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Are you tired of spending tons of time and money on freelancers and agencies — only to have them not work out? Every business owner, including Austin, has devoted huge amounts of hard-earned profit into these hires, only to watch the investment go to waste.
It's frustrating and disheartening to watch such costly efforts deliver such poor results. So why does this keep happening — and how can you align your internal systems to expertly manage freelancers and agencies as you grow?
After hiring Facebook Ads agency after agency without anything to show for it, Austin made a huge discovery: he was the only commonality. He was the one constant across all of those failed hires — and he was setting them up for failure.
There are three key ways you may be setting your agencies and freelancers up to fail:
- You're asking them to solve the wrong problem. There are fundamental things you need to fix in your business before you're ready to work with an agency.
- You hired the wrong person. Vetting and hiring well is its own skill — one worth developing before you outsource again.
- You're not setting them up to succeed properly. This is the biggest and most fixable problem — and exactly what this article is about.
A few key fundamental shifts can set contractors and agencies up to save you time and produce the results you're after.
The biggest downfall of poor agency management is, by far, burning through hard-earned profits. If you don't set up your internal systems to manage freelancers and agencies successfully, you are flat-out torching the profits you worked so hard to produce. And each time it doesn't work out and you head back to square one, you're spending valuable time and effort making the same mistakes.
How You Manage Outside Hires.
Every business is unique, but after years of coaching 6 and 7-figure entrepreneurs, there's a very strategic framework for managing agencies and freelancers successfully. It's not only important which elements you focus on — but also the order you choose to do them.
"Success" is an easy word to leverage, but it's worthless without underlying meaning. In terms of working with freelancers and agencies, success means the output and results you're ultimately working towards. These need to be set and agreed upon by both sides before any work begins.
The output should be achievable, relevant, time-bound — and leading to the right results: profits and growth.
Most agencies fail not because they're bad at their job — but because there was never a shared definition of what winning looks like. Define success before you start, and you eliminate the single biggest source of friction in any contractor relationship.
It's easy to say "let's create an email campaign to drive sales." Sure, it's a legitimate goal — but it's way too vague to implement. This is why it's so important to define the tangible deliverables you want to produce.
Don't risk details getting lost in translation during a rapid-fire conference call. Instead, list the specific deliverables and their respective timelines, and have them in a place everyone can see and find. Clearly defined deliverables create better alignment and clarity — and make accountability easy. Remove the emotion and guesswork from your day-to-day work by putting the outputs in plain text. It will be crystal clear whether they delivered those or not.
Vague goals create vague results. When you get specific — this many blog posts, this open rate, this revenue target, by this date — you transform a soft agreement into an accountable system. Specificity is the foundation of everything.
The key to successful execution is developing a map that connects your vision to your actions. Your "map" should contain large goals and smaller "subgoals" known as milestones. Milestones create check-in points throughout the process so your team can evaluate progress, gather feedback, and stay informed.
Implementing and monitoring carefully defined milestones keeps everybody on track and prevents any unpleasant "final reveal" that falls miles short of your expectation. No more surprises at the finish line.
Milestones are your early warning system. They tell you whether you're on track before it's too late to course-correct. A project with no milestones is a project you can't manage — only react to at the end. Always build the checkpoints in from the start.
You also need to establish a rhythm of communication and feedback with your freelancers. Think of it as "cadence" — because it's all about tempo and flow. How often will you communicate? Through what platforms? When can you expect updates or reports?
Once you establish these baseline expectations, you achieve the consistency and trust that allows everybody involved to excel. Never end a call without first establishing your next point of contact:
This simple habit cultivates accountability, predictability, and authentic progress towards your goals. It sounds small. It isn't.
BAMFAM is one of those small habits that has an outsized impact. The moment you end a call without a next step booked, you've lost momentum and created ambiguity. Keep the cadence tight and the relationship predictable — for both sides.
With the right success definition, clear deliverables, milestones in place, and a solid communication cadence, you now have everything you need to get into motion — and actually get results.
The final step is simple but easily overlooked: execute consistently, then iterate based on data. Review what's working at each milestone. Double down on what's producing results. Adjust or cut what isn't. The best agency and freelancer relationships aren't static — they evolve as you gather real-world feedback.
The businesses that win with outside help are the ones that treat it like a system: plug in, measure, optimise, repeat. Done right, a single great agency relationship can compound into one of the most powerful growth levers in your business.
Execution without iteration is just activity. The ones who win use data from every milestone to get sharper, not just busier. Build in the review habit from day one — it turns a good agency relationship into a great one.
Stop hoping you get lucky with your next agency hire. Use this framework — define success, list deliverables, create milestones, establish a cadence, and execute and iterate — and watch your outside relationships transform from money pits into genuine growth engines.
The order matters. The specificity matters. And the accountability that comes from following these steps is what separates the businesses that scale from the ones that stay stuck.
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