The first 90 days of an Australian agency relationship

The first ninety days are when an Australian agency relationship tells the truth. Not in the workshop — workshops are a genre — but in the unglamorous sequence that follows. Who got access. Who wrote the first thing that shipped. Who came back from leave. Who changed the tracking. Who was in the weekly when the first awkward number arrived.

Marketers often treat onboarding as a courtesy the shop performs. It is the first delivery. If you sleep through it, you will spend the rest of the contract arguing about a foundation nobody poured.

This sits in working together. The brief you should have written before the kick-off is writing a brief agencies will actually read. Bring that document into the room. Do not replace it with a fresh “alignment session” unless you can say what decision the session will produce.

Days 1 to 14: access, people, and the end of the pitch cast

The first job is not insight. It is keys.

Analytics, ad accounts, search consoles, social logins, the CMS, the CRM, the product feed, the brand drive, the legal folder with the claims you are allowed to make. Decide who is the advertiser of record. Decide who is an admin. Write it down. A shop that wants owner-level access to everything “for speed” is asking you to make the exit expensive. A client that withholds the analytics property is asking the shop to guess.

The second job is names. The pitch team will begin to dissolve in week two. That is not automatically a scam. Senior people sell. Ask, in week one, who will be in the weekly in week eight. Meet those people. If the shop cannot produce them, you bought a reel.

The third job is the constraint pile. The lawyer’s lines. The franchisees. The union. The out-of-stock reality. The CEO’s allergies. The agency cannot discover these in a cute interview if you already know them. Dump them early. Shops that flinch are telling you they priced a smoother client.

Do not spend the first fortnight in a two-day offsite unless the work is a brand project that genuinely needs one. Always-on media and search need a working account more than they need a wall of notes.

Days 15 to 45: a measurement truce and a first ship

By the end of week two you should be fighting about measurement. That is healthy. Get it done.

Agree what you will not pretend. Last-click is a view, not a religion. Platform-reported return is a view with a conflict of interest. Brand studies, incrementality tests and simple before-and-afters are views with different costs. Pick the views you will look at together for the next two quarters. Write the windows. Write who can change a conversion event. A shop that changes the event in week three and then claims a lift has taught you their craft.

This desk will not nominate a target ROAS for your category. If the shop does, ask for the baseline from the months before they arrived, produced the same way. If you do not have a baseline, the first month’s job is to make one, not to announce a transformation.

Then ship something. A cleaned campaign. A page that was wrong. A creative test with a kill date. A reporting view a human wrote. The point is not scale. The point is to see the shop do the job while you are still allowed to be picky.

If nothing can ship because access is still a mess, that is a client problem. If nothing can ship because the shop is still “in discovery”, that is a shop problem. Ninety days of discovery is a product. It should have been sold as one.

Days 46 to 90: the real weekly, the first dull month, the first no

This is the stretch that predicts the year.

The weekly should now be boring in the right way. A queue, a decision, a risk. If it is still a tour of the agency’s philosophy, the philosophy is the product.

You should meet the people who do the work when the account lead is on leave. Australian shops are not large. Leave is a fact. A relationship that only functions when one person is in the building is a key-person risk you are funding.

You should hear a no. No to a brief that would waste the month. No to a claim. No to a channel you cannot staff. A shop that has not disagreed with you by day 90 is either perfectly aligned or insufficiently brave. The second is more common.

You should see how they behave when the number is ordinary. The first dull month is when retainers earn themselves. Shops that panic into extra slides are performing. Shops that say “here is what we will try next, and here is what we will stop” are working.

If you are on a monthly, compare the hours and names to what you thought you bought in what Australian agencies actually charge. If you are on a project, compare the critical path to the date you are still quoting internally. Drift is cheapest to name now.

What the client has to bring, or the shop will invent it

A decision-maker who will be in the weekly, or a named deputy with authority. Steering groups are how onboarding becomes archaeology.

The offer as it really is. If the price will move, say so. If the product is late, say so. Agencies can work around a hard truth. They cannot work around a cheerful fiction.

The last six months of activity as you currently report it — even if the reporting is embarrassing. A shop that cannot see the embarrassing version will build a beautiful version that does not join to finance.

Time. Someone on your side has to review creative, approve spend and answer the Slack that unblocks production. If that person is on a plane for a month, say so and stop the clock. Do not punish the shop for your diary and then call it a slow start.

A point of view about taste. “We’ll know it when we see it” is how you burn the first creative cycle and then blame the makers.

Red flags that are still cheap to act on

The login request that never comes, because the shop is running from screenshots you send. You do not have a partner. You have a commentator.

The strategist who is “in the mix” and never in the calendar.

The report that arrives as a PDF of platform screenshots with a logo on the cover.

The suggestion, in week five, that you need a different package to do the thing in the original proposal.

The feeling that you are being onboarded into their product, not them into your company. Productised delivery can be fine. It is not what the pitch described if the pitch described a craft team.

Raise it. Ask for a redesigned pod, a rewritten scope, or a pause. The how to choose work you did is wasted if you are too polite to use it in month two.

A ninety-day pack that prevents folklore

Write a one-page operating note at day 90. Who is on the account. Where the files live. What the measurement truce is. What shipped. What you will not do in the next quarter. What the notice period is, while everyone is still civil.

Give a copy to finance and to whoever covers you on leave. Agency relationships fail in the handover between marketing managers as often as they fail in the work.

If you cannot write the page, the onboarding did not happen. You had meetings.

The desk’s view

Treat the first ninety days as the first delivery. Get the keys, meet the real people, agree the numbers you will not pretend, and ship something small enough to judge. Workshops are optional. Access is not. If the shop is still introducing itself at day 90, you are not late to worry. You are late to decide.