Manual 5 · Vendor Defense · 5.12
How to know when it's time to fire
your marketing company
The answer first, before the story. You fire a marketing company when the calls that turn into jobs still aren't coming, and they can't tell you why in words you understand. Not when one slow week rattles you — when the phone has stayed quiet for months and their only answer is a chart.
The decision itself is yours: a judgment and a phone call nobody can make for you. Digging up the report and the numbers is screen work; hand that to whoever runs your internet. And if you haven't hired anyone yet, read on anyway — the same test grades any company before you sign.
First, rule out the boring reasons
A company deserves real time to prove out. So before you decide they're the problem, clear the two reasons the phone can go quiet that have nothing to do with them.
One is the season, your prices, or a market that just went cold. That one's cheap to check: ask two trades in town who don't compete with you whether their phone is quiet too. Search work is also slow. Google's starter guide, as of July 2026, says some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months — and that you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work helped. That word, "months," is also the one a company reaches for when it has nothing to show. So don't settle it on a calendar. Settle it on paper: pull the proposal and the first two reports. If the wait was spelled out at signing, it's a wait. If "months" only showed up after the phone went quiet, it's a stall. The line between patience and being played is a whole page of its own: reading the report.
The other reason is a broken pipe on your own end. Before you blame anyone, make sure the leads aren't quietly dying at your door, in a contact form wired to an email nobody checks. One plumber found his site had been sending enquiries to a dead address for who knows how long, which he figured was why things had "been quiet lately". Changing the address that form mails to is small screen work — if you can get into the site. Plenty of owners can't, because the company they're about to fire holds the login. Have whoever runs your screens try it today, before you say a word to the company. If it opens, fix the address and test it. If it doesn't, read leaving clean before you ask them for it.
Count what became a job
A dead month and a slow Tuesday feel nothing alike, and you don't need a chart to know which one you're standing in. The week tells you.
That instinct decides this. The dashboard shows you impressions, clicks, "visibility" — all climbing, while the phone sits cold. What those words actually mean, and how they get used to stall you, is the whole job of the report page. Here, you only need one question.
Ask the question a tradesman actually owns: count what's actually landed on the calendar since you hired them, then make them account for the gap. Jobs on the calendar are the whole reason you pay them. The moment you ask it, the doubt turns around. You stop grading yourself and start grading them.
Somewhere in that report is a bar chart throwing a parade for impressions — cheering a number that never put a truck in a driveway by itself.
Why the report never gives you the answer
The report shows a full month of work while the one number that pays you flatlines. That's the shape to watch for: motion everywhere, phone silent.
Say the arrangement out loud and it turns grimly funny: a company cashing a check every month while the phone stays quiet.
Now the part where the words have to be exact. Read what you signed. A marketing agreement can bind you to a fee for a list of activities — pages, posts, "optimization" — and say nothing about a ringing phone. One owner, out more than thirty thousand dollars, read his and found it spelled out: there was "no contractual requirement to actually get me leads".
So a "rankings guarantee" promises you a number, not your money — and nobody can honestly promise you the order Google puts things in. On a comparison site, the "top pick" spot has been sold to the highest bidder. The robocall scripts that pitch guaranteed placement, and the FTC's own ruling against them, are picked apart in the contract red flags.
You don't have to take our word for that. Google puts it in print: no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and beware of anyone selling one. Their page, not ours.
Make the call, in five steps
This is the quit-math. It's short, and it's yours.
- Count the calls that became jobs since you hired them — checked against your own phone, not their tracking number.
- Compare that to before you hired them. Better, the same, or worse?
- Ask them to explain the gap. In writing, even if you also call — email is the one that leaves a copy. Then give it five business days.
- Listen for what they measure in the answer — your number (calls, jobs) or theirs (impressions, rankings).
- Decide. No calls and no straight answer — fire them. Calls up and a straight answer — stay. One without the other — give it one more month with the count running, then run this again.
Since I hired you, how many phone calls and booked jobs came from your work — and how does that compare to before?
A picture for it, if you came up on the tools and not the screen: a bad marketing company is a brick sitting on your brake pedal. You're paying every month to sit still. Pull the brick off the pedal; spending more just floors the gas against it.
Decide before you re-sign
One warning before you pull the trigger. Firing and re-signing on a loop is its own trap. An owner described shopping marketing like shopping insurance every couple of years, just to get the rate back down. That's a reflex. Don't churn to an identical replacement.
Sometimes the honest answer is that a website was never the thing that rings your phone, and some shops run for years on word of mouth without one. If that's you, the money belongs where your jobs actually come from, not with a new company selling the same channel.
And a company worth keeping will sometimes tell you not to spend. One owner's firm talked him out of a bad move because he needed leads that month, not in a year. That's not the one you fire.
When you go to leave, listen for the line they reach for: you're about to turn a corner. You've been about to turn it since the day you signed. It's a corner that backs away exactly as fast as you walk toward it.
Done right, firing is the front half of a smarter hire. The rule an owner sets after a burn is simple: the next firm is one that already made you money, or one that only gets paid when the work does. What you're aiming for is a real owner's version — the one who handed the work to the right person, called it a weight off his shoulders, and watched it pay for itself and grow the business. Relief, then growth. That's the bar.
The decision, made
You gave them time. The metric still didn't move. Jobs on the calendar are the whole reason you pay them.
Staying this long was reasonable. Giving a company a real chance is just how you run a business, and a report full of motion reads like progress one more month at a time. Now you've got the one question they can't answer with a chart.
A few places to go from here. To decode the exact report you're staring at, read how to read the monthly report. Once you've decided to go, leaving clean is the order that gets you out without losing your site, your number, or your reviews, because knowing you should fire them and getting out clean are two different problems, and leaving has its own toll. If money has already been taken that shouldn't have, that's fighting the bill. And the five questions keep the next company from selling you a report instead of a ringing phone.