Who actually does the work when you hire a marketing agency?

When you hire an agency you're really hiring a few specific people, and you often don't find out which ones until after the work has started. The pitch is done by whoever's good at pitching. The work goes to whoever has room for it. Neither of those is a problem on its own. Not being told is.

At Consultico the answer is four people and a partner network. Leona Wade manages the accounts and is who you'd deal with day to day. I do strategy, websites and the strategy workshops. Juan Canals Marti handles paid social and analytics. Lucy Dinse tests what we build before a client sees it. Where a job needs someone we haven't got, a specialist comes in from the partner network and you're told whose work it is.

Who's on your account here

The detail behind those four names, because a role on its own doesn't tell you much.

• Leona Wade, account manager. She came in as a technical marketing assistant across search, social and strategy projects, and now runs our client portfolio and acts as the point of contact into the partner network. She graduated in marketing and entrepreneurship from the University of Strathclyde and has taken further training in SEO and Google Ads.

• Me, Paul Wilson. I've been building sites since 2017 and I'm certified by the Market Research Society. Most of what I do on an account is the deciding rather than the delivering, which is worth knowing if you're expecting me to be the one writing your pages.

• Juan Canals Marti, Meta and analytics. Funnel structure, tracking, feed work and the paid social itself. He isn't an employee. He runs Marti Clearpath, his own agency, and works with us as a partner. He has a BSc in maths and economics, which is roughly why the measurement ends up with him.

• Lucy Dinse, testing. She works through what we build before a client sees it, and helps shape how our internship programme runs. She's currently a student at Strathclyde.

Each of them has a biography and a list of what they've worked on on our site. That's deliberate. If a name doesn't lead anywhere, you've got no way of checking it.

Where the work usually goes instead

Four arrangements cover most of the market, and you're almost certainly buying one of them.

• One team throughout. The people who pitched are the people who deliver. Common in small agencies, and the thing most clients assume they're getting.
• A pod. Your account sits with a group rather than a person, so the specific hands change while your contact stays the same.
• Senior on the call, junior on the work. The experienced person sells and reviews; somebody earlier in their career produces. Perfectly workable when the review is real.
• Passed on entirely. Freelancers in a busy month, or a second agency doing the whole job.

None of that is wrong. I'd rather a specialist did a job than have someone learn it on your money. The version worth noticing is a monthly report arriving from a name you've never spoken to, with no obvious way to ask that person a question about it.

Whether any of the four holds up comes down to the hand-off. Each of them involves one person explaining your business to another, and a bit of it falls out every time that happens. That's the real cost of a large team, and it's why somebody who stays on your account for two years is worth more than the job title makes it sound.

What white labelling means, and what you should be told

White labelling is when one agency sells the work and a second agency delivers it under the first one's brand. Your contract is with the first. The people doing the work are at the second, and quite often you're never told they exist.

It's a normal commercial arrangement and it can be a good deal. A small agency with a strong client relationship and no developer of its own is better off buying that in. Partner arrangements are part of how we work too, which is why Juan is up there with his own company beside his name rather than blended into ours.

What it changes for you is smaller than it sounds and worth knowing anyway. Your logins and your data may end up sitting with a company you have no contract with. If something goes wrong, the person who can fix it is one step further away than the person you can complain to. And if the two agencies fall out, your account is inside that argument.

What we hold to is that where a partner does part of your work, you get their name and you can talk to them. The related question, which is who owns the site and the accounts at the end of it, we've covered in how to choose an SEO agency.

The rule we publish under

Our rule is that the byline goes to whoever did the work. If Leona ran an account and wrote it up, it goes out under her name rather than mine, even though mine is better known and would probably do more for the page. We won't put a person's name on work they didn't do.

That costs us something. A byline only works if there's a real biography behind it, so a finished piece can sit and wait while we build the page the name points at.

Google's guidance for site owners lands in the same place, and it's unusually direct. Under the heading "Who (created the content)" it asks whether it's "self-evident to your visitors who authored your content", whether "pages carry a byline, where one might be expected", and whether "bylines lead to further information about the author or authors involved". It finishes: "We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it" (Google Search Central).

There's a second half to the same question now, which is whether a person wrote it at all. Google's position is that the tool doesn't change the standard: "Using AI doesn't give content any special gains. It's just content" (Google Search Central, 2023). Its guidance also asks you to explain how something was made wherever a reader would reasonably wonder. What I'd hold us to is narrower and easier for you to check. The name on a piece is the person answerable for it, and if it's wrong, that's who you take it up with.

What checks the work before you see it

Two different answers, one for what we publish and one for client accounts.

Nothing goes on this site below 80 out of 100 on a five-part score covering the writing, the SEO, the evidence behind the claims, the technical setup and how easy the piece is to quote. That isn't an intention. It's wired into the build. The score sits in the file, it's tied to a hash of the article's own text, and if anyone edits the article afterwards the score expires and the site refuses to deploy until somebody judges it again.

We built it because we failed it. When we finally scored the five articles that were already live, they came out at 72, 61, 60, 58 and 42. Every one of them had gone up without anybody scoring it.

The same exercise produced the second rule. Every external source now gets opened before it's cited, to confirm the page really contains the number attached to it. That came from checking our best-read article and finding that three of its four sources didn't. A source can be named and still not say the thing, and a reader has no way of telling from the page.

On client accounts the checking is more ordinary than that. The account manager sees everything before it goes out, and anything technical goes past whoever owns that discipline. Organic search is Leona's and mine. Paid media is Juan's. The first step of Think First, our strategy workshop, is also a check on us: somebody from the team who knows nothing about the business researches it on their own, then presents it back to the rest of us as if they were recommending it to a friend. If they can't explain what the business does, either we've misread it or there's something worth knowing about how the business explains itself.

We publish the findings that complicate the story as well as the ones that flatter it. The most recent is six near-identical pages we shipped on one day, where the explanation we expected to find fell apart the moment we looked at all six rather than two.

The team is young, and that cuts both ways

Three of the four people above came through the University of Strathclyde, and our office in Glasgow is on the same campus. One of them is still a student there. The internship programme is a real route in rather than a filing job: Lucy arrived through it and now helps decide how it works for the people coming after her.

I'm not going to argue that being young makes the work better. It doesn't on its own, and it isn't a reason to hire anybody.

Here's the version I actually believe. A team that's been doing this for twenty years can work from instinct, and much of the time the instinct is right. We haven't got twenty years of it, so we write things down instead. The framework is written down. The scoring is written down. The rule about sources is written down. That's slower and a lot more boring. It also means you can read the method before you commit to it, which you can't do with somebody's instinct.

There are limits to a team this size. We're deep in search, paid media and strategy, and where a job needs something we haven't got, we say so and bring somebody in rather than learn it on your account. We're also small enough that a sudden pile of work gets sequenced rather than absorbed, which sometimes means telling someone not yet.

Google's own guidelines for the people it pays to assess search results tell them to weigh "the information you find during reputation research, verifiable credentials, etc, not just website or content creator claims of 'I'm an expert!'" (Google, 2025). That's the right test, and this page is built so you can run it. Every name above links to a biography and the work behind it, our Google reviews are public, and the clients are named in our case studies. We're proud of that work, and confident it stands up to a closer look.

How to find out who's on your own account

Ask for the name of the person who'll write the content or build the campaign, rather than the name of whoever is on the sales call. Then watch whether that name turns up.

If it comes back and the work then arrives from somebody else, that isn't automatically bad. It's a thing to ask about, and how that gets handled will tell you a fair amount about how the rest of the relationship is going to run.

It's worth pushing on because it's also how sites get assessed. Google's search quality rater guidelines say near the start that "every page belongs to a website, and it should be clear" who is responsible for it and who created the content on it. Pages that need a high level of user trust are marked down where there's "an unsatisfying amount of information about who is responsible for the website or who created the content" (Google, 2025). If your business sits in one of the fields where that bar is set higher, we've written separately about which topics those are.

The other reason to settle it early is that two fees aren't comparable until you know what's inside them and who's doing it. We've put our own numbers and the things that move them in one place rather than scatter them about.

Who you'd actually be talking to

If you're weighing us up, this page can only take you so far. What settles it is whether the people on it turn up. Leona or I would be on the first call, and if your work would touch anyone else, you'd meet them early rather than find out later.

Tell us what you're trying to grow and we'll tell you who'd be doing it. If the thing you're actually stuck on is what to spend money on at all, that's the Think First conversation instead.