Phil Risher, founder of Flash Consulting, breaks down how digital marketing agencies shortchange small business owners: burying support in slow email systems, ignoring ad budget optimization, and skipping real ROI analysis by checking actual sales data instead of guessing at average ticket size.
So we come across this all the time. And I wanted to just share with you the three ways that we see digital marketing agencies taking advantage of small business owners. And the reason I actually started Flash Consulting was because I was in a small business as a sales director, and I felt like I was getting taken advantage of. So the first thing, and this is right off the bat, is they have a support email, and they tell you to email that. This was a bane in my existence because if I wanted to do anything, I had to email support. They would email me back in like 48 hours with a ticket number and I'd have to follow up with them. And they're just taking advantage of people because there's a better way to do things than just emailing a support number. The second thing is they actually don't optimize your budgets. Some companies do, some companies don't. A lot of times it's just to set it and forget it. And until you reach out to them with an issue, they're not really looking at your stuff. And then the third thing is that they don't actually look at your roi. A lot of times companies just say, okay, well, your average ticket is this. So you should be getting this amount of return on investment when you should be going into their CRM and analyzing the data.
