The pattern you have probably lived through.
It goes like this. You take a few agency meetings. One of them sends a founder or a senior strategist who asks good questions, understands your business fast, and says things you have not heard before. You sign.
Then a kickoff call happens, and the senior person introduces your new account manager. Pleasant, organized, responsive. Over the next two months the senior person appears less and less, and eventually not at all. Your questions get answered a day later, after someone checks with someone.
Nothing dramatic goes wrong. The reports arrive. But the sharp thinking you bought is gone, and you are not sure when it left.
I hear a version of this story on most first calls. The owner is usually a little embarrassed, as if they should have caught it. They should not be. The handoff is designed to be smooth enough that you do not notice until the results have gone flat.
Why agencies do this.
It is not malice. It is math. An agency makes money on the gap between what it charges you and what it pays the people who do your work. Senior people are expensive and there are not many of them. Coordinators are affordable and trainable. The business model only works if the senior people sell and the junior people deliver.
The industry even has a name for the senior people. They are called the pitch team. Their job is to win you, not to keep you.
Coordinators, to be fair, are often good at their jobs. They keep the calendar, they move the tickets, they send the reports on time. The problem is not that they are bad. It is that they are not allowed to make decisions, so the decisions stop being made.
I understand the model because I came up in it, in live brand activation, where the person who designed the event and the person who ran it on the day were almost never the same. I started MBC in 2018 partly because I wanted to be both.
If the smartest person you met is not the person who runs your account, you did not hire the smartest person you met.
How to tell it has happened to you.
Some of these are obvious once you name them. Others hide behind good manners.
- Every question you ask gets answered with a version of "let me check with the team." A director answers, then checks if needed.
- Nobody has ever told you to stop doing something. Coordinators add. Directors subtract, because they are judged on results and not on activity.
- Your reports describe what was done, not what changed. Posts published, hours spent, impressions served. A senior person leads with the number you actually care about.
- The strategy has not changed since the proposal. Real plans get revised when the market answers back. A plan that survives six months untouched is a plan nobody is thinking about.
- You cannot reach anyone senior without scheduling it. If the only path to the strategist is a quarterly business review, the strategist is not on your account.
- The account manager cannot explain why a recommendation was made, only that it was. That is relaying, not directing.
If three or more of those describe your situation, you are paying senior rates for junior ownership.
Why it matters more for a local business.
Big companies can absorb a coordinator-run account because they have a marketing department of their own to direct it. The agency is extra hands. The brain is in-house.
A local business usually hired the agency to be the brain. When the brain quietly becomes a coordinator, there is nobody left to make the hard calls. So nothing gets stopped, nothing gets rethought, and the budget keeps flowing into whatever was decided on the day you signed.
That is how an HVAC company ends up running the same ads for two years while the search landscape shifts under it. Not because anyone was lazy. Because nobody senior was looking.
The cost is rarely a disaster. It is slow. A plan that should have been revised in month three runs until month twelve. A channel that stopped working keeps getting fed. A competitor takes the map pack spot you had and nobody on your account notices for a quarter. By the time the owner feels it, a year of budget has gone into autopilot.
What to ask for instead.
You are allowed to ask who, specifically, will own your account and how much of their week you will get. You are allowed to ask whether that person has the authority to change the plan without a committee. And you are allowed to ask how you reach them when something breaks on a Tuesday.
The structure I landed on is the simplest answer I could find. I am the marketing director on every MBC account. The team behind me does the production work, and I check it. Clients have my direct line during business hours. One flat monthly fee, quoted before we start, so I am never tempted to add activity to justify an invoice.
That is not the only honest way to run an agency. But any agency you consider should be able to answer those three questions without flinching.
If you want the senior person back.
Read how the role is structured on the Fractional Marketing Director page. Then book a call. The person on that call is the person who will run your marketing, which is the whole point.
Written by Matthew Montez, founder of The MBC Group in Denver. Matt has run the agency since 2018 and is the marketing director on every account. Questions about your own marketing? Book a call, or read about the Fractional Marketing Director service.