There's No Such Thing as a Good Agency, Only Good People at Agencies: How to Vet Who Touches Your Account

You can usually tell who was actually running an account within about ten minutes of opening it. Not the agency on the contract. The person. The account is a paper trail of their judgment, and it reads like one.

I opened one recently where the structure was tidy, named sensibly, every campaign labelled, a clear logic to how it was built. And then nothing had been touched in five weeks. Tidy, and abandoned. Someone good had set it up and then quietly stopped being the one who looked after it. The brand was paying the same retainer either way, and had no idea the hands had changed.

That's the whole point I want to make, and a few nine-figure operators said it out loud recently in a way I've believed for years. There's no such thing as a good agency. There are only good people at agencies. And the entire job of vetting one is working out which people you're actually getting, and whether they'll still be there in six months.

Why the name on the door tells you almost nothing

Here's the thing about agencies as a business model. In any decent-sized shop, a handful of people carry most of the real quality, and everyone else is somewhere on the way up or the way out.

Think about a hundred-person agency. Realistically maybe twenty of those are genuinely excellent, and that's if they're well run. The rest are fine, learning, or coasting. That's not a knock on agencies specifically, most companies look like this. But it matters more here, because what you're buying is judgment applied to your money every day, and judgment doesn't average out across a team. You get the specific people assigned to you, not the agency's best work in a case study.

This is also why comparing two agencies on their pitch deck is close to useless. The deck shows you the twenty good people's best month. It tells you nothing about who'll be in your account on a wet Tuesday in August.

Compare it to a law firm for a second, because the contrast is sharp. If you move from one firm to another, you broadly know what you're getting. There's a bar association, there are junior and senior associates, there's a structure that's roughly consistent shop to shop, and they bill by the hour so the incentive is at least legible. Agencies have none of that. There's no standard, no shared structure, no consistent ladder a media buyer climbs. Every shop is run completely differently. So "we hired an agency" tells you far less than "we hired a law firm" does, and people treat the two decisions as if they carry the same certainty.

So the question isn't "is this a good agency." It's three sharper ones.

Question one: how many accounts is one person actually running

This is the one I'd lead with, and it's the one most likely to get a vague answer.

Ask, plainly: how many accounts will the person doing the day-to-day work on mine also be running. Not the team. The individual whose hands are in the account.

There's a number where it stops being possible to do the job well, and it's lower than people admit. One person genuinely looking after one account knows your margins, remembers what you tested in March, spots when a winning ad starts to fatigue before the numbers scream it. The same person spread across ten accounts is doing none of that. They're firefighting, pulling the same three levers on everyone, and calling it management. I'd treat one buyer carrying eight or ten brands as a structural failure, not a busy week. It means the model only works by giving you a thin slice of someone's attention and charging you for the whole person.

The honest version of this answer sounds like a real ratio with a reason attached. The evasive version sounds like "you'll have a whole team behind you," which is the line that's doing the most hiding. A team behind you usually means no single person is genuinely accountable for your account, and the work gets done by whoever's free.

Question two: will a senior person ever actually touch it

The second trap is the bait-and-switch on seniority. You get pitched by the founder or the head of strategy, you sign, and then the account quietly lands with whoever's most junior and available.

A version of this happens in a lot of service businesses, and it's worth naming. The senior person who built the thing is brilliant and stretched thin, and the people with the time are young and talented but missing the judgment that only comes from having seen a few hundred accounts go wrong. There's a real difference between someone who can run the tactics and someone who's developed the instinct for when the tactics are the wrong call. That instinct is the whole value, and it's exactly the bit that gets quietly removed after you sign.

So ask: who specifically works on my account, what's their experience, and when does a senior person actually look at it. Weekly? Monthly? Only when something's on fire? You want a real cadence, not a name on an org chart who'll never open your Ads Manager. And I'd push for the answer in named people and rhythms, because "senior oversight" as a phrase is designed to sound like more than it is.

Question three: how long do people actually stay

This is the one almost nobody asks, and it might be the most telling.

Turnover is the quiet killer in agency work, because the value is in the relationship and the institutional memory, and both reset to zero every time a person leaves. The really capable operators I know guard against this obsessively in their own teams, because they understand that if you're constantly rebuilding, you never build anything big. Every time someone with years of context walks out the door, that knowledge walks with them, and the client feels it as a sudden, unexplained drop in how well they're understood.

So ask the agency straight: what's your team turnover, and how long has the person who'd run my account been here. A shop that loses people every few months is going to hand your account around like a parcel, and you'll spend the relationship re-explaining your business to a rotating cast. A shop where good people stay for years is telling you something real about how it's run, and about how much continuity you'll actually get.

There's a related tell worth watching for, and it's a strange one. The agencies doing loud public flexing about how much money they're making are often the ones least worth hiring. Partly because it's a sign of where their attention is, and partly because a brand that can see its agency is crushing it tends to start wondering why it's still paying them. The people genuinely doing the best work are usually the quietest about it.

Including us, and that's the point

Here's the part I want to be straight about, because it'd be a bit rich to write all this and exempt myself.

Run these questions at us too. Ask how many accounts the person on yours is carrying. Ask who's senior on it and how often they're actually in there. Ask how long our people stay. If any agency, mine included, gets cagey or reaches for "you'll have a whole team behind you" instead of naming names and ratios, that's your answer right there.

Because the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this is that every one of these relationships ends eventually. People leave, businesses change, what worked for two years stops fitting. That's not cynical, it's just how it goes. The only thing that separates a good run from a bad one is whether the people in your account were genuinely good while they were there, and whether you knew who they were the whole time.

So I'd stop asking whether an agency is good. It's the wrong question, and it doesn't have an answer. Ask who, specifically, is going to do the work, how stretched they are, and how long they're likely to stay. Then go and ask the agency you're with right now, or the one you're about to sign, and see how comfortable they are answering it. What would yours say if you asked today?