The call starts the same way every time.
The founder is polite. Professional. A little guarded. They've been referred or they found us through a piece of content, and they want to talk about their marketing, and there's something underneath their voice that I've learned to listen for. A tightness. Like they're holding a door closed with one hand and knocking on a new door with the other.
About ten minutes in, after the small talk, after the overview of their business, after the rehearsed version of what they're looking for, the door opens.
"I don't trust my agency. But I don't know enough to fire them."
I've heard that sentence, or a version of it, from over forty founders. Different industries. Different revenue levels. Different agencies. Same ache.
Let me describe the ache. Because it has a specific shape, and nobody talks about it honestly, and I think someone should.
You're a founder. You built something. Maybe from scratch, maybe from a family business, maybe from an opportunity that showed up sideways and you grabbed it with both hands. The business works. It makes money. It employs people. It's real.
And at some point, the business gets big enough that you need marketing help. Not just a logo or a website. Real help. Campaigns. Funnels. Ad spend. Strategy. The stuff that's supposed to turn the thing you built into the thing it could become.
So you hire an agency.
The agency is polished. They have a deck. They have case studies. They have a process with a name, something like "The Growth Accelerator Blueprint" or "The Revenue Catalyst Framework." The name doesn't matter. They all have one. And the deck looks good, and the people seem smart, and they use words you don't fully understand but that sound like they know what they're doing.
You sign. You pay. Somewhere between $3,000 and $15,000 a month, depending on the size of your ambition and the size of their pitch.
And then you wait.
Here's what happens next, in almost every conversation I've had.
The first month is exciting. There's a kickoff call. There's an onboarding process. There's a shared Slack channel or a project management board with your name on it. Things are moving. You feel the momentum.
The second month is quieter. There's a report. The report has numbers in it. The numbers are presented in a way that sounds positive, but you're not entirely sure what they mean. Impressions. Reach. Click-through rate. Cost per click. The agency walks you through it. They use phrases like "trending in the right direction" and "building momentum" and "early signals are encouraging."
You nod. You don't fully understand. You don't say that.
The third month, maybe the fourth, the ache starts.
It starts as a question you don't ask: is this working?
Not "are the numbers going up." Numbers can go up and mean nothing. Impressions can double while revenue stays flat. The question is: is this actually making my business better? And you realize, with a feeling that's closer to shame than frustration, that you don't know how to tell.
I talked to a home services founder in February. He'd been with his agency for fourteen months. He was paying $8,500 a month. He told me:
"Every month I get a report that's like reading a different language. They tell me things are going well. I look at my bank account. I can't connect the report to the bank account. And when I ask them to explain it, they explain it in a way that makes me feel stupid for asking."
That's the ache. Right there. It's not anger. It's not even frustration, not at first. It's a specific kind of loneliness. You're paying someone a significant amount of money to do something you can't evaluate, and the gap between what they tell you and what you experience is a gap you can't cross because you don't have the vocabulary.
Another founder, e-commerce, told me: "I asked them why our cost per acquisition went up 40% in one month. They said it was seasonal. I asked what season. They changed the subject."
Another one, a SaaS founder: "They keep telling me about impressions. I don't sell impressions. I sell subscriptions. When I ask about subscriptions, they tell me that's downstream and they can't be responsible for what happens after the click. So what are they responsible for?"
Another: "I've had three account managers in eleven months. Every time I get a new one, I have to re-explain my business from scratch. But the invoice never changes."
Here's what's underneath all of these conversations, the thing nobody says in the pitch meeting, the thing that only comes out at minute ten of a call with a stranger:
The founder feels trapped.
They don't trust the agency. But they don't know enough to evaluate whether the agency is actually bad or just bad at communicating. And the risk of leaving, of firing the agency and going through the whole process again with someone new, feels enormous. Because what if the next one is worse? What if the next one is the same? What if the problem isn't the agency at all but the founder's inability to understand marketing, and they'll just end up in the same position with a different logo on the invoice?
Ernest Becker wrote about how humans build immortality projects to manage the terror of death. Your business is your immortality project. The thing that outlives you. The thing that carries your name and your work and your choices into a future you won't see. And you've handed that project to someone who treats it like a line item on a spreadsheet.
That's the ache. It's existential. It's not about marketing metrics. It's about watching someone else hold the thing you built and realizing they don't hold it the way you do. They can't. It's not theirs.
Girard helps explain why switching agencies getting the same thing again so often feels like nothing changed.
The agency industry is mimetic. Profoundly, structurally mimetic. Agencies watch each other. They copy each other's positioning. They hire each other's people. They use the same tools, attend the same conferences, read the same blogs, adopt the same frameworks, and speak the same language.
This means that when a founder fires Agency A and hires Agency B, they're often getting the same operating system with a different skin. The pitch sounds different. The deck looks different. The personality of the account manager is different. But the underlying methodology, if there is one, is built from the same components because Agency B learned from the same sources Agency A learned from.
The founder doesn't know this. They just know it feels familiar. They just know that three months into the new relationship, they're getting reports they can't read and answers that don't connect to their bank account. Again. And the shame deepens, because now they've been through two agencies and the common denominator is them.
Girard would say: the rivalry between agencies is a mimetic rivalry. They're competing for the same clients by offering the same thing in the same way, which means the competition drives them toward convergence, not differentiation. The more agencies compete, the more alike they become. The more alike they become, the more interchangeable they are. The more interchangeable they are, the more trapped the founder feels, because leaving for a competitor isn't leaving at all.
It's switching seats on the same bus.
I want to be careful here. I'm describing a pattern, not a universal. There are good agencies. Agencies that communicate clearly, that tie their work to business outcomes, that treat the founder's company with the seriousness it deserves. I know some of them. I respect them.
But the pattern is real. And the reason I know it's real is that forty different founders, in forty different conversations, with zero coordination, described the same experience with the same emotional texture. Same ache. Same shame. Same trapped feeling. Same sentence: "I don't trust them but I don't know enough to fire them."
When forty people independently describe the same wound, the wound is real.
So why does it happen? Not the emotional story. The mechanical story. What's actually broken in the agency model that produces this ache so reliably?
Three things. I think it's three things.
The knowledge asymmetry is structural. The agency knows marketing. The founder knows their business. These are different knowledge domains, and the agency has zero incentive to close the gap. If the founder understood marketing well enough to evaluate the agency's work, the founder wouldn't need the agency. So the agency's business model depends on the founder staying in the dark. Not maliciously. Not as a strategy. As a byproduct. The expertise gap is the moat, and nobody fills their own moat.★
The metrics are disconnected from the outcome. Agencies report on what they control: impressions, clicks, cost per click, ad frequency, creative engagement. Founders care about what matters: revenue, profit, customers, growth. The gap between these two sets of numbers is where the ache lives. The agency can show improvement in their metrics while the founder sees no improvement in theirs, and neither side is lying. They're just measuring different things and pretending they're the same thing.
The incentive structure rewards retention, not results. The agency makes money when the founder keeps paying. Month after month. The agency does not make money when the founder's problem gets solved. A solved problem is a canceled contract. So the incentive, again not maliciously but structurally, is to keep the founder dependent. To keep the work ongoing. To keep the reports just complex enough that the founder can't tell whether progress is happening or whether "progress" is a word the agency uses to mean "we're still here."
This is why we built the Verdict.
I'm not going to pitch it here. This isn't a sales letter. But I want to explain what it is because it came directly from these conversations, from sitting with this ache forty times and asking: what would actually help?
The Verdict is an audit. An independent evaluation of a founder's current marketing, performed by someone who doesn't have a retainer to protect. It looks at the ads, the landing pages, the funnel, the messaging, the data, and it tells the founder, in plain language, what's working, what isn't, and what the numbers actually mean.
It's designed for the person who says "I don't trust them but I don't know enough to fire them." Because the problem isn't trust. The problem is information. The founder doesn't have enough information to make a decision, and the person who should be providing that information is the same person whose income depends on the decision going a particular way.
The Verdict breaks that loop. Not by replacing the agency. By giving the founder the vocabulary to evaluate the agency. Sometimes the Verdict reveals that the agency is actually doing good work and just communicating it badly. That's happened. Sometimes it reveals that the agency is spending $4,000 a month on campaigns that haven't generated a lead in six weeks. That's also happened.
Either way, the founder gets to stop guessing. And the ache, the specific ache of not knowing, starts to dissolve. Not because someone gave them an answer. Because someone gave them enough understanding to form their own answer.
I keep thinking about Becker.
The Denial of Death. The idea that everything humans build, every institution, every company, every brand, every legacy, is fundamentally an attempt to create something that survives our own mortality. We can't live forever, so we build things that can.
The founder who starts a business is engaged in this project whether they know it or not. The business is the thing that carries their work forward. The thing that says "I was here and I made this and it mattered."
And then they hand it to an agency. And the agency treats it like an account. Account number 47. The Tuesday morning status call between the Monday morning status call and the Wednesday morning status call. The founder's immortality project becomes someone else's Tuesday.
That's not a communication problem. That's not a metrics problem. That's a meaning problem. The founder and the agency are not in the same conversation. The founder is talking about their life's work. The agency is talking about Q2 performance.
I don't know how to fix the agency industry. I'm not sure it wants to be fixed. Mimetic systems are self-reinforcing. The agencies that succeed are the ones that look like successful agencies, which means looking like each other, which means the differentiation that would actually help founders is the differentiation that the market punishes.
But I know what the ache feels like. I've sat with it forty times. I've heard the crack in the voice when someone finally says the thing they haven't said to anyone, the thing they were ashamed to say because it felt like admitting they're in over their head.
You're not in over your head. You're in a system that's designed to make you feel that way. Not by villains. By incentives. By structures. By a mimetic industry that converged on a model that serves the agency's interests and calls it "best practices."
The ache is real. The shame is misplaced. And the first step out of it isn't hiring a new agency or firing the old one. It's getting enough information to know the difference between a partner and a passenger.
I don't have a neat ending for this. The forty-first founder is calling next week.