Agencies do their best work for clients who lead them well, and their most forgettable work for clients who cannot. If your retainers feel expensive and your results feel vague, the problem is usually not the agency. It is that nobody senior on your side is setting direction, judging quality and connecting each agency’s slice to a whole. That is a leadership gap wearing an agency costume.
How unled agency relationships drift
The pattern is predictable. Without a strategy from the client, the agency writes its own, and it naturally features more of what the agency sells. Without a senior counterpart, quality review defaults to whether the client liked it, which rewards safe work. Without someone connecting the agencies, paid, SEO, creative and PR optimise their own metrics in parallel, and each monthly report is a defence of the retainer rather than an honest account of the whole. None of this is malice; it is what fills a vacuum.
What agencies wish clients had
Ask agency leaders privately and they will tell you: their best accounts have a strong client-side marketer. Clear briefs instead of guessing games. Fast decisions instead of three-week approval loops. Honest feedback from someone who can tell strong work from busy work. Accountability that flows both ways. Agencies price uncertainty into their retainers; a well-led account is simply a better client, and gets better people assigned to it.
What changes when a CMO takes the wheel
Within a quarter of senior leadership arriving, four things typically happen to an agency stack. The strategy comes from the client, and every agency gets briefed into their lane against it. Reporting gets rebuilt around commercial outcomes, and the padding becomes visible. One or two retainers usually end, not out of drama but because the direction reveals they were duplicating or drifting. And the remaining agencies lift, because they finally have a counterpart who makes their work matter. The net effect is routinely the same or better output for less total spend, which is a strange thing to buy leadership with, but it works. This sits at the heart of our marketing and communications engagements.
Do you need this full-time?
Rarely. Directing an agency stack well takes senior judgment applied consistently, not a forty-hour week. One to two days a week of fractional CMO leadership is usually enough to run strategy, hold three or four agencies to account, and report one clean picture upward, at a cost the recovered retainer waste often covers by itself.
Frequently asked questions
Should we fire our agency before hiring leadership?
Backwards order. Bring the leadership in first: a fair share of underperforming agencies turn out to be fine once properly directed, and the CMO will know which ones to keep within a month.
Can’t the biggest agency just coordinate the others?
An agency coordinating its competitors has an unresolvable conflict of interest. Coordination is a client-side job.
How many agencies is too many?
There is no magic number, but every agency needs someone with the seniority to direct it. If your count exceeds your capacity to lead them, either the count or the capacity has to change.
Retainers not adding up?
Rachel will audit your agency stack, keep what earns its place, and direct the rest properly.