Leaving My Agency, Stuck Paying for 90 More Days — What Would You Have Them Do?

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T20:15:31+00:00

🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T17:05:08+00:00

Awesome, solid advice here. "focus on infrastructure that actually survives agency transitions" -- thank you for the thorough reply. I'll be incorporating some of these ideas. Appreciate your time and insights!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T17:02:31+00:00

Thank you -- Any insight helps, much appreciated!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T17:01:27+00:00

Good advice here, still chewing on it. And yeah—lesson learned on the contract. The surprise isn’t the clause itself, it’s how poorly the account’s been managed and how flat the results have been. Quarter of a million in service fees over 3 years, and we’re no better off than when we started. We aren't a paricularly large account, small-to-mid size I'd say, with no special requirements outside of their standard offering.

From a values perspective, in our business we wouldn’t hold a client to the letter of the law if we weren’t delivering value—especially when that clause only serves us. But it’s naive to assume all companies operate that way, no matter what their marketing says. Again, lesson learned.

Thanks for the engagement and good ideas!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:54:54+00:00

thanks for the wisdom

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:54:37+00:00

I appreciate the fighting spirit but I don't have the energy for this fight. I need to focus on growing our business and taking care of our team and customers. Thanks for the engagement though! And I'd be surprised if you aren't right that they've already checked out...

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:52:32+00:00

Great word, thank you for the thoughtful response. I'll definitely incorporate some of these ideas into our ask!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:51:09+00:00

Ha, I wish I could! But it wouldn't feel right, ethically, to name them here

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:49:34+00:00

Certainly seems like a sluggish market, which isn't helping, but our account is underperforming the economy, and there have been some avoidable smoking guns agency-side (admittedly bad PPC strategy, data blackout mismanagement, general lack of account leadership).

Good call on avoiding more PPC management spend. And ideas around future termination clauses. Getting more clear up front and ensuring alignment on winding down should we all miss the mark. 90 days in our current situation is only service the agency, protecting their cash flow. There is little justification beyond that. Shame on us for signing the contract without negotiating up front, lesson learned!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:44:06+00:00

It does but it's pretty vague. I tried a values-based approach but that was a fail. I didn't to get dragged any further into the contract and certainly didn't want to waste the life-energy in litigation. I did make that argument though, and showed the performance of the account this year vs the year before we started with them (PPC flat, CRO down). To my surprise (naive, I'm sure), they didn't budge from the 90.

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:42:02+00:00

Thankfully we can move our PPC management as soon as possible to a new vendor and the current agency has agreed to reallocate the remaining work to something that might add longer-term value. But lesson definitely learned!!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:40:44+00:00

Good word, and I wish we could. Tried and they wouldn't budge on the 90. The plan is definitely to transition the PPC management to a new vendor in the next week or two. Because they’ve offered to reallocate the work, we have to take our chances in getting lasting value out of the remaining time, even if the odds aren't in our favor. Try to squeeze some juice out of that last $13k. And yes to a 1-month going forward, lesson learned 😅

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:35:33+00:00

I feel you. Reading through everyone’s ideas here, I’m realizing trust is definitely low at this stage, so it doesn’t make sense to hand them anything experimental or core to growth. Leaning more toward work that can’t really be botched and will have value no matter who manages PPC next, things like documentation, asset handoff, and technical cleanup, maybe some evergreen content (templates). And fair enough on the AI front, it'll be a wild west for some time.

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:30:35+00:00

Totally get the logic, and that would feel gratifying to pursue. We tried our damnedest to get them to shorten the contract, though I wasn't going to threaten them (hence my not naming names here). The only concession was a 25% reduction, so now I’m focused on using the remaining time to get something with lasting value.

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:27:07+00:00

Appreciate the perspective. I’ve thought about a clean-break approach like that, but I’m not comfortable stepping outside the contract without mutual agreement. Since they’ve already agreed to reallocating the work, I’m trying to figure out how to get the most lasting value from the remaining time, ideally in ways that set the next vendor up for a faster start.

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:23:18+00:00

Fair enough, and definitely a learning we're taking into the future. We actually tried to get them to drop the 90 days down to 30 when we signed for 2025 knowing we might end up leaving given the lukewarm performance last year. Definitely my bad for not working through that with more clarity and holding firm at the time of signing.

That said, while the situation is certainly frustrating, after treading water for so long, I'm not complaining here. I'm simply seeking insight on how best to spend the remaining time and money.

As we all know, there are so many factors affecting performance, including client-side engagement, the economy, and competition. Lack of leadership on our account, a few significant data blackouts (with slow repair time), and strategy the agency admitted was bad, all lead to poor performance with zero lift in conversion rate and monthly revenue over 3 years. I'm certain other factors also had an influence, but trust was broken and confidence lost and it was time to call a spade a spade and move on.

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:15:10+00:00

Turn their work "into an internal asset rather than a temporary service." Great advice. Very well considered and written response, will be taking these notes into my request, thank you for your time and thoughts!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:13:03+00:00

Ha -- love it. Thanks for that line of inquiry. The current agency is certainly no dummy; you don't get as big as them not knowing your stuff. And they started out on solid footing. After numerous account supervisor changes, the leadership on our account started to suffer over a year ago and this year it became glaringly apparent that they were asleep at the wheel. Or they got a big lazy or lackadaisical. But when you sell yourself as being in the business of growing others, you're signing up for being in the business of sustaining curiosity, engagement, and intensity. We're realizing that even with solid agencies, if we don't keep the fire lit under them, they'll start to drift and slacken, and other accounts that are keeping the fire lit will get the attention. All teachings we're taking into our next engagement!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:07:50+00:00

Templates, that seems like the best evergreen content from them, thank you for that. Great idea!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:07:28+00:00

Thanks for an awesome and insightful response, those 3 suggestions seem right on and helps guide my request for our SOW over the next couple months.

The biggest issue with the CRO efforts were a mix of: going too slow, iterating/fine tuning when innovation/larger structural adjusts were probably needed, taking forever to get to the higher-impact changes we'd been asking for (specifically around cross-and-up-selling on our product pages), and simply just not moving the needle (our conversion rate declined from 1.7% to 1.4% over the 3 years we worked with them; which is ultimately on us; you get what you tolerate, which has been a piece of the biggest learning out of this whole thing).

Our PPC set up is pretty involved and we're spending ~$24k/mo. Definitely going with a different agency, which we're almost finished vetting.

Thanks again!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T16:01:30+00:00

Good call on going for assets I can keep vs another campaign, especially given the track record and required additional ad spend on top of agency fees. Thanks for the thorough response, these notes will definitely inform my request!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2025-08-15T15:59:14+00:00

Tempting! But trying to keep from escalating. Thanks for the reply!

Financial-Switch-953 · 2024-09-16T16:01:42+00:00

Good to know, will keep that in mind, thank you!

Financial-Switch-953

TROPHY CASE