We turn down work regularly, usually because the timing is wrong rather than the business. Here is the framework we use, offered in full because a bad fit costs you more than it costs us.
Signals you are ready
- You have proven demand: customers are buying, through some channel, repeatably
- Your unit economics are known well enough to name an acceptable cost per acquisition
- You can service more volume without the delivery side breaking
- Someone internally can make decisions and approve work within a week
Signals you are not
- You have not yet found product-market fit and are hoping marketing will supply it
- Nobody can say what a customer is worth
- The budget is your last runway and needs to work within six weeks
- Approvals require four people and a monthly meeting
Agency, freelancer, or in-house?
| Situation | Best fit |
|---|---|
| One channel, clear scope, tight budget | Specialist freelancer |
| Multiple channels needing coordination | Agency |
| Channel is core to the business and stable | In-house, eventually |
| Strong executional team, weak direction | Embedded senior strategist |
Questions worth asking before signing
- 1.Who does the daily work, and what else are they on?
- 2.What happens in month one, specifically?
- 3.What would make you tell us to stop spending?
- 4.Which of your clients left, and why?
- 5.Do we own the accounts, the data and the creative files?
The last question matters more than it sounds. Account and data ownership is where relationships turn adversarial when they end, and every good agency has already made peace with the answer.
What a fair first month looks like
Audit, measurement repair, a written plan with named owners, and one or two quick structural wins. If the first month is a discovery workshop and a slide deck, you bought a presentation.