12 questions to ask an agency before you sign
Most founders choose an agency the way they’d choose a restaurant. Someone recommended it, the website looked good, the person on the call was likeable.
Then eight months later they’re in my inbox explaining that it didn’t work out, and when I ask what went wrong, the answer is almost always something they could have found out on the first call, if they’d asked.
So here are the questions. Use them on me too. I’d rather you did.
The questions that reveal who actually does the work
1. Who will be running my account day to day?
Not “who’s on the team.” Who, specifically, opens my ad account on a Tuesday morning?
The person selling to you is very often not the person doing the work. That’s the standard agency model: senior people win the business, junior people learn on your budget. It isn’t a scandal, it’s just how the economics work, and you should know you’re buying it.
2. How many other accounts does that person manage?
There's no magic number, but there is an honest answer. Fewer accounts usually means more attention per client; a higher number can still work if the agency is genuinely built for it. What you're testing is whether they'll tell you the truth about where you'd sit, and whether you'd get someone's focus or whatever is left after the loudest clients have taken theirs.
3. What happens if they leave?
Agency staff turnover is high. If your entire account knowledge lives with one person, you’re one resignation away from starting again, and you’ll pay for the relearning.
4. Can I speak to the person who’d actually run it, before I sign?
Watch what happens when you ask this. The answer, and the speed of the answer, is more informative than anything on the website.
The questions about how they think
5. What would you look at first?
If the answer is entirely inside the ad account, be careful. The ad account is one room in the house. Plenty of what breaks ecommerce growth, margin, product page, offer, retention, is nowhere near it.
6. What do you need from my business to know if this will work?
A good answer includes your numbers. Product cost, margin, return rate, repeat purchase rate. If nobody asks what your product costs to make, they cannot tell you whether your advertising is profitable. They can only tell you whether it’s busy.
7. When would you tell me not to hire you?
Every honest operator has a list. Wrong stage, wrong margins, foundations not ready, budget too low to learn from. If they can’t name a single situation in which they’d turn work away, they’ll take anyone, which includes people they can’t help.
8. What’s the thing you’d want me to fix before spending a dollar more on ads?
There is always something. An agency that says “nothing, you’re ready” either hasn’t looked or doesn’t want to slow down the sale.
The questions about time and truth
9. How long before we know if this is working?
Anyone promising a transformation in 30 days is telling you what you want to hear. The first month is diagnosis, rebuild and learning, and performance sometimes dips before it lifts, because that’s what a reset does.
Fast results in ecommerce usually mean discounting, and discounting isn’t growth. It’s revenue borrowed from next quarter.
10. What happens when something isn’t working?
Listen for whether they’ve thought about this at all. Most decks only describe the version where everything goes well. The relationship is defined by the other version.
11. What’s outside your scope, and will you tell me if the real problem is out there?
This is the question I’d want asked most. Every agency has a scope. The dangerous ones treat everything inside it as the answer, because that’s what they sell. If your problem is margin and you’ve hired a media buyer, the media buyer will keep buying media.
12. What does month one actually look like?
Not the strategy. The calendar. What gets done in week one, week two, week three. Vagueness here is not a communication style. It’s an absence of a plan.
What the answers are really telling you
Notice what most of these questions have in common: none of them are about tactics.
You’re not trying to work out whether they know how to structure a campaign. Almost everyone can structure a campaign. You’re trying to work out three things:
Who’s actually doing it. Seniority isn’t a luxury. It’s the difference between someone who’s seen your situation fifty times and someone who’s seeing it for the first time, on your money.
Whether they’ll look outside their own scope. Because the constraint is often not in the thing they sell, and the ones who won’t look will spend your budget optimising the wrong room.
Whether they’ll tell you the truth when it’s inconvenient. Which you can’t test in advance, but you can absolutely hear in how they answer question 7.
And if you’re already in a bad one
You don’t need to wait for a contract to end to ask these questions of your current agency.
Ask number 1 and number 2 today. If you don’t like the answers, if it turns out the person who charmed you in the pitch hasn’t opened your account in four months, that’s not a small thing. That’s what you’re paying for, and you’re not getting it.
I lead strategy on every account I take. No juniors making the calls, no rotating account managers, no being handed off. That’s not a positioning line, it’s the reason I only work with a small number of brands at once. Ask me all twelve.
Book a discovery call with me here. I'll look at your ad account and your business numbers together, and tell you straight where the real opportunity sits.
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