Jennifer Zick had a fascinating take on this on the Up Arrow Podcast, and it's stuck with me. She argued that if you find yourself burning through agency after agency, the root issue might not be the agencies at all. It's often a sign of a deeper, internal problem: a lack of strategy. When a founder is on their fifth advertising agency in a short time, the problem probably isn't five different agencies being bad at their jobs. It's more likely that the business itself has a product-market fit issue, a retention problem, or no coherent marketing strategy to guide the agency's work.
Zick's firm finds that the agency or internal employees are almost always competent. They're just not well-directed or integrated into a bigger picture. They're executing tactics, creating a kind of "random acts of marketing" that feel busy but don't connect to a central strategy. This leads to founder frustration, employee burnout, and a revolving door of agency partners. The real sign you've outgrown your agency, in this view, is when you realize you're paying for tactical execution when what you desperately need is strategic leadership, and the agency isn't structured to provide it. You keep asking for a different result from the same tactical inputs.
Mike Sheldon, speaking on the Modern Retail Podcast, made a point that really clicks with Zick's. He said the traditional advertising agency business is not growing because marketers are no longer just looking for ads. They need partners who can help them solve broader business problems. The demand has shifted from execution to strategic counsel. This shift is clear in how pitches are run and what brands expect. Agencies are now competing with management consultancies and the rise of in-house creative teams.
So when you put their ideas together, the picture becomes clear. You've likely outgrown your current agency when your needs have evolved from "run my Facebook ads" to "help me figure out my entire growth strategy." The agency might be excellent at the first task, but completely unequipped for the second. Their team, processes, and business model are built for execution, not for high-level direction. At that point, you're not just looking for a new vendor. You're looking for a different type of partnership entirely. The solution may not be another tactical agency, but rather an entirely new approach, like bringing in a Fractional CMO to build the strategy before you hire anyone else to execute it. You have to fix the internal direction problem first.