Working together

Why month-to-month beats annual agency contracts

Key takeaways

  • Long agency contracts protect the agency, not the client.
  • Month-to-month terms keep an agency earning your business every month.
  • A trustworthy agency is willing to be fired easily, with fair notice and full ownership handover.

Most agencies want you to sign for twelve months. There's a reason — and if you look closely, it usually isn't your benefit. Here's how I think about contracts, and why this studio runs month-to-month.

Long contracts remove the pressure to perform

When an agency already has your money locked in for a year, the incentive to deliver every single month quietly fades. Month-to-month flips that. We have to earn the next month with good work — every month. That pressure is healthy, and it's pointed in your favour.

You shouldn't pay for a bad fit

Sometimes the chemistry isn't right, or a strategy doesn't pan out the way anyone hoped. With an annual contract, you're stuck paying anyway. Month-to-month means you can walk if it isn't working — which is exactly why we work hard to make sure it is.

"But agencies need stability"

They do — and we get it from doing work clients want to keep paying for, not from contracts that trap them. If the only thing keeping a client around is a signature on a 12-month deal, the relationship was already over. We'd rather know that early and fix it.

What we ask instead

A fair 30 days' notice, so we can wrap things up cleanly and hand over everything — accounts, data, files, all of it. No exit fees. No holding your assets hostage. You own your business; we're just glad to help while it's a good fit.

Judge an agency by whether they're willing to be fired easily. The ones who are tend to be the ones worth keeping.
Jared McElreath

Founder of Cedar & Sparrow, a senior-led marketing studio. After years inside agencies and in-house teams, he started the studio to do the opposite of the agency runaround: senior work, honest reporting, and no long contracts. More about Jared →

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A different kind of agency relationship.

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