Hiring a marketing agency is hiring an employee you can't see working.
No desk to walk past. No output you can inspect with your own eyes until the money's already spent. Just a monthly invoice and a report you may not fully understand.
Which means the interview is everything. You get one meeting where they're motivated to answer anything you ask. Most owners waste it nodding at a slide deck.
Don't nod. Ask these ten questions instead. For each one I'll give you the answer you want to hear, and the answer that should end the meeting.
1. Who owns the ad account?
The answer you want: "You do. Your account, your billing, your login. We work inside it as a manager."
The red flag: "We run everything through our master account, it's easier that way." Easier for whom? If they own the account, they own your campaign history, your conversion data, and every dollar of learning your budget paid for. Fire them and you start from zero.
The pattern I keep seeing: no access to your own ad account is the single most common trap owners discover only when it's too late to matter.
2. What exactly happens when we cancel?
The answer you want: A clean, specific list. You keep the accounts, the creative, the tracking numbers, the data. Thirty days notice, no penalty.
The red flag: A long contract with auto-renew buried in it, "offboarding fees," or vagueness about what you keep. Agencies that plan to earn your renewal don't need to trap you into it.
Ask this one early. How an agency treats your exit tells you everything about how they'll treat your engagement.
3. Show me an actual report you send clients.
The answer you want: A report where the top line is calls, booked jobs, or revenue against spend. Business numbers first, marketing numbers as supporting detail.
The red flag: A wall of impressions, reach, clicks, and engagement rate, with nothing that connects to your bank account. Impressions don't fix trucks or pay payroll.
The pattern I keep seeing: reports full of impressions and zero calls. If the sample report doesn't mention the phone ringing, the real ones won't either.
4. How do you decide my budget?
The answer you want: Questions back. What's your average ticket? Close rate? How many jobs can you actually take on next month? A budget should be reverse-engineered from your capacity and unit economics.
The red flag: A number that appears before they know anything about your business. If the budget comes from a pricing tier instead of your math, it was designed for their margins, not your growth.
5. What would make you tell me to STOP spending?
This is the honest-agency test, and almost nobody passes it cold.
The answer you want: Immediate and specific. "If you can't answer leads fast enough. If you're at capacity. If the numbers show the channel can't return your costs." An agency that can name the conditions for pausing your spend is an agency that watches for them.
The red flag: A blank stare, or "we'd optimize through it." An agency that can't imagine telling you to stop is an agency whose income depends on you never stopping.
My own rule is public: if you're sure a channel returns more than 3x collected revenue against its costs, keep it. If you're not sure, pause it and fix the measurement. Any agency should be able to articulate their version of that line.
6. How will I know which channel made my phone ring?
The answer you want: A concrete tracking plan, usually a tracking number per channel, set up before launch. Not after. Before.
The red flag: "Our dashboard handles attribution." Ask what feeds the dashboard. If they can't explain it in one plain sentence, neither the dashboard nor the agency knows.
This isn't exotic. The minimum viable setup is small enough that I wrote it up as a checklist in call tracking for small business. An agency that resists it is protecting itself from measurement.
7. Why do you do technical audits?
Sneaky question. Watch their face.
The answer you want: "We mostly don't." A technical audit is occasionally justified — a genuinely broken site, a migration, a penalty. Occasionally.
The red flag: Audits as a recurring line item. The pattern I keep seeing is agencies billing quarterly "technical audits" as filler work when they've run out of things that move revenue. Our line at Kung Pow: we will never do a "technical audit" without a damn good reason.
8. What results do you promise, and to whom?
The answer you want: Careful, conditional language. Real guarantees exist, but only for businesses with a proven offer, where close rate, capacity, and margins are known. An honest agency qualifies you before promising you anything.
The red flag: "Guaranteed #1 rankings" or guaranteed results offered to anyone with a pulse. An agency that guarantees everyone is pricing failure into everyone's fees. I broke down exactly how that math works in the truth about performance based marketing agencies.
9. Walk me through your method. Specifically.
The answer you want: A boring, checkable explanation. Which channels, why those, what gets built in month one, what a weekly cycle looks like. Good marketing is mostly unglamorous execution, and honest agencies describe it that way.
The red flag: "Proprietary system." "Secret methods we can't share." Secrecy in this business is almost always a costume for absence. There's nothing under the cape.
10. Show me one client story with real numbers, start to finish.
The answer you want: A specific business, a specific timeframe, specific numbers, and honesty about what was hard. Ours is a client who went from zero to 654 booked appointments in 90 days, hitting 5.4x ROAS by day 60. Every serious agency should have at least one story they can tell at that level of detail.
The red flag: Logos instead of numbers. "We've worked with brands like..." is not a result. It's a decal.
Two more signals that don't need a question
Some tells surface on their own if you're watching.
- Their existing clients' websites. Pick one, screenshot it, check back in six months. The pattern I keep seeing: the site looks exactly the same after half a year of retainer fees. Ask yourself what those months bought.
- How fast they get to your numbers. An agency that spends the first meeting asking about your close rate and capacity is planning to be accountable. An agency that spends it on their awards is planning to be admired.
How to run the meeting
Don't ambush anyone. Send a few of these questions ahead of time — good agencies love an owner who asks sharp questions, because it means you'll be a partner instead of a passenger.
Then watch for the difference between answers and performances. An answer is specific, checkable, and occasionally admits weakness. A performance is smooth, flattering, and evaporates when you ask "how, exactly?"
You're about to hand someone your money and your growth. Ten questions is cheap diligence.
And yes, these questions apply to us too. Bring the whole list.