"Dear Rich,

I am a Marketing Director at a B2B fintech. We have about 300 employees but have secured new funding to hire 100 more before the end of the year so we're growing fast.

About 18 months ago we hired a creative agency to handle our brand refresh, website redesign, and campaign creative. The founder is well connected and spoke at an event our CEO attended. He worked his charm and our CEO personally introduced us to them and was very enthusiastic about using them. You can probably see where this is going.

I had no choice but to roll with it. The brand work was fine. Not exceptional, but fine. The website was delivered late and over budget, and the end result was acceptable. Since then we have moved into the ongoing retainer phase and the quality has fallen off a cliff.

The senior people who pitched us are nowhere to be seen. Our day-to-day contact is a mid-level account manager who is perfectly nice but clearly overwhelmed. The creative work is generic. I have sent back briefs three and four times on the same piece of work. Timelines slip constantly and every delay comes with a cheerful apology and no change in behaviour. I feed back clearly and fairly but I strongly feel that there are side conversations going on between my CEO and their founder.

Last month they delivered campaign concepts for our upcoming product launch of the year. It was so off-brief that my team could not even identify which product it was supposed to be for. We will have to redo most of it internally over a few weekends.

Here is the complication. Our CEO still thinks they are great. He plays golf with the agency founder. He references "our agency" in board meetings like it is a point of pride. When I have gently raised concerns, he tells me to "give them clearer briefs" or "be more collaborative" or "manage them better". I honestly feel as if he is being coached by the other side.

I have tried clearer briefs. I have tried workshops. I have tried giving feedback directly to the agency. Each time I get nodding, agreement, promises to put more senior resource on the account, and then absolutely nothing changes.

Meanwhile the retainer is costing us around $15k a month. That is $180k a year going to an agency that is actively making my team's job harder. I would much rather swap them out for someone else or hire in-house.

I do not want to be dramatic about it. They are not terrible people. They are just not delivering. But I feel trapped between an underperforming agency and a CEO who has emotional equity in the relationship.

How do I handle this without losing sleep or my job?"

Laura, Texas

Rich's reply

Laura, I expect most marketing leaders have been in similar situations and it's always a bit maddening.

I remember once when one of my VPs of marketing was having an affair with an agency I couldn't stand and I refused to sign off their purchase orders as they just felt off. I knew saying no could be career limiting but I felt that was the better option for me at that time.

It is one of the hardest dynamics to deal with because the problem is not really about the agency. That on its own would be relatively easy to manage if you had full autonomy. The problem is about relationships and the fact that your CEO has accidentally created a situation where giving honest feedback feels career threatening.

Let us deal with that part first because it is the part that matters most.

Your CEO introduced this agency. He is personally connected to the founder. He references them proudly. He likes them because he liked what he heard about them and he enjoys their company.

When you tell him the agency is underperforming, what he hears, whether he realises it or not, is that his judgement was wrong. Nobody enjoys hearing that, and CEOs enjoy it less than most. Maybe he even, myopically, feels that you'll make him look bad in front of his friend.

So you cannot approach this as "the agency is bad" as that has got you nowhere so far. But you could approach it as "the business has outgrown what this agency can deliver." That is a completely different conversation. One is a whinge. The other is a natural occurrence. Same facts, different frame.

But before you have that conversation, it wouldn't be a bad idea to bring some facts to the table, just in case you need them. Not because your CEO is unreasonable, but because when emotions and personal relationships are involved, fact based arguments may help change the tide.

Here is something you could try and, as always, feel free to take it on board and chart your own course.

Have your team start a simple log. Nothing elaborate. A shared document that tracks every piece of work the agency delivers. Date requested. Date due. Date actually delivered. Number of revision rounds. Whether the final output was used as delivered or reworked internally. Time your team spent on rework.

Do this for eight to twelve weeks. Be scrupulously fair. If they deliver something on time and on brief, log that too. You are not building a prosecution. You are building a picture that you should be mature enough to treat like a hypothesis. "We need to change our agency to get better value for money and drive growth."

At the same time, start tracking the internal cost of rework. When your team spent a weekend redoing that campaign concept, that has a cost. Calculate it. Hours multiplied by loaded salary rates. You do not need to be exact, just be directional. If you are paying $15k a month for agency output and then spending another $8k in internal time fixing it, the real cost of this relationship is $23k a month. That number may get attention in a way that "the creative is not very good" never will.

Now, while you are building this evidence base, I want you to try one more thing with the agency. Because you have to try and be balanced and give the hypothesis a chance to go in whatever direction is true, regardless of feelings.

Request a formal quarterly business review. Put it in writing. Make it structured. Not a coffee and a chat with the founder. An actual meeting with an agenda where you present the data: delivery timelines, revision counts, brief adherence, internal rework hours. Bring your log. Be specific.

If your CEO values the relationship as much as you think he does, then this agency founder should value it too and be mortified by the prospect of not delivering for him.

Cut out the middleman and build that relationship yourself. But the important advice is to be factual.

Say something like: "You are our retained agency for a reason and we want this to continue. But the current delivery model is not meeting our needs and here is the evidence. We need to agree on specific changes and a timeline to see improvement, otherwise we're going to outgrow you pretty soon."

It's not a threat. It's not personal opinion based. It's numbers. You're being fair. And you're giving them a chance to step up.

Give them 60 days after that meeting. Set clear expectations. If the senior people need to be back on the account, say that explicitly. If turnaround times need to improve, define what good looks like. Put it in an email after the meeting so there is a record.

Two things will happen. Either they step up, in which case you have solved the problem without any political fallout and possibly gained an external ally. Or they do not step up, in which case you now have a documented trail that shows you gave them every opportunity and they still could not deliver.

That trail is your protection.

Now let us talk about the CEO conversation.

If the 60 days are up and nothing has changed, you go to your CEO. But you do not go with a complaint. You go with a proposal.

"I want to talk about how we set up our creative support for the next stage of growth. Our pipeline targets are more than what they were when we brought the agency on. I have been tracking our delivery metrics and I think we have outgrown the current model. Here is what I am seeing."

Then you show the data. Timelines. Revision rounds. Rework costs. You are not saying they are bad. You are saying the business has moved and the agency has not moved with it. You are also detailing your dialogue with the founder. You treated his friend fairly.

Then you present the alternative.

Give him a side-by-side comparison. Agency model versus in-house model. Cost, capacity, speed, quality. Make it about what the business needs, not about what the agency is failing to do.

If your CEO still pushes back, and he might, then you have one more card to play. Suggest a hybrid. Keep the agency on a reduced retainer for project work or overflow, which preserves the CEO's relationship, but bring the core capability in-house. This gives him a way to save face while you get the resources you actually need.

The golf friendship does not need to end. And you don't need to be frustrated forever.

By the time you have that conversation you will have four months of evidence, a documented attempt to fix the relationship, and a clear alternative that is better for the business. No reasonable CEO pushes back on that. And if your CEO is unreasonable, well, that is a different letter entirely.

You are not trapped. You just need to sequence this properly. Build the case, give them a fair shot, then move decisively if they miss it.

Onwards,

Rich

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