The impulse to fire an underperforming marketing agency is a symptom, not a diagnosis. The act of firing is simple, but it solves nothing if you haven’t done the hard work of understanding why the relationship failed. Too many founders get stuck in a loop, churning through partners every six to twelve months, blaming the agency for failures that are actually rooted in their own business. The real problem is almost always a lack of strategic clarity and a fundamental disconnect between marketing activities and financial reality. Unless you fix that, firing your agency is just a costly delay before you repeat the same mistakes with a new one.
The Diagnosis Before the Decision
Before you even think about firing them, you have to look inward. As Jennifer Zick described on the Up Arrow Podcast, many founders have "scar tissue and PTSD around the word marketing" because of chronic, misplaced blame. When results are poor, it’s easy to label the agency incompetent. It’s harder, but more important, to ask if you gave them the right objective in the first place. The core issue, as Taylor Holiday of Common Thread Collective repeatedly hammers home on Ecommerce Playbook, is the fatal disconnect between marketing teams and finance teams. When your agency’s "proxy metric is disassociated from the financial metric," they can legitimately think they’re winning while your business is bleeding cash. They see a great Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), but don’t see that it’s on a low-margin product that’s sinking your contribution margin.
This isn’t necessarily their fault. It is a failure of leadership. Your job as the business owner is to provide a single, unified performance target that is rooted in profitability. This is where a metric like Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) becomes non-negotiable. Until you can give your agency a clear, profit-based goal and the financial data to track it, you are practically forcing them to optimize for vanity metrics that feel good but don’t build your business. If their core metrics aren’t competitive, Michael Shaffa suggested on the Serious Sellers Podcast that you may need to go back to the drawing board on your product or offer before pouring more money into ads.
Where the Model Breaks
The classic agency model itself is showing its cracks. The old fear that an agency paid on percentage of spend will just burn your cash isn’t quite right; as was pointed out on The Bottom Line, agencies know they’ll get fired if they’re completely reckless. The real problem is a more subtle misalignment. They optimize for what they can control and easily measure within ad platforms, which, in a post-ATT world, is increasingly disconnected from your bottom line. Add to that the common frustrations of the agency model: getting locked into a 12-month contract as Nik Sharma warns against on Limited Supply, or being a low-priority client who struggles to get attention, a pain point mentioned on the 2X eCommerce Podcast. These issues drive many founders to believe the solution is to bring marketing expertise inside.
This leads directly to the agency vs. in-house debate, which is often the wrong framing. Bringing someone in-house isn’t a magic pill. Tomer Raabinovich mentioned on the Serious Sellers Podcast that while all the eight-figure sellers he advises manage PPC in-house, it’s a capability they scaled into over time. A new, under-resourced internal hire can burn out just as fast as an agency can underperform. The right question isn’t who does the work, but what is the work? Is there a clear strategic direction that any partner, internal or external, can execute against to drive profitable growth?
The Breakup: Process and Professionalism
Once you’ve done the diagnostic work and confirmed that a change is non-negotiable, you can proceed with the separation. First, find your contract and read the termination clause. Understand your notice period, typically 30 days. Second, before you have the conversation, ensure you have full administrative access to every single one of your accounts: Google Ads, Meta Business Manager, Google Analytics, your Shopify backend, everything. You must own your own data and assets. Do not proceed until you have confirmed this.
When you deliver the news, be direct, professional, and brief. This is a business decision, not a personal failing. You can say, “We