Last time I talked about channel focus, specifically why spreading your team across five channels at 20% effort each is almost always worse than showing up properly on two. A few of you replied asking a version of the same question: “We’ve got an agency handling most of this. Does that change the equation?”

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It does. But probably not in the way you’d hope.

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What “we’ve got an agency” usually means in practice

I spoke with three different founders this week. Different industries, different stages, different team sizes. But the same underlying pattern in all three.

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Each of them had outsourced some or all of their marketing execution. An agency handling SEO and ads. A freelancer running social. A small retained team doing content and campaigns. And in every case, when I asked who was making the strategic decisions, the answer was the same.

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The founder.

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Not “the founder with support from the agency.” Not “the agency, based on a clear brief we gave them.” Just the founder, squeezing in decisions between everything else, without a proper brief, without a strategic framework, without a clear picture of what success looks like.

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What they’d bought wasn’t marketing. It was a to-do list with someone else’s hands on it.

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The difference between execution and strategy

This distinction sounds obvious until you’re in it. Then it gets blurry fast.

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Execution is: writing the posts, running the ads, updating the website, building the campaign, reporting the numbers. A good agency can do all of that. Many do.

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Strategy is: deciding who you’re talking to, what you’re saying, why it matters to them, which channels are worth your time, what a conversion looks like, how marketing connects to revenue. That’s not a creative brief. That’s a set of decisions, and they’re yours.

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The mistake is thinking that once execution is off your plate, the strategy will sort itself out. It doesn’t. It just gets quieter. The agency keeps working. The activity keeps happening. But underneath it, the strategic questions are still unanswered, and now they’re harder to see because there’s always something running.

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One of the founders I spoke with this week was spending around £2,000 a month on an agency. Good people. Responsive. Delivering the assets they were asked for. But when I asked what the agency’s brief was, she described a call at the start of every month where she told them what she needed. When I asked who decided what the audience segments were, she said she did, roughly, based on instinct. When I asked how they measured whether any of it was working, she paused.

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She wasn’t getting bad execution. She was getting execution without thinking. And the monthly call where she drove the direction wasn’t strategy. It was the founder doing strategy informally, in the gaps, without realising that was what she was doing.

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What happens to the marketer you hired for the same reason

The same pattern applies when it’s an in-house hire rather than an agency. Junior or mid-level marketers are, by definition, better at doing than deciding. That’s not a criticism. It’s the nature of their experience at that stage.

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What I see repeatedly are marketing team members who are clearly capable, clearly working hard, and operating in near-total isolation from the commercial side of the business. No OKRs. No visibility of the sales pipeline. No clear brief on what the business actually needs marketing to achieve right now. They’re creating content, running ads, managing channels, and making daily decisions about what to prioritise based on whatever feels most urgent.

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That’s not their fault. Nobody made the call. The decisions that would give their work direction were never made, because the founder assumed they’d been delegated when they’d actually just been abandoned.

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The real question to ask your agency next week

Not “what did you produce this month?” Not “what are the numbers?” Those questions keep the activity conversation going.

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The question that cuts to the actual issue is this: if I took myself completely out of the loop, would you know what to do next month?

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If the answer is no, or a hesitant yes, you haven’t delegated your marketing. You’ve just hired someone to wait for your instructions.

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That might be fine if you have the time and clarity to give good instructions consistently. Most founders at this stage don’t. Which is why the activity keeps running, the costs keep accumulating, and the results stay stubbornly disconnected from the work going in.

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The one thing to do this week

Pick one area of your marketing that’s currently being handled by an agency, freelancer, or junior team member. Then ask yourself: if they needed to make a strategic decision without me, what would they base it on?

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If the answer is “nothing written down” or “they’d have to guess,” that’s your gap. Not an execution gap. A decision gap. And it’s yours to close, not theirs.

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The good news is that this kind of clarity doesn’t take months to create. A focused brief, a clear ICP, an agreed-upon definition of what you’re trying to achieve right now — that’s often enough to change what your team does with the budget you’re already spending.

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Drop me an email if this sounds familiar. I’m genuinely interested in what the pattern looks like in your business.

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P.S. Next week: a founder came to us convinced they needed a new agency. What they actually needed took two weeks and cost a fraction of the retainer. I’ll walk through exactly what we found and what changed.‍