The Agency Graveyard
The Agency Graveyard: Why You Keep Firing Partners and Hiring the Same Problem I’ve watched this pattern repeat for years. A business owner sits across from me, frustrated, explaining how their last three agencies failed them. The stories sound different on the surface, but the structure is identical. “They didn’t get our vision.” “They couldn’t execute what we needed.” “The relationship just stopped working.” Here’s what I’ve learned: the agency wasn’t the problem. The problem was sitting in the chair telling me about the agency. The Briefing Blind Spot Let me show you something that stopped me cold when I first saw it. Research from the BetterBriefs Project surveyed over 1,700 marketers and agency staff across 70+ countries. They found that 80% of marketers think they write good briefs. Only 10% of creative agencies agree. That’s not a small perception gap. That’s a canyon. The same research revealed something even more damaging: an estimated 33% of marketing budgets are wasted due to poor briefs and misdirected work. In the UK specifically, marketers estimate 26% of their budget evaporates because they can’t articulate what they actually need. Think about that for a second. One-third of your spend disappears before the agency even has a chance to fail you. But here’s the part that really matters: three in five marketers admit to using the creative process to clarify the strategy. They’re not briefing agencies. They’re using agencies as expensive thinking partners to figure out what they should have known before the engagement started. The Founder’s Paradox I used to think this was just a communication problem. Bad briefs, unclear expectations, misaligned objectives. Fix the input, fix the output. Then I started noticing something deeper. The instincts that built your business are now preventing it from scaling. The same decisive action that got…
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