Why Specialist Agencies Make You Manage Six Vendors Who Can't See Each Other's Work

“What are you going to do in there?” The engineer had a look of suspicion and concern on his face. I had just asked him to grant me access to a nonprofit’s Google Tag Manager account.

“Just QC, bro. I would never make any changes without working with you first and scheduling a time to coordinate so you can verify and make sure nothing breaks.”

His face softened and then he explained his worry: just a few weeks prior to my arrival, the org’s entire website had crashed because a contractor had installed an analytics tool in GTM without looking for conflicts or considering performance impact and without working with IT. And this was during the business’ peak selling season when the greatest concentration of high-dollar conversions were happening.

After my engineer buddy and I established our inter-departmental SLA and commiserated on the annoyance of over-sharing of unqualified admin-level access across uncoordinated departments, he granted me admin access. What I found was quite concerning: there were maybe 20 admin-level accounts, some of which were from vendors the org hadn’t worked with for years.

IT and I worked together to determine which contractors still needed to have GTM access; then we did the much trickier work of determining who in the company was really qualified and really needed access. I removed everyone else either quietly or with a quick update email depending on the person. Finally, we created a process that every contractor was required to go through before making any tag changes. As a bonus we even scrubbed some old tag containers that were no longer needed.

Beautifully, no one complained, and the problem was solved.

Well, I should say this version of the problem was solved. Google Tag Manager may have been secured but we still had many other versions of the “too many contractors managed by too many departments” problem to solve.

Nobody Owns the Seams

Even companies with 20 or more team members often don’t have a system where they can coordinate their relationships with contractors. Raise a hand if you’ve ever run into one of these problems:

The Own Goal: Multiple departments working with their own ad agencies end up spending ad money to compete with each other for the same keywords
Dueling Brands: A nonprofit fundraising team hires their own graphic designers, creating their own branding assets while the marketing team is working with another agency to try desperately to rein in the brand.
SEOpocalypse: A well-meaning UX designer redesigns and relaunches your website, but no one tells them to work with the SEO vendor who has been working for months to grow organic search. The site relaunches without a careful plan and 50% of SEO equity is burned in the process (true story).
The Pile-up: No one owns DNS so everyone does. A CRM sending on your mail subdomain here, a newsletter doing the same there, and soon enough SPF, the record that lists who may send as you and is limited to ten lookups, is quietly pushed past the limit. Email authentication fails for all tools using the sending domains at once and only days to weeks later does someone notice spam rates have skyrocketed.
The Rashomon: The executive team gets three different KPIs reports from three different departments who are working with three different agencies. Which story is true?

This can all happen because, without coordination, specialists create seams. Each specialist stays in their lane and no one makes sure they’re all working together.

So who owns the seams? Who in your business knows where contractors overlap or are redundant? Who knows where the toes to avoid stepping on are? These problems can be solved within organizations that work with a large number of vendors, but you have to be intentional about it. And for certain teams, the benefits will be found in keeping the number of vendors low by finding agencies that cover a wide range of disciplines while maintaining technical excellence. Remember, the more vendors you work with, the more of a job it becomes to keep track of them all. Who are you paying to do that job?

Beyond the seams, there are three more underappreciated reasons why working with multidisciplinary agencies can help your business:

You Pay the Mobilization Cost Every Time

When I was a kid I worked for a landscaping company and I distinctly remember my boss teaching me about the concept of “mobilization cost.” He told me that, all in, it cost something like one thousand dollars just to gear up and gas up and mobilize his crew and to show up to the jobsite. This was one reason he had a minimum job size; the job had to be big enough to warrant his mobilization cost.

Mobilization Costs

Marketing agencies have their mobilization costs as well. If you hire a different agency for eight different digital services, you end up paying their mobilization fee eight times. If you hire an agency that can do six to eight of those services, then you only pay to onboard them once. After that you’re just paying for services and outcomes.

What do mobilization costs look like on your invoice? Higher rates, minimums, onboarding time, and set-up fees.

Time and Energy Costs

An operator can save a lot of time and energy as well as money by working with a multi-talented agency. Fewer 1099s, fewer meetings and phone calls and emails, fewer people to keep track of. There is a real coordination tax in managing a large number of vendors.

Security Costs

It can seem like digital security is just an IT problem but every employee should own their slice of the security pie. It’s underappreciated just how much power an agency can have over essential business assets like brand, email list, credentials, domain name, and much more. Many of these security concerns can carry legal risk as well. If a naughty vendor decides it’s a good idea to sell or send to your list or if an email list is thoughtlessly stored on an unencrypted Google Drive and shared with multiple parties, that’s on you. By using fewer agencies, your business’ risk surface is decreased. You only need to grant one agency access to your email system or analytics or tag manager.

Good Partnerships Compound

Just as a good friendship gets better as you share more and more of your life with your friend, a good agency partnership gets better the longer you work together. And while you can gain some of these compounding benefits by simply working with lots of vendors over a long time period, the value really begins to accrue when concentrated with fewer agencies across more of your digital platforms. All of this assumes you’ve hired an agency that wants real partnership with you rather than a quick paycheck and a “see ya later.”

Some of the ways long-term relationships with your agency improve over time:

They learn your brand at a deeper level, allowing them to write better copy, design better ads, reach better audiences, and suggest better partnerships and channels.
They know your culture and rhythms, allowing them to contribute to your culture rather than clash with it.
You get to know each other on a personal level, creating a more fulfilling, harmonious work environment.
Your shared learnings compound over time. While it’s important to solve the problem of organizational learning and knowledge management so that you’re not reinventing the wheel every time you run an experiment. Nonetheless, so much of the knowledge of your teams will always reside in your people.
The longer you work with an agency who knows your whole digital program rather than just their specialist niche, the more you build up a real brain trust that results in greater and greater efficiencies over time.

You Don’t Know What to Ask For

The fog of war can shroud the marketplace just as it does the battlefield. You don’t know what you don’t know. If you’re a busy entrepreneur, tending to the development of your team, sales, operations, payroll, and the thousand things that growing your business requires, you don’t also have the time to stay abreast of the latest SaaS tool, marketing channel, search engine algorithm update, viral video format, etc. etc. So what you need is an agency who makes such things their bread and butter and can keep you updated only on the things relevant to your goals.

But if you only work with specialist agencies, you’ll miss out on so much discovery because a specialist can mostly tell you about what’s happening in their industry. The thing is, all the digital parts tend to influence each other. One digital tool tends to domino into the next; an email conversion leads to a webpage conversion. If you work with an end-to-end digital agency, they can raise issues that never would have made it onto your shopping list. This effect multiplies if you can bring them in earlier in the planning phase of any given project.

Who Feels the Coordination Tax First

So cui bono? Not every business is equally in need of a full-suite marketing agency and not every business can take advantage of the benefits we’ve described equally. Small teams, early-stage businesses, nonprofits that have notoriously over-burdened marketing teams, or solo-entrepreneurs who don’t want a lot of employees, can all benefit from the full-suite marketing agency efficiencies we’ve described.

We can also think about this from a cash flow perspective. Are you trying to improve cash flow? When you think about the coordination tax of working with multiple agencies, does it sting when you think about where else you could deploy those precious dollars? Then a full-suite agency may be a better fit for you.

If your org has most of the skills already in-house then you may just need a specialist who can fill the gaps. And a business that’s large and well-organized enough to have a system for vendor management may avoid many of the pitfalls of having too many agencies.

When a Specialist Is the Right Call

Let’s consider some of the objections to the case we’ve made thus far. We like intellectual honesty around here so let’s discuss some of the counterpoints.

First, the phrase, “jack of all trades master of none,” is famous for a reason. While you might be saving money and potentially compounding growth by working with fewer agencies who do more, what you want to avoid is the contractor who is eager to please and says “I can take care of that” to any given digital problem, but who ultimately lacks the expertise required to give you the quality of work you need. Think of the graphic designer who makes amazing logos but doesn’t understand UX or content and strategy-driven websites. Think of the SEO who knows how to increase your rankings but doesn’t know the nuances of DNS records and deliverability and yet offers to help with your email program anyway.

Second, a specialist can bring depth of experience and a singular focus that makes them the best at what they do, and sometimes that’s what you need: a person who does one thing really well. And some highly complex jobs require specialization that even the best full-suite marketing agency simply won’t be able to accomplish. For instance, choosing and setting up complex CRMs for businesses with multiple sales teams and complex funnels may warrant a CRM specialist who knows the ins and outs of the tools and industry.

The best-case scenario here is when you run into a job that requires a specialist, you’re already working with an end-to-end agency who can coordinate with them and make sure their specialized project fits in correctly with your larger digital program. And you need an agency that is honest and willing to tell you when they don’t know something or are out of their depth. This is really your best answer to the “nobody owns the seams” problem.

Third, watch out for a full-suite agency that uses their multidisciplinary approach as an excuse to sell you services you don’t need, can’t afford, or aren’t ready for. A good agency is not just technically adept across a wide range of disciplines, a good agency is an ethical agency who actually cares about you, your team members, and your business. The fact that an agency can do more things for you doesn’t mean they should.

Fourth, watch out for vendor lock-in! You never want to need a hostage negotiator to get out of a relationship with a vendor. If you work with one agency who holds the keys to nearly every aspect of your businesses’ digital world, they have a lot of power. Make sure that as many of your accounts and tools as possible are held and controlled by you so your multi-disciplinary agency doesn’t become a multi-disciplinary tyrant.

Breadth vs Bluffing

Not every agency or contractor who offers to do more work for you is trying to fleece you. Many of us really like to solve problems for our clients and offer to do more in good faith; but a good-faith offer is not necessarily a qualified offer. So how do you qualify them?

Here’s a short checklist of questions you can ask to help you vet any given agency, vendor, or contractor that is offering to help you with any given project. Any good pro will be okay with being asked these questions, especially early on in your relationship:

What have you actually done in this discipline? Good answer: Stories with outcomes. Bad answer: “Congratulations! You’re customer number one!”
Who can I talk to that you’ve worked with? Good answer: A real client they’re proud to refer you to. Bad answer: “Ummm, all our clients are confidential.”
What do you not do? What would you refer out? Good answer: something concrete. Bad answer: “We will literally do your laundry if you pay us,” or “Oh well we really know everything and can always watch YouTube or ask GPT if there’s something we don’t know.”

Monday Morning: Map Your Vendors

Here’s a Monday-morning exercise that will help you think more clearly about your mix of contractors and agencies:

List every vendor you have and who has access to what. I bet there are more than six. Are there any old admin accounts that can be removed?
Consider the gaps and overlaps in the digital agencies you work with. What’s missing and what’s redundant?
Think about the next steps you want to take in marketing and technology. Do you already have the partners you need? Do you need a new agency who will replace some of your current vendors while increasing scope? Do you need a specialist?

Sometimes we don’t really need to change anything or hire or fire anyone; we just need to take a little time and space to think and to get perspective. I encourage you to make time for little exercises like these; they’re the difference between being calm and thoughtful or harried and frantic in your entrepreneurship.