I’ll tell you something most agencies won’t: a lot of marketing is built to be very good at one thing, and it isn’t growing your business. It’s maximizing the invoice.
I know this because I used to be very good at it myself.
Early in my career, my team and I took a parenting brand from zero to three million euros in two years, on fewer than ten products. I’d found what makes people say yes — and for a while, I used that without asking hard enough questions about who I was using it on. I’m an honest man. I don’t believe in taking someone’s hard-earned money for something they don’t need. But I’d done exactly that, more than once, because I was good enough at the job to make it feel fine in the moment. Eventually the gap between what I was doing and who I actually was got too wide to ignore, and I walked away from marketing entirely for a while to sit with that.
When I came back to this work, it was with one rule I haven’t broken since: I only recommend what a business actually needs. Not what pads the invoice. Not what keeps a client dependent on me for longer than they should be. What actually moves their business forward.
How “extraction” usually shows up
It rarely looks like fraud. It looks like a perfectly normal-sounding sales process, and that’s exactly what makes it hard to spot from the outside:
The scope keeps growing. You come in for a website. Somehow you leave with a website, a social media package you didn’t ask about, an SEO retainer you don’t understand, and a monthly ad management fee — each one pitched separately, each one sounding reasonable on its own, adding up to a bill nobody actually planned for.
The pricing is a mystery until it isn’t. You fill out a form. Someone calls you. Then calls again. Then wants a “quick chat” before they’ll give you a number. That process isn’t about understanding your needs — it’s about building enough rapport that the eventual price feels less negotiable by the time it arrives.
The relationship is designed to be sticky, not useful. Some agencies build systems that are quietly hard to leave — proprietary platforms, unclear ownership of your own content, contracts that auto-renew into the next tier. The incentive isn’t “keep this client happy enough that they choose to stay.” It’s “make staying easier than leaving.”
None of this requires anyone to be a bad person. It’s just what happens when the business model rewards the invoice getting bigger instead of the client’s business getting healthier. Incentives do a lot of quiet damage.
What the opposite actually looks like
The alternative isn’t complicated, which is probably why it’s rare — it’s just inconvenient for anyone optimizing for revenue per client instead of results per client.
Pricing is public, before you ever talk to me. You shouldn’t have to sit through a sales call to find out what something costs. My pricing is published, the quote you get is fast, and the number I give you is the number you pay — no follow-up chasing, no hidden line items later.
I tell you what you don’t need. If a full system is more than your business needs right now, I’ll say so. Sustainable growth at a fair price beats a padded invoice every time — not just ethically, but practically, because a client who got exactly what they needed is a client who comes back.
Nothing about the relationship depends on you being unable to leave. Every plan includes an ongoing advisor call because I want to be useful enough that you’d choose to keep working with me — not locked into an arrangement that’s expensive to exit.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it should
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a business owner usually can’t tell the difference between good marketing and extractive marketing from the outside. Both come with a confident pitch. Both promise growth. Both can point to some kind of results. The difference only shows up later — in whether your invoice grew faster than your business did, and in whether the person you hired was still telling you the truth once they had your trust.
I built my agency around one test I hold myself to: would I recommend this to a friend, at this price, for this reason — or am I recommending it because it’s good for me? If it’s the second one, I don’t sell it. That’s not a slogan. It’s the actual reason I left this industry once, and the only condition under which I was willing to come back to it.
If you’ve ever felt like an agency was selling you the version of “growth” that happened to be good for their retainer — you’re not imagining it, and you’re not the problem. Find someone whose incentives are actually pointed at your business doing well, not just at your invoice getting bigger. That’s the whole basis I want to be judged on.