I used to be a tradesman. AV installations, home theaters. I hired a marketing company and paid them $1,000 a month. What did I get? A questionnaire attached to a Meta ad. No website. No landing page. No SEO. No Google Business optimization. Just a form and an invoice.
I know exactly what it feels like to hand someone your money and get nothing back. So let me break down what your $1,000 a month is actually buying.
Their Tool Costs
Here's what a typical agency pays for the tools they use on your account:
- SEMrush or Ahrefs (SEO tool): ~$20-30/month per client (they split the cost across 50+ clients)
- Canva Pro: $13/month (split across all clients)
- Scheduling tool: $5-15/month per client
- ChatGPT/AI writing: $20/month (split across all clients)
- Reporting dashboard: $10-20/month per client
Total actual tool cost per client: roughly $40-60 per month.
They're charging you $1,000.
Where the Rest Goes
Overhead. Office space. Account managers. Sales team commissions. The CEO's lease payment. You're not paying for results — you're paying for their business model.
The account manager assigned to your business is also managing 15-30 other accounts. Your business gets maybe 2-3 hours of actual attention per month. That's $330-500 per hour of actual work on your account. For that price, you could hire a specialized freelancer who spends all their time on your business.
What You Should Demand
If you're going to pay an agency, demand transparency:
- How many hours per month are spent specifically on your account?
- What exactly are they doing each month? Not "optimizing" — specific actions.
- Access to everything — every login, every account, every analytics dashboard. If they won't give you access to your own Google Ads account, that's a red flag the size of Texas.
- Ownership — if you leave, do you keep the website? The ad accounts? The content? If not, you're renting, not buying.
The Alternative
The tools agencies use are available to everyone. The knowledge to use them is available to everyone. What most business owners lack is time — which is fair, you're busy running a business.
But the solution isn't paying $1,000/month for $50 worth of tools and 2 hours of someone's time. The solution is finding someone who's transparent about what things cost, gives you ownership of everything, and doesn't lock you into a contract because they know they have to earn your business every month.
That's what we built Business in a Box to be. Not because we're smarter than agencies. Because we remember what it's like to be on the other side of that invoice.