No – this wouldn’t be normal. I can see holding off on some things if your site was penalized and they had made a bunch of changes right away. But you should have been updated on what they were doing and why.

I would also pay attention to your backlinks. Check and see if you start getting a ton of bad low-quality links.

Otherwise, if they don’t want to work on the site I wouldn’t pay them.

They could easily be checking for pages that rank between 5 and 10 and work on those – tech on-page and outreach if that’s a part of the plan.