Let’s get this out of the way. If you’re asking how many hours your agency is dedicating to your account, you’re already asking the wrong question.
This isn’t law or consulting. Great marketing isn’t billed by the hour; it’s built on outcomes. You don’t go to a heart surgeon and ask how many minutes they’ll spend in the operating room. You ask whether they’ve saved the last ten patients. You want the best, not the busiest.
The same applies to marketing. Especially in a world where AI, automation, and decades of data can collapse 20 hours of grunt work into 2 hours of laser-focused execution.
Why Hourly Thinking Kills Growth
Hourly models sound logical at first glance. But in practice, they reward inefficiency. You’re not paying for strategy — you’re paying for time. And time doesn’t scale.
The best marketers don’t win because they put in the most hours. They win because they know where to push, what to prioritize, and when to pivot. That’s judgment, not labor. That’s experience, not stopwatch metrics.
When founders obsess over hours, they invite the wrong kind of accountability. You get bloated meetings, unnecessary reporting, and box-checking. That’s how mediocre agencies justify their invoices: by telling you how hard they’re working instead of how well they’re performing.
Impact Doesn’t Wear a Timesheet
I’ve seen junior marketers take 12 hours to write a landing page that converts at 0.9%. I’ve also seen seasoned pros, people who’ve scaled brands from $1 million to $100 million, knock out a new headline test that triples conversion in under 30 minutes.
What do you want: time spent or business made?
If you want to pay for time, go to Fiverr. If you want to build a business, pay for thinking.
This is why the best founders — and the best agencies — don’t talk about hours. They talk about impact. Market share. Repeat purchase rate. LTV:CAC ratio. Revenue growth. Brand equity. These are the metrics that matter.
The Real Questions You Should Be Asking
If you’re trying to gauge whether your agency is working hard enough for you, fair. But hours won’t tell you that. Here’s what to ask instead:
- What traction are we seeing from the current strategy?
- What are the top three growth levers we’re focused on?
- Where are we overperforming or underperforming compared to industry benchmarks?
- What are we testing, learning, and optimizing this month?
You’re not just buying deliverables. You’re buying judgment. You’re buying the compounded experience of someone who’s seen your problem before and solved it faster than you knew was possible.
A New Marketing Equation: Results per Hour
If you’re dead-set on evaluating hours, flip the math. Stop asking how many hours someone’s spending and start asking how valuable each hour is.
A $250-per-hour marketer who delivers $1 million in incremental revenue is a better investment than a $50-per-hour freelancer who keeps your social calendar filled with zero engagement.
This isn’t about vanity pricing. It’s about velocity. Smart marketing compounds. A few brilliant moves early on can change your entire revenue trajectory, but only if you value strategic acceleration over tactical busywork.
The Takeaway
Chasing hours is a race to the bottom. You’ll end up with a partner who gives you exactly what you asked for: 30 hours a month, broken into timesheets, with no skin in the game for whether your business grows.
If you want real growth, stop asking how long it takes. Start asking what it’s worth.
Because at the end of the day, minutes don’t build businesses. Momentum does.
And great marketing? It doesn’t count hours. It makes them count.
