Phone's not ringing like it used to. Your first instinct is to call your marketing agency and chew somebody out. Sometimes you're right. A lot of the time you're not. Here's how to tell which one it actually is, in the order that saves you the most money.
Phone's not ringing like it used to. The estimates you're closing feel smaller. The crew's asking when the next job starts.
Your first instinct is to call your marketing agency and chew somebody out.
Sometimes you're right. A lot of the time you're not.
I've been on both sides of this. I ran a hardscape crew for ten years and hired marketing agencies along the way. Most of them left a lot to be desired. Big promises, weak follow-through, fancy words around average work. Then I became the guy running marketing for contractors, and I got to see the other side too. The times the owner was the bottleneck. The times the market shifted and nobody noticed. The times the agency actually was the problem.
Before you fire anyone, including yourself, you need to know which one it is.
They can overlap. A soft market makes every agency look worse and every owner mistake hurt more. But before you blame any of them, you need to know which one is actually pulling your numbers down.
Here's how to check each. In order.
This is the one most contractors never check. And it's the one that burns the most agencies unfairly.
Google search demand for your services changes month to month and year to year. Seasonality. Economy. Interest rates. Local housing market. When that demand drops, your phone drops with it. That's not your agency's fault and it's not your fault either.
Here's a real example from a couple weeks ago.
I ran a market demand scan for a contractor in Asheville, North Carolina. He does retaining walls and outdoor living. His business felt soft. His first thought was the agency.
I pulled 24 months of local Google Ads search data for his whole industry. Compared the last 90 days to the same 90 days one year earlier so seasonality couldn't distort it. Here's what came back:
Every single category in his industry showed growing demand year over year. The market was not the problem.
His market wasn't soft. Demand was higher than last year across the board. So if his business was down, the answer wasn't in the market bucket. It was in one of the other two.
That's the point of this check. You run the demand scan first. If the market is flat or down in your category, you've got your answer and you stop blaming everyone else. If the market is up, you move on to the next bucket.
Most contractors skip this step entirely. They feel slow, they assume the market is slow, they make big decisions based on a gut feeling. Sometimes they're right. A lot of the time the market is fine and they just torched their relationship with a decent agency.
Put in your city and your trade. I'll pull the actual Google search demand numbers for your industry in your area, compared year over year. No sales pitch, no signup wall beyond your email so I can send you the report.
Run my market scan →Market data is free. Run it first. It either ends the conversation or points you to the next step.Rule one of the diagnosis
If the market is up and your business is down, an agency problem is on the table.
Here's how to check without taking their word for it.
Log into it right now. When did they last post? When was the last photo uploaded? Are your services, attributes, and categories all filled out? If you haven't seen activity in 60 days, somebody isn't doing the work.
Search your main service plus your city. Are you showing up in the map results? Where? Is it worse than it was six months ago? A good agency tracks this with a grid scan so you can see exactly where you rank across your whole service area, not just from your office.
Ask for a Google Analytics report. Pull the last 12 months. If traffic is falling off while demand is rising, somebody is missing the work. A good agency will show you this without you asking.
Is your agency helping you collect them? Are they responding to them? Or are new ones trickling in without any help? Review volume and freshness move your rankings. If that pipeline is broken, it costs you calls.
Are you getting fewer leads, or fewer closed deals? Agencies get blamed for conversion problems that are actually sales problems. Tracking the difference is their job. Spotting it is yours.
If any of those signals are red and the market is up, you've got an agency problem. Not every contractor has a bad agency. But when you do, it usually shows up in two or three of these checks at once.
A good agency should be able to prove what they're doing. If they can't, they're probably not doing it.
Market is up. Agency checks out. The problem might be you.
I say this as somebody who spent a decade as the owner on the hook. No agency can fix what only the owner controls. And the stuff that only the owner controls is usually the stuff that actually moves the needle.
Here's the short list of things that kill contractor businesses and have nothing to do with marketing.
That's five. I've got at least five more, and they're each worth their own breakdown. Following up with past customers. Tracking where your leads actually come from. Training a repeatable sales process instead of winging every estimate. Being present on your Google Business Profile. Doing what you said you'd do, when you said you'd do it.
These are the ones you can't outsource. And they're almost always the real difference between two companies in the same market with the same agency, where one is growing and the other is dying.
The full list of ten is the next post. If you want it when it drops, the newsletter's at the bottom of this page.
You can also do all three at once if you've got the time. But if you only do one, make it the first one. Market data is free, it's fast, and it either ends the conversation or points you to the next step.
Most contractors skip straight to blaming the agency because it feels good. It's a shortcut. And shortcuts are expensive.
Run the demand scan for your trade and your city. It's free and it takes about a minute. Then subscribe so you don't miss the follow-up post on the ten things no agency can fix for you.