This is a YouTube video titled "Want Real Roofing Growth? DON’T Hire an Agency Blindly" created in July 2025. The content features Adam Sand, CEO of the Roofing Business Partner, explaining in a detailed monologue the true costs and operational structure of marketing agencies, particularly for roofing businesses. He discusses roles within agencies, the impact of AI, pricing models, and advice on partnering with or eventually building in-house marketing teams. The video is an educational presentation aimed at roofing business owners to better understand agency services and avoid common pitfalls.
Have you ever wondered where does your $5,000 per month marketing retainer really go? I'm Adam Sand, CEO of the Roofing business Partner. Today we break down the true cost of running a legit agency and how to finally partner with pros who actually grow your roofing business.
So then it's important to understand what does it cost to actually run an agency. What are the roles that you need in a marketing agency? Well, you gotta have CEO, then you have to have someone who sells the marketing to you. And this is important for you to know. If you don't respect the fact that the agency is a business, they're not going to treat you like that. They're going to need someone to sell you the marketing. So there's going to be a commission that they have to pay. They're going to have to have someone to babysit your emotions, right? Like they have to have some kind of account manager. That's why I say am 80 to 100k. They need some kind of account manager that is capable of running marketing, who has got experience in running campaigns, strategizing marketing. Then you're going to have to have someone to write content, right? 60 95k. This job is getting decimated by AI. Currently writing content, it's not worth what it once was. Now you're more like a proof proving AI generated content and strategizing on content. But this role is getting decimated by AI. But still someone has to do something. Then you have to have someone to design things, right? Someone who has to make things look good because if it doesn't look good, it's not appealing. So you have to have somebody design. I wouldn't say it's quite getting destroyed by AI like writing is, but it's getting optimized. With AI as agencies, we have to figure out ways to use AI. It's the only way for us to be able to put out the level of creative that's possible and remain price competitive. You also need someone to run the pay per click and meta ads. Now even this is now getting some impact from AI which is bringing down the cost a bit because you have to run the meta ads, but then you also have to manage them. This is getting to be a little bit more optimized and then someone to do SEO stuff, right? So technical back end SEO and then there's a lot of times there's nerdy backend developer things, not necessarily for you as a roofer, but you know, some agencies will still need to have that person on staff to do stuff because if you have a lot of websites under management, there's DNS settings and there's proxying things and doing all these different privacy things. So sometimes they'll have this on a contractor basis, but a large agency would have somebody literally doing nothing other than just provisioning technical parts of the actual agency work to make sure the technical part's taken care of. And then a lot of times you need someone to manage all these people. Like you're gonna need hr, you're gonna need people to manage these people. Depending on the size you know you're gonna spend, however much. So if you think about it, human resources cost is 550k plus the salesperson plus the CEO. If you divide that by 85, you have 6.5 full time equivalent employees. Well, an agency runs the same way as a roofing company. You have to earn a revenue per capita. Now it's only around 250,000 revenue per capita. But to have those six and a half employees, you got to do 1.6 million in revenue, which if you're running $5,000 per month accounts, you need 27 accounts. If you're going to say, have a rule of no more than eight accounts per account manager, they need more account managers than you have. So for every input of human effort and service demands a requisite increase in price. And again, this is so you understand what you're buying from. So, so it's important to know, understand, respect and empathize with the agency that you hire. What do they have on staff? What is the service level agreement that you can expect? Now if you never want to get trapped an agency, there's a guy named Alex Hormozy. He writes about this in A hundred million Dollar leads and he says if you want to avoid the agency trap, you gotta be willing to learn and eventually build in house people. But I wouldn't say this is what you do at 3 million, I would say this is what you do at 30 million. Because at 3 million you gotta figure out service market fit. You gotta replicate the human DNA that's needed to grow your company. It's not the time to start bringing your marketing in house. And I'm not saying that because I have a bias or anything. I'm saying you only have so much attention that you can give. You should probably focus on the main thing, which is growing your business. So things to look for are they running a profitable agency. Remember the virtuous cycle of price. You want your marketer to value your business, so put yourself in their shoes. You want your marketer to make lots of money off you, so they don't want to lose you as a client. And they will be doing the virtuous cycle of trying to do more for you because they want to keep you as a customer. You want to make sure they have the right people on staff to help you. If they don't have people on staff to help you, you are in trouble. That's why the min a key teammate left our marketing agency. We went into full bore recruitment, talent acquisition, business development, connections, you know, reaching out to networks. Because I don't want our customers to go 5 days, 10 days, 20 days without the key people in the business to do the work. And they must either know your industry or be very talented at learning about industries and their needs. So if they're not a roofing specific agency, then you want somebody who is very proven way of onboarding you so that they get a very clear understanding of your industry. Now if they're not in your industry, you're the expert. You're the one that's teaching them. They're the mechanic, the mechanics, they're the strategists, they're the operators, but you're the expert. Then there are lots of tools they need. You want to make sure they have them and you want to read the reviews. This is something that I did and then I've learned that Alex Hormozi put it into practice, which is the way to absorb marketing knowledge like I did when I had a roofing company, which is that you have time versus money. You're going to pay with the currency you value the least. If you value time more then you want to use money. If you value money more, then you're going to use time, right? The currency you value the least is what you spend. So if you are using money to accelerate the time, you want to make sure that at least you learn the basics and then level up the agency when you've outgrown them. So then you start documenting, you hire and train and you co create with the agency, possibly level up the agency again, but eventually run your own shit and innovate.
