An agency horror story

Author

Jessie Healy
June 20, 2025

Hey Founder,

Trigger warning - this email contains an agency horror story…

I wanted to share so you can avoid this happening to you.

Here goes…

In January - a brand I mentor handed over their campaigns to a “top-tier” agency paying north of $7K USD per month in agency management fees.

Last week I dug into the accounts, here’s what we found:

Google had been left completely unmanaged for the last month. Not a single change or optimisation had been performed!

The agency had essentially ghosted the client - but they were still charging them full fees and letting their campaigns spend like crazy.

In 30 days - $9K was wasted on a Performance Max campaign left running RAMPANT at 0.2 ROAS. The brand normally has at least 10X that ROAS.

Whole country-regions were running on Google but excluded on Meta.

To top it off - as well as the Google issues - in Meta a key campaign restructure - discussed, agreed, and signed off — was never implemented - so the brand thought they were optimising for 7 day click but actually it was including 1 day view conversions.

End result? A $300,000+ revenue miss … and the poor founder left scrambling to regain lost revenue.

The agency refused to refund the $9k of overspend.

😩 Why This Keeps Happening

I wrack my brain about this…

Why are agencies so bad? We know there are good ones out there, but these horror stories seem to outnumber the good stories.

Most agencies start the same way: A well-meaning founder who’s decent at Facebook ads and doing solid work.

They gain traction, take on more clients… and then they try to scale.

But here’s where it all breaks down:

To stay profitable, they either:

Hire cheap junior talent (with limited experience), or

Hire someone good—but overload them with too many accounts.

Either way, you lose. You’re no longer paying for real expertise or meaningful time on your account. You're getting what the business model allows: low-effort, high-volume execution.

The only reason the agency was ever any good was because the founder cared more than anyone else and put in extra hours. Once they step back even slightly, quality plummets.

The Solution? Take things in-house, or learn the ropes

If you’re spending five or six figures on paid media, you should consider taking your ad management in-house.

Why?

  • You get full control over your spend

  • You see issues before it’s too late

  • You learn what works and what doesn’t - which makes you a better founder, marketer, and decision-maker

Do you have that niggly feeling that your agency is maybe not doing much at all?

Running your ads in 2025 is not actually very time-consuming (thanks to algorithms and AI doing most of the work) - it is about doing things smarter, not harder.

You just need someone with deep strategic experience to guide you.

If you want to explore me being your guide - let’s chat.

x Jessie