When hiring an agency, I focus on two key things: the likelihood of them getting the results I want, and how certain they are about achieving those results.

For the first part, I look for agencies with clients similar to my company in terms of type and stage. This gives me an idea if they can handle my specific context.

For the second part, I do aggressive reference checks. I mean really aggressive – I’ll ask for calls with 2-3 past customers for detailed 30-minute conversations. I ask about both the good and bad of working with the agency, including any issues that came up.

In my experience, good agencies are fine with this process. I used to worry reference checks would scare off the good ones, but they’re actually cool with it because they have clients who speak well of them.

If an agency is nervous about reference checks, that’s usually a red flag that their results might not be great.