Sydney Vasquez, integrator and COO at Contractor Dynamics, spent time early in her career working briefly at a marketing agency. What she saw there is exactly why she’s sharing this now. This is not a hit piece on any particular company, but an honest account of the practices she witnessed that are costing roofing company owners money every single day.
Every roofing company that contacts Contractor Dynamics has some version of the same complaint. They’ve worked with multiple marketing agencies and seen zero results. They don’t know where their money is actually going. They signed a contract and got burned. What most of them don’t realize is that this isn’t just bad luck.
In some agencies, there are systematic practices happening behind the curtain that are designed to benefit the agency at the expense of the client. Here are the six questions that will help you identify those practices before you sign anything.
Ask what percentage of your ad spend they are keeping.
This is the one question most roofing owners never think to ask, and also the one that costs them the most. At the agency that Sydney used to worked with, it was standard practice to build a percentage clause into every client agreement. A client would sign up for a $5000 monthly package, believing that $1000 was the management fee and $4000 was going directly into their ads. What they weren’t told was that the agency was also taking a percentage of that ad spend and pocketing it without disclosing it upfront.
The clause remains buried in fine print, and most clients never find it. Account managers are trained to deflect the conversation if a client started doing the math and asking questions. Some clients will eventually notice that their ad account showed only $2000 in actual spend when they expected $4000, but by then they were already locked into a contract.
The question to ask before signing is this: are you taking a percentage of my ad spend, and if so, what is that percentage? Any roofing contractor marketing agency worth working with will answer that question clearly and immediately. Agencies that dodge it or bury the answer in contract language are telling you everything you need to know.
Ask what data will back up any recommendation to increase your budget.
The upsell machine is the natural partner to the hidden ad spend cut. At agencies that take a percentage of what you spend on ads, account managers have a direct financial incentive to encourage you to spend more, regardless of whether the results actually justify it. Sydney watched account managers call clients and tell them their ads were crushing it and they should pour more money in, even when the data told a different story, because hitting their internal sales metrics mattered more than the client’s ROI.
The protection against this is simple. Never increase your marketing budget based on an account manager’s enthusiasm. Only increase it based on specific data that demonstrates the current spend is producing returns that justify scaling. If an agency can’t show you clear, trackable evidence that your current campaigns are performing at a level that makes increasing the budget a logical next step, the answer is no until they can.
Confirm that you own every marketing asset they build for you.
This is where some of the most damaging agency practices live, and where the language gets deliberately confusing. At the agency Sydney worked at, clients would pay for a new website over a six-month agreement and believe they owned it when the agreement was complete. What they were never told clearly is that while technically they owned the website, the agency owned all of the content and files associated with it. When a client tried to transfer their site to a new host or a new provider, they discovered they couldn’t take anything with them.
Asking a roofing contractor marketing agency whether you will own your website will always get you a yes, regardless of what the fine print actually says. The better move is to tell the agency upfront that you will set up the website backend access yourself and grant them permission to build and edit within your existing platform. Any ethical agency will agree to that immediately. An agency that insists on building within their own platform and granting you access afterward is setting up a situation where you don’t actually control what you paid for.
The same principle applies to ad accounts and call tracking numbers. Do not let any agency create ad accounts in their own name and give you access. Create the accounts yourself, give the agency access, and retain the ability to revoke that access at any time. When it comes to call tracking numbers, ensure from the beginning that any numbers set up on your behalf can be transferred to you if you ever need to leave. Starting over with new ad accounts and new tracking numbers after leaving an agency means losing every piece of data those accounts contain, and that data has real value.
Ask how long it takes to receive included deliverables.
If a roofing contractor marketing agency tells you that graphics, video editing, or ad creative are included in your package, that sounds like a benefit. What it might actually mean is that those deliverables are included but subject to queue times that can stretch to 15 business days or more because the agency has intentionally understaffed its creative team.
In Sydney’s experience, this was not an accident. The long queue times created pressure for clients to pay an upsell fee to get their work expedited. The understaffing was a deliberate mechanism to generate additional revenue from clients who had already been told the service was included.
Before signing, ask specifically how long it typically takes to receive each type of included deliverable. Get a specific number of business days, and don’t accept a vague “we’ll get to it as quickly as possible.” If the timeline is going to delay your ability to launch ads or update your marketing, you need to know that before you’re already committed. Long queue times on included services are a red flag worth paying attention to before you sign, not after.
Ask how quick your account manager can respond, and how often they will meet with you.
At the agency Sydney worked at, there were no internal standards for account manager communication. No requirement for how quickly emails needed to be returned, and no mandatory meeting cadence with clients. Whether a client heard from their account manager regularly or almost never depended entirely on the individual account manager, and the clients who got stuck with overwhelmed or disengaged reps could go weeks without a response.
The proactive party in those relationships was often the client, chasing down their own account manager for updates on campaigns they were paying for. That dynamic should not exist. Your account manager should be the one proactively reaching out to you with reports, data, and scheduled time on the calendar.
Before signing, ask the roofing contractor marketing agency directly: what is your internal standard for how quickly account managers must respond to client communications, and how often is my account manager required to meet with me? The answer will tell you whether accountability is built into how the agency operates or left to chance. Agencies that have clear, documented communication standards are worth considering. Agencies that answer vaguely or can’t point to a specific standard are likely operating without one.
Ask how often your ads will be optimized, and how you can verify it.
This last question is one of the most important for roofing companies running paid advertising. At the agency Sydney worked at, there was no internal standard for how frequently ad accounts needed to be optimized. Overloaded account managers managing too many clients with not enough hours would often get to ad accounts once a month, sometimes less. For clients whose competitors were optimizing their ads weekly, that monthly cadence meant falling further behind with every week that passed.
The math is straightforward. An account optimized 4x a month improves at 4x the rate of an account optimized once a month. That means less wasted spend, faster improvement, and better data to make decisions from. Weekly optimization is the standard that actually moves the needle, and any agency managing your ads should be able to commit to it and show you how they verify it’s being done.
Before signing, ask how often the agency will optimize your ad accounts, and ask specifically how you can verify that the optimizations are actually happening. A simple change log or update note inside the ad account is a reasonable expectation. A roofing contractor marketing agency that can’t or won’t commit to a specific optimization cadence is telling you that your account will be managed whenever someone gets around to it, which in a competitive market is simply not good enough.
What these six questions actually tell you
The point of asking these questions is not to be adversarial. It’s to find out whether the agency you’re talking to operates with transparency, accountability, and structure that a real long-term partnership requires. An agency that answers all six of these questions directly, specifically, and without hesitation is worth having a serious conversation with. An agency that deflects, gets vague, or makes you feel like you’re being difficult for asking is showing you exactly how they’ll behave once you’re a client.
The roofing companies that consistently build great marketing results are the ones that treat their marketing decisions the same way they treat every other significant business investment. With due diligence, clear expectations, and real accountability built in from the start.
If you’re hearing all of this and thinking it sounds exhausting, and wondering whether bringing marketing in-house might be a better path for your company, that’s exactly the conversation our team is set up to have with you. We train roofing companies to build, manage, and optimize their own marketing so they never have to depend on an agency again. Every week you’re writing a check to a vendor who isn’t serving you is a week of budget and momentum you’re not getting back.
Book a marketing demo and let’s take an honest look at what’s working, what isn’t, and what your marketing could actually look like when you own it. If you already know it’s time to build something better, our consulting program is where roofing companies trade dependency on outside vendors for a marketing engine they own and control.
