The Agency Graveyard: Why You Keep Firing Partners and Hiring the Same Problem
I’ve watched this pattern repeat for years. A business owner sits across from me, frustrated, explaining how their last three agencies failed them. The stories sound different on the surface, but the structure is identical.
“They didn’t get our vision.”
“They couldn’t execute what we needed.”
“The relationship just stopped working.”
Here’s what I’ve learned: the agency wasn’t the problem. The problem was sitting in the chair telling me about the agency.
The Briefing Blind Spot
Let me show you something that stopped me cold when I first saw it.
Research from the BetterBriefs Project surveyed over 1,700 marketers and agency staff across 70+ countries. They found that 80% of marketers think they write good briefs. Only 10% of creative agencies agree.
That’s not a small perception gap. That’s a canyon.
The same research revealed something even more damaging: an estimated 33% of marketing budgets are wasted due to poor briefs and misdirected work. In the UK specifically, marketers estimate 26% of their budget evaporates because they can’t articulate what they actually need.
Think about that for a second. One-third of your spend disappears before the agency even has a chance to fail you.
But here’s the part that really matters: three in five marketers admit to using the creative process to clarify the strategy. They’re not briefing agencies. They’re using agencies as expensive thinking partners to figure out what they should have known before the engagement started.
The Founder’s Paradox
I used to think this was just a communication problem. Bad briefs, unclear expectations, misaligned objectives. Fix the input, fix the output.
Then I started noticing something deeper.
The instincts that built your business are now preventing it from scaling. The same decisive action that got you to revenue is now creating bottlenecks. The hands-on control that ensured quality in year one is now the reason you can’t delegate in year five.
Research from Bain & Company on the Founder’s Mentality confirms what I’ve observed: growth creates complexity, and complexity is the silent killer of growth. Most successful companies don’t achieve scale because as they grow, they allow their founder’s mentality to fade—or worse, they cling to it when it no longer serves them.
Here’s the paradox: every business will fall to the level of the functional systems, not rise to the founder’s standards.
You expect the business to rise to your standards. That will never happen. For as long as there’s a gap between your systems and your standards, you experience a lack of congruence that causes you to step in and take over.
And that prevents scale.
The Emotional Truth Behind Agency Firings
When I dig into why clients actually fire agencies, the rational reasons they provide rarely match the emotional reality.
Research shows that firms that fire their ad agencies have lost market share in the two quarters immediately preceding the firing. The fall in stock price of client firms correlates significantly with the fall in market share before they pull the trigger.
The agency becomes the scapegoat for broader business performance issues.
Industry experts confirm what I’ve seen firsthand: when clients fire agencies, they provide rational feedback and reasons to justify what is largely an emotional response to the relationship. The underlying truth is simpler and harder to articulate in a professional business environment: they no longer feel the love and commitment.
But you can’t put that in a termination letter.
The System-Standards Gap in Action
Let me paint you a picture of how this actually plays out.
You hire an agency because you need help. You’re clear about that. You know you can’t do everything yourself anymore.
The agency asks for a brief. You write what you think is a comprehensive document. It feels complete to you because you’ve been living inside your business for years. The context is obvious. The objectives are clear. The constraints are understood.
Except they’re not.
The agency receives a brief that’s missing critical information you didn’t realize you needed to include. They’re not clear on the strategic direction—research shows only 6% of UK agencies are clear on the strategic direction in the briefs they receive. They’re not clear on the target audience—only 38% of UK creative agencies have clarity on the target group in client briefs.
So they do what any rational service provider does: they make educated guesses. They fill in the blanks with assumptions. They use their experience to interpolate what you probably meant.
And they get it wrong.
Not because they’re incompetent. Because you asked them to read your mind while simultaneously expecting them to elevate your thinking.
The Churn Cycle
Here’s what the data tells us about the current state of agency relationships.
The average client-agency relationship now stands at approximately seven years, according to a joint 2025 study by the ANA and 4As. That sounds promising until you break it down. Integrated full-service agencies report an average tenure of 7.3 years, while media-only agencies have a significantly shorter average tenure of 3.7 years.
The fragmentation is evident.
More telling: 40% of clients surveyed will switch agency partners in the next six months. This isn’t an anomaly. This is the industry baseline.
But here’s the contradiction that reveals the real problem: 81% of agency leaders agree that strong client relationships are the biggest factor in retaining accounts—ranking above effective communication at 67% and campaign performance at 49%. Yet 50% of respondents said they had fired an agency in the past two years.
The relationship matters more than the work. Yet clients continuously burn through agencies.
What Actually Needs to Change
I’m not suggesting agencies are blameless. I’ve seen plenty of agencies overpromise, underdeliver, and hide behind opaque processes. I’ve watched agencies claim capabilities they don’t have and delegate work to systems that degrade quality.
But I’ve also seen business owners fire agencies for failing to execute a vision the owner couldn’t articulate. I’ve watched founders blame external partners for not reading their minds. I’ve seen leaders expect agencies to compensate for internal dysfunction.
The pattern I keep observing: you’re not hiring agencies to solve a communication problem. You’re hiring agencies to solve a systems problem you haven’t diagnosed yet.
Your business has outgrown your instincts. The decisive action that worked when you had five clients doesn’t work when you have fifty. The hands-on control that ensured quality in year one creates bottlenecks in year five.
You need functional systems that operate independently of your constant intervention. You need clarity on what you’re actually trying to accomplish before you brief an external partner. You need to close the gap between your standards and your systems.
The agency can’t do that for you.
The Real Question
Before you fire your next agency, ask yourself a different question.
Not “Why did this agency fail me?”
But “What am I asking them to fix that I should have fixed internally first?”
Because if you don’t answer that question honestly, you’ll just hire the same problem with a different logo.
I’ve seen this cycle repeat enough times to know: the agency graveyard is full of partners who were asked to solve problems their clients couldn’t name. They were expected to elevate thinking that hadn’t been clarified. They were supposed to execute against a vision that existed only in the founder’s head.
That’s not a vendor failure. That’s a systems failure.
And until you address the gap between your standards and your systems, every agency relationship will follow the same trajectory. Initial excitement. Gradual misalignment. Eventual termination. Repeat.
The next agency won’t be different. Unless you are.
