If you've paid a marketing company before and got reports instead of jobs, start with one rule. Judge the company on how it handles ownership, terms, and reporting, not on how good the pitch feels. The ones worth hiring give you admin access to your own ad accounts, your page, and your lead data from day one. They start on a short term that renews when the numbers are there, not a 12-month lock. They report in plain language tied to what a booked job actually costs you, instead of impressions and reach. And one person stays accountable for the number after the sale, rather than passing you to a junior. The red flags are the mirror image of that. I run a one-person operation out of Aurora, Ontario, so I have skin in this framing. Use the same checklist on me that you'd use on anyone else.
The red flags: what a bad marketing company looks like
Most of the ways this goes wrong show up before you sign, if you know where to look. Here are the ones that have cost owners the most money.
- A 12-month lock with nothing tied to performance. A minimum term is fine on its own. The problem is a long contract with no line that says what happens if the results don't show up. If they want the commitment but won't tie any of it to a number, ask who that contract is built to protect.
- Vanity metrics in the report. Impressions, reach, likes, and clicks look impressive and tell you almost nothing about revenue. If the monthly report is heavy on big numbers and light on cost per lead and cost per booked job, you're being managed, not served.
- They won't give you admin of your own accounts. If the ad accounts, the page, and the lead data live under their logins and you can't get in at the admin level, that's a structural problem no matter how the campaign performs. When you leave, you lose the history and the learning the platform built up.
- Guaranteed results. First-page rankings or a promised lead count usually means closing the deal matters more to them than setting up something that works. Nobody honest can guarantee what a market will do.
- A senior closer, then a junior does the work. The experienced person wows you on the call, then hands your account to someone junior after you sign. The gap between who sold you and who runs the account is where a lot of the disappointment comes from.
The green flags: what a good one looks like
The signs of a company worth hiring are quieter, and most of them are about confidence. A company that expects to earn the renewal builds the relationship so you can leave, and then bets it won't come to that.
- A short initial term that renews on results. They ask for enough time to prove the system against real data, then let it renew when it's working. On my side that's a 90-day term in successive blocks, which is roughly how long the platforms need to settle into a reliable cost per booked job.
- Plain-number reporting tied to cost per booked job. You get what was spent, how many leads came in, what each one cost, and what a booked job cost. Because it's all tracked, each booked job traces back to the exact ad that caused it.
- You own everything from day one. Ad accounts, domain, website, creative, and every lead sit under your name. If it ends, it all transfers cleanly and nothing gets held hostage.
- One person is accountable for the number. The person who runs the account is the person who answers the phone when you call. No handoff, no account manager reading a script off a dashboard you can't see.
You can read how I structure that end to end on the method page.
What questions should you ask on the sales call?
Ask four questions, and treat the wrong answers as a reason to end the meeting politely. First: "Do I own the ad account, the page, and the lead data at the admin level from day one?" If the answer is anything other than a clean yes, stop there. Second: "What number does your reporting optimize toward?" You want cost per booked job or cost per lead, not reach. Third: "Who actually runs my account day to day, and is that you?" A handoff to a junior after a senior pitch is a real signal. Fourth: "What happens if it doesn't work?" An honest company will tell you that you don't renew and you keep everything built. Anyone who answers that with a guarantee is selling you the close, not the work.
Why do cheap marketing retainers usually cost the most?
A cheap retainer usually costs the most because the price has to come out of somewhere, and it comes out of the work. To make a low fee profitable, a company runs your account the same way it runs forty others: templated creative, a shared media buyer glancing at the dashboard once a month, and a report auto-generated from platform defaults. The ad spend keeps flowing while the account drifts, so the real cost is the wasted budget stacked on top of the fee, month after month. On modern platforms the creative is most of what decides a campaign, and good creative takes real time and attention. The math on a bottom-dollar fee only works if that attention gets cut. You feel it as leads that never quite show up, and a bill for ad spend that quietly bought very little.
How do you sanity-check a marketing company's portfolio?
Treat a portfolio as a starting point for questions, not proof on its own. Nice-looking ads and a wall of logos tell you someone can design and can win deals. They don't tell you the work booked jobs. So ask about the businesses closest to yours: same rough size, same channels, same kind of customer. Ask whether the company hit the targets it set, how it communicated when things weren't working, and whether the owner would hire it again. Ask to see a real report from a live account with the numbers that matter, cost per lead and cost per booked job, even with the client name blurred. Be careful with testimonials that praise the relationship but never mention results. The tell you want is an operator who talks about economics and constraints before they talk about creative.
How should you vet me with the same list?
Run every question above on me, because I'd rather you do that than take my word for it. You own your ad accounts, domain, website, creative, and lead data from day one, and it all transfers if we stop. The term is short and renews only when the numbers are working. Reporting is in plain figures tied to what a booked job costs, with no vanity metrics. And there's no handoff, since I'm the one who runs the account and the one you call. I won't guarantee a result, because I can't honestly promise what your market will do. If it doesn't work at the end of a term, you don't renew and you keep everything built. There's more on who I am and how I got here on the about page.
Being burned once is expensive. Being burned twice is a checklist problem, and now you have the checklist. If you want to run it against me on a short call, get in touch and we'll talk straight about whether it's a fit.