If you’re paying an agency to handle your website, marketing, SEO or content, you’ve way more power than you realize. Not. Because you’re special. Because you’re income.
I worked inside a marketing agency for years. I was in the meetings, I watched the spreadsheets. And I built the landing pages nobody had time for. Here’s what clients hardly ever see: how the relationship really honestly works from the other side of the desk, and why the power doesn’t sit where you’d guess.
The myth of your dedicated person
Most clients think one person is looking after them. A friendly account manager who knows their business inside out, answers the phone. And gets things done.
Sounds nice. It’s also not true.
An agency might handle hundreds of clients at once. The account manager looking after you has dozens of other accounts. And the same goes for everyone backing them up, designers, developers, copywriters. And the SEO team included. Your share of the cake is pretty small.
Your slice grows only when something big gets paid for. Or when a fat chunk of your cash lands in a schedule, which happens a lot. Faster output isn’t always the reason. Sometimes it’s about making the agency’s numbers look good for the quarter.
The tightrope
Clients don’t see this part. Agencies run on steady income to keep the machine tuned.
Clients leave. Budgets get cut, a new marketing director shows up with an agency they already like, a company gets bought. Each departure leaves a hole. And you’ve to fill it with new business before payroll goes out.
The agency survives on a tightrope, basically. Bring in new clients fast enough to replace the ones leaving. Lean too far one way and people get laid off.
That tightrope is where your power actually sits. Most clients don’t even know it’s there.
It’s really a support centre.
An agency works a lot like a support centre. And support centres live and die by their KPIs. I know this because I lived it.
Every person you reach ends up filed in some column. And every one of those columns comes with its own script:
1. You call. That counts as engagement. Tick.
2. You complain. That’s a different column entirely. Whoever’s on the other end will try to calm you down. They’ll throw in a discounted campaign, a free landing page, and if you’re big enough, a video call so you can list your complaints.
3. You settle down. Problem solved, and there’s another KPI checked off: client saved.
Look at what that list leaves out. The issue you raised doesn’t always get fixed. What they wanted was for the complaint to disappear, and that’s not the same thing.
Now threaten to leave.
This is the one that actually makes a difference. Threaten to walk away, and the entire tone shifts.
The more you spend, the harder they fight to keep you. That money matters a lot to the agency. A revenue stream like that doesn’t get replaced overnight, so they’ll throw everything at you to hold onto it. Losing your account entirely is worse to them than eating a small loss on it.
Work it out from their end. £1,000 a month on website development and support comes to £12,000 a year. On top of that, let’s say marketing campaigns run you £100,000 a year.
Losing £1,000 a month would hurt. But losing the relationship entirely, along with the campaign budget? That’s not something they’ll recover from quickly. Finding, pitching and onboarding a new client that size can take months.
I’ve watched this play out. Meetings get called. People float ideas for how to bring the client “back in line”. Not to help the client. To protect the agency’s bottom line.
When “No” stops being an option
Here’s what that tightrope does to the people in the middle.
Account managers already deal with plenty of stress, taking demands from clients on all sides. Hand them a major account, though, and somehow “No” vanishes from their vocabulary.
Every idea gets approved. Last-minute changes? Sure. There’s a calendar invite for every pointless brainstorming session, and a yes waiting inside it. This agency will bend over backwards to please.
Need a landing page by 4:50 on a Friday? Fine, our devs can pull that off. Site goes live over the weekend? Not an issue.
I was one of those devs. No one asked us. The yes was given before the ticket got to us.
The asylum’s being run by the lunatics now.
Grab it and run.
That’s how the big spenders get treated. Here’s what happens to everyone else.
Seven and a half years of watching the same pattern play out, all from a developer’s seat. Grab and run is what I always called it.
We’d land a big win. We knew it was a big win because it was on the “big wins” slide at the monthly town hall. So it was… well, a big win.
After that, we’d move through the phases inside ClickUp. The exact names they used escape me, but it was roughly this.
- Discovery. Ask the client what they’re after, check out their competitors, then leave with a list you can work from.
- Design. There was a ton of going back and forth with the client. Par for the course.
- Build. And more back and forth.
- Go live. Get sign-off, then pick a launch date. Any day works except Friday or the weekend, since that’s just asking for trouble. I handled the go-lives myself because I had the process down cold. Staging goes to live, DNS entries get set, and then you sit there watching DNS propagate, waiting for the switch to flip.
- Snags. ClickUp labeled it the “snags list”. Those few hours were something else.
Then nothing.
Daily backups for your site run £10 a month. ManageWP does the same job for around $3. That’s one hell of a markup.
Want the site rolled back? That’s £100 an hour. Seconds is all it takes.
Looking for a new plugin? That’ll be the purchase price plus 35% on top.
Your site is showing as out of date and needs plugin and theme updates? Our maintenance package runs £400 a month. Keep in mind a lot of clients have more than one website. That’s multiple lots of £400.
I get it, agencies need revenue to keep the lights on. Morals matter to me though, and this crossed a line. Sitting in on client calls, hearing their concerns, I understood exactly why they were frustrated. Pay thousands for a website, then get hit with extra charges for the basics? I’d be furious too.
Every team 360, I brought up the same thing: we take the client’s money and then we forget about them. Honestly, some client sites were still on PHP 7.4 and WordPress 5, since the code was written so badly that any upgrade broke them. So what’s the fix? Charge the client for us to repair it.
Small spenders got ignored. That was the rule. Attention went to the big-budget clients. If all someone paid for was hosting, they got nothing at all. No maintenance, no updates, no development. No PHP upgrade either, and no WordPress update since version 5. Their sites just sat on our server.
That scared the crap out of me. One managed server held 120 of our sites, and about a dozen had been forgotten. Those carried vulnerabilities eight years old, just sitting there waiting to be found. Any one of them could turn into a security incident.
That’s part of why I left. More on it later.
So what are you supposed to do with that kind of power?
You’ve got use. That’s clear now. This real question is what you do with it.
You can absolutely use it to turn out free landing pages and weekend launches. Lots of clients do that. But a discount plus a calming video call isn’t the same as actual quality work. And a tired team throwing together your Friday afternoon page isn’t giving you their best either.
Smarter move: use it to ask for what actually matters.
- Who’s actually on my account, and how many hours went into it last month?
- Results, not freebies. Fix the problem I raised, don’t just make the complaint go away.
- Honesty. I’d rather you tell me “that’s not a good idea” than give me a nervous yes.
An agency that’ll tell you “No” when you’re wrong is actually looking out for you. If yours won’t do that, maybe ask why.
Exit, stage left
Me? I was the developer with a conscience, so I walked. That was it for the career, and I’m pretty sure they were happy to see me go. I cared too much. Too many questions from me about bad architecture calls and whether the client actually needed any of it, plus I wouldn’t stop pitching alternatives. The process had a thorn in its side and that thorn was me, which is exactly why the hellscape chewed up someone with my personality flaws and spat them out.
AI was used to render the featrued image and checked writing for consistency.
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