The agency can't make the decisions you keep avoiding.

Dear business owner,

Hiring an agency should take work off your plate. That is a reasonable expectation.

You should not need to become a designer to approve a website, a copywriter to explain your offer or a media buyer to understand whether a campaign is doing its job.

But there are decisions your agency cannot responsibly make without you.

What can your business actually promise? Which customers can you serve well? What are you prepared to change when the evidence challenges your original idea?

Those questions remain even after the contract is signed.

The brief has to meet the business

Imagine you ask an agency to position your business as a premium choice.

They can help you define that position, express it clearly and build the materials around it. They can examine how customers experience the business and point out where the promise breaks.

They cannot quietly decide that your response times will improve, that your team will receive training or that you will stop accepting work you cannot deliver properly.

Those choices involve the business itself.

If the experience stays the same while the price and presentation change, the customer will eventually notice. Then the argument becomes whether the branding worked.

The branding may have made a promise the operation was never ready to keep.

THE BUSINESS HAS TO DELIVER WHAT THE MARKETING ASKS PEOPLE TO BELIEVE.

This goes both ways

I have worked on the agency side for years. I am not giving agencies permission to shrug and say the client was difficult.

A good agency should make the decisions easier to understand. Explain the options. Recommend a direction. Say what evidence supports it and what remains uncertain.

If a client is being asked to approve something, they should understand what they are approving and what the consequences are.

Sending a beautiful presentation and waiting for praise is not enough. Neither is accepting an obviously confused brief because questioning it might delay the invoice.

There should be a person responsible for each decision, enough information to make it and an agreed point at which it needs to be made.

That sounds basic. It is also very useful when five people are commenting and nobody believes they have the authority to say yes.

Give the relationship somewhere to go

At the start of the next project, write down the business outcome you want and the decisions that could prevent it.

Maybe the offer is still unclear. Maybe two partners disagree about the audience. Maybe the sales team is promising something delivery cannot support.

Bring that into the conversation early. It gives the agency a chance to help with the real problem instead of discovering it after the work has been produced.

You are paying for judgment as well as execution. Let the people you hire challenge you. Expect them to explain themselves. Be willing to make a decision once the implications are clear.

A strong relationship can carry difficult conversations. In fact, I would be more concerned by a relationship in which nobody ever has one.

Kindest regards, Nader

What decision is currently waiting behind the phrase “we need better marketing”?