Speaker (Peter Vander Wall) warns founders not to hire a marketing agency before they have a clear marketing strategy. He explains agencies often operate as "productized service" businesses that push the services they excel at (e.g., Facebook ads), so without a prior strategy founders risk adopting tactics that don't fit their business.
Chapters
Most agencies follow a very specific business model, and it's something I call like a productized service business model. If you go to an agency, typically there's one or two services that they really excel at, and that's kind of the main thing they offer. And so if you as a founder, go to a Facebook ad agency and you're like, I know as a business owner, Facebook ads are the missing link in my business, then you go to that Facebook ad agency and 75% of the time it's going to work out great. The problem comes when you as an agency owner, don't have that overarching strategy masterminded out yet, and you're still trying to figure out out what marketing strategy is even the right path to follow. And so if you go to the Facebook ad agency, they're going to say, oh, yeah, Facebook ads, we can get you there. It's like asking a barber if you need a haircut. Like, of course the answer is always going to be yes. But if you've ever tried this, then you know that it doesn't actually work the majority of the time. And that's because you, as the business owner, need to come up with your marketing strategy before you go and start hiring people to implement the tactics for you.
