You don't need an agency yet

There’s a moment I’ve watched play out at company after company.

The company is growing. The board, or the founder, finally says the thing everyone’s been waiting for: we need to invest in marketing. A budget appears. And then – with real money in hand and the best intentions – they go find an agency.

Six months later the money’s gone and no one can quite say what it bought.

I don’t think the agency is the villain. The problem starts earlier, and it’s quieter. When a company scales, marketing usually isn’t built for it. It grew by accident – a hire here, a tool there, a freelancer someone liked. There’s no structure underneath. So when the budget lands, there’s nothing to aim it with. You can’t brief what you haven’t built. And an agency you can’t brief will fill the silence with activity – campaigns, dashboards, a lot of motion – because that’s roughly what you asked for, without knowing you were asking.

The most expensive marketing is the kind you can’t brief.

It’s rarely a marketing problem

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: this is almost never a marketing problem. It’s the operating model catching up with the growth. Marketing is just where it shows first, because it’s the most visible line of spend. Sales has a number. Product has a roadmap. Marketing, before it’s built, has a budget and a lot of hope – so it’s the first place the money leaks, and the first place someone notices.

Which means the fix isn’t more activity. It’s structure, and knowing what to ask for.

What to build in-house and what to buy. What actually moves something at your stage, and what’s just expensive noise. Which one hire changes everything, and which five tools you could cancel tomorrow. Whether you even need an agency yet – and if you do, what to hand it, so it can do the thing it’s genuinely good at instead of guessing.

None of that is glamorous. It’s the unglamorous work of deciding, out loud, what this company needs marketing to do next. But it’s the work that makes every franc after it compound instead of evaporate.

I’ve built these functions from the inside more than once – once at a company right after its Series A, when the money to grow had just arrived and the machine to spend it well hadn’t. Never from the agency side of the table. And that side matters. When you’ve sat where the money gets spent, not where it gets billed, you learn quickly where it leaks. You learn that the founder rarely needs someone to run more campaigns. They need someone to sit in the room and say, plainly, what to ask for.

Before you sign anything

So before you sign the retainer, try this. Spend a week – not a quarter, a week – writing down what you’d actually ask an agency to do. If you can write that brief with a straight face, hire them. You’re ready, and a good agency will be worth every franc. If you can’t, that’s not a reason to panic. It’s just the real first job, showing itself.

The agency isn’t the mistake. Buying one before you know what to ask for – that’s the mistake.

–S.