Every month, you get the report.
It’s a slick PDF filled with colorful charts and impressive-sounding numbers. Your marketing agency tells you that “impressions are up 15%,” “keyword rankings have improved,” and your “engagement rate is solid.”
It all sounds good. But then you look at your own dashboard—your sales, your revenue, your bottom line—and you can’t see the connection. You’re paying a significant monthly retainer, but you have a nagging, expensive question that the report never seems to answer:
“So what?”
You have a right to be skeptical. The traditional agency model has become masterful at burying the lead. They sell you on activity, not outcomes. They overwhelm you with vanity metrics, hoping you won’t ask about the only metric that actually matters.
And it’s the #1 metric they are actively hiding from you.
It’s not “Return on Ad Spend.” It’s not “Cost Per Lead.” It’s not even “Customer Lifetime Value.” Those are all important, but they are downstream of the real issue.
The #1 metric your agency is hiding from you is their Alignment Score.
What’s an Alignment Score? It’s the measure of how deeply your agency’s goals, actions, and definition of “success” are integrated with your actual business objectives.
- A low Alignment Score is when your web developer is measured on launching a page, your SEO person is measured on ranking for a keyword, and your social media manager is measured on getting likes. They all hit their individual goals, but your business goes nowhere. This is a state of vendor chaos.
- A high Alignment Score is when every single person working on your digital presence operates from a single, unified strategic plan, and every action is measured against one question: “Does this drive the client’s business forward?” This is a state of strategic partnership.
The traditional agency model is, by its very design, a low-alignment system. It’s built on separate departments, junior account managers acting as middlemen, and a financial incentive to sell you more fragmented services, not to deliver a cohesive result. They can’t show you their Alignment Score because, frankly, it’s terrible.
This is the core of our “Anti-Agency” narrative. We believe that a high Alignment Score is the only foundation upon which predictable growth can be built.
It’s why we don’t have account managers, only senior-level partners.
It’s why we insist on a Strategic Alignment phase before we ever touch a line of code or a piece of content.
And it’s why we operate as One Team with our clients, providing a single, unified report that connects every action to a real-world business outcome.
So, the next time you get that slick PDF report from your agency, don’t just ask, “So what?”. Ask them for their Alignment Score. Ask them how their web developer’s goals are tied to your sales team’s quota.
Their answer—or lack thereof—will tell you everything you need to know.