Most of us believe our vision is clear, but often it’s a vague wish. That lack of concrete strategic direction is the silent killer of agency relationships and ultimately, growth.
We blame the partners. I’ve done it. You hire a team, the output feels wrong, and you fire them. Then you repeat the loop six months later with a new “expert” who promises to fix the mess. But if you look at the wreckage honestly, the common denominator is usually the instructions. The signal was never clear to begin with.
You wanted someone to execute a vision that didn’t actually exist yet.
This is uncomfortable. It suggests that the bottleneck isn’t their competence, but your clarity. We tend to hand off “strategy” as a loose collection of goals and expect a vendor to translate that into commercial mechanics. That handoff is where the entropy kills you. The noise takes over.
You cannot outsource the translation layer.
Real growth happens when you collapse that separation. When you stop treating communication as a product you buy and start treating it as a system you own. If you can’t articulate the physics of how your idea converts to revenue, no agency can save you. You are just paying for expensive guessing games.
It requires slowing down. It requires building a bridge between the idea in your head and the hands doing the work.
Maybe it’s time to stop looking for better vendors and start looking at the architecture of your requests.
Does this match what you’re seeing in your own projects?
Hit like if this hits home—I’d love to hear how you handle that strategy-to-execution gap in the comments.
