Why I don't do contracts (and never will)

Ask any agency why they need a twelve-month contract and you’ll get the same answers: “marketing takes time to work”, “we invest heavily upfront”, “it protects both parties”.

Two of those are half-true. One is nonsense. None of them are the real reason.

The real reason

Contracts exist because keeping a client who can’t leave is easier than keeping one who can. That’s it. Once the ink dries, the incentive to be brilliant every month quietly disappears. Month one gets the A-team; month seven gets the report template with your logo swapped in.

I’ve seen it from the inside. The clients on rolling terms got the urgency. The ones locked in got managed.

“But marketing does take time”

It does. That half is true. SEO compounds over months. A customer journey takes time to build. No argument.

But notice the sleight of hand: the work taking time doesn’t require you being trapped. If the work genuinely compounds, you’ll see it compounding (rankings creeping up, calls increasing, list growing), and you’ll stay because staying is obviously the right call. The contract isn’t there for when things work; it’s there for when they don’t.

What no-contract actually does

Working monthly-rolling does something uncomfortable and brilliant: it makes every month a renewal decision. Which means:

• The work has to be visible. You can’t hide behind “it’s building” for long when the client can leave at Christmas.
• The reporting has to be honest. Numbers going the wrong way get discussed and fixed, not buried on slide nine.
• The relationship has to be earned. No account-manager-reading-a-script. You keep clients by being worth keeping.

It also does something for you beyond the exit door: it changes how you feel about the spend. Marketing you’re trapped in breeds resentment; marketing you’re choosing breeds attention. Clients who can leave engage more, and marketing works better with an engaged client.

The bit that makes it possible

Here’s the part that matters more than the billing terms: you have to own everything. Your website, your data, your customer list, your ad accounts. If leaving your agency means losing your website, you don’t have an agency: you have a landlord.

Everything I build is yours outright. Walk away tomorrow and it all keeps working. That’s not generosity; it’s the price of admission for calling yourself honest. And it’s precisely because you could walk away that I can’t get lazy.

No contracts. No lock-in. No hostages. If that sounds refreshing, it says more about the industry than it does about me, and honestly, that’s the point. See how my ongoing marketing works, from £395 + VAT a month, cancel whenever.