There's a question that almost never comes up on an agency sales call, and it's the one that decides how the next twelve months go: who is going to do the work?
Not who owns the agency. Not who is on the call being charming about your market. Who opens your website on a Tuesday morning and writes the page.
If you're a contractor comparing two or three agencies right now, or you've already been through one and still can't say what they actually did, that's the question to lead with. At Gridwork the answer is that I do the work, and you'll never be handed to an account manager, because there isn't one.
The short version
Most agencies are built out of handoffs. You talk to a salesperson, then an account manager, who briefs a strategist, who assigns a junior writer. Every one of those passes is a place where what you asked for and what gets built drift apart, and the internal meetings that manage the drift are inside your invoice. We took the handoffs out. There are never more than ten clients here at a time, and no junior does the work.
How an agency engagement is usually staffed
Here's the structure, described honestly, because there's nothing sinister about it. It's just how a company scales when it needs to serve sixty clients with people who cost less than the person who sold you.
You meet a salesperson. Good ones know your trade well enough to be convincing in a forty minute call. They don't do delivery, and after signing you probably won't speak to them again.
You get assigned an account manager. This person is your contact. They're organized, they run your monthly call, and they send the report. They are usually not the person who touches your site, and often they can't tell you why a decision was made without checking.
Behind them sits a strategist who set the plan, a writer who produces the pages, and sometimes a contractor overseas who does the technical work. On a mid-sized account that's four or five people, none of whom has your whole picture in their head.
Then there are the internal meetings, which exist for a real reason. When five people share one account, somebody has to keep them synchronized. Your monthly call is thirty minutes. The meetings about your account are longer, and you fund them.
What every handoff costs you
Ask anyone who has run a crew: the job that goes wrong is usually the one where three people each did their part correctly.
Marketing works the same way. You tell the account manager that septic work is your best margin and the calls dry up in February. She writes it in the notes. The strategist reads a summary of the notes and builds a keyword plan. The writer gets a brief with a keyword and a word count. Four weeks later a page shows up about the thing you said you didn't want to be known for, and nobody lied to you at any point.
The cost shows up in two places.
In drift. Every pass strips context. What you meant becomes what was written down, then what fit in the brief. The further the work travels from your sentence, the more generic it gets, which is why so much contractor content reads like it could belong to any company in any city.
In time. Every question becomes a round trip. You ask on the call, the account manager checks, the strategist answers next week. Multiply that by a year of small questions and the pace of the whole engagement is set by the speed of the relay, not the difficulty of the work.
My clients are owners and operations managers who are too busy to pick up the phone in the middle of a workday. For them, one person instead of five isn't a staffing detail. It's the difference between getting an answer and getting a status update.
Every handoff is a place where what you asked for and what gets built drift apart. The alternative isn't better communication, and agencies have been promising better communication for thirty years. It's fewer people.
In-house vs. agency vs. one person who does the work
Three ways to get this done, and the honest case for each.
Hiring in-house buys you attention that belongs only to you. It also costs real money before anything ships. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts median pay for advertising, promotions, and marketing managers at $165,780 a year as of May 2025, and that's one salary, before benefits, tools, and the months it takes a new hire to learn your trade. A coordinator at half that is affordable and usually can't build a technical foundation or write pages that rank. In-house makes sense when marketing is a full-time job at your volume and you can afford to be the one managing it.
A traditional agency buys you a bench. Paid media, video, design, PR, and coverage when one person is on vacation. If you need four disciplines at once, that bench is worth paying for, including the coordination overhead that comes with it.
One operator who does the work buys you the shortest path between what you said and what gets built. No brief telephone game, no relay. The tradeoff is capacity, which is the next section, and I'd rather you hear it from me than find it in month three.
Somewhere in that comparison is the version that fits your business. Most of the contractors I talk to have already tried one of the first two and are looking for the third because of how the first two ended.
What you give up with one person
The honest list, because an article that only sells the upside isn't worth reading.
You give up depth on the side channels. I don't run your social media, and if you need broadcast production or a national paid media program, an agency with those specialists will beat me at it and I'll tell you so on the first call.
You give up the illusion of redundancy. When I take a week off, the writing pauses, and I schedule around that rather than pretending it isn't true.
You also give up availability, in the sense that I can't take on twelve more clients this quarter. That's a real cost to you if you want to start next week and the roster is full.
Marketing agency red flags
Patterns worth noticing before you sign, all of them things I've seen contractors get caught by.
- Nobody will name the person doing the work. "Our team" is not an answer. A name is an answer.
- The person on the sales call disappears after signing. Ask directly whether they'll be on your monthly calls. Watch how the answer gets phrased.
- The report grows while the work shrinks. Forty pages of impressions and no new pages on the site is a tell.
- You can't get a straight answer without a follow-up email. That's the relay showing.
- A guarantee about your rankings. We wrote about that one at length in The Gridwork Momentum System. A promise about your results is a promise about your market and your crew, neither of which the agency controls.
Questions to ask any agency before you sign
Print these. They take four minutes and they're hard to dodge.
- Who specifically will write my pages, and can I talk to them before I sign?
- How many clients does that person handle at once? The number matters more than the size of the company.
- When I ask a question between calls, who answers it, and how long does it usually take?
- Show me a page you wrote for a contractor in a trade like mine. Not a portfolio screenshot. A live URL.
- What happens to my account if the person assigned to it leaves?
- What am I paying for that isn't work on my site? Everyone has overhead. The willingness to describe it is the signal.
Ask number one of any agency and listen for whether the answer is a person or a process. If you're comparing us to a shop with a real bench and you need that bench, hire them. The mistake is paying bench prices for a junior writer.
Why we cap at ten clients
There are never more than ten clients here at a time, and no junior does the work. Those two halves are the same sentence. The cap is what makes the second half possible.
Ten is roughly what one person can carry while still knowing each business well enough to answer without looking anything up. Past that, the only way to keep the plates spinning is to hire someone cheaper and start briefing them, and then you'd be paying for handoffs again, just from a smaller company.
So the cap is the operating limit of a delivery model with no handoffs in it, not modesty and not a scarcity play. It's also why I can tell you on a Tuesday what happened to your traffic last week, without checking with anyone first.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a marketing agency, or should I hire someone in-house?
If marketing is a full-time job at your volume and you have the money to hire well, in-house gives you attention nobody else gets. Most contractors doing under a few million don't have that job to fill yet, and a part-time coordinator can't build the technical foundation. Outside help is usually the better trade until that job exists. If you're still deciding whether to hire anyone at all, the short list you can run yourself is worth reading first.
How do I choose an SEO agency?
Ask who does the work, how many accounts that person carries, and to see a live page they wrote for a business like yours. Everything else on a sales call is negotiable. Those three answers tell you what the next year will feel like.
Isn't one person a risk if something happens to them?
It's a real risk and you should price it in. What you get back is that nothing about your account lives only in a handoff note. Your site, your analytics, and your Google Business Profile stay in accounts you own, so you can hand the whole thing to someone else without asking permission.
Who do I talk to at Gridwork?
Me. John. The person who did the audit, wrote the pages, and built the link plan is the person on your call, which is why the calls tend to be short.
Where to start
If you're comparing agencies right now, take the six questions above into every one of those calls. You'll learn more from how they're answered than from any proposal.
And if you want a straight read on where your own site stands before you hire anybody, book a Digital Strategy Session. Thirty minutes, free, and you'll talk to the person who would do the work.