risk.
Ask for the uncomfortable truth about your business. Performance partners will tell you things retainer agencies won't. They'll point out weaknesses in your funnel, problems with your creative, gaps in your tracking. They have financial motivation to surface these issues early.
Look for operators, not presenters. The best performance partners are practitioners who've built things themselves. They understand what growth requires because they've done it with their own money on the line. Real growth marketers have P&L experience, not just campaign management.
The Deeper Principle
This isn't about marketing. It's about how relationships work when stakes are shared.
Consider partnerships in your own life where both parties were genuinely invested in the outcome. Where success and failure landed on everyone. Those relationships had a different quality. More honesty. More urgency. Less politics.
Now consider relationships where one party was exposed and the other was protected. More friction. More managing. Less doing.
Performance-based marketing partnerships apply this principle to a specific domain. When both parties have real stakes, the relationship works better. Not because of trust or culture or good intentions. Because the math demands it.
Incentives shape behavior more reliably than intentions.
Find partners who've bet on your success. Then build something together.
Ready for a Partner With Skin in the Game?
We structure every engagement around shared outcomes. If you're spending $100K+ monthly on paid acquisition and want a partner with real exposure to your results, let's talk.
Apply to work with us and get a growth partner who wins when you win.
Robbie Jack•Jan 08, 2026•7 min read
