UpTrajectory Review
Jackie Cullen's Entrepreneur piece starts from a familiar pain: growth multiplies marketing tasks faster than a small team can absorb them. Her signal is blunt. When your people spend more hours maintaining campaigns than creating new ones, the structure has failed. That diagnostic is the strongest part of the piece, and it applies whether or not you ever hire an agency. An operator who tracks where the week goes will usually find that ad tweaks, email list hygiene, and social scheduling have quietly consumed the calendar that should have gone to product, partnerships, and sales calls.
For a small-business owner, the cost of that drift is real but rarely appears on a ledger. Every hour a founder spends adjusting bids is an hour not spent closing a customer or refining the offer. An agency can absorb that repetitive load and bring skills a five-person shop cannot justify hiring full-time: media buying, search optimization, design, analytics. The trade is straightforward. You pay a retainer, you reclaim the calendar, and you aim the recovered hours at work that produces revenue. Done well, the arrangement pays for itself. Done poorly, it becomes an expensive way to avoid learning marketing.
Cullen frames the agency choice as a partnership, and that word deserves scrutiny. Plenty of vendors use the language of partnership, then behave like order-takers: they run the ads, send a monthly PDF, and wait for the renewal. A genuine partner sets measurable targets, shares raw data, challenges your assumptions, and kills underperforming campaigns without being asked. Operators who skip that discipline end up with activity reports instead of results. The piece likely covers vetting and fit in depth; the excerpt alone does not. Our advice holds regardless: treat the pitch meeting as a job interview, not a sales demo.
The second-order effects cut in both directions. A good agency raises conversion rates, shortens your week, and trains your team by example. A bad one locks you into a long retainer, holds your ad accounts hostage, and leaves you with no in-house skill when the contract ends. Hidden costs also live in onboarding: the agency needs weeks to learn your customer, your voice, and your margins, and you will pay for that learning curve. Budget for it, or the first quarter will disappoint and the relationship will sour before it starts.
Watch two numbers after you sign: the cost to acquire a customer, and the hours your team reclaims for sales or product work. If neither improves within ninety days, renegotiate or exit. Before you sign, ask for references from businesses your size, insist on owning every account, pixel, and audience list, and write a ninety-day review into the contract. Cullen points the right direction; the operator must supply the yardstick.
“If your team is spending more time maintaining campaigns than creating new opportunities, it may be time to rethink your approach.” — Entrepreneur
Takeaway: Audit where your team's hours go before hiring an agency; if maintenance crowds out creation, outsource the maintenance and keep creation in-house.
Excerpt from the original — Entrepreneur
As your business grows, so do your marketing demands. If your team is spending more time maintaining campaigns than creating new opportunities, it may be time to rethink your approach.