Ten questions that tell you if an agency actually does the work

You are not buying a strategy, you are buying an execution habit

Every agency pitch sounds similar because the strategy part isn’t where they differ. Most of them would suggest broadly sensible things. What differs is whether the work gets done, in month six, in a busy week, when nobody is watching.

That’s hard to assess in a sales call, which is why the questions below are almost all about mechanics rather than ideas. Ask them in order. You’ll learn more from how quickly someone answers than from the answer itself.

1. Who, by name, will do the work?

The person on the call is often not the person who writes your emails. That’s not automatically bad — it’s bad when nobody will tell you who it is.

Ask for the name, the role, and how many other accounts that person handles. Ask whether any of it is subcontracted, and to whom. A confident answer sounds like a name and a number. An evasive one sounds like "our team".

While we’re here: we’re a one-person shop, so our answer is short — Brandon does the work and Brandon is who you talk to. That has genuine trade-offs, and we get to them further down.

2 and 3. What happens in month one, and what happens in month six?

Ask for the deliverables of the first thirty days, in specifics. Not "onboarding and discovery" — what will exist at the end of it that didn’t exist before?

Month one is where the difference between an operator and a reseller shows up fastest. A reseller’s month one is a questionnaire, a strategy deck and an invoice. An operator’s month one produces something you can look at: an account built, a sequence live, a first issue written. Both cost the same in fees. Only one of them leaves you with something.

Then ask about month six, which is the better question and almost nobody asks it. Plenty of agencies are excellent for ninety days. The engagement decays afterwards because the setup work is finished, the ongoing work is less interesting, and the client has stopped watching closely. Nobody plans this. It happens because month six has no launch date attached to it.

Ask what a normal month six looks like — what gets produced, what gets reviewed, who looks at the account and how often. If the honest answer is that month six is mostly maintenance, that might be exactly right for what you’re buying. But you should know it before you pay a setup-heavy fee expecting the same intensity all year, and you should know whether the fee drops when the intensity does.

4. What is the notice period, and what happens on the last day?

Long lock-ins are usually a substitute for confidence. A twelve-month minimum tells you the vendor expects that some clients would leave at month four if they could.

Ask two things: how much notice, and what you receive when you go. The second answer should be immediate and boring — your accounts stay yours, your data is exported, your files are handed over. Hesitation here is the loudest signal in the entire conversation.

5. What do I own?

Go through it item by item and get the answers in writing: the domain, the website and its source, the ad accounts, the Google Business Profile, the CRM records, the mailing list, the creative files.

The right answer is that all of it is created in your name from day one and the agency has access rather than ownership. Anything else is a cost you can’t see yet, and it’s the single most expensive thing owners find out too late.

Watch for the softer version of a bad answer, which is "of course it’s all yours" with no detail behind it. Ownership of an ad account or a Google Business Profile is a specific technical fact about whose business created it, not a matter of goodwill. Ask which account each one sits in, and ask for the answer in an email rather than on a call.

6 and 7. What will reporting show me, and will you tell me when it’s bad?

Ask to see a real report from an existing client with the name blanked out. Then read what it measures.

Impressions, reach and follower counts describe activity. They go up if you do almost anything, and they’re what a report shows when there’s nothing better to show. What you want is a line from spend to inquiries to customers, plus an honest note about what could not be tracked — because in most small businesses a meaningful share of new work arrives by phone or word of mouth and can’t be attributed cleanly. A report that claims perfect attribution is a report that has decided not to mention the gaps.

Which leads straight into question seven: will you tell me when something isn’t working? Reporting is only worth reading if bad news survives the trip to your inbox, and most reports are written to be reassuring rather than useful.

Ask directly: tell me about a time you told a client to stop doing something, or that a channel wasn’t right for them.

Someone who does the work has an answer immediately, because it happens constantly. Someone who sells the work has to invent one on the spot, and you can hear it. This question is the closest thing to a lie detector in the list.

Follow it with the version that costs them money: is there anything in your service list you’d tell me not to buy? A vendor who has never once talked a client out of a line item is not advising, they’re order-taking.

8. What do you need from me every month?

Every engagement requires something from the client, and the ones that quietly fail are the ones where nobody said so up front. Approvals, a photo, twenty minutes on the phone, a decision about an offer.

Ask for the honest number of hours and the specific moments. If the answer is "nothing at all", either it isn’t true or the work is generic enough not to need you — and generic marketing about a business that isn’t generic is what most disappointing retainers turn out to be.

9. Where does the pricing stop?

Ask what the fee includes and, more importantly, what it doesn’t. Ad spend, print, postage, software licenses, stock photography and platform fees are commonly billed separately, which is fine — as long as you know before the second invoice.

Ask whether pass-through costs carry a markup. There is no correct answer, but there is a correct behavior, which is telling you plainly. We bill print and postage at cost with no markup, and print for a large mailing list can run well past the fee itself, so we’d rather that number be discussed before anyone signs.

10. Why would this not work for me?

Ask them to argue the other side. Under what circumstances would this be a bad fit, and who do they turn away?

Everyone who genuinely does the work has a list. Ours: a business with no repeat purchase and no referral behavior gets little from a newsletter. A company that needs full social media management should hire someone else, because we don’t do it. Someone who needs national enterprise SEO is talking to the wrong shop.

An agency that can’t name a single bad fit is telling you that their answer is the same regardless of your question.

The honest trade-offs of hiring a small shop

These questions favor small operators, so it’s only fair to name what you give up by hiring one. There is no bench. If one person is ill or on holiday, capacity is genuinely zero for that period, and no amount of process changes that. There’s no specialist for every discipline — depth in a few things, not coverage of everything. There’s a ceiling on volume, and at some scale you will outgrow the arrangement.

What you get in exchange is that the person who sold it does it, nothing is lost in a handover between three people, and there’s no account manager translating your question to someone you’ll never meet.

Both of those are true at once. The right choice depends on which failure you’d rather risk: the small shop’s capacity, or the large one’s distance from your account.

One question to end on

After the ten, ask this: what would you do first if you were me and had half this budget?

You’re not looking for a cheaper quote. You’re testing whether they can prioritize — whether they know which single thing matters most for a business like yours, or whether the plan is just everything they sell, listed.

The answers to all eleven should be things you could write on one page and hold someone to. If you can’t, you didn’t get answers, you got a pitch.