Somewhere around the twentieth minute of a first call, an owner asks it, usually a little apologetically, as though everyone else already knows: what would you be doing on a Tuesday? It is the sharpest question in the whole conversation and almost nobody in this business answers it plainly. So here is the plain version. Every month an agency does two kinds of work for you. One kind changes what your money buys. The other kind produces documents describing what your money bought. Both arrive on the same invoice at the same rate, and the ratio between them is the single most useful thing you can know about who you have hired.
The work that changes what your money buys
Start with the part that has a dollar consequence. In a paid media account, the recurring job is deciding which searches, audiences, and placements keep getting funded and which get cut off, and that decision has to be made against real outcomes rather than clicks.
Concretely, on a Tuesday: someone reads the list of actual phrases people typed before they clicked your ad, and removes the ones that will never book, which in a home services account means the job seekers and the people hunting a part number for a repair they intend to do themselves. Someone shifts budget out of the campaign that produced six leads at $140 into the one that produced nine at $55. Someone rewrites the headline on the page those clicks land on, because the page is where half the loss happens and nobody in this industry spends enough time there. Someone ships two new versions of an ad to find out whether the offer or the photograph is doing the work.
None of that produces a deliverable you can hold. That is the tell. The work that moves revenue mostly leaves behind a changed setting and a different number the following month, which is precisely why so many agencies pad the engagement with things you can hold instead.
The work that produces paper
Here is the part that costs us business to write down. These are the line items we see billed every month across the accounts that arrive here from other shops, and in our read none of them move revenue for a local service business or a small ecommerce brand.
The monthly reporting deck is first. Twelve to twenty slides, mostly charts of impressions and clicks, often prepared by someone who did not touch the account. It describes a month that has already ended and changes nothing about the next one. We do not produce one for anyone, and when a prospect asks for one as a condition of signing, we say no and explain why.
The branded dashboard login is the same product with a subscription attached. So is the quarterly strategy deck that restates the last quarterly strategy deck with new dates. So is impression-share reporting for a business that needs the phone to ring, where a rising number is used as evidence of progress it cannot demonstrate.
Then the two that cost the most. Social media posting packages sold to businesses whose customers arrive through search, where three posts a week to 400 followers is billed at $800 a month and nobody has yet shown us a booked job that came from one. And the four-blog-posts-a-month content retainer sold to a plumber or a dentist, where the posts target phrases nobody in your city searches and the retainer renews for a year before anyone checks. Content can absolutely work. Content bought by the pound does not.
You can price this yourself without a meeting. Go through last month’s invoice and split the line items into the ones that left behind a document and the ones that left behind a changed account. If the document side clears a quarter of what you paid, you are funding an account-management layer whose job is to make the relationship feel managed. That is real labor by real people, and it is worth something to somebody. We have yet to see it show up in a client’s bank balance.
The three lanes, and what each one costs
When somebody asks what does a marketing agency do, the answer at this firm is three lanes of work with prices printed next to them, and publishing those prices is most of our argument against percentage-of-spend agencies. Paid media is the buying and cutting described above. Conversion design is the pages the traffic lands on, which is where a bad month is usually manufactured. Performance creative is the ads themselves, the photographs and the offers, remade often enough that the people seeing them do not go numb.
Our tiers run $1,850 a month for Starter Lite, $2,500 for Starter, $4,500 for Growth, and $7,500 for Scale, all posted on the services page with a three-month minimum and six months on Scale. Your ad spend goes straight from your account to Google or Meta and we never mark it up, which means the fee is the whole of what we make and you can see it. Project work sits outside the tiers: account audits, website builds, brand identity.
If you want to know what any of that should cost at your spend level, our marketing cost calculator puts our prices on the same chart as a freelancer at $50 to $150 an hour and a full-time hire at about $122,000 in year one. It will sometimes tell you to hire the freelancer.
What happens when you hire four of them at once
Among the small businesses currently working with an outside marketing partner, nearly one in five works with four or more of them 1. Four vendors is not a marketing department. It is four partial views of one path from ad to invoice, each of which can produce a healthy-looking report while total revenue sits flat, because none of them owns the handoff in the middle.
It also explains the mood. The most common frustration small business owners report about their marketing is not knowing what is working 2. Confusion of that kind is rarely a measurement failure. It is what happens when four people are each responsible for one part of a chain and nobody is responsible for the chain.
The test that separates the two halves
Ask your agency for a dated list of what changed in your account last month. Not a report. A changelog: dates, and what was turned off, turned up, rewritten, or launched.
A shop doing the first kind of work will send it inside a day, and it will be boring reading full of budget shifts and negative keywords and a new landing page headline. A shop doing the second kind will send you a report instead, or ask what you mean, or offer to schedule a call about it. That answer costs you nothing and tells you more than a quarter of reporting will. It is the same test we would want a client to run on us, and it is the one thing worth doing before you sign anything, including with us or with any of the other firms doing this work in Atlanta.
If the changelog comes back thin, the next question is harder, and it is the one we ended a related piece on when we wrote about whether you need an agency at all: was there anything in the account worth changing, or has the person you hired been maintaining something that was finished a year ago and billing you for the watch?