This is actually a very fair post, but the unarticulated lesson is this: Agency expertise is incredibly hard to scale. If the individual who sold you on their expertise will not be handling your account or driving the strategy for it on a frequent basis, run away.

When an individual has broad & deep capabilities in a practice area, they are in demand. In order to scale they must hire around them and that usually means that individual gets into a trap: they now have a payroll support and entirely different problems than not having enough time for all the clients that they sold their attention to. Some figure out how to get past that, but most don’t so you as the client are left with a precipitous drop in quality.

When hiring an agency, it’s important to get a verbal commitment on the % of work attributed to each agency team member during the pitch (this isn’t very hard) and then have those exact statements written into the contract with levers to reduce fees or exit altogether if those thresholds are not met by the agency. No one ever does this second part, but with the current bloodbath agencies are experiencing I imagine most will be happy to commit to that kind of expertise guarantee to win new business.

The point of hiring an agency is to access expertise and scale that is too difficult to build & manage in-house. If the agency isn’t regularly providing that kind of value, like OP has described, it’s time to bounce. Don’t throw good money after bad, even though changing or leaving agencies can also be painfully disruptive.

When times get lean it’s a great opportunity to calculate ROI on all time and money spent. Maybe some dollars are shifted from new customer acquisition efforts to customer retention. Also starting asking why you do certain activities, just to make sure you’re super clear on the goals. Do you work on SEO because you want to brag about page rank or is it really about creating more sales? Probably the sales, but if you can’t attribute real revenue to an activity you should start to question whether or not you’d need to continue the activity at its current level.

Echoing what u/isprobablyatwork said, but going to add on that you would also do well to identify a business mentor to help guide you through some formalities and point out some pitfalls along the way. I have a few in my network if you’d like some recommendations — my dms are open. I’m mostly retired now so not pitching myself for the gig, but man I would have loved to have been in your shoes at 22. If what your statements are accurate, you could really be sitting on a great opportunity and you don’t want to spoil it on legal woes.

Can he customize with graphics? The yacht crowd would be into that. A lot of charcuterie gets passed around fancy boats.

May I ask what the benefit is to you, the facilitator? Do you also fit the profile and are looking to share & converse among peers?

I ask because I’ve found that in groups like this that are “always free” the participants end up being the product.

I’d be interested in a reliable group like this, but not if it’s an avenue to be sold to.

I did not wish to make myself unreachable, just wanted to compartmentalize things so I can deal with them on my schedule. Similar to routing or label rules in an email inbox. I found it helps some with reducing distraction

I did three things to cut down some spam :

1. got rid of the Founder/CEO label on LinkedIn. Can use a title like “cat herder” or “bean counter” if your industry tolerates a more cheeky approach.

2. I got a Google Voice number for all the social media and platform profiles. You can still put the actual phone number in your email signature, etc. people in your contacts will display as such if they call the Google Voice number. I think unknown numbers can route to a voicemail box.

3. I changed my first name on LinkedIn to an emoji character and put my full name in the last name field . When a sales team buys a contact list or uses an automation tool I get filtered out because the emoji breaks the script or I get an email that starts with “Greetings [emoji]” and those are also easier to filter out on my end.

Hopefully these ideas are applicable to others as well!

I have this challenge often. I sell digital services that have direct attributable ROI, but reliable tech services can be pricey in the US. Even if I guarantee ROI and have very accommodating termination language in an agreement, lots of business owners won’t give themselves the chance to do the math on the opportunity if pricing feels too high for them upfront. I see many others egregiously under bid a job only to hike pricing or reveal that half the job wasn’t included in their price once a customer is locked in. Ethically I can’t get onboard with that approach, but I lose work to competitors that way too often.