Is your agency actually earning that retainer, or just cashing it?
You’re paying them every single month, the reports always look nice and busy, the calls are friendly enough…but somewhere in the back of your head there’s this nagging little voice going “…wait, what exactly am I getting for all this money?”
Trust that voice. It’s smarter than your agency wants it to be.
We’ve looked through hundreds of agency engagements over the years, and look, some of them were perfectly fine. But a genuinely uncomfortable number were charging premium retainer rates for work that was mediocre, padded to hell, or quietly farmed out to somebody overseas making three bucks an hour while you got billed like a senior specialist was on it. (If you want the full ugly breakdown of how this happens, we wrote the whole playbook on it.)
The agency audit answers the question you can’t exactly ask them to their face (or wouldn’t get a straight answer to even if you did)…are you getting taken for a ride here, and how much of this stuff could you honestly be doing yourself with AI for a tiny fraction of what you’re paying?
And sure, if you’re just using an agency to tick a box, cover your ass, and get something off your plate, fine. This isn’t for you. (Yes, some CMOs actually do this.)
Why you can’t just ask your agency this
Because they’ll fucking lie and spin 😂
“Hey, quick question, are you guys overcharging me and underdelivering?”
Go ahead. Ask. See what they tell you.
Of course they’re going to say everything’s great. Of course the monthly report is going to lovingly highlight every win and quietly bury everything else in a footnote. They’re not necessarily even lying to you…they just have every incentive on God’s green earth NOT to point out the part where you could fire them tomorrow and be totally fine.
Your incentives and their incentives are not perfectly aligned, and never will be.
What you actually need is somebody with no skin in the game. We don’t sell ongoing marketing services with retainers and reporting like a traditional agency, so we’re not sitting here trying to knife your agency so we can slide into their spot and become your new monthly bill. We’ve got exactly zero reason to spin this one direction or the other. We look, we tell you the truth, you decide what to do with it. The end.
What we actually dig into
- We review your contract, and look at what they’re actually delivering versus what you’re actually paying for, because you would not believe how often those two numbers refuse to line up.
- We look at the quality of the work…is the SEO solid or is it quietly hurting you, is the content genuinely good or is it AI slop with their logo slapped on top, are the ads actually optimized or just sort of running on autopilot.
- We look at what’s padded, the inflated hours and the mysterious “strategy sessions” and the line items that exist purely to make the invoice look fatter (we know exactly where agencies hide the fluff, because we’ve been on the inside).
- We look at what results they’re really driving versus a pile of vanity metrics, because impressions are not revenue and we’ll happily separate the two for you.
- And the big one, we look at how much of their whole deliverable a decent AI setup could now do faster, cheaper, and honestly a lot of the time just flat-out better.
And then we tell you what to do about it
An audit that just shrugs and goes “yeah, they’re kinda bad” isn’t worth much to anybody. So we hand you an actual path forward, whichever way the evidence ends up pointing.
If your agency turns out to be genuinely solid, great…you’ll finally KNOW that for sure, and we’ll show you where to push them to do even better (plus which of their line items you could still reasonably pull in-house with AI anyway). If they’re somewhere in the mediocre middle, we’ll arm you with the ammo to renegotiate, because it’s a whole lot easier to have that conversation when you’re holding specifics on the work and the costs and the gaps. And if they’re straight up screwing you…well, we’ll tell you plainly, and then we’ll walk you through how to replace what they do, which of their deliverables you can automate, what tools to use, what it’d actually cost to run in-house, and what’s still worth keeping a real human on.
Either way you walk out the other side knowing exactly where you stand and what your options actually are.
What it costs
The Agency Audit runs $2,500+, depending on how many channels your agency is running and how complicated the whole engagement is.
A single-channel relationship (say they’re just doing your SEO, or just your paid) lands near the bottom. A full-service agency juggling SEO and content and paid and social and email lands higher, simply because there’s a whole lot more for us to dig through.
Here’s the math that actually matters though. If you’re handing an agency $5K, $10K, $20K a month, this audit pays for itself the very instant it helps you cut, renegotiate, or replace even a slice of that. One month of savings usually covers the whole thing. Everything after that is gravy 😎
Paid upfront via Stripe, work starts when payment clears. You probably know the drill by now 😉
Pair it with a strategy
The audit tells you what your agency is doing and what to do about it. If you want the bigger picture too, where AI fits across your ENTIRE business and not just the agency-shaped slice of it, bundle it with an AI Strategy and we’ll discount it since a bunch of the research overlaps anyway.
Worst case here, you find out your agency is actually great and you sleep a little better at night. Best case, you save yourself a small fortune.
There’s genuinely no version of this where you come out behind.