Phil RisherPhlash Consulting · No. 1 Digital Marketing Consulting Company For $1m-10m Home Service Businesses 🚀

If an agency only tells you what’s broken, they’re not the right agency

11 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:03

In this monologue, Phil Risher expresses frustration with marketing agencies that merely point out problems without offering concrete solutions or measurable outcomes. He recounts an experience where a pitch‑deck agency criticized his already‑growing business (30% YoY growth) by highlighting issues like broken SEO, 404 pages, and site speed, despite his success. Risher contrasts this with agencies that provide balanced feedback: they acknowledge what’s working, suggest specific improvements, explain why those changes matter, and project tangible business results (e.g., adding a call‑to‑action that could generate 20 extra leads). He emphasizes that the hallmark of a good marketing partner is outcome‑driven guidance rather than endless criticism.

Chapters

I hate marketing people. They are so annoying because every call that you get on, they're going to tell you why something is bad that you've done. I remember the first time I got on a call with a marketing company that was trying to pitch me on their services, and they basically just like chewed up all my marketing stuff and said how bad it was. And the crazy thing is my business was growing 30% year over year, and they were saying how my marketing sucked, my SEO was broken, my 404 pages, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what I found was the companies that are actually good at marketing, They're going to tell you that this is good, here's what you're doing well, here's the thing that you can make an update to, and here's the outcome that you're going to achieve if you make that update. The reason is because every single marketing company is going to have their own take on things, but the companies that are actually good will not just tell you that your stuff's bad, they'll tell you how to fix it, why to fix it, and then the ultimate outcome that it's going to provide for your business in real tangible things. Not just like, oh, your website is slow, so if you speed it up and you do this, then you're going to get more leads. But like, hey, if you add this call to action onto your website, you're going to generate 20 more leads from it based off of how many people you have coming to your website.