Marketing agency, independent consultant or in-house hire: how do you know what your company lacks before you pay?

The agency's monthly report goes up on the screen at the Sunday management meeting (in Riyadh and Amman, the working week starts on Sunday): reach up, clicks up, cost per click down. Then the sales manager says the leads aren't buying, and the bank statement agrees. The general manager decides the agency is the problem and starts looking for a new one, or for someone to hire.

My view: he's answering the wrong question. "Agency or consultant?" compares suppliers before anyone has named what's missing, so companies buy what they already have, change agencies twice in a year and end up where they started. What's missing is usually one of three things: someone to execute, someone to decide, or someone inside who owns marketing.

Why doesn't switching agencies usually fix the problem?

Because the new agency inherits the same offer, audience, sales follow-up and definition of success.

The myth: campaigns aren't selling, the agency must be weak, replace it. Sometimes that's true. But if the offer doesn't persuade, if a lead waits two days for a WhatsApp reply, or if the ads reach people who don't make the buying decision, the new agency repeats the mistake with nicer creative. You buy the same problem from a new supplier, plus the months it needs to learn your account.

The rule I apply: when execution is working and the money still doesn't come back, more hands won't bring it back; what's missing is a decision. To test it, I put the sales sheet and collected revenue beside the ad report for the same period, then walk the path I work on: market, offer, ad, lead, CRM follow-up, sale, revenue. The broken link is rarely the ad alone.

So before canceling any contract, find out where money leaks between the ad and the payment. That's where I start in a marketing audit, and the answer tells you whether you need a new agency at all. What to ask of any supplier comes after you know what each one actually sells.

What does a marketing agency sell, and what does a consultant sell?

An agency sells execution and a consultant sells decisions; how each is paid shows the difference.

An agency is a team (designer, copywriter, campaign manager) selling its hours and output, from posts to campaigns run daily on Google Ads, Meta, Snapchat and TikTok. A good one produces faster and with more range than any single employee.

An independent marketing consultant is one person, not a firm, brought in for questions no campaign answers, however well it's run: who actually buys, what offer moves them, at which link the money drops out before it reaches your account, and what number the executors are held to.

Then look at the contract. If you pay an agency a monthly retainer, you pay for ongoing activity and hours; a percentage-of-spend fee grows when spend grows, not when revenue does; a project fee pays for set deliverables. None is tied to collected revenue unless the contract says so. That's not a charge against agencies; it's how the contract works. Leave the number unwritten and the agency is judged on what its own dashboard measures: reach, clicks, cost per result.

A consultant has a different incentive and a different weakness. They earn nothing from a bigger ad budget, unless they take a commission from an agency or tool they recommend; ask about that in writing. But they don't run your campaigns every day. Hire one as a cheaper agency and you'll get a sharp diagnosis and campaigns nobody launches.

What is your company missing: hands, a decision or an owner?

These are different gaps with different fixes, and a company can be short of more than one.

One question separates them: if you doubled the people executing tomorrow, would sales move? If yes, because offer, audience and follow-up are in place but nobody gets the ads out on time, you're short of hands: an agency or freelancers, not a consultant. With a small ad budget, weigh the agency's fee against the spend it will manage; a freelancer plus one person inside running one channel may be the better start.

If no, or if you're a Jordanian company entering Saudi Arabia or launching an offer before Ramadan without knowing who it's for, you're short of a decision: a consultant for a set period, not a second agency.

The third gap shows over months, not in one campaign: channels multiply, the budget grows, nobody reviews the executors' work and nobody inside answers for marketing. That's a missing owner.

When is an in-house hire the answer?

When the need is permanent and daily. An employee knows the product, the sales team and the customers as no outsider can, and is there when something breaks on a Thursday evening as the weekend starts.

But it's the slowest option to start and the hardest to undo: search, interviews, probation, then months before they produce. The common mistake: hire someone to execute, ask them to set direction alone, and you've hired hands when you needed a decision. And one hire rarely covers design, content and media buying at once; expect them to manage an agency or freelancers.

I've worked on more than 50 startup projects as part of the founding team, all through my freelance and consulting work. I built the marketing plan and helped hire the right marketing and design team. The order matters: the plan first, then hiring to fit it. To test candidates first, see how to hire a marketing manager.

Decision table: what is missing, and who fills it?

Tick every row that's true today; more than one kind of help means a combination.

What you see in your company	What's missing	Help that fits	Put in writing first
Nobody makes or launches ads; offer and audience are clear	Hands	Agency or freelancers	Monthly deliverables and dates
Campaigns have run for months; sales haven't moved	A decision on offer, audience or follow-up	Consultant, before changing agencies	Where the path to revenue breaks
Nobody reads agency reports beside sales	Someone to hold execution to revenue	Consultant first, then an in-house owner	Weekly report: spend, qualified leads, collected revenue
You're entering a new market or launching an offer	A decision before the ad	Consultant first, then execution	Who, offer, channel, test budget
Leads go unanswered the same day on WhatsApp or phone	Follow-up, not marketing	Your sales team, with a written rule	Who owns each lead, and reply time
Marketing is daily work for years, across channels	An in-house owner	Employee, maybe a part-time lead first	Role naming the problem and measures, not tools
Ad accounts in the agency's or a former employee's name	Ownership	You, before any supplier	Admin for two company people, on company email

Two rows have nothing to do with suppliers: follow-up and ownership. Fix those first; they're cheap, and any new supplier will trip over them.

Can an agency and a consultant work together, and who answers to whom?

Yes, and it works when accountability is clear. The consultant sets direction and the scorecard, the agency or in-house team executes, and management holds both to that scorecard: qualified leads for whoever executes, collected revenue for the whole path.

It goes wrong in two ways. The consultant ends up reviewing the agency's designs, and you pay twice for one job. Or the agency ends up choosing the offer and audience because nobody else will, and you're buying strategy from someone paid for activity.

My rule: whoever executes doesn't set, on their own, the number they're judged by, or the report will always look good. Make collected revenue in the sales sheet the referee.

What should the first written scope say before you pay?

Five things, agreed before the first payment.

1. Deliverables, with quantities and dates. Include anything a consultant will execute themselves.
2. The number you'll judge by. Qualified leads or collected revenue (cash received after cancellations and returns), not reach, clicks or platform ROAS; see what ROAS leaves out. Hold the agency to qualified leads, and send it a monthly CRM export of which ones became sales; it can't see your revenue otherwise.
3. A baseline before a target. I split the first 100 days into three phases (Diagnose, Build and Launch) and fix no target until the baseline is validated. A number promised before anyone sees your data is a guess.
4. Account ownership and access. Whose name every account sits under, from ad platforms, GA4, Tag Manager and Merchant Center to the domain, hosting, WhatsApp Business number and CRM.
5. What happens at the end. Which source files (designs, video) and reports you get, and when access is removed.

Accounts: grant access, don't hand them over

Item four is the hardest to fix after signing. The company owns the accounts and grants access, never the reverse.

In Google Ads, only an Admin can give account access and change access levels. So create the account yourself on a company email and payment method, keep Admin with two people in the company, not one, and give individual users who do the work Standard access, which is enough to edit campaigns; all five levels are explained in marketing team playbooks.

If the agency creates the account from its manager account (MCC), Google says the manager automatically becomes the owner. Linking an account you created doesn't automatically grant ownership. Google recommends making a manager the owner only if it needs those privileges, and says the client account still owns its data and can unlink.

Check whether billing or conversion tracking runs through the agency's manager account. After unlinking, a cross-account conversion tag stops recording conversions for later clicks, and an account on manager-paid monthly invoicing stops serving.

Meta's developer documentation lists, among its ownership models, ones where the agency owns the ad accounts, yet says most marketing companies won't need to claim ad accounts from their clients. So create the ad account in your company's business portfolio (Business Manager) from day one, add your Pages to it, then grant the agency access from there. A partner that manages your ad accounts by storing your passwords is, in Meta's words, "not an approved model."

Where do you start this week?

Spend an hour with three months of sales sheets and ad reports, tick the table rows that apply, and write what's missing in one line before you call any agency, consultant or candidate. If it's hands, take that line and the scope above to agencies.

If it's both a decision and an owner, and you're not ready for a full-time role, that's what I offer as part-time marketing leadership (other areas are on the services page). Request a consultation and send your one line with it.

Want your team trained on this? Corporate training programs.