2026-09-23 on jwogrady

Your agency isn't slow, it's locked out

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:41:21 -0500

Here is the thing nobody tells you before you sign.

The best predictor of whether a local marketing engagement produces anything is not the agency’s talent. It isn’t your budget, your industry, or how good the pitch deck was. It is something much more boring:

How many things can they do without stopping to ask you?

That number is the whole relationship. And almost nobody negotiates it on purpose, which is why so many of these arrangements feel like wading.

Call them at nine on a Sunday

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:06:10 -0500

The most useful number I know of in a local competitive analysis is not in any tool, costs nothing, and you collect it with a telephone.

Call your competitors at nine o’clock on a Sunday night. Count how many of them answer.

That’s it. That is the measurement. If you sell anything with an emergency in it — water where water should not be, no heat in February, a door that won’t lock — then some meaningful share of the money in your market is moving at hours when a tool’s dashboard is a flat line and a human being is standing in a hallway deciding who to try next. Competitor after-hours answer rate. Nobody sells it to you because nobody can; it isn’t in a database anywhere. It is, however, entirely knowable by anyone willing to spend forty minutes and look slightly odd.

Close enough, or known

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:46:00 -0500

Local means near.

That is the first thing anyone learns about marketing a local business, and it is load-bearing. It is why you buy a radius on a map, why you write a page for every town within forty minutes, why people in this trade say “near me” out loud without embarrassment. Distance is the axis. Everything hangs off it.

We were two rounds of revisions into naming the kinds of local business before anybody noticed that it is only true of some of them.