A contractor I know, HVAC in central Florida, got a pitch from a big marketing agency last year. $8,500 a month. The deliverables sounded impressive. “Full-funnel digital marketing. SEO, paid search, paid social, retargeting, email, review management, monthly strategy call.”
He almost signed it. Then he asked me what I thought.
What I think, and what I told him, is roughly this.
What’s actually in a $5k to $15k a month agency package
If you break down the invoice honestly, there are four categories.
The first is ad spend passed through. A typical agency hands you a package where some meaningful chunk, let’s say 40 to 60%, is actually media. Google Ads budget, Meta ads, maybe Local Services Ads. That money is going to Google and Meta, not the agency. If you cancel the agency tomorrow, you still get to spend that money yourself.
The second is ad management. The agency charges a percent of ad spend, or a flat fee, to actually run the campaigns. For a competent manager this is roughly 10 to 20% of spend. It’s real work. Picking keywords, writing ads, watching conversion rates, pausing what’s not working.
The third is content and SEO. Writing a blog post or two a month. Updating service pages. Building backlinks. The work is real but the yield is slow. SEO moves on a 6 to 12 month timeline, not a 6-week one.
The fourth is reporting and strategy. A monthly deck, a quarterly review, a slack channel. For a big account this is useful. For a small one it’s mostly theater.
What’s often not in there, and should be: the website itself (that’s usually a separate build fee), missed-call text-back, review-asking, follow-up on quotes, the inbox for leads that come in from the ads. Those are what we’d call the “front office.” If you don’t have them, the leads your ad money generates leak out the back.
When a $10k-a-month agency is worth it
Three conditions have to be true, in my opinion.
One, you already have the front office handled. The phone is answered, every lead gets a reply within the hour, quotes get followed up, reviews get asked for. If the leads already being generated are converting, pouring more into the top of the funnel makes sense.
Two, you have the capacity to take the work. If you’re already turning down jobs because you can’t staff them, there’s no point in spending more to generate more.
Three, you’ve got the cash to run this for 6 to 12 months before judging it. SEO specifically doesn’t start producing until month 6 at the earliest. Paid search is faster, maybe 60 days to see what works. But a one or two month agency relationship almost never produces meaningful ROI data, so if you’re going to do it, do it for at least two quarters.
When it’s a trap
If you’ve got any of these, the agency money will not fix the problem.
Your calls go to voicemail during business hours. More ads means more voicemails.
Your quote follow-up is “I’ll try to remember next week.” More leads means more forgotten quotes.
Your Google Business Profile has 11 reviews. SEO can only do so much against a competitor with 180 reviews. Fix the review ask first.
Your website takes seven seconds to load on a phone. No amount of paid traffic survives that bounce rate.
In every one of those cases, the first thousand dollars of marketing spend should go to fixing the front office, not to generating more leads to pour through it. The payback is almost always better than another thousand on ads.
The honest math
I’m biased here, obviously. We build the front office. $297 a month. One product, no retainer. So of course I think that’s where to start.
But I was giving contractors this advice before I built this company. The order of operations is: fix the front office, measure what you have, then spend on acquisition.
The HVAC guy I mentioned ended up doing exactly that. Spent six months on his operations first, got his review count from 24 to 112, added missed-call text-back, built out his service-area pages. He’s now spending about $3,500 a month on Google Ads with a different, smaller agency, and converting at roughly double the rate he would have a year ago. His effective customer acquisition cost is lower by a lot.
What to actually ask any agency
If you’re evaluating a marketing agency right now, ask them the three questions below. The answers will tell you a lot.
What percentage of this fee is media spend versus your management?
What specifically are you optimizing for, and how often?
If I canceled you in month three, what would I keep?
An honest agency has clean answers to all three. A less honest one deflects. Trust your gut on the deflection.
If you want the front-office version first, that’s what we built. See what’s in it or read the honest side-by-side versus a full-service agency. If after all that you still think a $10k package is the right call, do it. Just make sure your house is in order before you light the money.
