Should I replace several marketing agencies with one team?
Usually yes, unless someone other than the founder already owns the result. Several specialist agencies can work, but only when one named person sets a single plan, decides priorities and answers for meetings and pipeline. Without that person, each supplier optimises its own report, gaps go unnoticed and the founder becomes an unpaid project manager. Fix ownership first, then count suppliers.
What is really going on.
Each agency is marked on its own homework
The SEO firm reports rankings, the PR consultant reports coverage, the ads people report clicks. All can rise in a month when no new customer appears, and nobody's fee depends on the number you care about.
The gaps sit between the suppliers
PR lands a good article and the website has no page that picks up the reader. Each supplier did its job. The join between the jobs belonged to no one.
You became the integrator by default
Someone has to brief four firms and spot what is missing. That fell to you, and it gets done in the gaps between everything else, which is to say badly.
What it is costing you.
Add up the retainers and multiply by twelve. For example, four suppliers at £2,000 a month is £96,000 a year. Then price the hours you spend each week briefing and chasing them at what an hour of your own selling brings in. Now write down the customers the whole arrangement can prove it produced last year. Most founders find the first number easy and the second one awkward.
Check it yourself in ten minutes.
You need your bank statements, the last round of reports and a pen.
- 1
List every marketing supplier, the monthly fee, and the one number each reports to you.
- 2
Beside each, write the last customer you can trace to their work.
- 3
Ask each supplier what the others are working on this month. Note who knows.
- 4
Pick one recent press article or campaign and check whether the website and your sales emails used it.
What we would do in the first 90 days.
One owner, one plan, one set of numbers.
- Week 1
A founder of ours runs your Growth Review. We check your site, two competitors, and what Google and ChatGPT say about all three, then send three fixes in writing.
- Weeks 2 to 4
We write a single plan covering website, reputation and pipeline, with one person answerable for it. It says what stops, what carries on and why.
- Days 30 to 90
Site pages, expert pieces and researched outreach run from that one plan. On the first Monday of each month you get one page: meetings held, pipeline accepted by sales, buyer questions where an AI assistant names you.
The Growth Team programme covers all three services from £2,500 a month (most clients pay £5,000 to £8,000), all prices exclude VAT, and you can stop after any step.
How Growth Team programme works ↗The short answers.
No. The problem is the missing owner, not the number of invoices. The programme covers website, reputation and pipeline, so overlap with existing suppliers will show up quickly. What you do about each one is your decision, and you can make it after the free Growth Review.
Compare it with the sum above, including your own hours. The programme starts at £2,500 a month and most clients pay £5,000 to £8,000, excluding VAT. Before that there is an optional two-week Growth Plan at £1,500, credited against the programme. The Growth Review costs nothing.
You could. The 2026 UK median salary for a marketing manager is £56,950 before employer NI, pension and software, and you would still pay the retainers on top. Coordination would improve. Overruling an agency on strategy usually takes a more senior hire.
Founders who said this also said these.
The last agency sent reports, not customers.
A marketing agency is working if you can name customers, or at least serious sales conversations, that exist because of what it did. Traffic, impressions, rankings and followers measure activity. They only matter when enquiries from the right buyers move with them. If several months in nobody can trace one qualified conversation to the work, the reports describe effort, not results.
Growth Team programmeI'm paying for SEO. I don't know what I get.
Ask for a dated list of what was changed on the website last month, and why. Real search work leaves evidence: pages rewritten, faults fixed, coverage earned on other sites. An agency that can show only rankings and traffic charts is reporting on the weather. The test that matters is whether enquiries from people who did not already know the firm are rising.
Website That SellsThree things worth reading first.
Should I still pay a marketing agency now that AI can do the work?
31 March 2026
Can we just do content, or do we need PR and a better website too?
31 March 2026
How do we choose a firm to help us get recommended by ChatGPT?
31 March 2026
Bring this one to the call.
Thirty minutes with a founder. We look at your site, two competitors and what Google and ChatGPT say about all three beforehand. You leave with three fixes in writing.