I run agencies. I have signed the invoices and I have sent them. So take this as a confession as much as advice: most retainers are not stolen, they are quietly wasted — by clients who never defined the job and agencies who were never made to defend the work.
You do not need a procurement process to fix that. You need five questions and the discipline to sit in the silence after you ask them.
1. What decision did you change this quarter?
Not what did you produce. What did you learn that made someone at your company — or mine — do something different. A good agency changes the plan. A billing agency executes last quarter's plan with new fonts.
If the answer is a list of deliverables, you are paying for output. Output is cheap now. Judgment is not.
2. Who actually touches my account, and for how many hours?
Ask for names, seniority and hours. Ask this in writing. The pitch team is almost never the delivery team, and the gap between the two is where your margin goes.
The honest answer sounds like: “Two mid-level people, forty hours a month, and I review it.” That can be a fine answer at the right price. What you cannot accept is vagueness. Vagueness is the tell.
3. What would you stop doing if I cut the retainer 30%?
This is the best question in the set, and I have never had a client ask it of me without learning something uncomfortable.
A strong partner answers in ten seconds because they already know which line items are load-bearing and which are ballast. A weak partner defends everything equally, which means they have never ranked the work by impact — which means neither have you.
Then ask the follow-up: if that 30% is droppable, why am I paying for it now?
4. What number are you on the hook for?
Reach is not a number. Impressions are not a number. Engagement rate is a number the way a horoscope is a forecast.
Pick one commercial metric — qualified pipeline, contribution margin, first-order profitability, repeat rate — and make it theirs. Yes, they will say they do not control it. They are right. Make them own it anyway, alongside you. Shared accountability changes what gets recommended in the room.
5. What are we doing that a good in-house hire would do better?
Any agency worth keeping will tell you the truth here, because they would rather keep the strategic half of the relationship than lose all of it. Community management, daily merchandising, customer service content, most email calendars — these usually belong inside your building.
An agency that insists everything must stay with them is optimizing for headcount utilization, not your business.
How to read the answers
- Specific, fast, slightly uncomfortable answers: keep them, and give them more scope.
- Polished answers with no numbers in them: renegotiate to a smaller, sharper scope for 90 days.
- Defensive answers: you already know. Give notice, keep the files, hire the one person who was doing the real work.
The problem is almost never that the agency is bad. It is that nobody on your side is senior enough to tell them what winning looks like.
That is the actual finding in nine out of ten audits I run. Fix the ownership gap and mediocre agencies get noticeably better within a quarter. Leave it open and the best agency in the country will still bill you for motion.